To all the non-vaccinators: Yours was broken, I fixed it for ya.

Start reading here: http://www.fda.gov/biologicsbloodvaccines/safetyavailability/vaccinesafety/ucm096228.htm

Consider first reading the whole thing before reacting.

I was reading your article up to this point. Way to turn off a reader.

This comment, as is the case with your first one, is clearly the result of honest and logical consideration. I respond well to that. :) I don’t respond well to “how dare you”. ;)

In any case: I’m a parent myself. I do have a feeling for the emotions and reflexes one has to deal with as a parent. However, I’m also a scientist. In this case, it’s in the best interest of one’s child to give preference to science, even when one’s parental instincts or intuition point in the opposite direction.

I could start a long discussion on why this is so, but instead I’ll summarise with this:

1. There is an uptick in the rate of diagnosed autism. Besides it being a relatively small uptick, there is also emerging consensus that it’s for a large part to the change in diagnostic methods (people are being diagnosed with autism more easily and also sooner).

2. There is a significant increase in the incidence of measles. In the UK, it is almost at epidemic levels. There is consensus that this is due to the reduced uptake of MMR. There is no other possible explanation.

Since the MMR scare, two kids have died in the UK of measles after a decade after no deaths. [1] Thanks to vaccine denialists, this is only going to increase.

So one can keep on trying to think the problem through (and your comment is one of the more clear results of such thinking), but in the end the stats don’t lie. There is a definite and in-your-face link between no vaccination and measles. You can’t get around this. On the other hand, the link between vaccination and autism is dubious at best, and is getting more tenuous every day.

Once again, this comes down to a very definite high risk vs. extremely low probability low risk choice. What do you choose?

[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/mmr-boycott-blamed-for-soaring-measles-cases-1765876.html

I wrote the first comment above, and in the time between then and now I’ve thought more about my thesis on this issue, and I’ve come to a better understanding about how viruses work and how the immune system deals with them.

I restate that I’m not a doctor, so I must resort to simpler analogies to express my thoughts.

The issue is with the idea of vaccinating infants with a slurry of dead viruses in a medium of preservatives and other liquids.

An analogy might be to me having a gallon jug filled with water that also contained little granules of arsenic. Or lead. Or mercury.

If I drink that entire gallon of water at one go (kind of like injecting a slug of vaccine into a baby), my system is overwhelmed.

But the body looks at the contents of the recent addition and starts processing. Some water is absorbed, some flushed out. No problem there.

The problem is with that arsenic/mercury/lead/etc. My body doesn’t quite know what to make of it, so some gets flushed, some hangs around in various tissues or in the blood stream, where it can go anywhere and either eventually lodge in tissue or get flushed.

Because of decades of science, we know that all of the things mentioned are bad, and we know that many things bad for adults are even worse for children.

But decades of science have also told us that things we “know” now often prove to be only *part* of the story when we see the results of further research.

Back to my analogy.

Injecting vaccines into kids is fine. The viruses are either dead or crippled, and as such any immune system worth its salt knows what to do with them, even the young ones. If there’s too much dead virus to process, the immune system just flushes it.

The thing I wonder about is the other stuff. The medium is made of a witches brew of, essentially, chemicals that aim to preserve and hold the viruses in an economically efficient way.

When those things hit the infant bloodstream, there is uncertainty about where to put them so they float around, either ultimately being flushed or lodging in a tissue somewhere.

The questions I have – and the ones typically answered by drug company marketing/legal people rather than doctors – are about these aspects of the vaccine.

People who have children know that we visit the doctor with astonishing frequency. Choosing to dose the children with one shot every week for four weeks feels more sensible than powering them all in at once (both to the loving parent and the poor nurse having to administer repeated shots to a screaming and terrified baby), and I reiterate that the risk of disease caused by this minimal lack of protection is less than that child being struck by lightning during the same timeframe.

On a personal note – your continued efforts to shame your readers and commenters really is beneath your station as a medical professional, and probably damages your potential for being a leader on this issue more than it helps.

There IS an uptick in the rate of diagnosed autism. I propose spending your energy researching and writing about what may be the true cause of this phenomenon instead.

You are an INCREDIBLY bad parent if you do not vaccinate.

Even the original 1998 Wakefield article in the Lancet that caused this whole mess has been recently officially retracted. If you did in fact do your research, you can come to no other conclusion than that you should vaccinate.

Thank you for correcting me!

http://noorderlicht.vpro.nl/noorderlog/bericht/43060193/