Why do some people think that vaccines can cause diabetes?
The usual suspects…
Can Vaccines Cause Diabetes?
And diabetes is listed on the package insert for some vaccines!
An entry in a package insert is not evidence that vaccines are associated with diabetes.
But folks can be reassured that there are many studies that have concluded that vaccines are not associated with diabetes.
“Vaccines currently routinely recommended to the general population in the U.S.* do not cause diabetes.”
Do Vaccines Cause Diabetes?
Not only that, vaccines help protect kids with diabetes. Remember, kids with diabetes are at increased risk to get flu and pneumonia and other vaccine preventable diseases.
There’s more too.
“There was a 33% reduction in the risk of type 1 diabetes with completion of the rotavirus vaccine series compared to the unvaccinated… We conclude that rotavirus vaccination is associated with a reduced incidence of type 1 diabetes.”
Rogers et al on Lower Incidence Rate of Type 1 Diabetes after Receipt of the Rotavirus Vaccine in the United States, 2001–2017
Vaccines might even be protective against diabetes!
So why do some people think that vaccines can cause diabetes???
Can your kids get vaccinated if you did one of those 23andMe genetic risk type tests?
“Risks associated with use of the 23andMe GHR tests include false positive findings, which can occur when a person receives a result indicating incorrectly that he or she has a certain genetic variant, and false negative findings that can occur when a user receives a result indicating incorrectly that he or she does not have a certain genetic variant. Results obtained from the tests should not be used for diagnosis or to inform treatment decisions. Users should consult a health care professional with questions or concerns about results.”
FDA allows marketing of first direct-to-consumer tests that provide genetic risk information for certain conditions
Not surprisingly, in almost all cases, the answer is yes.
Autoimmunity as a Contraindication to Getting Vaccinated
That doesn’t mean that there aren’t some true medical reasons that kids shouldn’t be vaccinated.
“Contraindications (conditions in a recipient that increases the risk for a serious adverse reaction) and precautions to vaccination are conditions under which vaccines should not be administered. Because the majority of contraindications and precautions are temporary, vaccinations often can be administered later when the condition leading to a contraindication or precaution no longer exists. A vaccine should not be administered when a contraindication is present; for example, MMR vaccine should not be administered to severely immunocompromised persons. However, certain conditions are commonly misperceived as contraindications (i.e., are not valid reasons to defer vaccination).”
Vaccine Recommendations and Guidelines of the ACIP
Which autoimmune diseases are listed as contraindications to get vaccinated?
None.
Which autoimmune diseases are listed as precautions to get vaccinated?
There are just a few, including Guillain-Barré syndrome (DTaP, Tdap, and flu vaccines) and thrombocytopenic purpura (MMR), but they typically don’t mean that you can’t still get vaccinated. And the general precaution to avoid getting a vaccine during “moderate or severe acute illness with or without fever” would apply to a time when you are acutely sick with your autoimmune disease, but you would get vaccinated once your symptoms were under better control.
Other things about autoimmune diseases are simply misperceived as being contraindications or precautions to getting vaccinated. Or they are pushed as anti-vaccine propaganda to scare you away from getting vaccinated and protected or to help you get a fake medical exemption.
“…vaccines are able to prevent some infections in MS patients known to accelerate the progression of the disease and increase the risk of relapses.”
Mailand et al on Vaccines and multiple sclerosis: a systemic review
For example, not only do vaccines not cause multiple sclerosis, they are recommended because they can prevent vaccine-preventable diseases that can make the disease worse for many people.
Vaccines are safe and necessary, even, and sometimes especially, if you have an autoimmune disease.
And having a predisposition for an autoimmune disease, either because of your child’s family history, or because of the results of some genetic testing kit you ordered on the internet, certainly isn’t a reason to skip or delay your child’s vaccines and leave them unprotected. You’re not avoiding any of the triggers that can cause autoimmune disease and simply increase the risk that they will get a vaccine-preventable disease and get others sick.
More on Autoimmunity as a Contraindication to Getting Vaccinated
That’s unfortunate, because you can’t make an informed choice about vaccines if you are basing that decision on misinformation.
Learn the Risks of Falling for Anti-Vaccine Propaganda
Take the infographic about the number of vaccine doses children in the United States normally get.
From the 1960s to today, propaganda about vaccine doses is meant to scare you from making an information decision about vaccinating your kids.
It is designed into making you think that kids get 72 doses of vaccines, scaring you and trying to reinforce the myth that kids get too many vaccines.
Have you seen and fallen for that trick? Did you ever think to actually count the total vaccine doses they list? As you can see above, it doesn’t come out to 72 doses…
But why do they do it? If they really think their “vaccines contain toxic chemicals” argument is convincing, then would it matter if the number of vaccine doses was 11 or 53 or 72? Why inflate it to make it wound scarier?
Still, however you want to count the number of doses of vaccines kids get today, one thing is crystal clear – they get protection from more vaccine-preventable diseases.
In 1983, kids may have only have gotten 11 doses of vaccines, but many still died from Hib pneumonia and meningitis, epiglotitis (Hib), pneumococcal pneumonia and meningitis, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, rotavirus, chicken pox, and meningococcemia, etc.
“for those trained in pediatrics in the 1970s, Hib (Haemophilus influenzae type b) was a horror.”
What to Know About Learning the Risks of Anti-Vaccine Propaganda
It is important to to learn the risks of falling for anti-vaccine propaganda – leaving your kids unvaccinated, unprotected, and at risk for vaccine-preventable diseases.
More on Learning the Risks of Anti-Vaccine Propaganda
My son started to have migraines when he was about 11 years old.
Must be stress, BPA, poor eating habits, all of the screen time, or vaccines, right?
“Americans spend the least on food, the most on health care, have the most highly vaccinated kids, and have the sickest kids of any industrialized country. More kids than not are now chronically ill, developmentally delayed, and eating or injecting prescription medications from cradle to grave – which is going to be a quicker trip for them than it was for their parents, according to data on life expectancy in the US. We are inured to childhood autism, epilepsy, allergy, asthma, diabetes, obesity, Crohn’s disease and cancer. We are dying younger. We are going backwards.”
Judy Converse on America’s New Normal: Chronically Ill Kids
That likely seems like a young age to get migraines and would fit well with the narrative that kids today are part of the unhealthiest generation ever.
Except that I started to get migraines at about the same age, and so did my mother. Like many of the other conditions that seem to be ballooning today, migraines have a genetic component.
The Unhealthiest Generation?
The CDC has long kept statistics on everything from asthma and cancer rates to diabetes and life expectancy rates and helps folks see how healthy kids really are today.
Who says that today’s kids are part of the unhealthiest generation ever?
Mostly anti-vaccine folks who blame vaccines for making kids unhealthy and alternative medical providers who think their holistic remedies will fix all of the problems they see in our unhealthy kids who they claim are full of “toxins.”
Toxins? If you are going to believe that our kids are all sick, then you have to buy into the narrative that toxins are everywhere, especially in vaccines, and they are making kids sick.
Of course, none of that is true.
Vaccines are safe and work to prevent us from getting sick and there are 2 to 3 million fewer deaths in the world each year because people are vaccinated and protected.
“From developing groundbreaking treatments for deadly chronic diseases to saving babies who are born premature, pediatric researchers have increased the ability of children to live full and fulfilling lives that only a few decades before would have been tragically cut short.”
Sandra G. Hassink, MD on the 7 Great Achievements in Pediatric Research
And today’s kids, all 73.6 million of them in the United States, aren’t the unhealthiest. They are actually a very healthy generation, being born with the lowest child and infant mortality rates ever, low rates of hospitalizations, and one of the highest life expectancies in history.
Our Healthy Kids
How do we know today’s kids are healthy?
One easy way is to compare them to kids in the past…
If you have only been listening to the alarmists who talk about the unhealthiest generation all of the time, you likely wouldn’t know that:
while 2.6% of kids were thought to be in fair or poor health in 1991, that is down to just 1.8% today (2015)
fewer kids today (4.5%) report having had an asthma attack in the previous year than they did in 1997 (5.4%), and that fewer kids have asthma today (8.5%) than in 2003 (8.7%)
since 1997, fewer children, whether or not they have insurance, are visiting the emergency room
fewer children are requiring overnight hospital stays, down from 5.5% to just 2.1% today (2015)
rates of hay fever or respiratory allergy are down since 1997, from 17.5% of kids to 15.6% of kids today (2015)
rates of epilepsy have been stable in children for at least 40 years
fewer kids have multiple ear infections since 1997, when 7.1% of kids had 3 or more ear infections, to just 5% of kids today (2015)
fewer kids are being prescribed antibiotics
childhood cancer rates have been rising, but only slightly, and mortality rates have been declining
suicide rates are rising, but only from historic lows – they used to be about the same or higher in the early 1990s
Of course, some conditions are on the rise, including ADHD, type 1 diabetes, food allergies, eczema, obesity, and most autoimmune diseases.
“A few conditions have decreased because of prevention (eg, lead encephalopathy), a few represent relatively new conditions (eg, human immunodeficiency virus type 1 infection), and some have increased after dramatic improvements in survival for individually low-prevalence childhood conditions that previously had high fatality rates (eg, leukemia, cystic fibrosis, congenital heart diseases). Most growth, however, reflects dramatic increases in incidence of a few high-prevalence conditions.”
James M. Perrin, MD on The Increase of Childhood Chronic Conditions in the United States
And autism rates have been up, but we mostly know why.
“…the numbers of people born with autism aren’t necessarily increasing dramatically. It’s just that we’re getting better and better at counting them.”
Although we don’t know why most other conditions are trending up (it isn’t vaccines), we will hopefully continue to develop new theories and reverse those trends.
It should be reassuring that many of the trends do show that our kids are indeed healthy.
What to Know About Our Healthy Kids
From gun violence and climate change to the threat of emerging infections, out children do face many threats and are certainly under a lot of stress. There is no evidence that this is the unhealthiest generation though. If anything, they are on track to be one of the healthiest.
