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>Yeah, so can lightning, bathtubs, and aspirin. The risk from vaccines is miniscule. Unlike lightning, risk of harm from vaccines is preventable. One commenter

• scythe 13y ago
  >Unlike lightning, risk of harm from vaccines is preventable. You can't be serious. Like, really, you cannot be serious. I provide three examples. You ignore the two [bathtubs, aspirin] that don't fit the pattern you want to make up (one for three isn't very good), where said pattern is "vaccines preventable, accidents not", and you further ignore that being struck by lightning is obviously preventable by, e.g., staying indoors, and while this isn't perfect the vast majority of lightning strikes do in fact occur outside. So your use of lightning is wrong, and it is yet insufficient to support the greater point you are making, which is also wrong. >Most people take various levels of precaution against those risks, yet many will just let anyone in a lab coat jab them without hesitation. Fine for them, fine for you, but don't expect me to fall in line without more information. Yeah, but wearing a helmet while riding a bicycle but not while riding a motorcycle is a clear sign of insanity, is it not? The level of concern ought to be at least somewhat proportionate to the risk, yet the degree to which certain people attend to the risks of vaccines is anything but commensurate with the level of attention given to the risks of poor diet, lifestyle, driving, sports, over-the-counter drugs, alcohol etc. >What do you think of the Japanese, who are relative "vaccine deniers"[2] yet somehow miraculously have the longest life expectancy anywhere on the planet?[3] The Japanese do not vaccinate for diseases which do not exist in Japan. They do, however, vaccinate for Japanese encephalitis, whereas the US does not -- guess why. Vaccine schedules in most countries are designed to attack the most prevalent diseases in that country; nowhere are they designed to provide lots of spurious vaccinations for profit. >What is absurd and damaging to society is the persistent obfuscation and non-disclosure of clinical trial data, and the failure to conduct proper non-rigged trials. Your allegations that trials are "rigged" is without basis. As I've explained below, your claims that the trials were "rigged" is a result of your failure to understand the effect size in question, that being the incidence of VAE linked to LYMErix. However, saying that clinical trials are "rigged" without any evidence therefor is absurd. >There is widespread doubt (among people who pay attention) about the system that is supposed to ensure peoples' safety. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_words http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_words >Vaccine court doesn't protect companies when they knowingly or maliciously harm people, my mistake. Your "mistake" was posting this godawful response. You explicitly claimed that it does. I explicitly showed that it does not. Furthermore, you allege things which you have not shown -- "knowingly or maliciously harm people" -- there is no evidence of malice here on the part of GSK, and by the time HLA-DR4+ was properly identified, the vaccine was being withdrawn from the market. It is indeed a good thing that these people are able to recover compensation from the government. It would be wrong to leave them out in the cold. It is a silly criticism that the rewards are paid by the government rather than the company, as the goal is to provide adequate care to people adversely affected by public health efforts, not to discourage the development of vaccines by private industry. >Fact is, you don't know if that is true or not. You don't have any proof of it. You merely want it to be true that anyone who claims injury by a vaccine is a fraud, and a litigious cheat. [Citation needed, indeed.] ...okay. I do know that it's true. Unfortunately, it's difficult to find aggregated statistics on idiopathic autoimmune disorders. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0090122997944123 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0090122997... >From the incidence data we estimate that 237,203 Americans will develop an autoimmune disease in 1996 and that approximately 1,186,015 new cases of these autoimmune diseases occur in the United States every 5 years. Not everyone is at equal risk, of course. Diabetes, for example, is linked to obesity. But the incidence of these disorders is already 1 in 1300 annually. Let's... let's be liberal. Let's assume that for an ordinary person, it's five times lower -- 1 in 6500. Oh, by the way. Women are predisposed to this danger arising from "nothing". I suggest a class-action lawsuit against the producers of nothing on behalf of women. >If that were really true for the LYMErix vaccine, the trials would have revealed the large fraction of people[1] who were predisposed to adverse reaction. There are serious problems with drugs qualification testing in the US and EU. Why don't you go read Bad Pharma by Ben Goldacre. here is a preview. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKmxL8VYy0M* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKmxL8VYy0M* Because I don't need any more of a headache than you've already given me. "Predisposed" in your post comes with some big* scare quotes: if we assume that all adverse events occur in HLA-DR4... well, let's look at the data. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X0100500X http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X01... 66 serious events for 1,400,000 vaccinations, or a 1:21000 chance of serious adverse events. If all of those cases happen to the 1/3 of people who are "predisposed" to Lyme arthritis, their risk is really 1:7000, slightly lower than their 1:6500 risk caused by... nothing. And that's only for disorders arising in the same year as the vaccination. And this very low incidence rate is exactly what we expect to see after a vaccine has passed a properly formulated clinical trial. Yes, I'm fudging the numbers. But I'm fudging them in your favor. The conclusion is obvious: down with nothing. >The statistics have to be credible. http://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/039...* http://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/039... If your argument consists of denying the conclusions of scientific studies outright without any further analysis, you're effectively making things up out of thin air. The study was correctly performed, as confirmed by the follow-up. >http://lmgtfy.com/?q=CDC+Vaccine+Adverse+Event* http://lmgtfy.com/?q=CDC+Vaccine+Adverse+Event* http://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/Activities/vaers.html http://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/Activities/vaers.html >Specifically, judgments about whether the vaccine was truly responsible for an adverse event cannot be made from VAERS reports. So the CDC is here... to back me up. Did you even look at the Google results? >Or consider that my recollection of the details was mistaken slightly. OPV use was curtailed after VAPP was discovered. Again, if not blatantly false, at least utterly misleading. The NIH did conduct trials to determine the safest form of oral polio vaccine, roughly ten years after it was introduced, largely because there's nobody, including me, who wants to see people get sick from a vaccine or anything else for that matter. The implication that the government scrambled to reformulate the vaccine in response to adverse events is absurd, and the 1960 formulation, still imperfect, is in use today: >Outbreaks of VAPP occurred independently in Belarus (1965–66), Canada (1966–68), Egypt (1983–1993), Hispaniola (2000–2001), Philippines (2001), Madagascar (2001–2002),[48] and in Haiti (2002), where political strife and poverty have interfered with vaccination efforts.[49] In 2006 an outbreak of vaccine-derived poliovirus occurred in China.[50] Cases have been reported from Cambodia (2005–2006), Myanmar (2006–2007), Iran (1995, 2005–2007), Syria, Kuwait and Egypt.[51] Since 2005, The World Health Organization has been tracking vaccine-caused polio in northern Nigeria caused by a mutation in live oral polio vaccines. You do of course have to keep these numbers in perspective. VAPP remains rarer than terrorism. >As long as you aren't a starving waif in some developing country (or a starving waif from the US). From the Wiki: In immunodeficient children, the risk of VAPP is almost 7,000 times higher A gross misrepresentation of life in developing countries, of the meaning of the term "immunodeficiency", and the causes of immunodeficiency. Immunodeficiency essentially means that a child cannot be vaccinated, as the purpose of a vaccine is to stimulate the immune system. Immunodeficiencies other than AIDS are not widespread in the developing world, nor are they generally a result of malnutrition, but you are of course correct that it is improper to vaccinate an immunodeficient child with any vaccine, OPV or otherwise! Agammaglobulinemia is, I assure you, not caused by poor nutrition. >If you're the sort of person who thinks a pharmaceutical company makes a favorable comparison to a "benevolent nonprofit organization" If I can show that it is true for a benevolent entity, then it follows a fortiori for GSK. That was the point. >I kind of regret that I wasted any time at all responding to you. Although your post is almost entirely banal, I do not regret responding to you. The misinformation you attempt to spread is dangerous, and while you have every right to claim it, people have the collective right to be informed that your arguments are weak and your conclusions incorrect. It is in the interest of people reading this to see your claims debunked, and so I have attempted to do so in a clear and scientifically accurate manner. My intent is not to find "common ground" with someone who does not read the links they post. My intent is to expose you.