Genuine question for anti-vaxxers

My cousin had a very severe reaction to a vaccine and ended up profoundly disabled for the rest of her life. She died in her 40s, mentally never progressing beyond 2, the age when she was vaccinated. My aunt and uncle broke their backs caring for her.
But, I still chose to vaccinate my DC - as I didn't want to feel responsible for him getting one of the diseases had I chosen not to....and I figured I was only even considering not vaccinating because, as you say, I hadn't seen such severe illnesses in my lifetime. But I do have sympathy with the fears around side effects.

Ah - a quick check suggests that the HPV vax has been given to both boys and girls since 2019 - great news!

That’s a complex argument. Pre vaccination most children would have been exposed to the childhood illnesses we now vaccinate against. They would either survive with lifelong immunity, survive with some form of life long damage but still have immunity or die.

Those who survived to adulthood would not succumb to the disease again despite exposure. So the comment about adult illness being less dangerous is not necessarily correct. If you were to do a deep dive into data the incidence of childhood illnesses presenting in adults would be small because most adults were probably immune. There are cases of adults dying of measles in the post vaccination era. Either because they didn’t have measles as a child or were not vaccinated or didn’t serum convert. Death from measles is higher than average in children under 5 and adults older than 20.

Even if a child who’s unvaccinated has a mild infection of measles later in life they can develop SSPE, a form of encephalitis that is generally fatal. Having the vaccination is the only way to prevent this.

My son had the HPV vaxx at school - we didn’t have to make any special requests.

If the DD is vaccinated then it doesn’t matter if she is exposed to the virus because she is then protected. There are a few rare cases where cervical cancer can be caused by different factors - so it’s important still to attend screening for those, but as up to 98% of cervical cancers are caused by HPV, the incidence of cervical cancers will become much rarer.

Ideally both boys and girls would have it; but the idea is that if girls can’t transmit it, then it can’t reinfect other boys — it breaks the chain of transmission. This is evident in the immediate drop in cervical cancer rates in the early cohorts that have had the vaccine. (Gay men and boys can also receive it by request on the NHS.)

Edited because I realised you were talking about the OP’s DD who isn’t vaccinated — is that right?

Boys are now offered it. My youngest has had it.

You are assuming I'm an anti-vaxer. I'm not. In fact, I got covid and flu vaccines just last week. My dc have had all their vaccinations too.

I just disagree with some of the exaggerated hyperbole that comes from the extremes on both sides of the debate. And yes, I do remember spending a couple of weeks in a darkened room. I also remember chocolate tasting like soap. But in the greater scheme of things, it was not a big deal for most of us. One of my dc had pretty much the same symptoms as I had as a child when he got the MMR so getting the vaccine didn't prevent him being extremely sick for a couple of weeks.

The problem with the HPV vaccine is that it’s only given to girls. As soon as your DD becomes sexually active she will be exposed to the virus. Not only does it cause cervical cancer but it can lead to oral cancer.
I hope you encourage her to attend cervical screening as soon as she is sexually active so any infection can be picked up early.

The HPV vaccine also protects against some of the main strains of genital warts, as well as the risk of cervical cancer. I am so delighted for my daughter that this is available for her.

I have two friends, one male, one female, who both developed HPV-dependent head, neck and throat cancer as middle aged adults. That type of cancer is on the rise. If the vaccine had been available when they were teenagers, they would have been saved painful and permanently disfiguring chemotherapy, surgery and radiotherapy, plus the worry about surviving the cancer and the risk of it returning.

I simply do not get why you would want to say no to the HPV vaccine just because it’s a vaccination. You can’t control or detect which sexual partners may have HPV, and unless you expect your children to live like nuns all their lives, it’s a hugely positive advance in public health.

So was I. Early 1960s, healthy well nourished.
I don't get why some posters think children in the mid 20th century weren't well nourished, they were.
Everyone got measles, most were quite poorly for a few weeks. That's weeks not days, weeks in bed in a dark room because it hurts your eyes. Weeks off school. A few got long term complications such as deafness. It's really not a trivial illness, nothing like a cold.

None of the anti vaxxers has answered the question about HPV vaccine. Cervical cancer rates have fallen by 90% since the vaccination program. Are you denying your daughters this protection? Or perhaps they are Gillick competent at 12.

Good for you! I hope your immune system never meets Clostridium tetani👌

That's irrelevant, the paper you linked isn't validated. Anyone can have chatgpt churn out a paper to support their point of view, add impressive co-authors and post it on a preprint server, so unless you're scientifically literate and knowledgeable in a specific area, you have to treat preprints with caution. I'm not engaging on gender politics since it isn't relevant here.

Do you know how vaccines work?

Not if their choices can have life threatening impacts on other people, no I won’t bloody respect their choices. I respect their right to make the choice, but also to hold the opinion that their decision is ill informed and selfish.

I’m not sure I am as confident as you on the “not a moron” point. Would you still be “satisfied with your decision” if your child became seriously ill with a condition that we vaccinate against? You are currently benefitting from herd immunity and most people being vaccinated. If everyone had the same attitude as you, the risks to your children would be a lot greater.

Read the paper, which has been published in a peer reviewed but a very low impact journal and tried my best to take it seriously, I really did, but it was difficult because it was a survey of FaceBook users. I think the unusually high no. of respondents who claimed to have a PhD might be...questionable.

The limitations are hilarious:

Additionally, we assume the survey was completed in good faith. However, as noted above, a small percentage of participants selected “prefer to self-describe” gender to make discriminatory statements and the frequency of other characteristics in this group was suspect. Thus, they were excluded from the primary analysis sample, but included in a sensitivity analysis that yielded largely similar results. It is possible that additional respondents who did not self-describe their gender completed the survey in bad faith.

tldr shit study published in a shit journal

The paper is linked in the article, I thought it would be more helpful to readers here to have the tldr version and the paper itself if they wanted to verify.

The problem with "credible qualified peers" is that they started pretending to believe that people could now change sex (or always could, or something like that) and either went along with it or were fully complicit in manufacturing and legitimising that nonsense. Now people don't trust them, surprisingly. Maybe people who made it to PhD have been exposed to enough of this in academia they trust these "credible peers" even less than Joe public.

This doesn’t answer the question though, it’s just a statement of “I looked at some stuff and it said not to”. What does your research tell you why you shouldn’t? What were the pros of not vaccinating that outweighed the cons of vaccinating for example?

I think you're totally right - it's because the current crop of young parents don't remember what it was like. They probably didn't have a friend who died in childhood and another who went deaf from measles and so on.

For most of human history, perhaps as many as half of all deaths were from infectious disease; now most developed countries have got it down to about 5 per cent (mostly in the old and frail). People just have no idea how things used to be.

We all know there have been failings in the past on the parts of pharma, regulatory authorities, and medical journals. Measures have been and continue to be put in place to ensure clinical trial data transparency.

Please stop making stupid shit up, like Publishing demands on medical professionals mean they name swap on journal publications, things like that.

Yes, the older you are when you get it, the worse chicken pox seems to be. It completely floored me in my late 20s!

I paid for my child to have the chickenpox vaccine because we had a family member who was severely immunocompromised at the time and unable to be around her unless she had it. Beforehand, I read a lot of information about it — most other Western countries vaccinate against chickenpox so there is a lot of safety data. It’s probably well overdue to add it to the routine vaccination schedule. Though small, there is a risk from chickenpox of serious complications like encephalitis with devastating outcomes.

I wish chicken pox vaccine had been available when I was a child.

I got it at 36, and was really ill. I was off work for over 3 weeks.

For several years afterwards, I got repeated attacks of shingles, so it was lurking around in my system for a long while. And shingles is really bloody painful.

Yes, although that's been walked back and now that there's a successful vaccine for shingles that's given to people aged 70-79, that's less of a concern.

My point was that every decision has a downside and you have made one in this instance that avoids the negligible risk of a vaccination that's been given successfully to millions of children for the statistically greater risk that leaves them open to a debilitating illness.

Many vaccines have decades, some more than a century, of data behind them from lots of different researchers, companies and countries all over the world. How does this weigh against your unquantified suspicion that pharmaceutical companies conceal information?

Do we know exactly how much information is concealed per thousand pharmaceutical companies; what kinds of information is concealed, where it is hidden, which companies or countries might do it more or less and how serious the concealment might be? Is it less when dealing with a childhood vaccination subject to global safety standards than when developing an experimental drug for erectile dysfunction? Who knows? It remains just a conjecture.

In comparison, we have actual data about vaccines, which anyone can get hold of and refer to, produced by mass public vaccination programmes, not just pharmaceutical companies. Why would you believe in the former unqualified suspicion, but not the latter research data?

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

But that data isn’t just from pharmaceutical companies. It’s from all the countries globally with vaccination programmes, all based on huge amounts of research going back more than a century. You can read the current research and epidemiology online at the gov.uk infectious diseases dashboards. Are you suggesting that this isn’t robust? Why would it not be? It’s not coming from pharmaceutical companies but ours and other countries’ healthcare systems.