Genuine question for anti-vaxxers

[Raisinmeup]

I see a lot online about anti-vaxxers and I’m trying to understand where they’re coming from, so this is a genuine question, not rage bait.

My understanding is that some parents choose not to vaccinate their children because they believe vaccines cause harmful side effects, or they just don’t trust the government and big pharma in general.

But what’s the alternative? If everyone stopped vaccinating, wouldn’t we start seeing diseases like polio coming back? That would mean more infant deaths and lifelong disabilities. It just doesn’t seem like a rational trade off?

From what I’ve seen, there seems to be a belief that immune systems can deal with these illnesses naturally, but I wonder if part of that belief comes from the fact that parents of today haven’t actually seen what a world without vaccines looks like. We’ve grown up in a time where infant death from preventable diseases is almost unheard of, so maybe it’s easy to forget how serious these infections really are.

And lastly, if you haven’t vaccinated your child and they then catch one of these illnesses, do you not end up turning to the same big pharma for the medicine or treatment anyway?

The NHS used to rationalise on their site that we don't use a chicken pox vaccine routinely because children gaining routine chicken pox infection helps boost the community immunity to shingles in the older population.

Adding it to our routine schedule is going to see a spike in shingles for the older population, whose immune systems are generally lower and they're more susceptible to the flare up.

They didn't and won't have the HPV either if it were my decision, but it's not really. Older one didn't have it.

The body clears HPV itself if we are healthy.

Once my children are adults they will have come into contact with most of the things we have vaccines for, and have gained immunity or resilience.

This is simply untrue. We have herd immunity in this country for diseases like measles and are at elimination status for, eg., rubella. This means your child will definitely not have come into contact with “most of the things we have vaccines for” - rather the complete opposite. If, for example, your unvaccinated daughter were to visit another country with rubella prevalence whilst pregnant, she would have no immunity and could very easily contract it, and her unborn baby suffer lifelong serious deformation or disability as a result.

This was the very reason why vaccinating for rubella was so important — it typically doesn’t cause many serious complications in children who get it, but it really does in the unborn babies of pregnant women who catch it. There are several childhood illnesses which actually have much higher levels of serious complications in adults, pregnant women and immunocompromised people who catch them than they do in children, so childhood vaccinations also protect those people.

It sounds like you really don’t understand vaccination and need to read some proper information on it and how to evaluate risk. The idea that these diseases were eradicated by sanitation is wishful thinking (we have data from across the world and from the twentieth century showing that’s just not true, for one thing).

This is a false dichotomy. I want neither. It's about risk, it's about us, (antivaxxers if we must) not believing our kids are at risk of death from the illnesses.

Yes, we could be playing a dangerous game long-term, and it IS selfish. I'm just being totally honest as OP is genuinely asking.

I'm interested in MY child's health, not global statistics to scare me. I want my child to be as healthy as can be, and no, I don't want them to have brain injury if that's possible from vaccines.

Is it possible from vaccines? I have no idea but I do believe if it were it would be heavily suppressed.

So I'd just not rather risk it.

To understand it, you need to be able to accept that some people are very selfish / selfish for their family.

It seems that you’re not. But you need to acknowledge that some people are. And they’re ok with prioritising them as an individual and rely on others making different decisions, and for them to then rely on that to minimise the impact of their decision.

If everyone around you is vaccinated, you can skip the vaccine with very little risk to you. It’s when they’re not that you start carrying any material risk.

(and yes, most won’t say that, because they haven’t thought it all the way through. They’ve looked into the more superficial stuff like infection rates in the population and vaccine risk and decided it’s ok. Not really acknowledging that a lot of that comes from others vaccinating ane creating that environment).

Being published in the Lancet gave the work credibility as I order for that to happen it had to go through a peer review process in a journal that is very difficult to get published in. As a parent, a preliminary study suggesting the vaccine could cause serious damage would be likely to give many pause for thought until the work was either replicated or refuted.

The body often clears HPV, but the cellular changes that lead to cancer are caused before the virus is cleared. That is precisely why we have seen huge drops in cervical cancer after the vaccine.

Please do some proper reading about this because your ideas are very naive!

Thanks. I'm learning here myself and reading everything, and I've considered vaccines a million and one times for my children. I've discussed with GPs and doctors also. I appreciate your engagement. My youngest child is increasingly ineligible for catch ups but I'd still consider taking her for jabs if I were convinced it was necessary for her optimal health.
I don't believe that a healthy diet and breast feeding to full term is going to prevent them from contracting deadly viruses?
I believe those things mean they are unlikely to suffer serious complications from regular low exposure to those viruses.
Yes, I'm relying on herd immunity. Yes, I'm being selfish.
I do wonder whether we would, as a population, be as at risk from these things as we were before sanitation and basic nutrition came about though. And I can muse this totally non-urgently as I'm in a very privileged position, and I'm taking full advantage of that.

Yes your last point has sent me into a few spirals when my baby coughed etc. it's honestly terrifying to think I've put them at risk.

I suppose it comes down to which you fear most. The lack of transparency and trust we can have in those who make and sell the vaccines certainly comes into it.

How did you do this research?

Do you understand the chemical terms?

I only ask because I have seen people think that 'sodium chloride' is a form of sodium. It isn't it is table salt. What it is made from is 'sodium' a highly volatile metal and 'chlorine' a highly poisonous gas.

What worried you about what is in the vaccines?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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 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.

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?

@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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

@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.

Vaccine for scarlet fever?

Show us please?

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.

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

I avoid that too.