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Mention vaccines in autism and you can feel the mercury rising and the conversation become an exchange of volleys between those who state their child became autistic because of a vaccine (such as the MMR) or because of something in vaccines (such as mercury via the mercury-based perservative thimerasol, which, with the exception of some flu vaccines, is no longer used in the vaccines used to protect preschool children against 12 infectious dieases). Harsh and sometimes ad hominem criticism and invective—-as well as some not unviolent tactics—- have been directed against those who state that there is no link between vaccines and autism.
Immunizations are a hot, hot topic in autism discussions because of the continued fear that those vaccines could “damage” or “harm” a child, in contradiction to the very meaning of the word “immunization,” which is from the Latin immune, which means “exempt, free from, devoid of”: Immunizations are supposed to make a person “free from” a disease like measles of Hepatitis B or whooping cough. Perhaps this is one reason why some parent autism advocates are all the more up in arms in claiming that there is a link between their child receiving a vaccine and the onset of symptoms of autism, as if the vaccine has made a child sicker, not healthier.
On Wednesday night I had the chance to converse about immunizations with a group of health care professionals and bloggers about health and parenting: I participated in a conversation about immunizations that was made possible by Revolution Health. Dr. Stacy Beller Stryer, a pediatrician in Maryland, responded to questions ranging from vaccine schedules for infants and older children; she noted that college students also need to get certain vaccines (Dr. Stryer has recently blogged about her 11-year-old daughter, who does not have autism, attending an autism camp as a “shadow”). Other participants included Catherine Morgan, who blogs on health and wellness at BlogHer and women4hope; Aliza Sherman Risdahl of Babyfruit: the miscarriage blog and motherhood diaries, who has a 13-month-old daughter; Tammie Booth of Susan Wenner Jackson of Working Moms Against Guilt; Denise Tanton who blogs on health and wellness at BlogHer; and myself of this blog. Cynthia Samuels of Cobblestone Associates, LLP, moderated.
Most of the participants are mothers, mothers-to-be, or thinking of being mothers and the vaccine-autism issue soon came up. I noted the lack of evidence for a link between autism and thimerasol; the recent vaccine court hearings in which lawyers for 12-year-old Michelle Cedillo argued that vaccines or something in them had caused her autism; chelation as a treatment for heavy metal poisoning and its dangers; and my son Charlie’s own history of vaccination (he is up to date). I referred to journalist Arthur Allen’s book, Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine’s Greatest Lifesaver and pointed that vaccines have long been regarded with suspicion.
Gardasil, the HPV vaccine was mentioned, but the conversation circled a number of times back to a possible link between vaccines and “something.” One participant noted the alarming pronouncements of both those who blame vaccines for causing autism, and those health professionals and scientists who point out the risks of catching measles and other diseases. And that to me is all the more reason why conversations like the one I was fortuanate to be part of on Wednesday night need to keep happening—-why there needs to be dialogue about an issue that so many parents feel, rightfully or wrongfully according to science, something more than strongly about.
Chuck, the World Health Organization fact sheet on smallpox says the death rate for unvaccinated individuals is 49%. That is an observed death rate when unvaccinated individuals contract smallpox.
There have been over 3 billion individuals born since smallpox was eliminated. The only reason that the incidence of smallpox was low in the developed world before 1977 was because of vaccination. You are engaging in denialism of the value of vaccines.
Humans are the only organism that gets smallpox. How would you propose that a manufacturor of a smallpox vaccine test the effectiveness of their vaccine over time? Deliberatly expose people to smallpox? How can the effectiveness of any vaccine be tested? Deliberatly expose people to the illness? Measure antibiody titers? At what cost? Who pays that cost? Ultimately the consumer must pay that cost because products that cost more to produce than they can be sold for are not produced.
A one in 100,000 adverse reaction means that 99.999% of individuals have no adverse reactions. How can a 1 in 100,000 adverse reaction be measured?
The outcome of your proposal would be to destroy the vaccine industry. 100% effectiveness is not achievable. For you to suggest that anything less is unacceptable is either hopelessly naive or deliberately malevolent. You want manufacturors to assume unlimited liability without compensation. Vaccines are not high profit items. If the profit associated with the sale of a vaccine is insufficient to cover the liability, they simply will not be produced.
Smallpox was only eliminated becuse the vaccine was made cheaply and was given away by the millions of doses. The last cases were in the most impoverished regions of the world.
The reason the NVICP was put in place was because manufacturors were going to stop producing vaccines. With insufficient profit to cover libilities, they have no choice. Realizing that no vaccines meant a return to endemic diseases, the NVICP was put in place.
The criteria you have put forward are not achievable. If unachievable criteria are the requirement for liability limitation, then vaccines will not be produced.
Your smallpox example does fail to meet my data collection criteria. It is unknown the total number of deaths attributed to small pox and if the deaths were regionally specific or globally uniform. For all I know your “billions saved” may be exponentially wrong.
There is no need for me to rethink my vaccine criteria, you just need to re-read my post.
I only defined data collection and requirements for NVICP coverage. Approval for new manufacturers or new vaccines was not addressed. You have created whatever subjective criteria for “acceptable”, “unacceptable”, and “approved”. You can do whatever you want with those words, but they were never presented in my model.
Assuming the 5% failure rate then:
“Smallpox vaccine was only 98.6% effective after 10 years” would still be covered by NVICP
“89% effective after 20 years” If they didn’t state the length of effective coverage and actively seek out those previously vaccinated and offered boosters before coverage ended then they better have a dam good legal team because NVICP will not be covering their behinds for anything.
98.6% still has room for improvement and is therefore still experimental.
Nothing in my criteria would have stopped the smallpox vaccine from being administered.
The industry and companies would be required to EARN protection from the US government, it would not be given to them like a blank check.
An addendum to my criteria:
All vaccines are voluntary.
All NVICP claims must be processed and decided within 60 days of submission to the NVICP and legal costs incurred by the government can not be more then 40% of the stated settlement.
Since I didn’t address the approval procedure, what thresholds do you believe must be required before a vaccine is “approved” for use on the general population? Or are you OK witht the status quo? Wheterver that might be.
So according to the criteria you suggest, the smallpox vaccine should never have been approved because it never reached those standards?
From the link on smallpox I posted above,
“One study of smallpox following the importation of cases into Europe and Canada (1950–1971) showed that mortality was 52% in unvaccinated persons, 1.4% in those vaccinated up to 10 years before exposure, and only 11% in those vaccinated over 20 years before exposure. For the age group of 10–49 years, the mortality rate was 49% in the unvaccinated and 4.3% in those vaccinated 20 years earlier.”
Smallpox vaccine was only 98.6% effective after 10 years, 89% effective after 20 years.
Far lower than the 100% effectiveness that you require for a vaccine to become non-experimental.
There are several billion people alive now that would not have been if the smallpox vaccine had not been deployed because it was unacceptable according to your standards.
Maybe you should rethink your vaccine acceptance criteria?
No one diagnosed with the vaccine preventable illness has been vaccinated.
How does one determine if a vaccine is 100% effective?
Declare it as experimental until it is 100% effective. CDC should be required to give full access to vaccines (by manufacturer) failure rate in numbers and percent failed of total vaccinated and give total number vaccinated. If failure rate is above 5% (or lower) then that vaccine and manufacturer loose all coverage under NVICP. Failure rate will also include second hand exposure from vaccinated to other individual when the other individual is diagnosed with vaccine preventable illness. Vaccines with higher probably of second hand exposure, like Flumist, that use live viruses, will be required to have a lower threshold for failure rate. CDC should be required to give an accurate count of all vaccine related illness that are diagnosed and the percent of those diagnosed that had been vaccinated.
Chuck, what is it that you think the medical establishment should do if a vaccine is not 100.0000000% effective?
Daedalus2u,
I had a chance to go back over this thread and I realized that I missed a question from you.
“So if vaccines are not 100.000000000000% effective we should do nothing and let the diseases run their course?”
My answer:
When vaccines are not 100.000000000000% effective the medical establishment does nothing except CYA and lets the diseases run their course. Six different documented cases of vaccine failure causing pain suffering, hospitalization, long term medical complications, some complications are still inadequately addressed by medical professionals more then a decade after onset. This happened to all members of my family including my wife who is not blood or genetically related. The only thing that every medical professional provided to us was denial, denial, and denial.
So, according to your theory, weakened immune system function or autoimmune disorder should be irrelevant and would not accelerate chemical or neurological reactions to any ingredient in the vaccine. Do you also presume that immune systems cannot be overburdened due to the administration of vaccine to an immature immune system? Is there combination of ingredients in vaccines along with external environmental exposure that could increase the toxicity of the ingredients or the external stimuli to the point of being neurologically toxic?
“Deep pocteks” is COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT in my discussions.
Chuck, my own hypothesis is that low nitric oxide leads to the neurodevelopment that results in greater expression of traits on the autism spectrum. I discuss this on my blog.
Any immune system stimulation is going to affect nitric oxide physiology. Infants are exposed to hundreds of thousands of antigens from the moment they are born. The number of antigens they are exposed to in vaccines is tiny. There are many orders of magnitude more antigens from the normal environment, which is completely filled with bacteria, viruses, fungi, pollon, dust, dirt, protazoans, dander, spores, and lots of other stuff known and unknown. All of these things elicit an immune response. If they didn’t elicit an immune response then infants would very quickly die.
Could an antigen in a vaccine have an effect? Sure, but then so could any of the millions of other antigens that a child is exposed to by the time they are 2 years old. Is there any reason to suppose that the antigens in vaccines are somehow “worse”, or “more active”, or “more responsible” for moving children on the autism spectrum? No, there is not. There is in fact good evidence that there is no change in the incidence of ASDs when vaccines are given or not given.
The only reason that vaccines have been latched upon is because there are “deep pockets” associated with vaccine manufacturors and so vaccine litigation is seen as potentially lucrative. There is not a bit of science to support it, it is all litigation driven by people trying to win the “legal lottery”.
I think the decline in infectious disease associated with increased bathing had to do with a reduction in basal nitric oxide. NO is one of the things that regulates the immune system. With low NO, the immune system turns on faster and harder. A problem now with many children having asthma and allergies. A more rapid and stronger “turn on” of the immune system would reduce the incidence of some infectious diseases. It also increases the incidence of asthma, allergies and autoimmune diseases.
People today are exposed to far fewer antigens than they were exposed to 100, or 1,000 years ago.
Most people in undeveloped regions have a gut full of parasites. What is the immune stimulation effect of that? What is the effect of malaria?
Vaccines are tiny little trivial immune activations compared to the mega major immune system activations that people experience from the many endemic diseases in undeveloped countries.
Joseph
Aug 10, 2007 at 3:51 pm wrote:
” They also address the “better sanitation” myth here”.
The ‘myth’ of better sanitation? That raises one of my new favorite interests, the history of Leprosy.
There has never been a vaccine for leprosy, caused by exposure to myobacterium laprae, and a cure (multi-drug therapy) was not discovered until the 1980′s, yet leprosy disappeared in Western Europe in the 20th century.
Modern sewage treatment and clean water systems appear to have created an environment where the bacteria cannot thrive and may have become extinct. Leprosy is still with us but only in tropical climates and underveloped regions such as the Indian sub-continent, parts of Africa, Brazil and Near East and Caribbean islands.
One issue I often think of is that we place a great deal of value on the DSM, which is a quite recent creation.
What if someone is inclined to believe that politics and societal views are influencing or driving the current autism epidemic and that the current DSM criteria is no better then any other DSM?
Problems are the start of new questions……. Parents who are not convinced by the arguments in Unstrange Minds have tended to favor biomedical theories and treatments for autism, from the exchanges I have had. Our contemporary US culture has something of an interest in biomedical and environmental theories of causation in general.
I only asked why did they ban Thimerosal and why they did it before the USA did. I would also ask why there wouldn’t be variance in the diagnosis rate given that there are different diagnosis criteria from culture to culture. (Note to Kristina, I am reading Grinker and only agree with a small number of his theories. There are more problems then answers provided by Grinker IMHO)
Yes, the US took longer than other countries to ban thimerosal. That does not, by any stretch, lead to the conclusion that thimerosal might cause autism. In fact, it’s interesting to note that many countries which never used thimerosal in vaccines (or which used much less of it) STILL have autism rates equal to or higher than ours.
Maybe you can answer another question, why did other industrialized countries like the UK, Denmark and others ban the use of Thimerosal in vaccines years before the USA? Is the USA just too stupid to know better?
So you categorically say that the effects of ingredients in vaccines past and present cannot adversely effect one or more of the subjective criteria currently used to scientifically define any ASD? Is that your position, yes or no? I am only discussing Immunizations, Children, and Lots of Questions.
Chuck, every single component of every single vaccine is tested for adverse effects. Individually and collectively.
Are there adverse effects? Yes, there are. At some dosages. Do those adverse effects include autism? No, they do not.
There is no understanding of what environmental effects (if any) contribute to the symptoms of ASDs. Why assume that it must be vaccines? The only reason I can come up with is because the pharmaceutical industry has deep pockets.
What about the adverse effects of chelation? That has been shown to cause adverse neurological effects in animals.