Please explain, succinctly, the anti vac argument

[WorkingBling]

With all the current news re vaccines and measles I realised that while I am very comfortable and believe strongly that vaccines are the most appropriate defense, I don't actually understand the anti vac argument. I remember the Wakefield thing but that has been debunked. So why do people still resist? What is the thinking?

Someone told
Me that he doesn't "agree with vaccines" in much the same tone as he mightn't say he doesn't agree with the death penalty but I was too nervous to push him further without understanding the issues better.

You know autism isn't one thing right?

Those studies you mention don't seem to have realised that.

There are hardly any (none current) as far as I know looking at autism & vacvination. The studies there have been have been epidemiological treating autism as one condition - so tell me precisely nothing. There are also hardly any studies at all on severe non-verbal autism in any area of autism research.

When ds1 was seeing various medical people the consensus was that it could have been the vaccine or it could not have been. They weren't going to commit or rule it out. That was enough for me not to risk damaging my other children.
Is the guN loaded or is it not?
We got off relatively lightly compared tk people on here whose stories I have been familiar with over the years.

I think the argument is pretty simple: I don't want to vacc my child but will hope they are protected because others do vacc.
The media has a lot to answer for on this.
Vaccinations are important, get your child vaccinated unless your HCP specifically advises you not to.

Why not read the thread kittie - where we've all said we don't expect others to protect our children.

Something I've found is that those who's children have had a bad reaction to a vaccination usually suggest caution around vaccinations - do erm, the opposite of freeloading then.

""Leading causes of death in under-five children are preterm birth complications, pneumonia, birth asphyxia, diarrhoea and malaria. About 45% of all child deaths are linked to malnutrition."

The WHO report linked above does go on to say:

"For some of the most deadly childhood diseases, such as measles, polio, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, pneumonia due to Haemophilius influenzae type B and Streptococcus pneumoniae and diarrhoea due to rotavirus, vaccines are available and can protect children from illness and death."

And vaccination against pneumonia is one of their key mitigations too.

(Pneumonia also being one of the common complications of measles, and immediate CoD. The linked page is a summary: is there a WHO epidemiological survey which shows what proportion of pneumonia cases arise during measles infection, and whether there are any significant difference in death rate?)

Kittie, just to clarify, I don't want to vaccinate my children and I do NOT expect and do NOT want you or anyone else to vaccinate your child to protect mine.

Kittie As the others have said, you are making assumptions about other people's thought processes based on your perspective. I do I not assume herd immunity will protect my children.

Sticklebackplastic Vaccine damage is not limited to autism. My understanding is that in bypassing the primary immune defenses, vaccines can change the way in which the body reacts. I do not wish to discuss the details of my children's health on an open forum but I would like to see a study comparing the long term health of vaccinated versus unvaccinated people. I would also like to see further research in the area of gut health.

I would like to see a study comparing the long term health of vaccinated versus unvaccinated people

Long term health in children up to age 10 show no adverse effects from scheduled vaccines in infancy on neuropsychological outcomes.

In fact, any significant effects went in the other direction. Vaccinated kids scored higher on a couple of cognitive measures than unvaccinated kids, including general IQ.

All effects held even when factoring out income levels, educational attainment of mother, and a very large set of other socioeconomic variables.

This is solid science. It was a large sample of over 1000 kids, so it had enough statistical power. And the effects were supported in a related study.

As time goes by, there will be more studies tracking effects of vaccination into adulthood. But there is very good evidence that long-term effects of vaccination are beneficial, not negative in any measure.

Governments around the world including our own have paid out compensation for vaccine damage - and if you read the list of potential (albeit rare) side effects on the warning labels of vaccines then for a very small number of children there must have been a problem which doesn't specifically mean autism.

Governments around the world including our own have paid out compensation for vaccine damage - and if you read the list of potential (albeit rare) side effects on the warning labels of vaccines then for a very small number of children there must have been a problem which doesn't specifically mean autism.

Yes. Nobody is disputing that vaccination has side effects.

(1) Vaccinating has risks for the individual child.
(2) Not vaccinating has risks for the individual child.
(3) Not vaccinating has risks for the wider community.

The best decision for the individual child is based on a personal balancing of those risks. Something like allergy to vaccine constituents, immunosuppression from serious illness, etc. raises risk (1) to the point that it becomes far safer not to vaccinate. But for the vast, vast majority of people, the risk of (1) is much smaller than the risks of (2) and (3), and it is safer to vaccinate that child.

The best decision for public health is based on a balancing of those risks for the typical child, combined with the cost of dealing with the outcomes of those risks and the cost of the vaccines. Hence the UK infancy vaccine schedule: for those diseases, it is safer to vaccinate that population.

As a PP has said, the best decision for any parent is to vaccinate your child unless a HCP has specifically told you not to. I would add that if parents are concerned about something and think their HCP isn't taking them seriously, then they should get a second opinion. But they shouldn't just quietly drop out of the vaccination schedule without talking it over with a HCP because that could easily be the wrong balancing of risks for their particular child.

Have you tried talking to a HCP about vaccination? Most of them haven't got a clue but tell you to vaccinate anyway. You have to get very high up the hierarchy before someone will dare suggest you exercise caution.

HCP's also have targets to meet.

Unique 9 out of the 1047 children in the study were unvaccinated.....

saintly I've spoken to many HCPs about vaccination. Some are better than others, which is why I suggest getting second opinions. If presented with a choice between a kid getting no vaccines or getting that kid a referral, most HCPs will seek a referral if there's the slightest indication that expertise (e.g., immunologist) is needed.

another It's a dose-response study, with the idea that if vaccines have long-term adverse effects then those with more, earlier vaccines should have greater adverse effects than those with fewer, later vaccines. So I should have said less-vaccinated rather than unvaccinated in my pp, sorry. But the conclusion is the same.

so a different proposition to comparing unvaccinated to vaccinated then... I don't agree that one can necessarily assume that the conclusions are the same.

I think it does hold up just fine as a clinical finding. That's the nature of a dose-response study. The only word changed in my less-precise summary is in bold:

^Long term health in children up to age 10 show no adverse effects from scheduled vaccines in infancy on neuropsychological outcomes.

In fact, any significant effects went in the other direction. Vaccinated kids scored higher on a couple of cognitive measures than less-vaccinated kids, including general IQ.^

Even the report disagrees with you. 'this cohort does not have a statistically significant number of unvaccinated children to determine .....'

I would like to see more of these studies, looking at auto immune diseases, cancers, allergies, mental health disorders and see them in a much longer time frame, though I accept that these populations are difficult to find.

I can't find that sentence. Did you mean this one?
This cohort did not have enough children who were fully unvaccinated in the first year of life to form robust estimates of neuropsychological outcomes as compared with children with other patterns of receipt.

Yep, it doesn't have enough power to compare no vaccine to 1 vaccine or two vaccines, etc. Still doesn't change the conclusion that long term health in children up to age 10 shows no adverse effects from scheduled vaccines in infancy on neuropsychological outcomes.

As geeka said.

YY to more long-term studies being useful, though.

Apologies for paraphrasing, I was flicking from tab to tab on my phone...

It does conclude that the timing of vaccines does not have an adverse impact on the outcomes being assessed.

But, I repeat, it does not make any comparison regarding completely unvaccinated children.

I maintain that this is a difference worth investigating and that it is not possible to conclude that the results would be the same.

By 'long term' I'd like to know how the health of vaccinated vs unvaccinated kids is after 50+ years, not 10.

Many vaccines including mmr and hpv haven't been around long enough to determine if they are safe in the long term.

No-one knows if these are safe in the very long term- all we can do now is guess.

I don't want my DCs to be used as guinea pigs.

Fwiw my hv was happy with my decision not to vaccinate. But it wouldn't surprise me if this reaction was uncommon.

Which vaccines have been around in the same form for 50 years or more?

I know that the polio vaccine has been around that long, and was given on its own at first, as a course of injections, then given on sugar lumps and now back to injections, but included with other vaccines. This leads me to think that it would be difficult to find matching groups who only differed by whether they received the same sort of polio vaccine or not.

Once you start to talk about communities which don't vaccinate - they probably have different lifestyles to the mainstream so again comparing like with like would be difficult.

Lavolcan the bcg (tuberculosis) has been used since the 1920s.

Of all the diseases we vaccinate against imo TB is the most terrifying. There are new antibiotic resistant strains that are far more dangerous than getting measles 100 times over.

But we don't routinely give this vaccine anymore.

Here's a link to some more info on the history of the bcg. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3749764/

Jackieharris, I agree with you about long term effects. We just don't know what the long term effects are, we can't know.

the BCG just doesn't protect from infection - it protects babies from the CNS complications of tuberculosis, but we urgently need a better vaccine against TB.