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How the Anti-Vaxxers Are Winning

49 points by gwintrob 10y ago

astrodust 10y ago
We're all going to die, quite literally, of stupid. Many people are going to suffer horribly, measels is no fun, and many will die because of these stupid, stupid anti-vaxxers. They should all be quarantined on some remote island off the coast of Alaska.
- jdoliner 10y ago
  I can understand the anger, it's quite horrifying that diseases we thought were eradicated are making a comeback. On the other hand I'm also horrified by the idea of shipping people off to Alaska for refusing to submit to a medical procedure. That's a very dangerous precedent that could be applied in all sorts of heinous ways.
  - keepper 10y ago
    Why? "your rights stop at mine". If they are willing to wear all encompassing bio hazard suits, and bubble their house, fine by me if they care not to vaccinate... It is our problem when people don't believe in herd immunity and other problems that can affect the community.
    - jdoliner 10y ago
      What exactly do you think grants you a right to herd immunity? You might really really want herd immunity, but you don't have a right to it. Your rights stop at theirs just as much as their rights stop at yours. They do have a right not to be subjected to medical procedures, you don't have a right to herd immunity. It's frustrating and regressive but herd immunity is something we have to decide on as a herd, and currently we're deciding against it.
      - HCIdivision17 10y ago
        I think this is sorta on the nose, but I would rephrase it as "Do we have a right to not be subjected to medical procedures?" And the answer to that seems to be fairly strongly in the affirmative. I imagine we will be approaching a more nuanced legal view of such things in the near future as we battle to understand where rights really stand. (Much like many of our rights, there are exceptional situations - like the oft quoted yelling "FIRE!" in a movie theater - and perhaps vaccinations should be treated similarly.) EDIT - I was pointed to some interesting CDC info below, and there is an interesting scenario possible: make measels a quarantinable disease. This would become a choice with teeth. Choose to vaccinate, or risk isolation. Thankfully, the CDC seems like a fairly serious outfit, and I'm not worried about abuse of power in this way, but it does rephrase the topic a bit.
        lsiebert 10y ago
        Quarantine laws exist for a reason.
        HCIdivision17 10y ago
        I had never looked it up, and it seems the CDC (unsurprisingly) is involved in applying these laws. https://www.cdc.gov/quarantine/aboutlawsregulationsquarantineisolation.html https://www.cdc.gov/quarantine/aboutlawsregulationsquarantin... From that site, it seems that isolation and quarantine is largely done at borders between states and country. It's also very serious, and it's not something the CDC takes lightly: the last major enforcement of the rule was in 1918 for the Spanish Flu (though it cites there were other minor applications - the ebola scare last year may be one small instance of that). In context of this, I would imagine that measles would need to be added to the list of diseases quarantine is enforced (I haven't spotted this list yet). EDIT: found the important list, and it mentions specifically measels are NOT on the list: The list of quarantinable diseases is contained in an Executive Order of the President and includes cholera, diphtheria, infectious tuberculosis, plague, smallpox, yellow fever, viral hemorrhagic fevers (such as Marburg, Ebola, and Congo-Crimean), and severe acute respiratory syndromes. Many other illnesses of public health signficance, such as measles, mumps, rubella, and chicken pox, are not contained in the list of quarantinable illnesses, but continue to pose a health risk to the public. Quarantine Station personnel respond to reports of ill travelers aboard airplanes, ships, and at land border crossings to make an assessment of the public health risk and initiate an appropriate response. One of the executive orders is linked in that list: https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2003-04-09/pdf/03-8832.pdf https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2003-04-09/pdf/03-8832.pdf
  - EpicEng 10y ago
    I'm not. These people represent a huge risk to those around them. We put people in tiny cells for less.
    - jdoliner 10y ago
      Do we? Last time I checked we put people in cells for committing crimes. What sorts of prisoners are you talking about here? It's not obvious to me but perhaps I'm being thick.
      - EpicEng 10y ago
        No, we put people in cells because they represent a threat to the general public. Of course, it doesn't always play out that way in reality, but their are a limited number of options re punishment as well. Society has a right to protect itself. If your decisions put my life, as well as thousands of others, in danger unnecessarily then you represent a significant risk.
    - astrodust 10y ago
      Stealing a $1 candy bar can mean a life in jail if it's your third strike. Deliberately avoiding vaccinations for your kids and causing a measels outbreak in a school where multiple children die carries no penalty. Maybe it should.
  - k-mcgrady 10y ago
    >> On the other hand I'm also horrified by the idea of shipping people off to Alaska for refusing to submit to a medical procedure. If a very small minority of people are going to endanger the lives of millions - or billions - of others shipping them off to a colony for refusing to submit to the procedure is kind in my opinion. I guess it depends on whether you have a more utilitarian outlook on ethics or believe personal freedom is more important. And I believe the 'dangerous precedent' you mention should be easy to protect from in a lawful democratic society. You should be entitled to your personal freedom and rights until they start infringing on the basic rights of others.
    - jdoliner 10y ago
      > And I believe the 'dangerous precedent' you mention should be easy to protect from in a lawful democratic society. It's not easy to protect from at all. There was a time in this country when we had forced sterilization of poor people. [0] It was justified using all the same language that you're using here and seen as an incredibly progressive policy. It's not easy at all to protect from these kinds of abuses. Quite the opposite in fact. > You should be entitled to your personal freedom and rights until they start infringing on the basic rights of others. Anti-vaxxers aren't infringing on any of your basic rights, they are putting you at risk but you don't have a right to herd immunity from diseases. They do have a right decide which medical procedures they undergo, again that may be regressive but that's currently the way it works in our country. [0] http://www.salon.com/2006/03/04/bruinius/ http://www.salon.com/2006/03/04/bruinius/
      - k-mcgrady 10y ago
        >> Anti-vaxxers aren't infringing on any of your basic rights, they are putting you at risk but you don't have a right to herd immunity from diseases I have the "Right to Life, Liberty, Personal Security". By putting my life in danger they are infringing on that right. Now they also have the right to "Freedom from Torture and Degrading Treatment" which forced vaccination may be treated as. But one right has to take precedence and I would argue it is the former.
      - astrodust 10y ago
  - worldsayshi 10y ago
    Well, how much statistical risk of death do you need to impose on someone to be guilty of involuntary manslaughter?
    - jdoliner 10y ago
      I'd be interested in seeing a counter example. But I'm pretty sure for someone to be guilty of manslaughter there has to be an actual death, not just a risk of death. Reckless endangerment might be a more reasonable charge, but I think that assumes herd immunity as the baseline of risk and thus anything that raises that is endangering you. As I've argued elsewhere in this thread, we don't have a right to herd immunity, it's something we'll either do or not do as a herd and currently we seem to be choosing the latter.
  - HCIdivision17 10y ago
    I don't think it's a dangerous precedent, in the sense that precedent happened a long, long time ago. These sorts of diseases are horrific, and quarantine is usually applied with extreme predjudice. Quarantine is no joke, and is a last line of defense. That said, quarantine might be overkill. But isolation really is a valid solution. It's just awful. But refusing vaccination is also awful, since it can lead to far more brutal suffering than the inconvenience of uprooting one's home. Honestly it's just a crap situation, where each solution that isn't vaccination is just a measure of weighing the ultimate amount of suffering and choosing the least bad.
  - MereInterest 10y ago
    Typhoid Mary was an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid fever. Her work as a cook resulted in numerous outbreaks and deaths. She was informed of the risks, and warned not to return to the food industry. She ignored these warnings, changed her name, and returned to work as a cook. As a result, another outbreak, and more deaths. Refusing to vaccinate is just as irresponsible as Typhoid Mary. It isn't punishment for refusing to submit to a medical procedure, any more than drunk driving is punishment for driving. It is refusing to take basic medical care, resulting in the decreased health of society.
    - arachnophobe 10y ago
      Another result was that she (Mary Mallon) was imprisoned/quarantined for the remainder of her life (after being released from her first quarantine and being told not to work as a cook, changing her name, working as a cook, causing more outbreaks and deaths). 23 years... She refused medical procedures that could have removed the infection (removal of gall bladder) and as such died in imprisonment/confinement. I'm not suggesting we should lock up anti-vaxxers, but if there is an outbreak of polio then those people who refuse to be vaccinated put at risk those who cannot be vaccinated.
- ph0rque 10y ago
  Maybe Australia?
- Joeboy 10y ago
  Maybe they're not stupid, though? I think they just think they can have the benefits of herd immunity without their own kids having to go through vaccination (which does entail some discomfort and risk). I suspect they're probably mostly right.
  - WalterSear 10y ago
    They're not wrong, Walter Sobchak, they're assholes.
  - DanBC 10y ago
    If they want the benefit of herd immunity they need to make sure the herd is vaccinated. But they don't do that. They push quite hard for everyone to stop vaccinating.
    - Joeboy 10y ago
      OK on reflection maybe the "stupid" theory does fit the facts pretty well. Still, I think that for every evangelical antivaxxer, there are a fair few people who are just like "As a parent I have the right to do what I think is best for my own child [and I don't give a fuck about yours]".
      - astrodust 10y ago
        "I think the risk that my child might get polio and develop horrific, crippling, and permanent physical disorders that will make the rest of their life a struggle is acceptable given how horrible autism is!" Ask someone older than 70 what polio is like. They all have stories of someone they know being struck down by it, and even those that squeaked through and survived never did well.
  - aanm1988 10y ago
    They are wrong. There are known limits to the number of unvaccinated people we can safely have, and those spots should be reserved for people who actually can't be vaccinated.
  - 10y ago
- flamedoge 10y ago
  Technically, those already immune will survive...
  - astrodust 10y ago
    So many people are all about survival of the fittest until they realize they're not the fittest.
    - flamedoge 10y ago
      We need to talk more about procreation. Neither full-on darwinism nor eugenics are reasonable answers.
- flubert 10y ago
  >They should all be quarantined on some remote island off the coast of Alaska. Close. Seems like they are self-segregating in Seattle. http://kuow.org/post/seattle-kids-have-lower-polio-vaccination-rate-rwanda http://kuow.org/post/seattle-kids-have-lower-polio-vaccinati...
- nonbel 10y ago
  >"Many people are going to suffer horribly, measels is no fun, and many will die because of these stupid, stupid anti-vaxxers." Actually it has been expected for quite some time that there should be a gigantic measles epidemic: >"The second scenario represents the impact of a vaccination programme that reaches high levels of coverage (85% of all new-borns) which are, nevertheless, not high enough to lead to eradication of the agent. However, for the first 15 years after the introduction of vaccination, it appears as if eradication has been achieved, there are no infections. Then, suddenly, a new epidemic appears as if from nowhere. This is an illustration of a phenomenon known as the ‘honeymoon period’. This is the period of very low incidence that immediately follows the introduction of a non-eradicating mass vaccination policy. This happens because susceptible individuals accumulate much more slowly in a vaccinated community. Such patterns were predicted using mathematical models in the 1980s6 and have since been observed in communities in Asia, Africa and South America7. Honeymoon periods are only predicted to occur when the newly introduced vaccination programme has coverage close to the eradication threshold." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12176860 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12176860 The reason is that they underestimated the infectiousness of measles (via airborne routes) when first implementing the vaccination policy. Vaccine effectiveness is not high enough to eradicate the virus, thus we should see a honeymoon period followed by a very large epidemic: >"The Center for Disease Control (CDC) led in mounting the program with a formal paper at the American Public Health Association annual meeting in Miami in the fall of 1966. Two colleagues and I wrote the “official statement” which outlined in detail unqualified statements about the epidemiology of measles and made an unqualified prediction. My third position in the authorship of this paper did not adequately reflect my contribution to the work.14 I will make but two quotes: 1. “The infection spreads by direct contact from person to person, and by the airborne route among susceptibles congregated in enclosed spaces.” (Obviously the ideas of Perkins and Wells had penetrated my consciousness but not sufficiently to influence my judgment). 2. “Effective use of (measles) vaccines during the coming winter and spring should insure the eradication of measles from the United States in 1967.” Such was my faith in the broad acceptance of the vaccine by the public and the health professions and in the infallibility of herd immunity. The results of this prediction are well known. The reported incidence of the disease dropped from a level of 400,000-500,000 cases a year during 1960-1964, to 250,000 in 1965 and 200,000 in 1966. This clearly reflected the use of the early-type vaccines in private practice. Incidence further dropped to 50,000 in 1967 and to 25,000 in 1968 but since then has continued a fluctuating cou~s e .T’~he variability can be related to the degree of the total national effort, and the availability of federal funds to defray vaccine costs. Eradication remains elusive although intensification of effort during the past 12 months appears to have brought incidence to a lower point, near 12,000 cases. There are many reasons and explanations for this rather egregious blunder in prediction. The simple truth is that the prediction was based on confidence in the Reed-Frost epidemic theory, in the applicability of herd immunity on a general basis, and that measles cases were uniformly infectious. I am sure I extended the teachings of my preceptors beyond the limits that they had intended during my student days. In the relentless light of the well-focussed retrospectiscope, the real failure was our neglect of conducting continuous and sufficiently sophisticated epidemiological field studies of measles. We accepted the doctrines imbued into us as students wikout maintaining the eternal skepticism of the true scientist." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6939399 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6939399
- Florin_Andrei 10y ago
  It's definitely irrational, although "stupid"? Not sure. I've seen fairly intelligent people falling victims to such delusions. Kid is born. You rejoice. Kid develops autism. You're devastated. Doc tells you it might be genetic, partially. The rational part of your brain goes "genes, mutations, alleles, etc". The irrational part of your brain goes "you mean my man-juice was bad and spoiled? how dare you? I am a real man and I'll see you in hell!" So at that point it depends on which part of your brain wins. Is it the part that gave us Einstein or Plato? Or is it the part that we're sharing with pigs and jackals? I think this model explains a lot of completely irrational things bouncing around the world these days.
  - astrodust 10y ago
    Intelligent people can behave stupidly, it happens all the time. You can call it "being irrational" or "getting emotional" or simply losing your mind, but whatever it is, stupid is as stupid does. Being intelligent about things means remaining objective and weighing facts and observations, not just chugging the anti-vaxx Kool-Aid and calling it a day.
wmboy 10y ago
"Measles is one of the most contagious and most lethal of all human diseases." Okay, I'm not a scientist, but I'm pretty sure that sentence is not accurate. The percentage of people that die from measles is extremely low, and it's hard to tell if it's the disease that causes it, or simply the fact that the person was already very weak (and therefore would have died from another sickness such as complications of a cold).
- wavefunction 10y ago
  I had an adult co-worker who had never been vaccinated for measles and had contracted it as an adult. He had to take expensive eye-drops regularly for the rest of his life, or he will go blind. He grew up in Utah.
  - grahamburger 10y ago
    I'm not sure if you were trying to suggest otherwise, but Utah's childhood vaccination rates are quite good relative to other US States: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6341a1.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6341a1.htm
    - wavefunction 10y ago
      I mentioned Utah because it's in the middle of the United States, rather than Sub-Saharan Africa. My coworker had all the benefits and access to modern medicine, and now he faces blindness.
- acqq 10y ago
  > The percentage of people that die from measles is extremely low Only because most of the children are vaccinated! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measles "It causes the most vaccine-preventable deaths of any disease." "In 1980, the disease was estimated to have caused 2.6 million deaths per year." It would be an unbelievably cruel experiment, but if "anti-vaxxers" would win in the US and force it on everybody, in about, let's say, a decade there would been enough children deaths (it's 2 from every 1000 infected!) to prove them wrong. As long as the most of children are vaccinated, it's the vaccinated ones who protect those of "anti."
ArtDev 10y ago
There will be a switch when parents fear the disease more than the vaccine. Rates will go up again.
- jdoliner 10y ago
  Possibly, I think the anti-vaxxer movement has more to do with a distrust of authority, particularly scientific authority, than it has to do with an actual fear of autism. If / when a measles outbreak happens there's still a question if people will be willing to accept medical science as an answer to the problem or if it'll be cast again as the villain. People are starting to distrust science, and there's no guarantee that scary diseases will change that, even if it seems to us here on HN as if it should.
  - hckr1292 10y ago
    Any suggestions for how to talk about the hazards of not vaccinating with loved ones who don't agree?
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - moultano 10y ago
      Pictures of dead/maimed children.
      - some-guy 10y ago
        Rarely do I get into Facebook arguments online, but this seemed to be the best solution -- posting picture after picture of children with measles and polio.
      - bigtex 10y ago
        Be sure to also read all the stories of healthy, active teenage girls who after getting the Gardisil shot had their health severely decline. Then read story after story of these same girls (all over the world) being told all their symptoms were made up and that they needed to see therapists instead of medical doctors. This type of behavior is why more and more people are questioning vaccines and their safety. The medical community acts as though vaccines have 0 side effects, even though the drugs clearly state they have side effects. I have read countless stories of parents whose child experience severe reactions right after vaccination and then the pediatrician or ER doctor never even thinks to consider that maybe the vaccine caused the problem. I have a sister in law who when she was a young girl got a vaccination and then within 24 hours was unable to walk for several days, basically paralyzed. This caused her mother, who is an ER doctor, to delay vaccinations for her younger siblings. I just wish the vaccine establishment would just be honest and admit that some children have to suffer or even die for the benefit of the "herd".
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
patrickg_zill 10y ago
I was likely (born early 70s) vaccinated according to the first schedule, although my parents allowed me to get measles, mumps and chicken pox. Since they've passed, I can't ask them for their exact reasoning as to why. The 1983-era CDC schedule: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/images/schedule1983s.jpg https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/images/schedule1983s.... Current schedule: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/easy-to-read/child.html https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/easy-to-read/child.ht... Just commenting: there is a big difference between the likely vax schedule that a 45yo of today got, and what an infant born this year or last, will get.
- climber604 10y ago
  I'd expect the schedules to change (improve) over time. So what's the point you're trying to make?
  - bigtex 10y ago
    They don't test what happens to someone when they get all those shots. Also chicken pox is reality is no big deal and all my siblings had it as a child.
    - flukus 10y ago
      http://www.webmd.com/children/vaccines/news/20110725/sharp-drop-in-chickenpox-deaths-due-to-vaccine http://www.webmd.com/children/vaccines/news/20110725/sharp-d... 100 dead kids and 11,000 hospitalized a year is no big deal? Not to mention shingles.
  - patrickg_zill 10y ago
    Seems obvious if you look at the schedules: 1983: vaccines given : 3 to 4 . 2017: vaccines given : ~10 . That is a big difference in terms of what you are asking a body to do.
lend000 10y ago
Mandatory vaccination is definitely a contentious subject, although many do not understand or acknowledge the subtleties. Pros for this position: 1. The individual is incurring some level of risk by not vaccinating. 2. Society is incurring some level of risk if the individual's risk of getting the disease is increased (although shouldn't this not affect people who are vaccinated anyway?) Cons: 1. You are mandating a person subject themselves to a medical procedure, a very personal violation of that person's liberty. 2. Taking a forced vaccine incurs its own (low) risk. A distant family member of mine contracted Polio from a Polio vaccine. The 'anti-vaxxers' have claims of other unhealthy complications of vaccines, some of which are probably true to a degree. The only argument I see for mandatory vaccination is that it has to be done before the individual in question can legally consent, so perhaps 'society' should have greater say than the individual's parents for what's best for their child, similar to how society imposes certain education requirements, even for home schooling.
- aanm1988 10y ago
  So the pros are innocent people don't up hurt the cons are "BUT MUH FREEDUMB". > Plus all the claims of other unhealthy complications of vaccines, some of which are probably true to a degree. This is the type of thing that gives anti-vaxxers fuel. Don't give them the benefit of the doubt, don't say more research is needed before deciding. Fine, you can choose not vaccinate your kids. They should be banned from public schools, and pretty much anywhere else. If you don't want to vaccinate them then they should have to live a shitty isolated life, because you sure as hell shouldn't get to make them or others sick with your idiocy.
  - godshatter 10y ago
    If freedoms means so little to you, feel free to give them up on a whim. Stay the hell away from mine, though.
  - szemet 10y ago
    In my country vaccination rules are rather strict! But: I've heard many stories about anti-vaxxer parents who managed to bribe doctors to throw out the vaccination but then do the bookkeeping as the if the child were vaccinated. And this is the worst imaginable setup... :( Maybe in richer countries, where the doctors are well payed (by the state or whoever enforces the vaccination rules), this would not be a problem...
aanm1988 10y ago
> 450 died That's the solution, unfortunately. Kids dying, the kids of rich idiots who decide not to vaccinate. Maybe we can get back polio and it will be just like when my grandma was a kid and she would get told not to leave the yard at certain times of year.
SeanDav 10y ago
It would be a huge concern if people stopped vaccinating. I am definitely in favour of vaccination - but if my experiences are anything to go by, the government and healthcare establishment have done themselves and the public no favours in their approach to the issues. At the peak of the autism-vaccination scare a few years ago, we were due to vaccinate our child. I researched as much as I could, but almost all the information out there was very basic and almost condescending. Rather than try face parents concerns head-on, the attitude was simply to say "vaccination" equals "good", with no hint of a balanced discussion to address real issues like side effects and harm from vaccinations. On the one side we were faced with almost hysterical rhetoric and supposed "facts" from the anti-vaccination groups and on the other, near apathy from the governmental organisations. We did go ahead and get our child vaccinated, but after approximately 2 weeks she starting displaying very worrying symptoms, her eyes rolling backwards into her head, becoming floppy, making peculiar sounds. We rushed her to hospital, where the doctors steadfastly refused to admit even the possibility that her symptoms were related to the recent vaccinations. It was just "coincidence". At least one of my nephews suffered some sort of febrile convulsions after the measles vaccination - again coincidence apparently. Even after all this, I still support vaccinations, because the disease is statistically far worse the than side effects from vaccinations.
- lsiebert 10y ago
  I think that's because that encourages people to assess the issue for their children, but really vaccines aren't just for your kid, they provide herd immunity that saves the lives of newborns, the immunocompromised like children on chemo, etc. Also people forget the horror of life before vaccines for things like polio.
  - nonbel 10y ago
    > "saves the lives of newborns" This is a myth, see my other post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13656462 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13656462
- acqq 10y ago
  Read about the former UK Doctor (found guilty by the General Medical Council of serious professional misconduct in May 2010 and struck off the Medical Register) that started it all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine_controversy There were a lot of studies trying to prove or repeat his "discoveries" only to confirm that he faked the results for the personal gain. But the bad media coverage of the affair and the small number of people who actually profited from the scare got us to where we are today. And of course, exactly the success of vaccination allows the existence of "antis."
234dd57d2c8dba 10y ago
Stupid question but, isn't this a self-solving problem? People that get vaccines won't get sick, only the anti-vaxxers will get sick. Anti-vaxxers will either die or be convinced to get vaccines. What am I missing here?
- ofcrpls 10y ago
  There are those who cannot take vaccinations due to medical conditions and there are those who opt-out from vaccinations due to beliefs. Guess who suffers damage for no fault of their own ( not blaming the children of the parents who are making the choice ).
  - zeveb 10y ago
    > There are those who cannot take vaccinations due to medical conditions Those folks are relatively rare though. Seems to me that living surrounded by contagion is part of the human condition, and that all of us have the right to take action to protect ourselves (and our children) from that contagion, but no-one has the right to violently force someone else to protect himself.
    - mobiplayer 10y ago
      There's always a little chance of getting infected even with the vaccine. Herd immunity makes that chance orders of magnitude smaller. It's not about forcing people to protect themselves. It is about forcing people to not increase the chances of my kids dying of a completely avoidable issue, just because these other people believe in fairies. Your freedom extends as far as where mine starts.
  - Someone1234 10y ago
    Children also cannot get the MMR until 12 months of age. So for the first year they're vulnerable to infection.
    - nonbel 10y ago
MichaelBurge 10y ago
Even if they did cause autism, the risk is less than the historically-verifiable risk of contracting measles, isn't it? If you take whatever the observed increase in autism is, blame it 100% on vaccines, and compare it to the number of historical measles deaths, are vaccinations still a good idea?
godshatter 10y ago
When I grew up, cases of the measles were common. I had them, my sister had them and many of my friends came down with them. I didn't come from a community of anti-vaxxers, either. It was just something that happened to kids, like the flu. I'm not supporting the anti-vaccination movement, just pointing out that this world of pretty much no one getting the disease is the new normal and that we survived as a civilization before it became so. Obviously it would be better if everyone were vaccinated. I'm just trying to put it in perspective.
- Protostome 10y ago
  Did you know that measles weakens the immune system years after infection? http://science.sciencemag.org/content/348/6235/694 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/348/6235/694
Glyptodon 10y ago
Anybody else find it mildly annoying when articles like this spend a paragraph saying "as a/an X, Y, and Z ... blah ..." In this case the follow-up is "I’m worried that our nation’s health will soon be threatened because we have not stood up to the pseudoscience and fake conspiracy claims of this movement." You have to be a scientist and have daughter with autism to worry about this? Really? As a person who's not a scientist and doesn't have an autistic/disabled daughter am I allowed to be worried too? I mean it's nice that you're an expert and have experiences, but they're mostly superfluous prefix to your main sentence there... (That said, I would support a law allowing for the parents of unvaccinated children to be charged with manslaughter or attempted manslaughter when pre-vaccination infants, those on chemotherapy, or similar come down with a disease like measles and live in the same vicinity, go to the same schools, etc.)
tu7001 10y ago
This is a lie, measles is completely harmless, I had it, hundreds of kids in my town had it nobody dies. I expect the similar situation in other cities; it was Poland 80's. The idea that stuffing healthy infant with coctail of dirty substances gives any adventages is ridiculous for me. You can google vaccine ingredients and check wiki. I didn't give injection to my daughter and she is pretty healthy.
owebmaster 10y ago
Anti-vaxxers and anti-GMOs are the proof that far right and far left meet each other in the extremes.
- alextheparrot 10y ago
  As they benefit from the largely immune population they endanger and munch of their drought-resistant corn.
- cpburns2009 10y ago
  I was under the impression anti-vaccination and anti-GMO attitudes were more common among liberals than conservatives (in the U.S. at least).
  - Jemmeh 10y ago
    I see both of those issues on both sides of the fence personally, just for different reasons. I live in Southern USA and there's a lot of agriculture here, a lot of the farmers I know are conservative and anti-GMO. But I think they're mostly against it because of all the food patents and monopolies. Most of the left-leaning people I know are more against it because "we need more research/we have a poor understanding of nutrition".
    - owebmaster 10y ago
      > Most of the left-leaning people I know are more against it because "we need more research/we have a poor understanding of nutrition" And the funny thing that this is what the anti-vaxxers think too
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  Not really, they aren't necessarily far on either side. They arexamples of uniformed opinions, one of which is predominant on the left and one on the right (though with a sizable left component), but lots of the people with those opinions are otherwise moderate members of the right or left. Extremism and ignorance may correlate (or not), but at a minimum they are distinct issues.
alextheparrot 10y ago
In what way does an individual have the right to not be vaccinated? More generally, in what way can the state not impose on the individual's health (Especially when it believes it is improving it)? There is a lot of talk about rights here, yet no explanation of why the right to not be vaccinated exists. The reason why the U.S. has a Bill of Rights is because many things we consider rights are not inalienable. The exact argument, and I present two quotes from the Supreme Court, that vaccines can cause harm [0] and that they therefore should not be allowed to be mandatory have been heard and refuted [1]. [0] "The defendant offered to prove that vaccination 'quite often' caused serious and permanent injury to the health of the person vaccinated; that the operation 'occasionally' resulted in death; that it was 'impossible' to tell 'in any particular case' what the results of vaccination would be, or whether it would injure the health or result in death" [1] "It seems to the court that an affirmative answer to these questions would practically strip the legislative department of its function to care for the public health and the public safety when endangered by epidemics of disease. Such an answer would mean that compulsory vaccination could not, in any conceivable case, be legally enforced in a community, even at the command of the legislature, however widespread the epidemic of smallpox, and however deep and universal was the belief of the community and of its medical advisers that a system of general vaccination was vital to the safety of all."
- jdoliner 10y ago
  Whether or not an individual has a right to not be vaccinated is really the question at stake here. AFAIK we don't yet have a direct SCOTUS decision on this and the default is that individuals can't be compelled to undergo procedures. That's not an argument either way, I'm just summarizing my understanding of the state of the world today. The discussion in this thread, at least my comments, are entirely about what I think the rights should be. I think it's very likely that we'll see a SCOTUS case in the near future about just this issue since we're getting close to a breaking point. My argument is that we're going to have a number of nasty things to contend with once we go down the road of forcing medical procedures for societal goods. As I mentioned else where in this thread there was a time when SCOTUS ruled that forced sterilization could be used to implement eugenics. [0] That's the type of thing I think we'd be opening ourselves up to by not respecting people's right to decline procedures. To draw another parallel that may resonate with the HN crowd. The argument that decided Roe V. Wade was that a right to privacy under the 14th Amendment implies a right to choose whether or not to have an abortion. I can't see any way that argument is going to hold up in a world where a right to privacy doesn't also imply a right to choose whether or not to be vaccinated. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_v._Bell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_v._Bell
dpatru 10y ago
This article does not explain why anti-vaxxers are winning, but it demonstrates why. It repeats tired establishment arguments that the diseases that vaccine protect against are dangerous, but does not address or even acknowledge the legitimate concerns of parents who have seen first hand, or have heard from trusted sources, serious adverse reactions to vaccinations. Loud denials by the medical establishment along with efforts to use state power to compel vaccinations, legal immunity for vaccine makers, and brutal retaliation against doctors who question the orthodoxy do much to help the anti-vaccination movement.
wonderflpancake 10y ago
I wish we would stop with the vaxxers vs. anti-vaxxers. I think most people (including myself) fall into the middle - we don't believe they are entirely safe, but understand its the lesser of two evils and have to roll the dice. What I dislike about the "pro-vaxxers" is their unwillingness to acknowledge ANYTHING negative about vaccines. - There IS "stuff" in most vaccines that we should ALL agree should not be in there (formaldehyde, aluminum, etc). There is no "safe" level of aluminum for a baby. Some vaccines manufacturers make them without these things if you really do the research for each one, but the chance your doctor carries the perfect brand combinations of the ones without all the questionable ingredients is unlikely. For example, if you find out XYZ co makes the MMR vaccine without aluminum, it doesn't really matter because you probably can't get the version from XYZ co. - The packet insert clinical studies that come in the vaccines are usually absurdly small. We should ALL agree millions of people are getting these vaccinations every year and a sample size of 500, 5000, or 10000 people in 1980 just doesn't cut it. There should be better ways to keep these studies current with much more data. But no one usually wants to hear these criticisms. "The science proves its safe!" Sure, until it doesn't. Wouldn't it be great if we could just acknowledge the obvious issues instead of opposing everything the other side says?
- akytt 10y ago
  Based on what scientific fact do you state "there is no safe level of aluminum for a baby?" We all, including babies, contain aluminum. That's the problem: i can't agree to "there's stuff in there that should not be" based on an opinion.
  - wonderflpancake 10y ago
    http://www.askdrsears.com/topics/health-concerns/vaccines/vaccine-faqs http://www.askdrsears.com/topics/health-concerns/vaccines/va... gives quite a bit of color. This is exactly what I always see happen. Common sense tells me formaldehyde and aluminum = not good. It's not iron after all. I don't recall every seeing formaldehyde or aluminum nutrition supplement pills. Yet people will literally argue that formaldehyde is naturally occurring and exists in our bodies and that's supposed to fly "scientifically". We need to do better.

49 points by gwintrob 10y ago

We're all going to die, quite literally, of stupid. Many people are going to suffer horribly, measels is no fun, and many will die because of these stupid, stupid anti-vaxxers. They should all be quarantined on some remote island off the coast of Alaska.

jdoliner 10y ago
I can understand the anger, it's quite horrifying that diseases we thought were eradicated are making a comeback. On the other hand I'm also horrified by the idea of shipping people off to Alaska for refusing to submit to a medical procedure. That's a very dangerous precedent that could be applied in all sorts of heinous ways.
- keepper 10y ago
  Why? "your rights stop at mine". If they are willing to wear all encompassing bio hazard suits, and bubble their house, fine by me if they care not to vaccinate... It is our problem when people don't believe in herd immunity and other problems that can affect the community.
  - jdoliner 10y ago
    What exactly do you think grants you a right to herd immunity? You might really really want herd immunity, but you don't have a right to it. Your rights stop at theirs just as much as their rights stop at yours. They do have a right not to be subjected to medical procedures, you don't have a right to herd immunity. It's frustrating and regressive but herd immunity is something we have to decide on as a herd, and currently we're deciding against it.
    - HCIdivision17 10y ago
      I think this is sorta on the nose, but I would rephrase it as "Do we have a right to not be subjected to medical procedures?" And the answer to that seems to be fairly strongly in the affirmative. I imagine we will be approaching a more nuanced legal view of such things in the near future as we battle to understand where rights really stand. (Much like many of our rights, there are exceptional situations - like the oft quoted yelling "FIRE!" in a movie theater - and perhaps vaccinations should be treated similarly.) EDIT - I was pointed to some interesting CDC info below, and there is an interesting scenario possible: make measels a quarantinable disease. This would become a choice with teeth. Choose to vaccinate, or risk isolation. Thankfully, the CDC seems like a fairly serious outfit, and I'm not worried about abuse of power in this way, but it does rephrase the topic a bit.
      - lsiebert 10y ago
        Quarantine laws exist for a reason.
        HCIdivision17 10y ago
        I had never looked it up, and it seems the CDC (unsurprisingly) is involved in applying these laws. https://www.cdc.gov/quarantine/aboutlawsregulationsquarantineisolation.html https://www.cdc.gov/quarantine/aboutlawsregulationsquarantin... From that site, it seems that isolation and quarantine is largely done at borders between states and country. It's also very serious, and it's not something the CDC takes lightly: the last major enforcement of the rule was in 1918 for the Spanish Flu (though it cites there were other minor applications - the ebola scare last year may be one small instance of that). In context of this, I would imagine that measles would need to be added to the list of diseases quarantine is enforced (I haven't spotted this list yet). EDIT: found the important list, and it mentions specifically measels are NOT on the list: The list of quarantinable diseases is contained in an Executive Order of the President and includes cholera, diphtheria, infectious tuberculosis, plague, smallpox, yellow fever, viral hemorrhagic fevers (such as Marburg, Ebola, and Congo-Crimean), and severe acute respiratory syndromes. Many other illnesses of public health signficance, such as measles, mumps, rubella, and chicken pox, are not contained in the list of quarantinable illnesses, but continue to pose a health risk to the public. Quarantine Station personnel respond to reports of ill travelers aboard airplanes, ships, and at land border crossings to make an assessment of the public health risk and initiate an appropriate response. One of the executive orders is linked in that list: https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2003-04-09/pdf/03-8832.pdf https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2003-04-09/pdf/03-8832.pdf
- EpicEng 10y ago
  I'm not. These people represent a huge risk to those around them. We put people in tiny cells for less.
  - jdoliner 10y ago
    Do we? Last time I checked we put people in cells for committing crimes. What sorts of prisoners are you talking about here? It's not obvious to me but perhaps I'm being thick.
    - EpicEng 10y ago
      No, we put people in cells because they represent a threat to the general public. Of course, it doesn't always play out that way in reality, but their are a limited number of options re punishment as well. Society has a right to protect itself. If your decisions put my life, as well as thousands of others, in danger unnecessarily then you represent a significant risk.
  - astrodust 10y ago
    Stealing a $1 candy bar can mean a life in jail if it's your third strike. Deliberately avoiding vaccinations for your kids and causing a measels outbreak in a school where multiple children die carries no penalty. Maybe it should.
- k-mcgrady 10y ago
  >> On the other hand I'm also horrified by the idea of shipping people off to Alaska for refusing to submit to a medical procedure. If a very small minority of people are going to endanger the lives of millions - or billions - of others shipping them off to a colony for refusing to submit to the procedure is kind in my opinion. I guess it depends on whether you have a more utilitarian outlook on ethics or believe personal freedom is more important. And I believe the 'dangerous precedent' you mention should be easy to protect from in a lawful democratic society. You should be entitled to your personal freedom and rights until they start infringing on the basic rights of others.
  - jdoliner 10y ago
    > And I believe the 'dangerous precedent' you mention should be easy to protect from in a lawful democratic society. It's not easy to protect from at all. There was a time in this country when we had forced sterilization of poor people. [0] It was justified using all the same language that you're using here and seen as an incredibly progressive policy. It's not easy at all to protect from these kinds of abuses. Quite the opposite in fact. > You should be entitled to your personal freedom and rights until they start infringing on the basic rights of others. Anti-vaxxers aren't infringing on any of your basic rights, they are putting you at risk but you don't have a right to herd immunity from diseases. They do have a right decide which medical procedures they undergo, again that may be regressive but that's currently the way it works in our country. [0] http://www.salon.com/2006/03/04/bruinius/ http://www.salon.com/2006/03/04/bruinius/
    - k-mcgrady 10y ago
      >> Anti-vaxxers aren't infringing on any of your basic rights, they are putting you at risk but you don't have a right to herd immunity from diseases I have the "Right to Life, Liberty, Personal Security". By putting my life in danger they are infringing on that right. Now they also have the right to "Freedom from Torture and Degrading Treatment" which forced vaccination may be treated as. But one right has to take precedence and I would argue it is the former.
    - astrodust 10y ago
- worldsayshi 10y ago
  Well, how much statistical risk of death do you need to impose on someone to be guilty of involuntary manslaughter?
  - jdoliner 10y ago
    I'd be interested in seeing a counter example. But I'm pretty sure for someone to be guilty of manslaughter there has to be an actual death, not just a risk of death. Reckless endangerment might be a more reasonable charge, but I think that assumes herd immunity as the baseline of risk and thus anything that raises that is endangering you. As I've argued elsewhere in this thread, we don't have a right to herd immunity, it's something we'll either do or not do as a herd and currently we seem to be choosing the latter.
- HCIdivision17 10y ago
  I don't think it's a dangerous precedent, in the sense that precedent happened a long, long time ago. These sorts of diseases are horrific, and quarantine is usually applied with extreme predjudice. Quarantine is no joke, and is a last line of defense. That said, quarantine might be overkill. But isolation really is a valid solution. It's just awful. But refusing vaccination is also awful, since it can lead to far more brutal suffering than the inconvenience of uprooting one's home. Honestly it's just a crap situation, where each solution that isn't vaccination is just a measure of weighing the ultimate amount of suffering and choosing the least bad.
- MereInterest 10y ago
  Typhoid Mary was an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid fever. Her work as a cook resulted in numerous outbreaks and deaths. She was informed of the risks, and warned not to return to the food industry. She ignored these warnings, changed her name, and returned to work as a cook. As a result, another outbreak, and more deaths. Refusing to vaccinate is just as irresponsible as Typhoid Mary. It isn't punishment for refusing to submit to a medical procedure, any more than drunk driving is punishment for driving. It is refusing to take basic medical care, resulting in the decreased health of society.
  - arachnophobe 10y ago
    Another result was that she (Mary Mallon) was imprisoned/quarantined for the remainder of her life (after being released from her first quarantine and being told not to work as a cook, changing her name, working as a cook, causing more outbreaks and deaths). 23 years... She refused medical procedures that could have removed the infection (removal of gall bladder) and as such died in imprisonment/confinement. I'm not suggesting we should lock up anti-vaxxers, but if there is an outbreak of polio then those people who refuse to be vaccinated put at risk those who cannot be vaccinated.
ph0rque 10y ago
Maybe Australia?
Joeboy 10y ago
Maybe they're not stupid, though? I think they just think they can have the benefits of herd immunity without their own kids having to go through vaccination (which does entail some discomfort and risk). I suspect they're probably mostly right.
- WalterSear 10y ago
  They're not wrong, Walter Sobchak, they're assholes.
- DanBC 10y ago
  If they want the benefit of herd immunity they need to make sure the herd is vaccinated. But they don't do that. They push quite hard for everyone to stop vaccinating.
  - Joeboy 10y ago
    OK on reflection maybe the "stupid" theory does fit the facts pretty well. Still, I think that for every evangelical antivaxxer, there are a fair few people who are just like "As a parent I have the right to do what I think is best for my own child [and I don't give a fuck about yours]".
    - astrodust 10y ago
      "I think the risk that my child might get polio and develop horrific, crippling, and permanent physical disorders that will make the rest of their life a struggle is acceptable given how horrible autism is!" Ask someone older than 70 what polio is like. They all have stories of someone they know being struck down by it, and even those that squeaked through and survived never did well.
- aanm1988 10y ago
  They are wrong. There are known limits to the number of unvaccinated people we can safely have, and those spots should be reserved for people who actually can't be vaccinated.
- 10y ago
flamedoge 10y ago
Technically, those already immune will survive...
- astrodust 10y ago
  So many people are all about survival of the fittest until they realize they're not the fittest.
  - flamedoge 10y ago
    We need to talk more about procreation. Neither full-on darwinism nor eugenics are reasonable answers.
flubert 10y ago
>They should all be quarantined on some remote island off the coast of Alaska. Close. Seems like they are self-segregating in Seattle. http://kuow.org/post/seattle-kids-have-lower-polio-vaccination-rate-rwanda http://kuow.org/post/seattle-kids-have-lower-polio-vaccinati...
nonbel 10y ago
>"Many people are going to suffer horribly, measels is no fun, and many will die because of these stupid, stupid anti-vaxxers." Actually it has been expected for quite some time that there should be a gigantic measles epidemic: >"The second scenario represents the impact of a vaccination programme that reaches high levels of coverage (85% of all new-borns) which are, nevertheless, not high enough to lead to eradication of the agent. However, for the first 15 years after the introduction of vaccination, it appears as if eradication has been achieved, there are no infections. Then, suddenly, a new epidemic appears as if from nowhere. This is an illustration of a phenomenon known as the ‘honeymoon period’. This is the period of very low incidence that immediately follows the introduction of a non-eradicating mass vaccination policy. This happens because susceptible individuals accumulate much more slowly in a vaccinated community. Such patterns were predicted using mathematical models in the 1980s6 and have since been observed in communities in Asia, Africa and South America7. Honeymoon periods are only predicted to occur when the newly introduced vaccination programme has coverage close to the eradication threshold." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12176860 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12176860 The reason is that they underestimated the infectiousness of measles (via airborne routes) when first implementing the vaccination policy. Vaccine effectiveness is not high enough to eradicate the virus, thus we should see a honeymoon period followed by a very large epidemic: >"The Center for Disease Control (CDC) led in mounting the program with a formal paper at the American Public Health Association annual meeting in Miami in the fall of 1966. Two colleagues and I wrote the “official statement” which outlined in detail unqualified statements about the epidemiology of measles and made an unqualified prediction. My third position in the authorship of this paper did not adequately reflect my contribution to the work.14 I will make but two quotes: 1. “The infection spreads by direct contact from person to person, and by the airborne route among susceptibles congregated in enclosed spaces.” (Obviously the ideas of Perkins and Wells had penetrated my consciousness but not sufficiently to influence my judgment). 2. “Effective use of (measles) vaccines during the coming winter and spring should insure the eradication of measles from the United States in 1967.” Such was my faith in the broad acceptance of the vaccine by the public and the health professions and in the infallibility of herd immunity. The results of this prediction are well known. The reported incidence of the disease dropped from a level of 400,000-500,000 cases a year during 1960-1964, to 250,000 in 1965 and 200,000 in 1966. This clearly reflected the use of the early-type vaccines in private practice. Incidence further dropped to 50,000 in 1967 and to 25,000 in 1968 but since then has continued a fluctuating cou~s e .T’~he variability can be related to the degree of the total national effort, and the availability of federal funds to defray vaccine costs. Eradication remains elusive although intensification of effort during the past 12 months appears to have brought incidence to a lower point, near 12,000 cases. There are many reasons and explanations for this rather egregious blunder in prediction. The simple truth is that the prediction was based on confidence in the Reed-Frost epidemic theory, in the applicability of herd immunity on a general basis, and that measles cases were uniformly infectious. I am sure I extended the teachings of my preceptors beyond the limits that they had intended during my student days. In the relentless light of the well-focussed retrospectiscope, the real failure was our neglect of conducting continuous and sufficiently sophisticated epidemiological field studies of measles. We accepted the doctrines imbued into us as students wikout maintaining the eternal skepticism of the true scientist." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6939399 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6939399
Florin_Andrei 10y ago
It's definitely irrational, although "stupid"? Not sure. I've seen fairly intelligent people falling victims to such delusions. Kid is born. You rejoice. Kid develops autism. You're devastated. Doc tells you it might be genetic, partially. The rational part of your brain goes "genes, mutations, alleles, etc". The irrational part of your brain goes "you mean my man-juice was bad and spoiled? how dare you? I am a real man and I'll see you in hell!" So at that point it depends on which part of your brain wins. Is it the part that gave us Einstein or Plato? Or is it the part that we're sharing with pigs and jackals? I think this model explains a lot of completely irrational things bouncing around the world these days.
- astrodust 10y ago
  Intelligent people can behave stupidly, it happens all the time. You can call it "being irrational" or "getting emotional" or simply losing your mind, but whatever it is, stupid is as stupid does. Being intelligent about things means remaining objective and weighing facts and observations, not just chugging the anti-vaxx Kool-Aid and calling it a day.

wmboy 10y ago

"Measles is one of the most contagious and most lethal of all human diseases." Okay, I'm not a scientist, but I'm pretty sure that sentence is not accurate. The percentage of people that die from measles is extremely low, and it's hard to tell if it's the disease that causes it, or simply the fact that the person was already very weak (and therefore would have died from another sickness such as complications of a cold).

wavefunction 10y ago
I had an adult co-worker who had never been vaccinated for measles and had contracted it as an adult. He had to take expensive eye-drops regularly for the rest of his life, or he will go blind. He grew up in Utah.
- grahamburger 10y ago
  I'm not sure if you were trying to suggest otherwise, but Utah's childhood vaccination rates are quite good relative to other US States: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6341a1.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6341a1.htm
  - wavefunction 10y ago
    I mentioned Utah because it's in the middle of the United States, rather than Sub-Saharan Africa. My coworker had all the benefits and access to modern medicine, and now he faces blindness.
acqq 10y ago
> The percentage of people that die from measles is extremely low Only because most of the children are vaccinated! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measles "It causes the most vaccine-preventable deaths of any disease." "In 1980, the disease was estimated to have caused 2.6 million deaths per year." It would be an unbelievably cruel experiment, but if "anti-vaxxers" would win in the US and force it on everybody, in about, let's say, a decade there would been enough children deaths (it's 2 from every 1000 infected!) to prove them wrong. As long as the most of children are vaccinated, it's the vaccinated ones who protect those of "anti."

ArtDev 10y ago

There will be a switch when parents fear the disease more than the vaccine. Rates will go up again.

jdoliner 10y ago
Possibly, I think the anti-vaxxer movement has more to do with a distrust of authority, particularly scientific authority, than it has to do with an actual fear of autism. If / when a measles outbreak happens there's still a question if people will be willing to accept medical science as an answer to the problem or if it'll be cast again as the villain. People are starting to distrust science, and there's no guarantee that scary diseases will change that, even if it seems to us here on HN as if it should.
- hckr1292 10y ago
  Any suggestions for how to talk about the hazards of not vaccinating with loved ones who don't agree?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - moultano 10y ago
    Pictures of dead/maimed children.
    - some-guy 10y ago
      Rarely do I get into Facebook arguments online, but this seemed to be the best solution -- posting picture after picture of children with measles and polio.
    - bigtex 10y ago
      Be sure to also read all the stories of healthy, active teenage girls who after getting the Gardisil shot had their health severely decline. Then read story after story of these same girls (all over the world) being told all their symptoms were made up and that they needed to see therapists instead of medical doctors. This type of behavior is why more and more people are questioning vaccines and their safety. The medical community acts as though vaccines have 0 side effects, even though the drugs clearly state they have side effects. I have read countless stories of parents whose child experience severe reactions right after vaccination and then the pediatrician or ER doctor never even thinks to consider that maybe the vaccine caused the problem. I have a sister in law who when she was a young girl got a vaccination and then within 24 hours was unable to walk for several days, basically paralyzed. This caused her mother, who is an ER doctor, to delay vaccinations for her younger siblings. I just wish the vaccine establishment would just be honest and admit that some children have to suffer or even die for the benefit of the "herd".

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

patrickg_zill 10y ago

I was likely (born early 70s) vaccinated according to the first schedule, although my parents allowed me to get measles, mumps and chicken pox. Since they've passed, I can't ask them for their exact reasoning as to why. The 1983-era CDC schedule: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/images/schedule1983s.jpg https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/images/schedule1983s.... Current schedule: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/easy-to-read/child.html https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/easy-to-read/child.ht... Just commenting: there is a big difference between the likely vax schedule that a 45yo of today got, and what an infant born this year or last, will get.

climber604 10y ago
I'd expect the schedules to change (improve) over time. So what's the point you're trying to make?
- bigtex 10y ago
  They don't test what happens to someone when they get all those shots. Also chicken pox is reality is no big deal and all my siblings had it as a child.
  - flukus 10y ago
    http://www.webmd.com/children/vaccines/news/20110725/sharp-drop-in-chickenpox-deaths-due-to-vaccine http://www.webmd.com/children/vaccines/news/20110725/sharp-d... 100 dead kids and 11,000 hospitalized a year is no big deal? Not to mention shingles.
- patrickg_zill 10y ago
  Seems obvious if you look at the schedules: 1983: vaccines given : 3 to 4 . 2017: vaccines given : ~10 . That is a big difference in terms of what you are asking a body to do.

lend000 10y ago

Mandatory vaccination is definitely a contentious subject, although many do not understand or acknowledge the subtleties. Pros for this position: 1. The individual is incurring some level of risk by not vaccinating. 2. Society is incurring some level of risk if the individual's risk of getting the disease is increased (although shouldn't this not affect people who are vaccinated anyway?) Cons: 1. You are mandating a person subject themselves to a medical procedure, a very personal violation of that person's liberty. 2. Taking a forced vaccine incurs its own (low) risk. A distant family member of mine contracted Polio from a Polio vaccine. The 'anti-vaxxers' have claims of other unhealthy complications of vaccines, some of which are probably true to a degree. The only argument I see for mandatory vaccination is that it has to be done before the individual in question can legally consent, so perhaps 'society' should have greater say than the individual's parents for what's best for their child, similar to how society imposes certain education requirements, even for home schooling.

aanm1988 10y ago
So the pros are innocent people don't up hurt the cons are "BUT MUH FREEDUMB". > Plus all the claims of other unhealthy complications of vaccines, some of which are probably true to a degree. This is the type of thing that gives anti-vaxxers fuel. Don't give them the benefit of the doubt, don't say more research is needed before deciding. Fine, you can choose not vaccinate your kids. They should be banned from public schools, and pretty much anywhere else. If you don't want to vaccinate them then they should have to live a shitty isolated life, because you sure as hell shouldn't get to make them or others sick with your idiocy.
- godshatter 10y ago
  If freedoms means so little to you, feel free to give them up on a whim. Stay the hell away from mine, though.
- szemet 10y ago
  In my country vaccination rules are rather strict! But: I've heard many stories about anti-vaxxer parents who managed to bribe doctors to throw out the vaccination but then do the bookkeeping as the if the child were vaccinated. And this is the worst imaginable setup... :( Maybe in richer countries, where the doctors are well payed (by the state or whoever enforces the vaccination rules), this would not be a problem...

aanm1988 10y ago

> 450 died That's the solution, unfortunately. Kids dying, the kids of rich idiots who decide not to vaccinate. Maybe we can get back polio and it will be just like when my grandma was a kid and she would get told not to leave the yard at certain times of year.

SeanDav 10y ago

It would be a huge concern if people stopped vaccinating. I am definitely in favour of vaccination - but if my experiences are anything to go by, the government and healthcare establishment have done themselves and the public no favours in their approach to the issues. At the peak of the autism-vaccination scare a few years ago, we were due to vaccinate our child. I researched as much as I could, but almost all the information out there was very basic and almost condescending. Rather than try face parents concerns head-on, the attitude was simply to say "vaccination" equals "good", with no hint of a balanced discussion to address real issues like side effects and harm from vaccinations. On the one side we were faced with almost hysterical rhetoric and supposed "facts" from the anti-vaccination groups and on the other, near apathy from the governmental organisations. We did go ahead and get our child vaccinated, but after approximately 2 weeks she starting displaying very worrying symptoms, her eyes rolling backwards into her head, becoming floppy, making peculiar sounds. We rushed her to hospital, where the doctors steadfastly refused to admit even the possibility that her symptoms were related to the recent vaccinations. It was just "coincidence". At least one of my nephews suffered some sort of febrile convulsions after the measles vaccination - again coincidence apparently. Even after all this, I still support vaccinations, because the disease is statistically far worse the than side effects from vaccinations.

lsiebert 10y ago
I think that's because that encourages people to assess the issue for their children, but really vaccines aren't just for your kid, they provide herd immunity that saves the lives of newborns, the immunocompromised like children on chemo, etc. Also people forget the horror of life before vaccines for things like polio.
- nonbel 10y ago
  > "saves the lives of newborns" This is a myth, see my other post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13656462 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13656462
acqq 10y ago
Read about the former UK Doctor (found guilty by the General Medical Council of serious professional misconduct in May 2010 and struck off the Medical Register) that started it all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine_controversy There were a lot of studies trying to prove or repeat his "discoveries" only to confirm that he faked the results for the personal gain. But the bad media coverage of the affair and the small number of people who actually profited from the scare got us to where we are today. And of course, exactly the success of vaccination allows the existence of "antis."

234dd57d2c8dba 10y ago

Stupid question but, isn't this a self-solving problem? People that get vaccines won't get sick, only the anti-vaxxers will get sick. Anti-vaxxers will either die or be convinced to get vaccines. What am I missing here?

ofcrpls 10y ago
There are those who cannot take vaccinations due to medical conditions and there are those who opt-out from vaccinations due to beliefs. Guess who suffers damage for no fault of their own ( not blaming the children of the parents who are making the choice ).
- zeveb 10y ago
  > There are those who cannot take vaccinations due to medical conditions Those folks are relatively rare though. Seems to me that living surrounded by contagion is part of the human condition, and that all of us have the right to take action to protect ourselves (and our children) from that contagion, but no-one has the right to violently force someone else to protect himself.
  - mobiplayer 10y ago
    There's always a little chance of getting infected even with the vaccine. Herd immunity makes that chance orders of magnitude smaller. It's not about forcing people to protect themselves. It is about forcing people to not increase the chances of my kids dying of a completely avoidable issue, just because these other people believe in fairies. Your freedom extends as far as where mine starts.
- Someone1234 10y ago
  Children also cannot get the MMR until 12 months of age. So for the first year they're vulnerable to infection.
  - nonbel 10y ago

MichaelBurge 10y ago

Even if they did cause autism, the risk is less than the historically-verifiable risk of contracting measles, isn't it? If you take whatever the observed increase in autism is, blame it 100% on vaccines, and compare it to the number of historical measles deaths, are vaccinations still a good idea?

godshatter 10y ago

When I grew up, cases of the measles were common. I had them, my sister had them and many of my friends came down with them. I didn't come from a community of anti-vaxxers, either. It was just something that happened to kids, like the flu. I'm not supporting the anti-vaccination movement, just pointing out that this world of pretty much no one getting the disease is the new normal and that we survived as a civilization before it became so. Obviously it would be better if everyone were vaccinated. I'm just trying to put it in perspective.

Protostome 10y ago
Did you know that measles weakens the immune system years after infection? http://science.sciencemag.org/content/348/6235/694 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/348/6235/694

Glyptodon 10y ago

Anybody else find it mildly annoying when articles like this spend a paragraph saying "as a/an X, Y, and Z ... blah ..." In this case the follow-up is "I’m worried that our nation’s health will soon be threatened because we have not stood up to the pseudoscience and fake conspiracy claims of this movement." You have to be a scientist and have daughter with autism to worry about this? Really? As a person who's not a scientist and doesn't have an autistic/disabled daughter am I allowed to be worried too? I mean it's nice that you're an expert and have experiences, but they're mostly superfluous prefix to your main sentence there... (That said, I would support a law allowing for the parents of unvaccinated children to be charged with manslaughter or attempted manslaughter when pre-vaccination infants, those on chemotherapy, or similar come down with a disease like measles and live in the same vicinity, go to the same schools, etc.)

tu7001 10y ago

This is a lie, measles is completely harmless, I had it, hundreds of kids in my town had it nobody dies. I expect the similar situation in other cities; it was Poland 80's. The idea that stuffing healthy infant with coctail of dirty substances gives any adventages is ridiculous for me. You can google vaccine ingredients and check wiki. I didn't give injection to my daughter and she is pretty healthy.

owebmaster 10y ago

Anti-vaxxers and anti-GMOs are the proof that far right and far left meet each other in the extremes.

alextheparrot 10y ago
As they benefit from the largely immune population they endanger and munch of their drought-resistant corn.
cpburns2009 10y ago
I was under the impression anti-vaccination and anti-GMO attitudes were more common among liberals than conservatives (in the U.S. at least).
- Jemmeh 10y ago
  I see both of those issues on both sides of the fence personally, just for different reasons. I live in Southern USA and there's a lot of agriculture here, a lot of the farmers I know are conservative and anti-GMO. But I think they're mostly against it because of all the food patents and monopolies. Most of the left-leaning people I know are more against it because "we need more research/we have a poor understanding of nutrition".
  - owebmaster 10y ago
    > Most of the left-leaning people I know are more against it because "we need more research/we have a poor understanding of nutrition" And the funny thing that this is what the anti-vaxxers think too
dragonwriter 10y ago
Not really, they aren't necessarily far on either side. They arexamples of uniformed opinions, one of which is predominant on the left and one on the right (though with a sizable left component), but lots of the people with those opinions are otherwise moderate members of the right or left. Extremism and ignorance may correlate (or not), but at a minimum they are distinct issues.

alextheparrot 10y ago

In what way does an individual have the right to not be vaccinated? More generally, in what way can the state not impose on the individual's health (Especially when it believes it is improving it)? There is a lot of talk about rights here, yet no explanation of why the right to not be vaccinated exists. The reason why the U.S. has a Bill of Rights is because many things we consider rights are not inalienable. The exact argument, and I present two quotes from the Supreme Court, that vaccines can cause harm [0] and that they therefore should not be allowed to be mandatory have been heard and refuted [1]. [0] "The defendant offered to prove that vaccination 'quite often' caused serious and permanent injury to the health of the person vaccinated; that the operation 'occasionally' resulted in death; that it was 'impossible' to tell 'in any particular case' what the results of vaccination would be, or whether it would injure the health or result in death" [1] "It seems to the court that an affirmative answer to these questions would practically strip the legislative department of its function to care for the public health and the public safety when endangered by epidemics of disease. Such an answer would mean that compulsory vaccination could not, in any conceivable case, be legally enforced in a community, even at the command of the legislature, however widespread the epidemic of smallpox, and however deep and universal was the belief of the community and of its medical advisers that a system of general vaccination was vital to the safety of all."

jdoliner 10y ago
Whether or not an individual has a right to not be vaccinated is really the question at stake here. AFAIK we don't yet have a direct SCOTUS decision on this and the default is that individuals can't be compelled to undergo procedures. That's not an argument either way, I'm just summarizing my understanding of the state of the world today. The discussion in this thread, at least my comments, are entirely about what I think the rights should be. I think it's very likely that we'll see a SCOTUS case in the near future about just this issue since we're getting close to a breaking point. My argument is that we're going to have a number of nasty things to contend with once we go down the road of forcing medical procedures for societal goods. As I mentioned else where in this thread there was a time when SCOTUS ruled that forced sterilization could be used to implement eugenics. [0] That's the type of thing I think we'd be opening ourselves up to by not respecting people's right to decline procedures. To draw another parallel that may resonate with the HN crowd. The argument that decided Roe V. Wade was that a right to privacy under the 14th Amendment implies a right to choose whether or not to have an abortion. I can't see any way that argument is going to hold up in a world where a right to privacy doesn't also imply a right to choose whether or not to be vaccinated. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_v._Bell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_v._Bell

dpatru 10y ago

This article does not explain why anti-vaxxers are winning, but it demonstrates why. It repeats tired establishment arguments that the diseases that vaccine protect against are dangerous, but does not address or even acknowledge the legitimate concerns of parents who have seen first hand, or have heard from trusted sources, serious adverse reactions to vaccinations. Loud denials by the medical establishment along with efforts to use state power to compel vaccinations, legal immunity for vaccine makers, and brutal retaliation against doctors who question the orthodoxy do much to help the anti-vaccination movement.

wonderflpancake 10y ago

I wish we would stop with the vaxxers vs. anti-vaxxers. I think most people (including myself) fall into the middle - we don't believe they are entirely safe, but understand its the lesser of two evils and have to roll the dice. What I dislike about the "pro-vaxxers" is their unwillingness to acknowledge ANYTHING negative about vaccines. - There IS "stuff" in most vaccines that we should ALL agree should not be in there (formaldehyde, aluminum, etc). There is no "safe" level of aluminum for a baby. Some vaccines manufacturers make them without these things if you really do the research for each one, but the chance your doctor carries the perfect brand combinations of the ones without all the questionable ingredients is unlikely. For example, if you find out XYZ co makes the MMR vaccine without aluminum, it doesn't really matter because you probably can't get the version from XYZ co. - The packet insert clinical studies that come in the vaccines are usually absurdly small. We should ALL agree millions of people are getting these vaccinations every year and a sample size of 500, 5000, or 10000 people in 1980 just doesn't cut it. There should be better ways to keep these studies current with much more data. But no one usually wants to hear these criticisms. "The science proves its safe!" Sure, until it doesn't. Wouldn't it be great if we could just acknowledge the obvious issues instead of opposing everything the other side says?

akytt 10y ago
Based on what scientific fact do you state "there is no safe level of aluminum for a baby?" We all, including babies, contain aluminum. That's the problem: i can't agree to "there's stuff in there that should not be" based on an opinion.
- wonderflpancake 10y ago
  http://www.askdrsears.com/topics/health-concerns/vaccines/vaccine-faqs http://www.askdrsears.com/topics/health-concerns/vaccines/va... gives quite a bit of color. This is exactly what I always see happen. Common sense tells me formaldehyde and aluminum = not good. It's not iron after all. I don't recall every seeing formaldehyde or aluminum nutrition supplement pills. Yet people will literally argue that formaldehyde is naturally occurring and exists in our bodies and that's supposed to fly "scientifically". We need to do better.