To think this takes not vaccinating to a whole new level

[Swanlaked]

DD has a child at school who has cancer. The school sent a letter home asking all parents to please think about giving their child the MMR if they haven't had it and also to inform them immediately if any child was in contact with chicken pox.

One of the mums at the school is still refusing to have her 3DC vaccinated. No health issues it's big pharma/poison/conspiracy theory crap

AIBU at this point to think the school should seek removal of the children and tell the bloody thicko to find another school for them?

Break wind, I'm not trying to get a 'gotcha'. If you read back, you'll see that when the person linked to the papers last night they asked 'what is wrong with these?' and I pointed out that there were conflicts of interest and people who are considered 'anti-vax' and who are looking for studies investigating vaccinated vs unvaccinated are unlikely to be satisfied with papers whose authors had received funding from vaccine manufacturers. Surely that's pretty obvious?

Their ideal end goal is that we throw them all in the bin and go back to the pre-vaccine levels of measles, mumps, polio, TB etc with all the childhood mortality and life-long disabilities that that brought?

Ah no - see, if we didn't 'poison' ourselves, and ate only organic foods, we wouldn't get sick in the first place. Non-vaccinated children have so much stronger immune systems.
Like this family, who probably ate healthy organic food and there was not a Macdonalds in sight..
Warning, this is distressing.
dianastaresinicdeane.wordpress.com/2011/09/15/lessons-from-a-kansas-graveyard-what-a-1903-outbreak-of-diphtheria-can-teach-us-today/

Diphtheria, even with modern medicine, is not a harmless childhood disease, and we don't hear about it any more because most people are vaccinated. For now.

bumbley from the link - Wakefield was describing how there was possible evidence of "vaccine induced pathology" when he was discussing the syndrome with the Legal Aid board (he planned to gather the cases and sue the manufacturers of MMR) before he actually found the cases. Who were recruited through anti-vax groups.

Breakwind, because if the same study had been conducted in the UK, it's extremely unlikely that you would have seen the same results. The unvaccinated children would have been unlikely to have contracted and died from measles. There are many other factors that could influence the outcome in developing countries that we are very fortunate not to have to consider in the UK.

When you say 'many other factors', do you mean.... factors like having access to the measles vaccination?

It's difficult to argue with such circular logic.

www.bmj.com/content/342/bmj.c5347.full

Posting it again because it's scary just how full of shit Wakefield was.

Peer review lets you know that a paper has passed a (reasonably low) hurdle. You can give it a little more weight in terms of th science but it certainly doesn't imply that it's the last word, that it represents 'settled' science, that it can't be questioned, or that you won't find peer reviewed documents that reach entirely different conclusions.

Lack of peer review, on the other hand, lets you know that something hasn't even got over that reasonably low bar. And in my own assessment of risk gets given less weight than anything that's peer reviewed.

I'm quite interested that we are to dismiss evidence from developing countries unless it involves Vitamin A in Guinea-Bissau.

No museum, people not suffering from malnutrition, vit A deficiency (as discussed earlier - see WHO for info) and access to healthcare including antibiotics for the treatment of the secondary infections that can potentially kill eg pneumonia.

reg same letter, there might be a template that's being used. like there are template letters for many things.

Actually - he said "the evidence is undeniably in favour of a specific vaccine induced pathology" BEFORE he even found the cases and then fiddled with their details.

And yet some people think he's heroic .

*So do anti-vaxxers believe that no child should be vaccinated? Their ideal end goal is that we throw them all in the bin and go back to the pre-vaccine levels of measles, mumps, polio, TB etc with all the childhood mortality and life-long disabilities that that brought? Because that sounds horrific to me, that they would wish that on millions of future children.

Typically anti-vaxxers do indeed like for other people to be vaccinated*

both these posts show that whatever answer you were to give as an 'anti-vaxxer' you'd be in the wrong.

I don't consider myself an anti-vaxxer even though i don't vaccinate. I'm not anti anything. but my answer to that question is what you chose to do with your child is your business. If you feel that vaccinating is best for your child, then I wish you well. If you chose not to vaccinate your child, I also wish you well. We all have to do a risk-benefit analysis and make that decision.

Jassy, I didn't say 'dismiss it' but what is it actually going to tell you about the health outcomes of vaccinated vs unvaccinated children in the UK? I wouldn't exactly call it a 'corker' as far as that is concerned.

I pointed out that there were conflicts of interest and people who are considered 'anti-vax' and who are looking for studies investigating vaccinated vs unvaccinated are unlikely to be satisfied with papers whose authors had received funding from vaccine manufacturers. Surely that's pretty obvious?

Sorry but I don't agree it's a conflict of interest.

A conflict of interest would be where a researcher sacrificed the primary goal of scientific accuracy for secondary gain - financial, personal, professional, for their institution - and attemped to disguise that.

It's the nature of pharmaceutical research that sometimes it's done by governments, sometimes by academia and sometimes by pharmaceuticals. A lot of the time it's a mixture of all three. And that's why scientists are pretty scrupulous about declaring upfront any current or previous funding or connections - they are trying to be as transparent as possible.

Anti-vaxxers will never find a real scientist who is 'pure' enough for them. Even if they've never worked on a commercially-funded study, they'll be working at a university that has funding from pharma, or they co-wrote a paper with someone who once gave a speach to GSK etc etc

I'm stunned that there appear to be people out there who actually genuinely believe that vaccines have NOT reduced the prevalence of diseases. I can kind of understand that there may be people who are concerned about vaccine adverse effects, even so concerned as to not want to vaccinate their own children (relying on others vaccinating theirs to provide herd immunity), but to actually believe that vaccines have not played a part in reduction of disease is staggering! I think we should be more concerned about our education system if this really is the case!

I don't consider myself an anti-vaxxer even though i don't vaccinate. I'm not anti anything. but my answer to that question is what you chose to do with your child is your business. If you feel that vaccinating is best for your child, then I wish you well. If you chose not to vaccinate your child, I also wish you well. We all have to do a risk-benefit analysis and make that decision.

Unfortunately, the decisions non-vaxers make are everyone's business because you and your children act as petri dishes for long-dormant diseases to mutate and gain traction.

I didn't carry out my own 'risk-benefit' analysis, I don't have a laboratory.

BreakWind, they were listed in the 'conflicts of interest' section of the paper so the authors obviously felt the need to disclose them as such. I guess you're free to disagree with them though.

Choices and circumstances- there is nothing to be done!

There are rules about what you should disclose as conflict of interest, those are not done according to 'feeling'

museum but you see, one lot of vaccines nearly killed my baby, i'm not about to take that risk again with her OR my other children. they've also never given another child any serious illness because they've never had one, despite living in the epicentre of the measles epidemic in south wales a few years ago and having friends who got measles.
I wish I could just blindly go and have them vaccinated without fear. I do. genuinely. but for us that risk is too great. thats what i mean by risk-benefit analysis.

"Anti-vaxxers will never find a real scientist who is 'pure' enough for them. Even if they've never worked on a commercially-funded study, they'll be working at a university that has funding from pharma, or they co-wrote a paper with someone who once gave a speach to GSK etc etc"

Because thankfully both industry and academia recognise that it is even more difficult to bring a medicine to market without collaboration between the two. They are becoming ever more enmeshed thankfully.

Jassy, I didn't say 'dismiss it' but what is it actually going to tell you about the health outcomes of vaccinated vs unvaccinated children in the UK? I wouldn't exactly call it a 'corker' as far as that is concerned

It's an interesting question about what could be learned about the difference in outcome among children for whom all other factors are equal.

You'd need to do an awful lot more digging into the study to determine whether biases of 'developing country so nothing we can learn from it' applies. Were the participants particularly poor? Malnourished? What was their actual access to healthcare? None of this is clear from the abstract.

Developing countries have access to infrastructure and they have wealthy middle classes as well.

If you're going to take issue with the study the sample size seems more fertile ground for questioning.

"museum but you see, one lot of vaccines nearly killed my baby, i'm not about to take that risk again with her OR my other children"

But this is a perfectly valid reason not to vaccinate and in this case perfectly acceptable to rely on herd immunity. No one should criticise you for this choice. It isn't based on woo.

Begtodiffer... Lovely chart, but it remains a fact that better hygiene and readily available hot water did that... Not the vaccines.

Also around the times of the drop offs in various diseases the definition of them were changed... Polio is the prime example here.

As an aside just because you have antibodies present doesn't mean you have immunity, and in the recent measles 'outbreaks' the only people who died had been vaccinated. The immune system is made up of many parts that are still relatively unknown, cellular, lymph, humoral... Immunity is built by being ill with viruses, they don't kill you it is the bacterial infection that do. Strengthening the immune system in ways we know now are the best defence. Ie organic food, probiotics, midday sunlight with no sunscreen, essential oils and natural medicine.

Did you know that $2bn has been paid out by the courts in the US this year for vaccine injuries.... Some of the stories are horrific and well documented... Might be good to use other research tools here, there are thousands out there.

Just something I learnt today that HIV was made by man... The green monkey serum (contaminated with SIV) used in vaccines have caused this in humans. It had been documented and the research replicated by independent scientists.

By vaccinating you are opening yourself up to a whole unknown world of future problems... Think auto-imune diseases, the immune system has been invaded by a non natural substance, it's gonna kick off at some point in the future.

Don't forget 'modern medicine' is only in its infancy, and doesn't realise to treat a disease you should treat the whole person not just suppress the symptoms... Natural all the way.

And yes I avoid people who have just been vaccinated, and will keep my children off school when the flumist gets sprayed around.

"Just something I learnt today that HIV was made by man"

Please, please do share your source!

You don't give your kids "modern medicine" stig? No antibiotics? No pain or fever relief?

I wish there was a function on Mumsnet that automatically inserted a 'citation needed' end note every time the words 'the fact is' was used.