Tag: vaccine choice

Learn the Risks of Falling for Anti-Vaccine Propaganda

If you are on the fence or hesitant to vaccinate your kids, it might not be easy to recognize that the vaccine information that you get on some sites is pure propaganda.

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.Learn the risks of following bad advice about vaccines.

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.”

Walter Orenstein, MD

Today, unless you decide to skip or delay your child’s vaccines, they are protected from these diseases.

What about the flu? Kids still die with the flu, but it is important to keep in mind that most kids who die with the flu are unvaccinated.

That’s why it is important to get your kids vaccinated. Don’t take the risk of following bad advice.

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

Kat Von D Just Took Away Your Vaccine Choice

Even as most of us understand that vaccines are safe and necessary, we are all free to make our own choices about vaccines and most other things in life. No one is forced to vaccinate their kids, despite what folks try to tell you.

Kat Von D has decided that she will be raising a vegan child, without vaccinations.
Kat Von D has decided that she will be raising a vegan child, without vaccinations.

Also, despite what many folks think, parents who choose to skip or delay vaccines have a lot of different reasons for doing so.

Kat Von D Just Took Away Your Vaccine Choice

Why has Kat Von D, a celebrity tattoo artist, decided to skip her child’s vaccines?

It seems that she wants to “raise a vegan child, without vaccinations,” even though many other vegans do indeed vaccinate their kids.

Why do we care what celebrities do with their kids? Well, for one thing, with 6.7 million followers on Instagram, she has the potential to influence a lot of people, not that anyone should really be taking health advice from a celebrity.

“My point being: I already know what it’s like to make life choices that are not the same as the majority. So your negative comments are not going influence my choices – actual research and educating myself will – which i am diligently doing.
This is my body. This is our child. And this is our pregnancy journey.”

Kat Von D

Just consider her comments about choices.

Kat Von D is all about making her own life choices, but in reality, she is taking away the choice for anyone who gets sick if they are exposed to her intentionally unvaccinated kid, if her child ever gets sick.

But how would her unvaccinated child get anyone else sick? While vaccine-preventable diseases don’t magically appear inside our bodies, we catch them from other people, if you have skipped or delayed a vaccine, then you have a much higher chance of getting one than someone who is vaccinated and protected. And since you can be contagious before you even have symptoms, you can expose others before you even know that you are sick.

Sure, most other people are vaccinated, but many are at risk because some are too young to be vaccinated, have true medical exemptions to getting vaccinated, including kids with immune system problems and cancer, and sometimes, vaccines don’t work.

Unlike parents who used to take their kids to chicken pox parties, you don’t have a choice if your child gets measles because they were exposed to an intentionally unvaccinated child at daycare, school, or the grocery store. In fact, that’s a reason that many pediatricians now dismiss unvaccinated families.

Hopefully Kat Von D and her husband will really continue doing “actual research” about vaccines and she will understand that the best choice we can all make is to get our kids and ourselves vaccinated and protected. At least she should understand that her choice about vaccines shouldn’t put the rest of us at risk.

What to Know About Kat Von D and Her Vaccine Choice

Kat Von D choice to raise an unvaccinated child and tell her 6.7 million followers on Instagram affects us all.

More on Kat Von D and Her Vaccine Choice

Was SIDS Discovered Only After We Began Vaccinating Kids?

There are a lot of myths about SIDS and vaccines.

In the 1970s, many folks tried to say that the DPT caused SIDS. It didn’t.

Rates of most causes of sudden infant death, including SIDS, have dropped since the mid-1990s.
Rates of most causes of sudden infant death, including SIDS, have dropped since the mid-1990s.

Fortunately, because SIDS rates have dropped so much over the years, even as we have added vaccines to the immunization schedule that protect infants against more diseases, it is easy for most parents to see that vaccines are not associated with SIDS.

Well, that isn’t exactly true. Getting vaccinated is actually thought to have a protective against SIDS…

Was SIDS Discovered Only After We Began Vaccinating Kids?

The Wisconsin Coalition for Informed Vaccination is pushing myths about SIDS and vaccines.
The Wisconsin Coalition for Informed Vaccination is pushing myths about SIDS and vaccines.

What about the idea that infants only started dying of SIDS after more kids started getting vaccinated?

Any truth to that?

Well, let’s start with when the term SIDS was first used, in 1969, when it was mentioned at the Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Causes of Sudden Death in Infants.

So would that make 1960 the year for “the initiation of routine vaccination?”

That would be a surprise to the kids in the 1940s who were already getting DPT, smallpox, tetanus, and typhoid vaccines.

“Sudden unexpected death in infancy, or “crib death,” is probably not a new syndrome, but it is one that has been clearly delineated and brought into sharp focus during the past 10 years. The first international conference on this subject, held in 1963, did much to formulate the salient features and to suggest the major areas open to research.”

Bergman et al on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome: Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Causes of Sudden Death in Infants

So just because SIDS finally got a name and an ICD9 code in 1969,  that doesn’t mean that is when it first appeared.

Dr. Kemkes investigated whether 19th century infant deaths attributed to smothering or overlaying shared the same characteristics as known SIDS cases. She analyzed data from the U.S. Federal Mortality Schedule from the years 1850-1880. She found that, just like SIDS, smothering and overlaying deaths occurred primarily during the second to fourth month of the baby’s life, were more likely in the late winter months and amongst boys, and there were more infant deaths among black babies.
The author concludes: “The study strongly supports the hypothesis that these infant deaths represent empirical evidence of 19th century SIDS mortality.”

Was SIDS the cause of infant deaths even 150 years ago?

To get ahead of anti-vaccine folks, while the smallpox vaccine came out in 1798, a similar case can be made for accidental smothering deaths in the medieval period and Renaissance – and before.

Infants have likely been dying of SIDS for ages – it just wasn’t called SIDS and was blamed on other things.

“During the night this woman’s son died because she lay on him.”

1 Kings 3:19

In fact, many people even think that “SIDS” is mentioned in the Bible and was described by the ancient Egyptians and early Greeks.

And again, if vaccines somehow cause SIDS, why have rates of SIDS dropped so much as more and more kids get vaccinated and protected?

What to Know About the History of Vaccines and SIDS

The establishment of SIDS as a medical term in 1969 has nothing to do with vaccines or the immunization schedule.

More on the History of Vaccines and SIDS

Has the Vaccine Court Compensated over 70 Families for Autism?

Has the Vaccine Court ever compensated the family of an autistic child?

Kind of.

Hannah Poling is autistic and her family was compensated by the Vaccine Court. But she wasn’t compensated for autism.

“Because she had an existing encephalopathy (presumably on the basis of a mitochondrial enzyme defect) and because worsening of an existing encephalopathy following measles-containing vaccine is a compensible injury, Hannah Poling was compensated.”

Why was Hannah Poling compensated?

Hannah Poling was compensated because she had a table injury.

Has the Vaccine Court Compensated over 70 Families for Autism?

Remember the Autism Omnibus Proceedings?

Those were the test cases that represented three different theories of how vaccines could possibly be associated with autism. None of them were upheld by the Vaccine Court and none of the families were compensated.

“The devil is in the details. You can call autism many different things and it looks very much differently to different folks. But at the end of the day, the Vaccine Court has awarded over 70 families that their children now have autism and these children developed encephalitis, which is brain inflammation, that turned into autism. 70 families. And your viewers can google Hannah Poling and Baxter Bailey. Those are two of the most popular cases. And the U.S. government said to them, your child received autism because of this. I mean, they were awarded. So, it’s in the books.”

Liza Longoria Greve on KOCO News 5

So how could anyone be saying that over 70 families of autistic children have been compensated by the Vaccine Court?

"Reaching out for the other side" of some arguments simply allows them to push myths and propaganda.
“Reaching out for the other side” of some arguments simply allows them to push myths and propaganda.

I guess folks can say whatever they want, especially when the media doesn’t understand the idea of false balance and gives them a platform, after all, that’s how you explain much of propaganda of the anti-vaccine movement.

How can they say that encephalitis turns into autism?

Again, folks can say whatever they want, but this is actually a little different from what they usually claim, that autism is encephalitis.

Of course, it isn’t.

70 Families? Google It

So what happens if you ‘google it‘ and actually research Liza Longoria Greve’s claim?

We already know about Hannah Poling… Again, she has a mitochondrial disorder and autism and she was compensated because it was thought that she had an adverse event to getting vaccinated because of her mitochondrial disorder.

And Baxter Bailey? You don’t find anything if you look for Baxter Bailey, but you will eventually find information about Bailey Banks, who was compensated for (acute disseminated encephalomyelitis) ADEM, which led to Pervasive Developmental Delay (PDD). He wasn’t compensated for autism though.

Baily Banks was not compensated for autism.
Baily Banks was not compensated for autism.

What about the other families she is talking about?

A little more googling and you find that she is likely talking about an article,  Unanswered Questions from the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program: A Review of Compensated Cases of Vaccine-Induced Brain Injury, that was published in the Pace Environmental Law Review in 2011 by Mary Holland, in which she reports finding “eighty-three cases of autism among those compensated for vaccine-induced brain damage.”

Instead of proof that vaccines cause autism though, Holland’s paper was little more than a “misleading recasting of VICP decisions.”

And vaccines are still not associated with autism.

What to Know About Vaccine Court and Autism

The vaccine court has never compensated anyone for so-called vaccine-induced autism.

More on Vaccine Court and Autism

Do Vaccine Mandates Force Parents to Vaccinate Their Kids?

Listening to some parents talk about new vaccine laws, you would think that pediatricians are going to start kidnapping babies or simply hold them down to force them to get vaccinated and follow the latest immunization schedule.

Is there any truth to that?

Of course not.

The History of Vaccine Mandates

There have been vaccine mandates in the United States since 1827, when Boston became the first city to require all children attending public schools to be vaccinated against smallpox.

Surprisingly though, it took a long time to get vaccine mandates protecting more children. It wasn’t until the 1980-81 school year that there were laws in all 50 states mandating that children required vaccinations before starting school.

This followed continued measles outbreaks in the mid-1970s and studies showing that states with vaccine mandates had much lower rates of measles than states that didn’t. And it likely explains why there were 10 measles deaths in the United States as late as 1980, even though the first measles vaccine was introduced in 1963.

It took even longer for the vaccine mandates to cover kids in all grades and not just those entering school, to cover kids in daycare, and to cover kids in college. And tragically, it didn’t take long for politicians to chip away at those vaccine mandates. Over just a few years, from 1998 to 2000, 15 states added personal belief vaccine exemptions.

Still, even before the addition of personal belief vaccine exemptions and without the abuse of religious exemptions and medical exemptions, vaccine mandates have never equaled forced vaccination.

Even the Vaccination Act of 1853 in the UK, which required everyone to get a small pox vaccine, didn’t actually force them to get vaccinated. It originally levied fines on people until they got the vaccine, but they soon allowed a conscientious exemption to vaccination, which many people took advantage of. Over the years, so many people were claiming conscientious vaccine exemptions in the UK, that in 1946, they repealed their vaccine requirements altogether.

What Is a Vaccine Mandate?

Since a mandate is typically defined as an official order to do something, a vaccine mandate would be an order to get a vaccine. But it is hardly an order to hold down and force a vaccine on someone.

Likewise, state laws that mandate vaccines aren’t forcing kids to get vaccinated. They are typically mandates to get vaccinated before attending daycare, public and private schools, and/or college.

Is your child going to camp this year? They might mandate certain vaccines if kids want to attend.

Do Vaccine Mandates Force Parents to Vaccinate Their Kids?

Do vaccine mandates take away a person’s choice about getting vaccinated?

Anti-vaccine folks go to great lengths to scare you into thinking that someone is going to force you to vaccinate your kids. They aren't...
Anti-vaccine folks go to great lengths to scare you into thinking that someone is going to force you to vaccinate your kids. They aren’t…

Of course not.

Again. We are not talking about forced vaccination.

For example, if you work in a hospital that requires a yearly flu vaccine, you can decide to work somewhere else. Sure, you no longer simply have the choice between getting vaccinated or leaving yourself unprotected and continuing to work at the same job, but you can still decide to skip the vaccine and look for another job.

These are mandates with a choice.

The same is true with vaccine mandates for kids to attend school or daycare. If you choose to skip one or more vaccines for a non-medical reason, then even if you are in a state that doesn’t allow religious or philosophical vaccine exemptions, you won’t be forced to get vaccinated. While it may not be an option you are happy with, homeschooling is an option for those who don’t want to vaccinate their kids.

That is your vaccine choice.

Public education is a benefit of those who comply with mandates or compulsory vaccination laws.

These state immunization laws and vaccine mandates have nothing to do with forced vaccination. They also don’t take away your informed consent, are not against the Nuremberg Code, and are not unconstitutional.

Have kids ever been forced to get vaccinations?

Not routinely, but there have been cases of health officials getting court orders to get kids vaccinated and protected, usually during outbreaks of a vaccine-preventable disease.

In 1991, for example, a judge ruled that parents of unvaccinated children who were members of the Faith Tabernacle Congregation in Pennsylvania had to get a measles vaccine. As a measles outbreak spread through Faith Tabernacle, an associated church, and the rest of the city, there were at least 486 cases of measles in the church, mostly among children, and 6 deaths.

“Parents are free to become martyrs themselves. But it does not follow that they are free, in identical circumstances, to make martyrs of their children before they have reached the age of full and legal discretion when they can make that choice for themselves.”

Prince v. Massachusetts

In addition to being unvaccinated, these children didn’t get any medical care, as their families instead relied on prayer. Finally, after the order was appealed all the way to the state Supreme Court, only nine children got vaccinated.

When parents disagree about vaccines, a judge might also step in decide that a child be vaccinated over one parent’s objections. A child might also get vaccinated against their parents wishes if they have lost custody for reasons that have nothing to do with the child’s medical issues and so a legal guardian, which might be the state, is making those decisions now.

Still, these are not the usual circumstances we are talking about with state vaccine laws. They are simply laws to get kids vaccinated and protected before they are allowed to attend daycare or school.

What to Know About Vaccine Mandates and Forced Vaccinations

Vaccine mandates do not force parents to vaccinate their kids.

More on Vaccine Mandates and Forced Vaccinations

 

How Can the Unvaccinated Spread Diseases They Don’t Have?

Folks who are intentionally unvaccinated often have a hard time understanding why the rest of us might be a little leery of being around them.

That’s especially true if we have a new baby in the house, younger kids who aren’t fully vaccinated and protected, or anyone with a chronic medical condition who can’t be vaccinated.

Why? Of course, it is because we don’t want them to catch measles, pertussis, or other vaccine-preventable diseases.

“How can you spread a disease that you don’t even have?”

It’s true, you can’t spread a disease that you don’t have.

But infectious diseases don’t magically appear inside our bodies – we catch them from other people. And if you have skipped or delayed a vaccine, then you have a much higher chance of getting a vaccine-preventable disease than someone who is vaccinated and protected.

So, just avoid other people when you are sick, right?

“…the increased risk of disease in the pediatric population, in part because of increasing rates of vaccine refusal and in some circumstances more rapid loss of immunity, increases potential exposure of immunodeficient children.”

Medical Advisory Committee of the Immune Deficiency Foundation

That works great in theory, but since you are often contagious before you show signs and symptoms and know that you are sick, you can very easily spread a disease that you don’t even know that you have.

An infant hospitalized during a measles outbreak in the Philippines in which 110 people died.
Children with measles are contagious 4 days before through 4 days after their rash appears, but you often don’t recognize that it is measles until they get the rash! Photo by Jim Goodson, M.P.H.

There’s the trouble:

  1. being unvaccinated, you or your child are at higher risk to get sick
  2. when you get sick, you can be contagious several days before you have obvious symptoms
  3. you can spread the disease to others before you ever know that you are sick, or at least before you know that you have a vaccine preventable disease

This makes intentionally unvaccinated folks a risk to those who are too young to be vaccinated, are too young to be fully vaccinated, have a true medical exemption to getting vaccinated, or when their vaccine simply didn’t work.

measles-santa-clara-county
Folks with measles often expose a lot of other people because they don’t yet know that they have measles and aren’t showing signs and symptoms yet.

In fact, this is how most outbreaks start. Tragically, kids too young to be vaccinated get caught up in these outbreaks.

Keep in mind that these parents didn’t have a choice about getting them protected yet. Someone who decided to skip their own vaccines made that choice for them.

And remember that while you can’t spread a disease that you don’t even have, you can certainly spread a disease that you don’t realize that you have.

What to Know About The Unvaccinated Spreading Disease

If you aren’t going to get vaccinated or vaccinate your kids, understand the risks and responsibilities, so that you don’t spread a vaccine-preventable diseases to others that you might not even know that you have yet.

More on the Unvaccinated Spreading Disease

What Are the Demands and Goals of the Anti-Vaccine Movement?

So what exactly do anti-vaccine folks want?

What are they trying to do?

Are they trying to scare parents away from getting vaccinating and protecting their kids, hoping to drag us back to the pre-vaccine era?

What Are the Demands and Goals of the Anti-Vaccine Movement?

Of course, some of the folks who are anti-vaccine don’t actually like to be called anti-vaccine. Instead, they prefer to say that they are pro-safe vaccines. So for them, it is rather obvious – they want safer vaccines without toxins.

Now, since vaccines are already safe and don’t contain any toxic ingredients, it would seem like their work is done already, right?

Another goal is having fewer vaccines on the immunization schedule. Jenny McCarthy often pushes the Turn Back the Clock immunization plan, wanting kids to only get vaccines that were on the 1983 immunization schedule, back when kids still died of meningitis, pneumonia, blood infections, severe dehydration, epiglottitis, and cancer from Hib, pneumococcal disease, rotavirus, hepatitis B, hepatitis A, chicken pox, HPV, and meningococcal disease, which are now vaccine preventable.

Other members of the anti-vaccine movement talk about vaccine choice. They want to be able to choose whether or not they should have to vaccinate their kids.

Again, done. No one is forcing parents to vaccinate their kids. We may not have a choice on whether or not your unvaccinated child gets sick and puts someone else at risk for getting a vaccine-preventable disease because they were too young to be vaccinated, had a medical exemption, or their vaccine didn’t work, but you can certainly make the choice to skip or delay any vaccines you want.

“I also warn them not to share their fears with their neighbors, because if too many people avoid the MMR, we’ll likely see the diseases increase significantly.”

Dr. Bob Sears in The Vaccine Book

What are other goals of the anti-vaccine movement?

Johns Hopkins Medicine, which includes the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the The Johns Hopkins Hospital and Health System went out of their way to correct this anti-vaccine misinformation.
Johns Hopkins Medicine went out of their way to correct this anti-vaccine misinformation about shedding.

Have you heard about the anti-vaccine folks who want to quarantine all kids who have recently been vaccinated for at least six weeks? Why quarantine kids who have been vaccinated? They are worried about shedding…

Would anyone go so far as wanting to ban vaccinations? Yup. So much for vaccine choice.

Some others want to rescind the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, which they think will help make it easier to sue vaccine manufacturers. That’s one of Andrew Wakefield‘s demands in his movie VAXXED. He and others never mention that if you are suing in civil court, then you must meet a higher burden of proof for vaccine injury than you do in Vaccine Court.

Remember when Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. thought he would be appointed to some special Trump commission on vaccines?

“We want safe vaccines, robust transparent science and an honest and independent regulatory agency focused narrowly on public health rather than industry profit.”

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on Mercury, Vaccines and the CDC’s Worst Nightmare

Kennedy’s vaccine commission never happened, but that hasn’t stopped him from pushing for an independent regulatory agency.

I’m not sure who would run or be a part of Kennedy’s independent regulatory agency though, as he believes that “Congress, the regulatory agencies, FDA and CDC, the IOM, the NIH, the AAP, the science journals, the university science departments and the press” have all been compromised by Pharma.

Kennedy also wants thimerosal out of vaccines, which, as most people know, is already out of all vaccines on the immunization schedule, including about 100 million doses of flu shots this past year. But like others, he seems to be moving on to aluminum as his new target.

What else?

Fortunately, it is easy to see why the demands and goals of the modern anti-vaccine movement are dangerous, unethical, and unnecessary, and like parents who decide to skip or delay vaccines, will simply put us all at risk for more outbreaks of vaccine-preventable disease.

What to Know About the Demands and Goals of the Anti-Vaccine Movement

Whatever their demands and goals of the anti-vaccine movement, the effect is that they are scaring parents away from vaccinating and protecting their kids from life-threatening vaccine-preventable diseases for no good reason.

More on the Demands and Goals of the Anti-Vaccine Movement