Why would someone say this about vaccines? Is it odd?

[PuzzlingPanda]

Was in a health food shop today and mentioned an ongoing issue I'm having with one of my do.

The man mentioned he thought the biggest thing going wrong with our children was all the vaccines they receive. He said they full of nasties, designed to make people ill.

It could be put down to a man having a pointless rant but why would he say this? Is there any sort of truth in it?

Not the first time I've heard negative things about vaccines.

Now I'm worried about it.

"Anyone who isn't sure whether a vaccine is worth getting may see the pro-vaccine stance as consisting of overly aggressive insults rather than reasoned argument and it may push them the other way."

But there have been years of reasoned argument. And there are loads of places online to get proper, scientific advice.

Ah yes, I forgot about whooping cough - I know you don't generally get lifelong immunity to it even if you have the disease so even though I got the old-school 70s pertussis vaccine (with added more potential side effects!) I may or may not be immune. Have they ever proposed an adult pertussis booster? Though I do still stand by my point that you don't need to be revaccinated against everything - as you said above, the live-virus ones like rubella, varicella, etc. tend to be long-lasting.

I must check what else I was vaccinated against...

Can you imagine if an anti vaxxer stated "I fuckin hate vaxxers. They make my piss/blood boil. Fuckin cretins/twats.". Can you? No, I can't either. If one did though mn would properly explode with pro vaxxer brainwashed apoplexy.

*most children who get whooping cough catch it from adults as adults often don't realise they have it

This is all the more reason to have children vaccinated. They are there to protect those with weaker or under developed immune systems*

No - vaccinating as children is pushing up the age it wears off to when it's not recognised. Which in turn makes babies and weaker immune systems more vulnerable.

My own mother caught WC. She had it for weeks and went into hospital many times BEFORE she persuaded anybody to check for WC. She must have infected huge amounts of vulnerable people because Drs wouldn't believe her she thought it could be WC since she'd been vaccinated. DESPITE that she was an age it could well have worn off, despite its not 100% effective anyhow and HCPs know this, and despite having classic and severe symptoms. She was told on numerous occasions it wasn't possible. The only reason she kept asking was because I was making my decision about jabs and had heard it wasn't necessarily that effective as a jab and at the time banged on to her that "see, your vaccine didn't work in the first place"

The following year they bought in the WC jab in pregnancy to protect babies straight from birth - in response to an increase in cases.

The difference is that "pro vaxxers" don't put other people's immunocompromised children at risk. They don't encourage other people to put their own children at risk. They don't tell people that their children's health problems are because of vaccines and either drown them in guilt and/or fail to look for other causes. They don't spread rumours in the developing world about vaccine safety so that polio is coming back in places where it was nearly wiped out..........

All they do is gratefully accept what modern medicine can do to keep their children safe.

Just realised my post below sounds like I don't think WC jab should be given at all - I don't. But I think we've gone too far in trusting certain vaccines to protect those who need protecting. I wish the first time my mum called 111 someone had dared to think it was possible she'd caught WC despite being vaccinated.

They don't encourage them to put their own children at risk
Right, so if someone chooses not to vaccinate on the say so of an 'anti-vaxxer' and that child gets sick/makes someone else sick, its the AV's fault, right?
So what if someone decides to vaccinate their child because a 'pro-vaxxer' says so, and THAT child reacts as badly as mine did, is that not the exact same thing? So if you can argue it one way, it works both ways.

OP, I was on the fence when DS was little, I kept reading such conflicting and quite frankly terrifying things from both sides and nobody seemed to have any kind of believability. I didn't know what side to trust. I'm normally very science minded but 7 years ago the NHS (etc) line was strictly "Vaccines are completely safe with no risks, always effective and completely necessary!"

That didn't sound right to me either.

This article wasn't around when I was trying to navigate my way through the confusion, but although I'd already come down on the side of vaccinating by the time I read it, it's stuck with me. I'll copy and past the relevant bit about "nasties".

www.huffingtonpost.com/jennifer-raff/dear-parents-you-are-being-lied-to-about-vaccines_b_5112620.html

They say that thimerosal in vaccines causes autism. It doesn't, and it hasn't been in most vaccines since 2001 anyway.

They say that the aluminum in vaccines (an adjuvant, or component of the vaccine designed to enhance the body's immune response) is harmful to children. But children consume more aluminum in natural breast milk than they do in vaccines, and far higher levels of aluminum are needed to cause harm.

pigeonpoo that sounds horrendous. I think it does go to show that we as a society have a little too much faith in vaccines in general. Far too many people, sadly including a lot of HCPs who should know better, assume that they only fail very rarely, and that they'll give a life time's protection to the vaccinated, and so patients miss out on the correct diagnosis.

I'm very sorry your child was ill. There are always going to be some people who suffer side effects- sadly anything that works will have side effects. And usually one child having a severe reaction is a reason not to vaccinate their siblings. That's why herd immunity is so important.

That NHS line was still being towed 3 years ago - in fact iv shared before on here it was a dr ridiculing my concerns, that initially delayed me further making a decision. She zoned in right away on the MMR and how Andrew Wakefield was struck off to persuade me that risk of vaccine damage is a myth. But I wasn't there for an MMR. I had a 9 week old baby at the time. I had the vaccine damage payment leaflet in my bag from the jobcentre place you go when needing to prove you have an illness for assessment.

Had the dr said - yes they can damage. And then explained the likelihood and risk-benefit percentages of the vaccines I was by then overdue to give my baby - I may have trusted her and gone ahead right away.

Instead I thought there was a conspiracy and she was a liar. Compounded by learning when I retold this to a certain GP who is anti-vaccine that the GPs get a bonus for percentage of children vaccinated in their surgery.

Iv learned otherwise since - but my child was left unprotected for longer than I would have - had she handled me differently and not thrown me out of the surgery when I produced the leaflet

But bertrand my point is why is it an awful thing to persuade a person one way, but the other way is 'just one of those things'?
I genuinely don't understand the difference.

pigeon sadly I've come across a few GPs like that myself who bizarrely assume any question about any vaccine can be answered by "the MMR doesn't cause autism". It has become apparent more than once that many know less than I do (although will happily tell me with confidence things I know to be untrue!) and so I cut out the middle man now and go straight to the literature or JCVI minutes.

Because there are huge benefits to vaccination- none at all to non vaccination.

I have a friend who is trying to put me off mmr. Relies on this - I'd love a scientific response:

drrimatruthreports.com/wp-content/uploads/Final-All-India-Medical-Congress-Paper.020415.pdf

That's the problem YouCannot - it undermines all trust in mainstream healthcare when that happens. Your told to trust the medical profession, ridiculed if you don't. Because they went to medical school and understand how to read and Interpret research and data, and you the parent - did not. Then you question something and end up realising how fallible it can be - especially if you've been given in genuine faith completely untrue information by HCPs

My child would have benefitted from not being vaccinated. So that's not strictly true.

sarednoob that 'report' is such a pile of shit I wouldn't know where to start. It's as scientific as my 2-year olds drawings. It refers to whale.to and natural news articles as sources, to start with. I think I have to go lie down after reading it.

pigeon exactly, exactly. Parents are treated as imbeciles. You mention vaccine risks and everyone assumes you are concerned about autism!

It's actually very hard to conduct proper trials into the long term effects of vaccines compared to unvaccinated children. Almost impossible.

i discusses vaccines during my pregnancy. I accepted the pertussis vaccine and declined the flu. The uptake in my surgery of the flu vaccine by pregnant women is only 50 per cent. My GP said his wife didn't have it either.

Lots of cretins where I live.

And the problem I find with this herd immunity argument is how does it apply when so many vaccines do wear off, so many adults are walking without ever having been vaccined or whose vaccinations have worn off and yet the focus is always on unvaccinated children?

Is that not one of the problems with the rubella vaccine? We generally had the virus as kids and remain immune.

But in a reasonable percentage of vaccinated people, the vaccine wears off as it were. What happens when these vaccinated girls wind up pregnant? I know they test for rubella immunity during early pregnancy but it's a bit late! It's generally a mild illness anyway - milder than chicken pox which isn't vaccinated against at all....

What happens when these vaccinated girls wind up pregnant?

Rubella immunity status is tested as standard when you become pregnant. If you were to become infected with rubella during pregnancy the potential harm to the fetus is huge. Thankfully since we vaccinate against rubella the likelihood of a pregnant woman catching it is very low,

I don't think it's equal though. It's not as simple as vaccines wear off.

Because they all have differing rates of effectiveness and sometimes that effectiveness (I think, anyone confirm/deny?) differs depending on which ethnicity receives it too and definitely different effectiveness depending on the age it's given

Also dependent on the immune system too and the antibodies it already holds - I think I read recently that having been infected with CMV in the past makes the flu vaccine more effective?

IF that is the case - then are we denying any illnesses making other vaccines more effective by vaccinating against them? For example could having natural mumps antibodies make the menB more effective? (I don't mean those specific illnesses just suggesting it's possible we could later find something like that out - for any vaccine)

leedy Why would I need to? I had a rubella vaccine when I was twelve and I was still immune to it per blood tests in pregnancy 28 years later (3 years ago), so unless it's suddenly worn off, I'm pretty sure I'm not a potential rubella vector.

I am retired. I got an MMR jab in my 50's. I worked on paediatric wards (often with immune suppressed). When my Hep B immunity was tested I asked if anything else to test, very sensible Occy Health, and my mate in infectious diseases, used the spare serum to test for as many as possible and my Rubella titre was borderline, immediate vaccination and MMR was available so had that rather than a single vaccine (probably cheaper but so what).

To the rest of you (has Panda been back?) I am vaccinated against smallpox, half the humans on planet are not (inc DC x 2) but the virus exists only in freezers in many some countries, but a sample turned up recently in the back of a freezer in UK.

Lastly, there was one batch of one vaccine (Jap Encephalitis) that did cause significant problems in 1990s, not sufficiently attenuated.

I will continue to have 'flu jabs, get my pneumococcus when next in UK and herpes z at 70.

Few more for sugar. Beautiful card, thank you for sharing.