SIL has not vaccinated my nieces

[Pittcuecothecookbook]

My baby has been booked in for her vaccinations soon. I asked my sister in law, who has primary school aged kids, about the experience and I was flabbergasted when she said she didn't get their jabs. I can't quite believe it!

When I asked why, she said the risks outweighed the pros but she struggled to articulate what the risks were beyond 'potential death'. I said that that was also the downside of not getting the jabs too! She said she was persuaded when her friend said that the jabs couldn't be undone if her kids had a reaction.

AIBU to be shocked and quite disappointed about this? I'm not looking forward to it by any means, but the eradication of many awful diseases and protection against those still prevalent is surely a non negotiable?

When her kids don't get these diseases, she'll be vindicated but that will likely be because the majority have had their jabs rather than proving jabs were unnecessary.

I imagine I'll get over this - my child will be protected - but I'm just at hearing this news.

‘Vaxxers’ - AKA normal people - are informed by and take the advice of highly qualified, disinterested experts. Many of those experts will have to keep children safe and alive when they contract awful disease.

Anti-vaxxers are informed by lies on the internet. They will not be responsible for any outcomes.

Take your pick.

Where’s the response to my question about stamping on the spreading of false, misleading, dangerous nonsense about vaccines?

That depends on which information you are describing.
I tend to prefer all information to be available, myself, and for thinking adults to be responsible for invalidating the bollocks, themselves. I also think you seem to have a very passionate stance on the matter whereas I prefer to analyse things for myself - bluntly I don't need very passionate people to filter information for me.

jaxhog you may find it interesting that only 10% of the worlds population was ever vaccinated against smallpox so quite incredible it was responsible for eradicating it don’t you think...

Dr William Thompson is pro vaccine and that yes is a conspiracy theory from the film Vaxxed.

See here www.snopes.com/fact-check/bad-medicine/

Please do some more research and just keep an open mind with what you read. There is a lot of misinformation on pro vaccination websites and studies are used in a highly misleading way to frighten people.

Hear hear - only one opinion allowed here on Mumsnet - all others are shouted down.
Sadly the same thing is happening in lots of areas and it's always the so called "Liberals" doing the shouting.

Cath, infant vaccination against smallpox was required by law in the UK and other European countries.

ImAldoot

You don’t oppose lies. OK then.

Aluminum in various chemical forms is commonly found in food and water:

Dietary and other sources of aluminium intake

Aluminium in the food supply comes from natural sources including water, food additives, and contamination by aluminium utensils and containers. Most unprocessed foods, except for certain herbs and tea leaves, contain low (< 5 micrograms Al/g) levels of aluminium. Thus most adults consume 1-10 mg aluminium daily from natural sources.

Hear hear - only one opinion allowed here on Mumsnet - all others are shouted down.

Very little of what anti-vaxxers say is opinion. Almost all is false statement of fact. And what opinion they do express is based on false statement of fact.

mary Yes it was and many parents went to prison rather than giving their children a vaccine that ended up killing so many. I’m also referring to worldwide vaccine rates as smallpox was a worldwide issue. If only 10% at most were vaccinated it’s practically impossible for the vaccine to have been responsible for eliminating it worldwide....

However I sincerely appreciate your tone... and kindness ... but I’ve been studying this and even more so the nature of disease and disease theory for many many years and have come to the conclusion I have with a very open mind ..
So we shall agree to disagree on this

Oh FFS. Smallpox was eradicated by a worldwide vaccination programme. Attempting to deny the efficacy of that isn’t a view or an opinion, it’s ludicrous and dangerous bollocks.

Sorry about my tone. I find recklessness or indifference about children’s welfare a subject worth getting worked up about.

Plimmy so please explain how, when a supposed vaccine uptake of >90% is needed to provide herd immunity, an uptake of less than 10% worldwide leads to complete worldwide eradication?

Disclaimer... I do realise I’m wasting my breath

Yes absolutely - I probably was googling things like vaccine damage, or are vaccines dangerous/are vaccines safe, not side effects of X vaccine.

The links you sent me were dated 2017 and 2016, so they weren't available in 2008. I didn't mean that there was no information in 2008 - but most of it was in scientific journals and so on. I don't remember if I looked up the CDC or Mayo Clinic because these are American so perhaps I wouldn't have known to look at them - but I do remember looking on NHS websites and there was not the depth of info you can find on there today, not even an acknowledgement that this might be a decision parents were questioning, just information on the recommended schedule.

In addition other posters have referred to the internet being more of a "wild west" and large health organisations not being on top of the wide breadth of conspiracy theories (probably if anything they thought it was a small isolated bunch of uneducated people who weren't likely to come to their sites to look for info, which is fair). The internet was not as widely used as it is today - social media was mainly for younger people, most of whom were not yet parents, and smartphones had only just been invented. I think it was the start of a shift but it hadn't quite happened yet. I was probably unusual among parents at the time for getting info from the internet rather than seeking out somebody like a doctor to ask. In hindsight, that would have been more sensible.

I think I felt like I was questioning agendas. I suppose that it didn't really occur to me that parents who had children they felt had been harmed by vaccines, or someone writing a website from what was probably their basement, might have an agenda in the same way that "big pharma" would. Indeed these less-polished, less-educated accounts somehow came across to me as more honest or more human, easier to relate to, than a carefully given, PR-scrutinised official statement. Like I said I've learned a lot since then and I am more sceptical of opinion based rather than evidence based information but I was quite young.

I'm not sure why I felt doctors, midwives, etc would be poor sources of information. I did feel a level of distrust for them at the time, which I actually attribute to some of the natural birth stuff I'd been drawn into (I also find this really unhelpful - and stand up against aspects of this now) but mainly I felt that I would be patronised by them and my concerns not taken seriously. I do regret that I didn't try. Probably if I'd asked, I might have met a different attitude to the one I was expecting. I often felt as a young mum I had to be quite defensive about decisions I was making. Perhaps that was simply a personal issue of mine.

I agree that a public information campaign would be helpful. Basically what I felt was that parents' concerns about vaccination were not being answered or addressed and I still think this is partially the case although I do think there is much better info out there and at least acknowledgement that some people are confused or have questions. All I want to say is that sweeping away concerns and fears does nothing to address them and it's much much more helpful to engage with people. Plus if people feel that their doctor is likely to be open to discussing concerns, they are much more likely to ask. I didn't ask because I thought I already knew what they would say, which was a mistake and a false belief because of course I didn't know. IMO though also, aggressive policies like making vaccination mandatory under threat of social services involvement or withdrawal of survival benefits or similar is likely to make people more afraid of asking for clarification or information from people in official positions, and that doesn't solve the problem.

.

There can't be an intelligent debate on mumsnet about vaccines.

Every country has a fund to pay out for vaccine damaged children. The question is a matter of weighing up the risks, because some people get damaged by these diseases and some people get damaged by vaccines. Pretending that no-one gets damaged by vaccines is wearing blinkers.

please explain how, when a supposed vaccine uptake of >90% is needed to provide herd immunity, an uptake of less than 10% worldwide leads to complete worldwide eradication?

Herd immunity is only necessary when there's a wild reserve of the pathogen. Smallpox vaccine was first used in 1790 so it's unclear what time frame your 10% number refers to or what the source is.

If you are genuinely interested in how smallpox was eradicated by vaccination it's well documented in this article.

Smallpox Vaccine: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Here's one relevant passage:

The global eradication effort, led by D.A. Henderson, originally used a strategy of mass vaccination campaigns to achieve 80% vaccine coverage in each country. This goal proved difficult to attain in many underdeveloped countries, but a serendipitous discovery led to a more effective strategy. Insufficient vaccine supplies in Nigeria led Dr. William Foege to try a strategy of aggressive case-finding, followed by vaccination of all known and possible contacts to seal off the outbreak from the rest of the population.5 This was the first time such a strategy was employed during the global smallpox eradication campaign, although it was also used in Leicester, England in the late 19th century.9 This strategy, known as surveillance-containment or ring vaccination, led to the disappearance of smallpox in eastern Nigeria even though the population coverage was less than 50%. The relative benefits of ring vaccination versus mass vaccination have been debated, but epidemiological evidence from Africa and Asia suggests that both lower population density and higher population vaccine coverage contributed to the elimination of transmission in many regions.10

That’s not true. The extent of necessary vaccination to achieve exhaustion of the disease (humans being the only reservoir) depends on where the disease takes hold. In Australia there was a lower vac rate, for example, than in Europe. Ring vaccination and quarantine - like in the anti-vaxxers’ favourite town of Leicester - was a good strategy. But in the end vaccination ended smallpox.

Attribution to Dettman of that claim - which is what I think you’re referring to - is almost certainly false anyway. But far more than 10% of people had to be vaccinated to kill off the virus here and elsewhere where it was endemic.

Yet more nonsense from the anti-vaxxers...

Sorry, that was a reply to the breathy Cathmidston.

There is a theory in antivax circles that diseases like smallpox, polio etc were naturally in decline and that we don't necessarily know it was vaccination which directly caused the decline, but that vaccination "took the credit" as it were.

I've never actually been able to find again, either the figures that antivaxxers use to back this up nor the evidence to the contrary proving the link with vaccination. I know antivaxxers claim that popular graphs which show a drop when vaccines were introduced are simply cut off at the end and don't show the longer pattern. However I don't know if this is simply because at a time before vaccines we probably had extremely poor data about disease rates too.

However - measles outbreaks in recent years in areas where MMR uptake had dropped DO back up the idea that herd immunity via vaccination works. It also seems unlikely that vaccination would have taken off as a thing in the first place if it was not observed, first hand, that people who are vaccinated have immunity towards what were at the time common diseases. It is only today that we have the luxury of questioning whether vaccination works, because we don't come into contact with diseases often enough to be at serious risk of catching them, so we have no idea if the vaccine is protecting us, or not.

Missconduct and by the same token the following is a counter opinion to that you’ve offered. As adults in the U.K. we have the right to make an informed decision on what makes more sense to us and this makes more sense to me:

Smallpox – eradication? Turning to the story of smallpox vaccination, we see an almost blind faith and disregard of available evidence in the much-touted anecdote ‘smallpox has been eradicated by vaccination’.  In England free smallpox vaccines were introduced in 1840 and made compulsory in 1853.  Between 1857 and 1859 there were 14,244 deaths from smallpox. Between 1863 and 1865 after a population rise of 7%, the
to 20,059.  In 1867 evaders of vaccination were prosecuted. Those left unvaccinated were very few. Between 1870 and 1872 after a population rise of 9%, the death rate rose by 123% to 44,840.  Then we see the phenomena of reclassification, at the time all authorities agree that chickenpox is non-fatal. Yet in the 30 years up to 1934, 3,112 people are stated to have died of chickenpox and only 579 of smallpox in England and Wales.

Smallpox was the first illness to be targeted with a mass vaccination campaign in 1840, which in fact lead to a dramatic increase in death rates from smallpox when most other illnesses without vaccines were experiencing a steady decline. (See the mortality rates of Scarlet fever, diphtheria, tuberculosis, whooping cough, tetanus and measles above). When eventually mortality did decline, lagging behind all the other illnesses looked at, we are told that this was due to the highly successful smallpox vaccine; a conclusion that could only have been drawn by someone ignoring all the medical evidence to date. Because levels of illness have been declining for many years prior to vaccination, evidently there are many factors responsible for this, other than the use of vaccines. So we are left with the issue of deciding what effect did vaccines have over and above what clearly would have happened anyway?

The only illness said to have been eradicated by vaccination is smallpox (although cases are still said to exist under a different classification) and interestingly the eradication is supposed to have occurred worldwide when in fact vaccine uptake rates were nothing like what they were supposed to be in order to achieve herd immunity. “The disappearance of smallpox from many regions despite the continued presence of large numbers of unvaccinated susceptibles was evident from the historical record (as had been noted by Farr more than a century ago).” Paul E.M. Fine Epidemiologic Reviews 1993 Johns Hopkins University, Vol. 15, No. 2 More importantly it was the only mass vaccinated illness before the 1900’s and the only illness to increase in death rate after the use of the vaccine, whilst all other illnesses were in decline without the use of vaccines. The symptoms of smallpox are still evident according to the World Health Organisation, only now the clinically identical illnesses are classified by different names for example ‘monkey pox’. The real biochemical proof of eradication is said to be due to the fact that the vaccine virus is not found in the natural world. Given that the only smallpox viral components we have are those that have been used for vaccines and now kept in laboratories, and that they have been so dramatically changed over time in the ongoing production of vaccines, it is highly probable that no naturally occurring virus or similar DNA thought to be from the virus looks anything like the supposed smallpox components that we have in the vaccine. It is very likely that the virus hasn’t been eradicated, it’s just that vaccine manufacturers have produced a vaccine virus that cannot be found in the natural world.

From the vaccine promoters point of reference obviously the more people vaccinated the better, however there is no verifiable percentage uptake that leads to the elimination of the disease, this is a complete mathematical hypothesis unproven with regard to any vaccine, and in any disease situation. If vaccines work, then the ‘vaccinated’ are protected, and they need not worry about those that choose to not vaccinate. The fact that vaccines cannot be given to sick people, the very people that need intervention to increase their immune function shows the potential problems with vaccines, problems that are not evident from any other natural immune enhancing intervention. Alternative and natural therapeutics, unlike vaccines, are actually designed for the sick.

Absolute cobblers.

Bertie a good example of a disease declining naturally is scarlet fever. This used to be a killer in the U.K...far worse than measles... but it declined naturally along with measles etc despite there being no vaccination program. It’s still around, but is relatively rare and fairly mild depending on how it’s managed. Giving antipyretics actually creates worse outcomes for instance

Absolute cobblers.
Another masterpiece from Plimmy

There is a theory in antivax circles that diseases like smallpox, polio etc were naturally in decline

Smallpox was still killing people in the 1940's

NYC Smallpox Outbreak

leading to over 6 million vaccinations in 4 weeks (over 80% of the population), which ended the outbreak. That doesn't sound like a disease "in decline" (whatever tf that means) to me.

Scarlet fever is bacterial, not viral, and is treated by antibiotics.

Another masterpiece by Cathmidston

Readers will no doubt wish to consider the reliability of her other posts.

Sorry Plimmy, your point is?
The incidence of Scarlet fever declined ....the fact it is bacterial and not viral is another topic. Whooping cough is also bacterial ....
so if you’re comparing like with like then scarlet fever declined along with whooping cough despite there being a vaccine for whooping cough and no vaccine for scarlet fever. Is that simple enough for you?