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It is safe to take many vaccines at once; in fact, this is the standard of care. Offit does not have credibility issues. His work on vaccines has probably saved
by carbocation 13y ago
It is safe to take many vaccines at once; in fact, this is the standard of care. Offit does not have credibility issues. His work on vaccines has probably saved millions of lives.
- enraged_camel 13y agoI'm pretty sure if you injected 10,000 vaccines into someone all at once, their body would explode. But please, do keep defending the guy's ridiculous hyperbole.
- carbocation 13y agoI'm interested to see the experimental evidence that you have to back up that statement. If you read my comment, you will see that I comment on taking simultaneous vaccines. For many vaccines, antigens for eliciting an antibody response to several diseases are combined into one formulation. 10,000 is probably 2-3 orders of magnitude greater than the number of different vaccines available on any market, so attacking or defending that number has no utility. And commenting as if that were my point detracts from the conversation. It's much more interesting to think about how his work likely saves hundreds of lives each day, and to contemplate what we can do in our own lives to have such a great impact at such a large scale.
- enraged_camel 13y agoYou misunderstand. Every vaccine contains several grams of fluid. 10,000 injected into your body all at once would kill you.
- ghshephard 13y agoThe useful part of the vaccine is on the order of micrograms. 10,000 * a single vaccine would be on the order of milligrams. The goal of a vaccine is to introduce molecular geometries that cause your body to react and form antibodies - you don't need a lot of liquid volume to accomplish that objective.
- saalweachter 13y agoI honestly don't know enough to know if 10,000 vaccines is hyperbole, but on the face of it it doesn't seem particularly implausible. I'm like 99% sure that like 99% of what's injected into you when you get a vaccine is some sort of filler like a saline solution, or a preservative like that good old mercury based one that everyone used to bitch about. So it's quite likely in my mind that you could formulate some sort of "everything vaccine" with a sufficient quantity of dead viruses or virus parts from 10,000 different viruses, and fit it into a single, normal-sized syringe.
- awda 13y agoFind me 10,000 different vaccines, I'm happy to guinea pig it.
- moocowduckquack 13y agoSpeaking of ridiculous hyperbole, are you sure you haven't confused vaccines with something else? Vaccine's active ingredients are made of very teeny tiny things such as deactivated viruses, and are not generally noted for their explodyness.
- robbiep 13y agoSome comments: In Australia the immunisation schedule includes (at the age of 2,4 and 6 months) 8 vaccines, one of which includes 13 valencies (13v pneumococcal pneumoniae). This is effectively 20 vaccines at the same time due to the 13 bacterial components included in pneumovax. You are right in that not only is it standard of care (ie, not dangerous) but it is less traumatic to have them all at once (8 vaccines is 5 needles and a syrup for rotavirus, the addition of which decreased paediatric hospital admissions in Australia by 100,000 pa). Above all else, it is actually more effective to deliver multiple vaccines at once. More antigens seem to generate a stronger immune response, not in 'severity', as in, possibility of severe reaction, but in seroconversion and decreased need for additional later vaccines.