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?

That isn’t why the Lancet pulled his paper.

If you mean news outlets when you say corporate media, then why on earth are you relying on those for vaccine information, as opposed to, say, information from the NHS/public health bodies/the vaccine leaflet/your own scientific understanding of vaccines/your GP?

Why would you think the Daily Mail or the Sun are sources of useful medical information in the first place? They don’t even get it right when it comes to celebrity news.

Why would you think news outlets can’t be trusted, but instead trust unverified anti-vaccination information from people with no scientific or medical background at all?

From your posts, you don’t actually understand either viruses or vaccines well — have actually read anything like the WHO or government infections diseases information? Why do you think they would misinform you?

This is completely anecdotal.
My friends breast fed children are a lot more sickly than my formula fed children. They seem to really suffer with their chests.
using your logic - formula feeding MUST keep children healthier, despite what’s been said. Because, you know, that’s the case in this singular instance.
I’ll alert the press 🙄

Yes all this. All are these responses reall? They are just so predictable. Before covid everyone i know would have been delighted with the introduction of a chickenpox vaccine and now it is being treated with great suspicion. It's sad.

Pharmaceutical companies won't accept or acknowledge that they are effectively injuring people with their medication, as per my experience of being harmed by an off label antipsychotic.

My GP denied i could get my movement disorder from the low dose and duration of the drugs, yet my neurologist said that some poor susceptible souls can be harmed by just one pill.

@thecatfromneptune

I've never said I rely on news for vaccine information
I have had conversations with my GP about it.
I don't believe the daily mail or sun are credible sources of medical information.
I don't trust unverified people online about vaccination.

Yes, a successful vaccine for scarlet fever was developed in the 1920s and 1930s, but abandoned after the development of antibiotics.

Scarlet fever is caused by a specific strain of strep bacteria that has been infected by a bacteriophage. Research on bacteriophages was eclipsed by the advent of antibiotics, but has recently become of interest again with the rise of antibiotic resistance.

There are vaccinations for both viral and bacterial illnesses — pneumococcal and meningococcal vaccines are examples of vaccinations against bacterial illnesses. We tend to vaccinate more against viruses because these can’t be eliminated by antibiotics. Now that we are seeing rising antibiotic resistance, we may want to vaccinate more against bacterial illnesses where possible. Plus, many of the serious complications of viruses are bacterial infections — antibiotics reduced those, but we might want to chance these rather less if we could not rely on antibiotics (which may be in our near future).

@user098786533
I realise peer review exists but in the same vein I think compartmentalisation could contribute to things being concealed. There's also collusion and integrity at play. Publishing demands on medical professionals mean they name swap on journal publications, things like that.

Bollocks!

So pharmaceutical companies never conceal information?

I suppose this sort of answers my question.. and if the response to anything factual is simply that you don’t believe the reported evidence, then I’ll probably never fully comprehend that viewpoint.

In a way though, my question still stands. It’s easy and, as you’ve even acknowledged yourself, extremely privileged, to ride the coattails of herd immunity and claim your children’s health is purely down to their “strong immune systems.”

My question isn’t about the here and now, while your children are benefitting from widespread vaccination. It’s about what happens if these diseases become common again. If you started seeing people around you losing infants, or children suffering complications, would you then fear the diseases themselves or would you still believe vaccination was the greater risk? Do we really need to reach the point again where babies die and boys are left infertile before we accept that these outcomes are preventable through vaccination?

You’ve also said you don’t believe your daughter could develop cervical cancer simply because she’s healthy.. so I suppose I already have my answer.

And yes, vaccine injury doesn’t exist in a black hole only “big pharma” can see. There’s active surveillance, independent investigation, and regulatory oversight. Vaccines can be withdrawn or restricted when credible evidence of harm exists, and that’s exactly how it should be.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

Do you know how vaccines work?

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.

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

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.