Vaccines take advantage of the natural immunological mechanisms of the body and enhance them. It's not some alien thing. I'd worry more about certain medications. Do you not take them either?
Chicago, I do know that the idea of mandatory vaccinations is being bandied about by some influential people. And there does seem to be a general movement in that direction (in Britain at the least). Midget, your simplification of quite a complex issue does worry me. I feel like I'm in a Kafka story lol You haven't specified which medications, so how would I know whether I would take them or not? I don't think the idea of vaccination is a bad one - just have major doubts about whether it's as practicable and beneficial as it's claimed to be. There have been many cases where a discovery delivered short-term results but then proved to be disastrous in the long term. Not only that, do I trust centralised authority to administer it in a safe way? Do I trust corporate-driven entities to put health and well-being before profit and control? Do I potentially allow psychopaths to have direct access to my child's body? These are very important questions to ask.
This thread is not about anyone's reputation. It's about a false claim made about vaccines. It's the evidence and the facts people should be interested in, they speak for themselves.
Again, it's the facts that matter here. An ad hominem is a fallacious argument. For something that isn't supposed to be a science, it's odd then, that one can earn a PhD in Nursing Science in the US. But it's even more surprising you wouldn't know that since they have the same degree programs in Australia. I also don't understand why you know so little about advanced practice nurses. They exist in Australia as well as in the US. In my state I have full prescriptive authority and I've had an infectious disease practice for more than 20 years. But this isn't about dueling claims of who we are, it's about the evidence. I didn't post a couple of selected studies, I posted factual information about the physiology of the immune response to vaccines. If you believe a vaccination taxes your immune system significantly enough to result in increased susceptibility to an infection, by all means, post some evidence. Explain the physiology that supports such an assertion. Tell us why every new microorganism that enters your mouth wouldn't do the same thing?
Then why didn't you just frame the discussion around your supposed 'myths' and leave the personal reference out if it? Does it help further the discussion to call someone out and claim they are wrong?
Your post has been addressed by others in the thread. I'll just address a couple things here. A lot of people believe all drug (including vaccines) research is funded and controlled by Big Pharma. That's not true, especially with vaccine research. Billions have been spent on publicly funded vaccine research. It's not just about drug company profit, it's about world public health. Infectious diseases don't recognize borders. Sanitation has had a big impact on extending our lifespans. One need only look at the data closely, however, to see the impact of vaccines follows their introduction, and the graph differs from a graph showing sanitation improvement. Also, there are plenty of areas left on the planet which still don't have improved sanitation, but they do often have vaccines and vaccine preventable diseases are at low levels in those areas. Smallpox with no human reservoir has been completely eliminated from the human population. Measles has been claimed by the anti-vaxxer crowd to not be a dangerous disease. Past fatality rates of 1 per 1,000 cases is claimed to have been due to poor nutrition and poor sanitation, not due to the pathogen alone. Because some parents believe these unsupported claims and aren't vaccinating their children, sadly, we now have enough cases in otherwise healthy populations to see that horrendously high fatality rate still holds despite nutrition, sanitation, and modern medical care.
The claim was made in a thread it would have been off topic to reply in. Taking the discussion to a new thread is pretty standard when that happens.
Just a friendly reminder that by vaccinating children you basically inject them with that "potentially fatal disease", the virus is just weakened so it does not reproduce as much as the original and the body can destroy it in most cases. I'm sure I could find several cases in which people died due to not being able to handle a vaccin if I would take the time to look into it, but I'm not a scientist so I'm not gonna waste my time on proving something I think is true. It is a fact that America has the largest number of children suffering from some sort of disability. As far as I could find withing the few minutes I spent on getting my facts right America also has the largest number of vaccinations at a young age (or at any age for that matter). Just some facts. I'll leave it up to people to believe what they want to believe. I just think you should at least consider this since we're not talking about one state here, but about an entire continent. On top of those facts I can also give you a list of names of people I know who suffered from certain diseases, even though they were vaccinated (yet I never got infected and I'm not vaccinated). I guess you get my point here, but I'd be lying if I'd say I never saw a vaccin do it's job, so I won't say that. Since certain people with a certain opinion won't change their mind anyway I don't think I'm gonna try to convince anyone who doesn't believe me.
Except your goal is not for continued discussion, rather you created this thread to inform everyone from your supposed position of authority or knowledge. I know you won't admit it, but that kind of thing turns people off and creates division rather than discussion.
Wow, there's a lot to address here. Killed vaccines only contain inactive antigens (pieces of the organism). They cannot cause the diseases they are intended to prevent. Live attenuated virus vaccines are just that, attenuated. They do not cause potentially fatal disease unless given accidentally to someone with a serious immune deficiency and in the case of live polio vaccine, only after passing through the gut of the vaccinated person and infecting an unvaccinated person. Do vaccines have risk? Yes. Do the diseases they are intended to prevent, obviously. The risk benefit ratio is extremely large. It will be really unfortunate if we have to have a resurgence of these once tamed dragons before people realize vaccines are safe and vaccine preventable diseases are deadly.
Well, most vaccines are deadened virus, although you are correct that some are live, but weakened virus. I'm not going to say that no one has ever had an adverse reaction to a vaccine, or that no one has died as a result of one. (That's why there's a fund for adverse vaccine events that's run by a government panel.) The issue is one of probabilities -- there are a far higher number of people who have died/would die from the disease than there are people who die from an adverse reaction to a vaccine. Anecdotal cases -- such as I know someone who had an adverse reaction, are not good evidence when looking at something like vaccines, which need to be observed across a wide population. There's no evidence whatsoever for the idea that vaccines cause developmental or speech delays. There are too many other variables -- the small bit of evidence we have indicates that it is more likely to environmental toxins, if, in fact, they are due to toxins themselves. These sorts of delays can be caused by all sorts of epigenetic changes, sometimes even those that take place at a grandparent or great-grandparent level, and all sorts of things can happen in utero or soon after birth. You really can't blame these on vaccines.
@GingerCoffee No offense, but I prefer my own reliable sources over your word, not because I don't trust you, but because I don't know you. Let's just agree to disagree on this matter.
It goes without saying that I agree to disagree with you. I have no illusions of changing beliefs, rather I'm trying to address claims.
This topic gives birth (between my ears) to a more philosophical debate. If we presume that one pathogen would/could not decimate the entire species - largely in part to our active immune system - a natural, inheritable immunity might emerge. That process would take time and cost a lot of lives, but a possible outcome would be super-human pathogen resistance. Based on that statement, it is somewhat "selfish" to alter natural processes. What appears right and beneficial now could be potentially problematic in the big picture, long time frame scheme of things. However, we have evolved to have the highest intellect which gives us the ability to build laboratories and create vaccines; which, in itself, could be considered a natural process. I don't know. Sorry for the interruption. Now back to the JJ & Ginger Show
I'm not sure what you mean, @Garball -- when you say a "super-human pathogen resistance," do you mean that people have developed this immunity that is then passed down? Or do you mean that the pathogens themselves change to become immune somehow to the human immune system? Actually, the latter is what has happened since humans and pathogens have coexisted. It is a constant battle against constantly evolving pathogens. We see this a lot right now with antibiotic resistant bacteria, due to all the overuse of antibiotics both in people and in the environment (such as in cow feed). We got cocky for a while, especially in roughly the 1970s, when people really thought we are just about to conquer all disease. But then AIDS came along, as well as a whole bunch of other nasty little bugs. They're never going to give up. Someday, they might win. But all we can do is fight the good fight until that happens.
It wouldn't work the way you envision nature working. If it was possible, it would have happened long before vaccines and antibiotics came on the scene. Think of it more like a continual arms race, but with vaccines (and now genetic and cellular level research) giving humans a great advantage. As we develop antibiotics, microorganisms evolve the means of defeating the drugs. With vaccines, you get vastly less efficient mechanisms of evolving resistance because you prevent the organisms from making billions of copies. Occasionally, we've seen other pathogens moving into a gap, like with the pneumococcal vaccine. We eliminated (not completely but significantly) 7 strains initially but that gave other strains a niche opening. But there are not infinite numbers of pathogenic pneumococcal strains, so adding more strains to the vaccine has resolved the problem. The current vaccine covers 23 strains for the elderly and 13 strains for kids and younger adults with risk factors like post splenectomy.
How can you say that it hasn't/isn't/won't happen? Where is your empirical proof that we have not "conquered an enemy" through natural processes. The modern windows of time you are concerning yourself with are too small to allow the light of a larger argument through
Uh, all of human history. I'm not sure why you think nature will do something that it hasn't done in the 3.5 billion years since life emerged on the planet.
Just so we're clear; let me see if I understand exactly what you're saying: Not only in the time of Homo sapiens, but in the entire history of life, a pathogenic microbe species has not been eliminated by means of another specie's immune system.
That's a little different from what you said initially, but my answer is not much different. "If we presume that one pathogen would/could not decimate the entire species - largely in part to our active immune system - a natural, inheritable immunity might emerge. That process would take time and cost a lot of lives, but a possible outcome would be super-human pathogen resistance. Based on that statement, it is somewhat "selfish" to alter natural processes. What appears right and beneficial now could be potentially problematic in the big picture, long time frame scheme of things." Microorganisms go extinct the same way other life forms go extinct. It's usually because the environment changes and is no longer conducive for the organism. The only way one species immune response would eliminate a species of microorganism would be if that species was the only reservoir for the organism. We accomplished that with smallpox vaccine. Smallpox had been around for thousands of years and human immunity was not sufficient to eliminate it. The fatality rate of ~30% was fairly consistent in populations with a long history of exposure. But new populations the organism was introduced into had fatality rates close to 95%. What that means is (and we see it time and time again) if a pathogen has a high fatality rate initially, one pattern we see is it will kill off the more genetically susceptible individuals and eventually more resistant genes survive and repopulate the species until an equilibrium evolves. In the other more common pattern, the pathogen that kills the host doesn't spread, and the milder pathogens replicate resulting in natural attenuation. This happened with the 1918 influenza pandemic. The first waves of infection had very high fatality rates. After a couple years, the H1N1 strain responsible for the pandemic became attenuated and seasonal flu severity returned. If microorganisms quit evolving, maybe the human immune system might be more effective. But those pathogens are constantly evolving and/or jumping species. That superhuman you mention can't evolve is these conditions. (These are a tad oversimplified explanations.)
So, that's not what you were saying? Oh, wait. You didn't answer that question. Even with your tad oversimplified explanations (for us simpletons), it still does not touch on the possibility that my hypothetical situation couldn't exist. In fact, you can't even say positively that we as a species are not on that path right now, or not until we interrupted it.
