Vaccines Save Lives, or Why It’s Important to Evaluate Information

I work in a school. I’ve heard the reasons, both rational-sounding and not so much, behind not getting a student vaccinated.†

That said, my child is vaccinated against everything that’s required and a few things that aren’t. I’ll tell you why.

1) Even if the research regarding vaccines causing autism was reliable (it’s not, see #4) I would much rather my child risk autism than polio. Neuro-typical people talk like having autism is worse than having polio, but that’s just not how I see it.

2) It’s utterly ridiculous to think that getting a girl vaccinated against Human Papilloma Virus will encourage her to have sex. If the much more immediate dangers of syphilis, herpes, gonnorrhea, and pregnancy don’t stop her, it’s damn certain the risk of eventually maybe developing cancer when she’s old (remember, we’re talking the thinking of teenagers here) won’t stop her.

Also, get over the idea that only someone who sleeps around can get an STD. I had a parent tell me recently that his daughter “wouldn’t ever need that” regarding the HPV vaccine. Really? Can you guarantee that she will never have sex with anyone who has ever had sex before? How many sex partners do you think she’d have to have before the STD could “take” and she’d be infected?

I’ll give you a hint: One. It takes one partner, who has ever been with one other partner. Your precious daughter could get infected with the virus that might eventually kill her when she loses her virginity on her wedding night. Our society doesn’t place ridiculous value on a man’s virginity, so how likely is it that her husband will be a virgin? Not bloody likely. Get real, Dad.

3) Me and my kid like to play with babies. The thought that me or my kid might have a bad cold that was actually whooping cough (it’s not so bad in adults, you see) and might pass it on to a child too young to have been vaccinated…yeah. NO.

4) As I mentioned, the research confirming a link is NOT RELIABLE. In fact, the original study has since been debunked, its author accused of fraud and stripped of his medical license.

Wakefield has been unable to reproduce his results in the face of criticism, and other researchers have been unable to match them.

Most of his co-authors withdrew their names from the study in 2004 after learning he had had been paid by a law firm that intended to sue vaccine manufacturers — a serious conflict of interest he failed to disclose. ~CNN (emphasis mine, because in science if you can’t reproduce it, it never happened.)

This lie is so dangerous, even National Geographic had a say.

The original research began to be discredited as early as 1999, when two studies commissioned by the U.K. Department of Health found no evidence that immunizations were associated with autism. In 2001, a panel of 15 experts from the Institute of Medicine, which advises Congress, found no connection between the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism. In 2004, a comprehensive review by the Institute of Medicine found no causal relationship between vaccines and autism. ~National Geographic

I’d like to point out a few other facts people either don’t know or conveniently ignore.

Autism is generally not diagnosed before the child is between the ages of two and three. That doesn’t mean the child developed autism in toddlerhood. It means it’s very difficult to diagnose it sooner. It’s not like there’s a blood test for autism spectrum. Evidence actually suggests that autism is caused by a bad-luck combination of genetic markers and chemical exposure before birth.

Some of the increase in diagnoses is caused by greater awareness. That means many of the “new” kids aren’t new at all–they’re just now being counted.

A basic tenet of scientific work is that nothing can ever be proven. Hypotheses may be disproven, or supported by evidence, but although we can be 99.999999999999% certain that we are right, it is bad science to declare something proven. Even the actual existence of the universe comes into question. So when you hear a scientist say “in study after study there is NO EVIDENCE of that” you may be hearing “We haven’t done enough research” when what he’s actually saying is “Case closed. Can we move on?”

Go ahead and tell me that we shouldn’t act on just theories. I’ll point out that gravity is a theory, and you are welcome to test it off any cliff you care to try.

Then I’ll take a deep breath and answer that the decider should actually be how much evidence supports the theory. Tons of evidence supports the dangers of measles, mumps, rubella, pertussis, HPV, meningitis, et cetera. Evidence supporting the dangers of vaccines? Not so much there.

And please don’t quote this guy at me. Try clicking on one of the footnote links in that article, which in accepted nonfiction format should lead you to his sources. Lovely little disclaimer about how it’s all just his opinion, isn’t it? From what I can see, he’s the rich medical version of the Tea Party. He talks about a hundred years of medical evidence, but provides no sources for that claim. If he does quote sources at all, it’s a sentence at a time, and he provides no links so you can check if he’s cherry-picking quotes from an article that actually supports a different conclusion.

A side-rant: An excellent and fast way to evaluate whether to bother reading an article is to check the sources. Just hold your mouse over a link and see where it goes. You’ll note that I quote and link a wide variety of sources. In contrast, try an article from Mercola.com where he links only to himself. Sure, maybe he’s the only person on the entire internet who “gets it.” But I kinda doubt it.

Want to argue the facts I’ve presented? You are welcome, but if you want it to post, keep it polite. I also suggest you bring your sources, unlike the good doctor up there.

Edited to add: Meanwhile, in Pakistan…

 

† My personal favorite? If we didn’t let “all those dirty immigrants” in, we would not need immunizations. I’m not kidding–someone said this to me. I gritted my teeth and smiled and wished there were a vaccine to prevent bigotry.