Genuine question for anti-vaxxers

So pharmaceutical companies never conceal information?

@user098786533
I realise peer review exists but in the same vein I think compartmentalisation could contribute to things being concealed. There's also collusion and integrity at play. Publishing demands on medical professionals mean they name swap on journal publications, things like that.

Bollocks!

Yes, a successful vaccine for scarlet fever was developed in the 1920s and 1930s, but abandoned after the development of antibiotics.

Scarlet fever is caused by a specific strain of strep bacteria that has been infected by a bacteriophage. Research on bacteriophages was eclipsed by the advent of antibiotics, but has recently become of interest again with the rise of antibiotic resistance.

There are vaccinations for both viral and bacterial illnesses — pneumococcal and meningococcal vaccines are examples of vaccinations against bacterial illnesses. We tend to vaccinate more against viruses because these can’t be eliminated by antibiotics. Now that we are seeing rising antibiotic resistance, we may want to vaccinate more against bacterial illnesses where possible. Plus, many of the serious complications of viruses are bacterial infections — antibiotics reduced those, but we might want to chance these rather less if we could not rely on antibiotics (which may be in our near future).

@thecatfromneptune

I've never said I rely on news for vaccine information
I have had conversations with my GP about it.
I don't believe the daily mail or sun are credible sources of medical information.
I don't trust unverified people online about vaccination.

Pharmaceutical companies won't accept or acknowledge that they are effectively injuring people with their medication, as per my experience of being harmed by an off label antipsychotic.

My GP denied i could get my movement disorder from the low dose and duration of the drugs, yet my neurologist said that some poor susceptible souls can be harmed by just one pill.

Yes all this. All are these responses reall? They are just so predictable. Before covid everyone i know would have been delighted with the introduction of a chickenpox vaccine and now it is being treated with great suspicion. It's sad.

This is completely anecdotal.
My friends breast fed children are a lot more sickly than my formula fed children. They seem to really suffer with their chests.
using your logic - formula feeding MUST keep children healthier, despite what’s been said. Because, you know, that’s the case in this singular instance.
I’ll alert the press 🙄

That isn’t why the Lancet pulled his paper.

If you mean news outlets when you say corporate media, then why on earth are you relying on those for vaccine information, as opposed to, say, information from the NHS/public health bodies/the vaccine leaflet/your own scientific understanding of vaccines/your GP?

Why would you think the Daily Mail or the Sun are sources of useful medical information in the first place? They don’t even get it right when it comes to celebrity news.

Why would you think news outlets can’t be trusted, but instead trust unverified anti-vaccination information from people with no scientific or medical background at all?

From your posts, you don’t actually understand either viruses or vaccines well — have actually read anything like the WHO or government infections diseases information? Why do you think they would misinform you?

Yes I remember it well.
Many things can cause brain damage, even non-physical things like toxic stress.

I avoid that too.

I hope you’re happy with the possibility that your children might catch an entirely preventable disease, and if it proves fatal for them it is entirely on YOU.

Vaccine for scarlet fever?

Show us please?

@thecatfromneptune
By corporate press I mean news outlets owned by billionaires.

@thecatfromneptune
By corporate press I mean news outlets owned by billionaires. The same billionaires who have pharmaceutical shares and government positions.

I know that no medical professional ever pretends there are no adverse reactions. It's more about widespread messaging. Widespread messaging is that vaccines are safe, effective, and necessary, and that anyone refusing them is silly.

It's dishonest.

@HourlyTime the old ‘oh but you’ll inject yourself with filler’ thing. I don’t disagree with the rationale there. Personally I don’t use cosmetic procedures or weight loss jabs so it doesn't apply to me.

however, I don't think those who fear vaccine adverse reactions believe that the same risks exist with Mounjaro or filler? So I think this comparison is silly.

@thecatfromneptune the Wakefield thing all comes down to the gut brain axis.

Wakefield suggested the gut was damaged by the live virus in some children.
From this he proposed that that gut damage led to symptoms we now label ‘autism’ which were the result of brain injury via gut damage.

At the time the Lancet pulled his paper they stated there was no link between the gut and the brain and any suggestion that there is would increase vaccine hesitancy, so it was best to pull it.

We now know that there is a link between the gut and brain and I believe they knew it then too.

No - completely disagree with this.

NHS pays for all kinds of treatments of injury or illness caused by decisions which they try to encourage people not to make. For example smoking related illness. This is how it should be. You don't change people's minds this way. Look at why they don't trust health advice, really look at it, and work on solving that. Not platitudes and not dismissals.

My child stopped talking overnight after their 12 month vaccinations and only made a noise the next morning and for years afterwards even with many specialists working with them. Took nearly 10 years before they could speak clearly enough to be understood and yet the day of the vaccinations they were perfectly clear. Their autism symptoms also got a lot worse and again took many years of working with multiple specialists before that helped.
The neurologists said because they have autism the brain barrier is thinner and that leaves them open to vaccine injuries which they know full well about and everyone with autism/adhd etc are more prone to injuries from vaccines.

This is just a bizarre view of viruses. We don’t merrily allow Ebola into Western countries thinking that better sanitation and “nourishment” will protect us from the effects of the virus, do we? As it happens, the death rate is a bit less in Western people who get it. Does that mean you’d be happy in relying on this to let it loose in the population?

We have plenty of data that shows that when it comes to complications from viruses, improved sanitation helps only some of them; and is not particularly related to measles or other illnesses like rubella or pertussis. No improved nutrition stops the rubella virus from damaging unborn babies, for example. Better medical treatment and vitamin A supplementation helps reduce the incidence of measles blindness, but it doesn’t stop the virus damaging the cells in the visual cortex in the first place.

This idea of vaccines coinciding with the development of public sanitation isn’t completely historically accurate, and it also relies on imagining that all these viruses are more like typhoid or cholera rather than smallpox or rubella. Viruses are diverse. Better sanitation reduces the effects of typhoid, but the modern world might actually enable measles (or, indeed, Covid) to spread faster and infect more of a population quicker, for example.

There’s more risk of being in a car crash, we don’t go into any of those statistics when buying a car, or getting into one.

Well some people do, NCAP ratings for example are consumer crash tests performed on new cars, and rate how well the car protects occupants (driver, passengers) and also pedestrians if a collision were to occur.

Not everyone wants to look at NCAP ratings and there are legal minimum requirements for that reason - any new car you buy in a rich country with good infrastructure and regulations is going to have as a bare minimum, things like seatbelts, lights, airbags, ABS, isofix to fit child seats easily etc. Probably other things that benefit safety but that we take for granted or don't think about because the details are quite technical. And in the UK we have MOT inspections to ensure that the car is still safe to drive even when it is not brand new. We also have regulations built into new road and junction design, signage and signals which help to ensure that where there is a higher risk for a collision, things like visibility and redundancy are built in so that if someone does make a mistake while driving, other drivers have the chance to notice and react to this without causing a further hazard, so it is less likely that someone will be in the wrong place at the wrong time and have a crash, even if someone does do something wrong.

As a result, car crashes are both rarer (per mile/km driven) than they used to be and less likely to result in death or serious injury when they do occur, and this improves all the time as older junctions get upgraded to newer standards and older vehicles with fewer safety features leave the road.

Healthcare could be the same - rigorous standards to ensure a basic level of safety and efficacy can be assumed so that if you're not bothered about the details and just want the summary of what's recommended - you can do that. I believe this currently works well for the most part, and if you feel flummoxed by any medical decision, it's almost always a good idea to follow the recommendations set out by NICE, WHO, unicef etc.

However, agree it is helpful to have nuance in the discussion and transparency for those who are interested or worried. Just not so much to have that displayed as the first line - it's very unclear and confusing. It does make sense for the first line communications around public health to be clear and simple, with access to more detail if people want it but I think it's OK for this to have to be actively sought out.

The thing is I do think this is better today. When DS age 17 was born, that was the first time I had ever come across any suggestion that vaccines might not be safe and effective and it scared the crap out of me. Back then, there wasn't much from the "official" sources or at least I found it difficult to find, whereas I had antivaxxers falling over themselves trying to bombard me with so much information that I was falsely reassured (that not vaccinating would be the safer choice). The discussions online are far too polarised, I agree. Trying to discredit antivaxxers using ridicule is unhelpful because it drives people right back to those same sources of misinformation because they are validating of your fears (which they often stoked in the first place!) and offer (false) certainty.

@Jumpingthruhoops actually nails it. She gets it.

So if we want to increase vaccination rates we should solidly quantify the risk of vaccine injury, and lay out what that can be, and how.

I have a friend who insists her child immediately regressed post-vaccination.

I've seen multiple posts on here also about it.

It's always put down to 'coincidence'

Do you really believe it's always coincidence? I don't, sorry I just don't.

Do you think the outcome for that child would have been the same if they were a British child? As in living in Britain and not India. Was that family living in squalor and poverty, or were they well nourished in a clean environment?

This may sound controversial. Those parents who refuse to vaccinate their children and if they fall very ill with any disease which are covered by vaccines, should pay for their treatment.

Why should the NHS who initially offered the vaccines free of charge, pay for the treatment?

Also, some people believe that not vaccinating your children is classed as neglect. I’m not sure about this.

The possibility of brain injury is not supressed, it is very rare and there is a compensation payment system for when it does happen.

Having said that have you heard of Leah Betts? A teenager who died from drinking too much water. It is rare but drinking too much water can cause brain damage.

This is the crux of it.

One side thinks vaccine injury is a negligible risk.

Other side thinks serious complications from diseases is a negligible risk.

First side has data on their side.

Other side doesn't believe that data is robust or honest. So that data doesn't really matter.

Do you believe pharmaceutical companies are totally honest when their products are found to cause harm? Do we have any examples of how they behave when this occurs?

Except it didn’t — even at the time, as I said, 99% of people in the field did not believe he was correct, and said so. The vaccine misinformationists, however, created a panic. This was widely decried at the time and resulted in a big resurgence of measles cases then and years later when masked reappeared in teenagers from that cohort.

I just don’t personally get why anyone believed or believes random minor celebrities, right wing politicians, scaremongerers, and so on, over a huge amount of robust population data from centuries of scientific work. It’s a strange kind of kneejerk distrust of authority which only works when, as I’ve said upthread, it’s actually relying on the knowledge that other people are vaccinating, and that protects your child. In the days with no vaccinations people did not have the luxury of believing charlatans because they saw around them the results of these diseases, from polio to measles blindness.

I, and most of the neighbourhood kids, contracted measles in the early 70's, so yes I know it was a common disease. I also know at the time that the serious side effects were much more prevalent than in my parents generation. There are also studies discussing the impact of undernutrition and over crowding on the prevalence of deaths. Better nutrition obviously does not eliminate the risks.

You also seem to be mistaking my point as my opinion. My dc are all vaccinated. I have been pointing out what is a common anti vaxx viewpoint re chance of catching measles.

Re the government policy. Governmental policy accepts that a percentage of those vaccinated will suffer injury for the greater good of preventing a higher level of damage from the disease itself.

You're correct. They've made an MMRV to replace the MMR, which many people will be more hesitant about.

I just think vaccines will become mandatory along with the digital ID eventually. So I think personal choice matters less to them.