Living in Harmony

I think one of the things that bothers me the most about the whole vaccine debate (and most other issues out there for that matter) is all the fear mongering that goes on on both sides of the issue.  If you don’t vaccinate, your kids could get sick and die, but if you do, they could get heavy metal poisoning and autism (and possibly die).  There is rarely any middle ground.  One of my biggest complaints about most governments is that they use fear as a way to control the population.  I think the most important thing is for parents to be informed about both sides of the issue (not just the side the doctors and pharmaceuticals want us to know), and to make their own decision based on knowledge and facts, rather than fear.

When you get past the fear mongering about the diseases and the vaccines, you can look at the real root of the issue.  Do vaccines work?  Are they necessary?  Are they responsible for the abolishment of polio, small pox, etc?  Are the diseases they’re meant to prevent really as bad as Merck et al would have you believe?  Are the vaccines as bad as the anti-vaccine enthusiasts would have you believe?  I do have a bias, as I am one of those anti-vaccine enthusiasts, but we did a lot of reading, researching, and soul searching before we came to our decision.  It wasn’t made lightly, and we believe we are doing the best thing for our daughter to help her develop a healthy immune system.  We also have a naturopath, three chiropractors, and our GP (yes, an MD), who all not only support the decision, but most (if not all) of them would not or have not vaccinated their own children.

That being said, please don’t take this post as a recommendation from me.  It is a personal decision not to be made lightly, and parents need to make a decision they can live with.  That is to say, if something goes wrong, will you forever be blaming yourself and others, or will you know you did what you thought best.  Really, years could be spent studying vaccines, their effects, how they work, etc.  There is so much information already out there.  I’m just going to touch on some of the things that helped Kris and I come to our decision.  I could write pages on this one subject, so I’m just going to be doing posts that cover one aspect at a time.  I am not writing this to spur a vaccine debate, but to share some thoughts and links for those who may be doing their own research or anyone who is interested in another point of view.

First, some links.  A friend recently linked this article to me, A Shot in the Dark, which makes for an interesting read and approaches the issue a little differently than other posts about vaccines I’ve read.  Here is the transcript for the meeting she mentions in which one of the immunologists comments he didn’t want his grandson to get thimerosol-containing vaccines.  This is another interesting article about tactics the CDC uses to try and scare a population into vaccinating.

For Kris and I, the key question was not, “Are vaccines effective?”.  I know people who don’t believe they are, but the reality is that scientific evidence supports the fact that vaccines are effective.  Here’s an interesting article with a great discussion on how pharmaceutical companies use semantics to make drugs sound more effective than they are.

There are many other tricks to make that effectiveness of drugs sound impressive. If you take alendronate (Fosamax), the most frequently prescribed drug for osteoporosis, you can be excused for thinking it lowered your risk of a hip fracture by 50 percent. That’s what the ads targeted to doctors claimed. Fifty percent is a most impressive claim, which means that half the women taking it will benefit. One in two. Not bad, eh?

If you look closer at the actual study, you find that for women on placebo, two women out of a hundred had a hip fracture (two percent). In the women on Fosamax, one woman out a hundred (one percent) had a hip fracture. In other words, you can lower your risk of hip fracture from two percent to one percent, an impressive 50 percent reduction. But 50 percent sounds impressive even though it is really only a one percent difference; that is, only one woman out of a hundred taking the drug saw any benefit. The company can promote this drug legally as being “significant” and “effective,” when, in fact, 99 percent of the women who took that drug had no effect whatsoever. They wasted their money, exposed themselves to the adverse effects of the drug and saw no benefit.

No, for us, the question was more like: “Are they necessary?” Questions that followed this one were: “Are vaccines responsible for wiping out disease?” “Even if so, is that necessarily a good thing?” “Are the diseases as bad as we’re told?” “Are vaccines safe?”

Reading through the CDC website for information for this post has been interesting for me.  There are all sorts of broad, sweeping statements disguised as “facts”, lots of fear mongering… Statements like disease can cause death and vaccines are generally safe.  They don’t say that vaccines can cause death and diseases are generally safe too.  (But I’ll go more into that in the future.)  For now, let’s take this statement from their website:

Perhaps the greatest success story in public health is the reduction of infectious diseases resulting from the use of vaccines. Routine immunization has eradicated smallpox from the globe and led to the near elimination of wild polio virus. Vaccines have reduced some preventable infectious diseases to an all-time low, and now few people experience the devastating effects of measles, pertussis, and other illnesses.

Let’s take a look at their evidence for this. This graph shows a sharp decline in measles after the introduction of the vaccine in 1963, and we are now at an all-time low.  It looks very impressive.  Until we look at a graph over a longer time period.

This graph shows a completely different picture, that deaths from measles were already on the decline long before the vaccine was introduced.

The same could be shown for most of the vaccine-preventable diseases. By not showing the complete picture, it’s easy to see why most people believe vaccines responsible for eradicating diseases. (Note: This is the same trick Al Gore uses in his movie when he shows graphs.) I do want to point out that the CDC one refers to cases of measles, while the others refer to deaths by the diseases. I tried to find a CDC one to show deaths or an over-time one to show cases, but came up short.  Honestly, I didn’t search that hard.  I was reading a direct comparison that showed a table with cases and deaths on it, but I can’t find it now.  When I have a moment I’ll search my history and put it here. The best I could find right now is an explanation, not a pretty graph, but it is on the vaccination news website.  There are more graphs and charts on the Vaccination Liberation site as well. Regardless, the graph does show that death from measles had dropped to near zero before the vaccine was even introduced.  When this is pointed out to the CDC, they plot another graph, for one disease only, and for cases only 10 years previous to the vaccine.

Another thing the CDC points out is that small pox vaccination programs eradicated the disease.  This has been shown again and again to be untrue, due to the fact that pockets of the population where vaccines were limited or nonexistent experienced a decrease in small pox outbreaks at the same rate as everywhere else.

Parenthetically, the average person today believes that mass smallpox vaccines were responsible for eradicating smallpox from the world. This is not so, for the simple reason that mass vaccination programs did not take place in many areas. In some third world countries 10% or less of the populations were immunized against smallpox due to financial and other limitations.

A couple more quotes from the same site.  Check out the site for references and lots more information.

However, vaccine proponents would have us believe that vaccines have been largely responsible for controlling virtually all of the former epidemics of killer diseases in the U.S.A. With the exceptions cited above, the facts do not bear this out.

According to the records of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, from 1911 to 1935 the four leading causes of childhood deaths from infectious diseases in the U.S.A. were diphtheria, pertussis (whooping cough), scarlet fever, and measles. However, by 1945 the combined death rates from these causes had declined by 95% before the implementation of mass vaccine programs. Other statistical information provided much the same pattern. According to a report in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, July 30, 1999, improvements in sanitation, water quality, hygiene, and the introduction of antibiotics have been the most important factors in control of infectious diseases in the past century. Although vaccines were mentioned, they were not included among the major factors.

An example of this process is provided in the text, Vaccination, l00 Years of Orthodox Research Shows that Vaccines Represent a Medical Assault on the Immune System, by Vera Scheibner, Ph.D., in which the author reviews the Swedish experience with whooping cough (pertussis) and the pertussis vaccine. In 1979 Sweden banned the pertussis vaccine because of a return of the disease in fully vaccinated children and also because of side effects which they considered unacceptable, including brain damage. In spite of this ban, which remains in effect today, the infant mortality in Sweden from pertussis is no greater than in fully vaccinated populations.

Another interesting thing to note is that once a child is vaccinated, doctors stop looking for that disease as a cause of illness.  This results in diseases potentially being misdiagnosed as something that there is no vaccine for.  It’s impossible to know for sure how often this happens, but it is definitely something to take into account when considering the number of cases of the diseases before and after the introduction of a new vaccine.

Even despite all this, there is still the niggling worry.  While I was doing research, someone on a forum I was on (I don’t know who, but whoever they are I’m very grateful) gave me some very sound advice.  She told me to start with the diseases.  After all, we’re vaccinating our child to protect them, right?  So if it turns out that there’s no need to protect them, it should make the decision pretty easy.  I’ll elaborate on my findings and thoughts on this sometime in the future.

Part 2 - Diagnosing VPDs

Posted on August 30th, 2008 by AttachedMama
Filed under: Vaccinations