Friday, June 6, 2014

10 Lies Anti-vaccers tell

The anti-vaccination has caused alot of harm over the years with their fear mongering and lies. These lies have caused parents to become to afraid to vaccinate their children, and themselves as well, despite the danger in not doing so.

The following is a list of ten lies the anti-vaccination movement has told, and why they are just bogus:

10. Studies indicate that vaccines cause autism.

While there are "studies" that claim that vaccines cause autism, only one of these so called studies have been published in a well respected, peer reviewed scientific and medical journal. That study, the Wakefield study (which was published in The Lancet in 1998) was retracted in 2010 after it had been discovered that the main author of the study, Andrew Wakefield, had committed fraud. On top of that the findings in the study itself had been long since discredited and disproved before the formal retraction.

The studies that followed since the Wakefield study that claim that vaccines cause autism have never been published in any credible medical or scientific journals. The only places that these studies have ever been published are either in non-credible pay-for-publish journals, or websites that promote alternative medicine and/or conspiracy theories.

9. Signs of autism show up in children only after they have been vaccinated.

As the old skeptics' saying goes "correlation does not equal causation".

Just because a child starts to show obvious signs of autism after they have had their vaccinations, it's far more likely that they were showing signs of autism before they received their vaccinations and that no one noticed simply because the child was to young to show any noticable signs of autism to anyone but trained professionals.

8. Adverse reactions to vaccines are common, often severe, and can cause death.

Actually only about one out of every 300 people will have adverse reactions to vaccines. Most of the time these adverse reaction are mirror, short lived, and are more annoying than debilitating.

Occasionally a person will have a severe adverse reaction to a vaccine, some of which can be fatal, but these types of adverse reactions are very rare, only about one to two out of every million people. You have better odds dying in a car wreck to get a vaccination than you from the vaccination.

7. Vaccines have never been shown to be effective against reducing the spread of disease, and has even been shown to increase the spread.

I'm sure smallpox and polio would disagree. Actually alot of diseases would disagree because it's been proven time and time again that anytime vaccines were in wide spread use the rate of infections of a disease that the vaccines are meant to protect against will go down dramatically, sometimes even eliminating a disease in an area.

6. Natural immunity is superior to immunity via vaccination.

If you try to get natural immunity from a disease (i.e. getting infected and sick from said disease) there is a pretty good possibility that the disease that you hope to make yourself or your child immune from will actually kill you or your child, or atleast cause a permanent disability. Also in many cases it takes several weeks for this form of immunity to happen, during which time you will be sick as heck.

On the other hand immunity via vaccination is much faster, doesn't leave you sick, and is far, FAR less likely to kill you than getting immunity from a disease by getting infected by that disease.

5. Vaccines contain aborted fetuses.

This is completely false and is a distortion of the fact that the weakened forms of some viruses in vaccines are grown in a culture of cell lines derived from fetal tissue of fetuses aborted in the 1960's.

There are no fetal cells at all in vaccines.

4. Vaccines cause shaken baby syndrome.

No, rapidly shaking a baby back and forth and causing their head to flop around causes shaken baby syndrome.

This isn't even just a bold faced lie, this is child abuse apology.

3. Vaccines contain high amounts of toxic ingredients.

While vaccines do contain chemicals that in high enough amounts are toxic to humans, the amounts of these toxins in vaccines are so low that it wouldn't hurt anyone even if they took that chemicals by itself.

As the old saying goes "the dose makes the poison" and no vaccine contains enough of a certain chemical to make it poisonous.

2. Vaccines cause SIDS.

While DPT/DPaT vaccines have been suspected of being one of the causes of SIDS in the past, current studies into SIDS point to that abnormalities in the development and function of medullary serotonin may be the more likely cause of SIDS, and that vaccines do not cause SIDS at all.

1. Most diseases meant to be prevented by vaccines are rare and mostly harmless, and thus there is no reason to vaccinate.

Most diseases prevented by vaccines use to be rare, but a few diseases such as measles and mumps are making a comeback due to people not getting their children the MMR vaccine. Outbreaks of more common diseases such as the flu and whooping cough are made worse if large groups of people do not get vaccinated.

Also, while many people can get over these diseases they are far from harmless and can kill, especially if the person is very old, or very young, or has something wrong with their immune system and they are unable to fight off the disease.

Even if a disease is rare there is still no reason not to vaccinate against it, as vaccinating will help guarantee that disease remains rare, and may even wipe out that disease.

1 comment:

  1. I agree, for the most part. Vaccines like MMR, DTaP & Hep-B are essential for children. But not all vaccines are beneficial. Gardasil (for HPV) and Zostavax (the shingles vaccine), both from Merck, are lousy. They're both very expensive, short-lasting, and minimally effective, with side-effects that may well exceed their touted benefits. They make lots of money for Merck, but it's not clear that they have any net benefit for people's health.

    Women need to know the truth about Gardasil, especially:

    1. Gardasil is only designed to protect against 2 of the 19 (so far) known high-risk strains of HPV. (Some researchers think it might also provide limited partial immunity against a couple of other, closely related strains, but we don't know for sure.)

    2. The vast majority of high-risk HPV infections are with strains that Gardasil does not protect against, and

    3. Sexually active women are at risk of cervical & other cancers, and still need regular PAP smears, regardless of whether they've had Gardasil.

    HPV types 16, 18, 26, 31, 33, 35, 39, 45, 51, 52, 53, 56, 58, 59, 66, 67, 68, 73, and 82 have all been identified as high-risk oncogenic strains, and Gardasil is only designed to protect against types 16 & 18. But in a U. Washington study (Winer 2006) those two types accounted for just 18% of high-risk infections.

    Worse, a recent CDC study (Markowitz 2013) found that Gardasil-vaccinated girls had slightly HIGHER rates of infection with high-risk HPV strains than did unvaccinated girls!

    Part of the problem is exaggeration of the vaccine's benefits by the manufacturer (Merck), but a big part is wildly inaccurate reporting by the press. For example, on 6/20/2013, on "CBS This Morning," I heard Holly Phillips, MD, report that Gardasil can "eradicate" (her word) the disease, and that people who get the vaccine will never get HPV-caused cancers. That kind of misinformation may well be causing some women to behave less responsibly, or skip PAP smears, which could cost some of them their lives.

    BTW, Markowitz 2013 (J Infect Dis., doi:10.1093/infdis/jit192) is now paywalled, but I have a copy. Let me know if you want it.

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