Tag: vaccine injury stories

Why Would Vaccines Be Designed to Kill People?

If you are playing devil’s advocate with anti-vaccine folks, trying to figure out how they think, it isn’t a terrible question.

Remember, many anti-vaccine folks think that vaccines never work and that they always cause injuries – to everyone that gets them.

Why Would Vaccines Be Designed to Kill People?

We can start with Larry Cook‘s “answer,” which was in the form of another question:

“Why do doctors and medical examiners deny vaccine injury and death?”
Larry Cook

Wait, do doctors and medical examiners deny vaccine injury and death?

Uh, no they don’t.

They are often skeptical that each and everything that happens after someone gets a vaccine, even if it is months or years later, is a vaccine injury though. But we do know that although rare, vaccine injuries are real and can sometimes be life-threatening.

But why would vaccines actually be designed to kill people?

Makes sense, right?

Make vaccines that kill people.
?
Profit.

Actually, it doesn’t make any sense, does it?

Vaccine-preventable diseases kill people. In the pre-vaccine era, they killed a lot more people.

If you want to control the population or make life-long customers, why not just let them get smallpox, measles, chicken pox, hepatitis B, and HPV?

“Results revealed a significant negative relationship between anti-vaccine conspiracy beliefs and vaccination intentions. This effect was mediated by the perceived dangers of vaccines, and feelings of powerlessness, disillusionment and mistrust in authorities.”
Jolley et al on The Effects of Anti-Vaccine Conspiracy Theories on Vaccination Intentions

And if you wanted to do that, you could just push a lot of conspiracy theories about vaccines to scare folks away from getting vaccinated…

So, could bacteria and viruses be controlling the minds of these disease-friendly, influential anti-vaccine folks, helping to make sure people are intentionally un vaccinated, so that they can spread among us more easily?

Since I’m too skeptical to go down that rabbit hole, it is probably a safer bet to think that most are just doing it to sell supplements in their stores, get commissions from pushing online seminars, and ads from folks visiting their sites.

“Conspiracy beliefs are therefore associated with common motivations that drive intergroup conflict. Two social motivations in particular are relevant for conspiracy thinking. The first motivation is to uphold a strong ingroup identity, which increases perceivers’ sense‐making motivation when they believe their group is under threat by outside forces. That is, people worry about possible conspiracies only when they feel strongly connected with, and hence care about, the prospective victims of these conspiracies. The second social motivation is to protect against a coalition or outgroup suspected to be hostile”
van Prooijen et al on Belief in conspiracy theories: Basic principles of an emerging research domain

Will any of this help anti-vaccine folks see that these anti-vaccine conspiracy theories aren’t true?

Unfortunately, it probably won’t.

Like vaccine-injury stories, conspiracy theories are one of the things that hold up, and hold together, the modern anti-vaccine movement.

How to Become a Vaccine Advocate

Are you tired of reading about outbreaks that might put your family at risk, either because they are too young to be vaccinated, fully vaccinated, or because they have a true medical condition that keeps them from being vaccinated?

Brittney Kara, who once wondered why vaccines weren’t mentioned in the Bible, gets a lot of other things wrong too.

Are you especially tired of reading about these outbreaks while friends and family members post anti-vaccine propaganda on Facebook that you know isn’t true?

How to Become a Vaccine Advocate

It is time to speak up and speak out against anti-vaccine misinformation.

It’s time to become a vaccine advocate.

Learn about vaccines and why we know that they are safe, necessary and that they work.
Review stories of people with vaccine-preventable diseases and be aware of the complications of these life-threatening diseases.
Know the answers to the frequently asked questions parents often have about vaccines.
Understand what life was like before we had vaccines.
Learn about anti-vaccine myths and talking points.
Make sure vaccines are easily available to everyone in your community.
Know that some parents are just scared to vaccinate their kids because of all of the anti-vaccine misinformation they see online, so need a little help to make the right choice about vaccines.
Visit these reliable and trusted sources of vaccine information.
Learn how to debunk anti-vaccine propaganda.

Most importantly, post and share stories when you or your family get a vaccine!

Share your #flushotselfie and let folks know you got vaccinated and protected.

And be skeptical when you see or hear something that is anti-vaccine, especially when they are talking about toxins, vaccine-induced diseases, Big Pharma, vaccine choice, mandatory vaccination, the benefits of natural immunity, or when they are trying to sell you their books, videos, seminars, or supplements.

If nothing else, drop a link to the vaxopedia whenever someone posts something about vaccines that you just know isn’t true.

Are the Risks Greater Than the Benefits for Any Vaccines?

The only reason some folks question the risk-benefit ratio of vaccines is because most of them have never had or even known anyone with a vaccine-preventable disease.

As more people are vaccinated and diseases disappear, they forget how bad those diseases are, skip or delay getting their vaccines, and trigger outbreaks. Photo by WHO

Of course, that’s simply because most people are vaccinated and protected. But if enough folks decide to skip or delay their vaccines, then we will have outbreaks and a higher risk of getting sick.

We shouldn’t have to wait for outbreaks for anyone to understand that the benefits of vaccines far outweigh their risks though.

Are the Risks Greater Than the Benefits for Any Vaccines?

Vaccines are safe, effective, and necessary.

Unless you have a true contraindication to getting vaccinated, until a disease is eradicated, the benefits of a vaccine will typically be far greater than its risks.

The switch from the live, oral polio vaccine to the inactivated vaccine is a good example of when this wasn’t the case though. Since OPV could rarely cause vaccine-associated paralytic polio (VAPP), once polio was well controlled in the United States, the risk of this side effect became greater than the benefit of continuing to use the vaccine, but only because we had an alternative polio vaccine that didn’t cause VAPP.

Similarly, the original rotavirus vaccine was withdrawn because the extra risk of intussusception, even though it was small, was thought to be greater than the benefits of the vaccine.

In the great majority of cases though, to think that getting vaccinated is a bigger risk than getting a vaccine preventable disease, you have to buy into the anti-vaccine hype:

that vaccine injuries are common
about Big Pharma conspiracies
that there are many vaccine induced diseases
that vaccines are full of poisons and toxins
pushing the idea that vaccine-preventable diseases are mild
that vaccines don’t even work
that natural immunity is better than immunity from a vaccine

Of course, none of that is true. These, and other anti-vaccine talking points have been refuted time after time.

Don’t put your kids at risk.

Don’t put others at risk from your unvaccinated child.

Get them vaccinated and protected.

Are Flu Deaths Exaggerated?

A lot of people die with the flu each year.

How many? Exactly? That’s hard to know for sure.

We know how many kids die with the flu, because pediatric flu deaths are a nationally reportable condition.

At least we think we know. There were 185 reported pediatric flu deaths during the 2017-18 flu season.

“However, influenza-associated pediatric deaths are likely under-reported as not all children whose death was related to an influenza virus infection may have been tested for influenza. Therefore, we used a mathematical model to estimate the total number of pediatric deaths based on hospitalization rates and the frequency of death in and out of the hospital from death certificates, estimating that there were more than 600 deaths associated with influenza in children.”
Estimated Influenza Illnesses, Medical visits, Hospitalizations, and Deaths in the United States — 2017–2018 influenza season

The true number of pediatric flu deaths was probably far higher than the number that has been reported.

Estimating Flu Deaths

Whether or not flu deaths are a nationally reportable condition, how do we know how many people actually die with the flu each year?

“CDC does not know exactly how many people die from seasonal flu each year.”
Estimating Seasonal Influenza-Associated Deaths in the United States

Instead of counting each and every death, statistical models are used by the CDC and other public health agencies to estimate the number of seasonal flu-related deaths each year.

“For these and other reasons, statistical modeling strategies have been used to estimate seasonal flu-related deaths for many decades. Only counting deaths where influenza was included on a death certificate would be a gross underestimation of seasonal influenza’s true impact.”
Frequently Asked Questions about Estimated Flu Burden

And these statistical models that have been improved and updated over the years. That’s why instead of the general “36,000 flu deaths a year” that we used to see, we get more specific estimates of flu deaths each and every year.

CDC estimates that influenza has resulted in between 9.3 million – 49.0 million illnesses, between 140,000 – 960,000 hospitalizations and between 12,000 – 79,000 deaths annually since 2010.”
Disease Burden of Influenza

Why such a big range in the estimates?

Some flu seasons are worse than others.

The 2017-18 flu season, for example, was especially bad, “with an estimated 48.8 million people getting sick with influenza, 22.7 million people going to a health care provider, 959,000 hospitalizations, and 79,400 deaths from influenza.”

Were there definitely 79,400 deaths?

No, again, that’s an estimate. There were likely somewhere between 69,000 (low range of the estimate) and 99,000 (high range of the estimate) flu deaths.

It’s hardly a guess though, as anti-vaccine folks seem to imply.

The estimates come from analyzing data from the Influenza Hospitalization Surveillance Network (FluSurv-NET), which is made up of 267 acute care hospitals and laboratories in 13 states and has comprises over 27 million people.

Are Flu Deaths Exaggerated?

Not surprisingly, anti-vaccine folks don’t like to hear about deaths from vaccine-preventable diseases. They would much rather exaggerate the risks of vaccine injuries!

Minimizing the risks of vaccine-preventable disease comes straight from the anti-vaccine propaganda playbook.

And guess what? None of the folks challenging the CDC’s “influenza math” seem to be epidemiologists or statisticians. They are just folks who want to scare you away from getting a flu shot.

“It takes little subtlety to recognize that the principal reason for flu hyperbole is to sell more vaccines. However, more and more people—even infectious disease specialists—are realizing that flu shots are fraught with problems. Roughly four-fifths of the vaccine injury and death cases settled through the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program are flu-vaccine-related.”
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr on The CDC’s Influenza Math Doesn’t Add Up: Exaggerating the Death Toll to Sell Flu Shots

Speaking of flu hyperbole, Kennedy doesn’t mention that there have only been about 2,500 flu-vaccine related compensated cases through the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program since 2006, even though at least 1,372,400,000 doses (yes, that billions!) of flu vaccine have been distributed since that time!

And although Kennedy calls those all “vaccine injury and death cases,” folks should be aware that since 1988, the number of “death cases” is far fewer than 2,500. In fact, there have been 157 filed death cases in the NVICP for the flu vaccine among billions of doses of flu vaccine given. Even then, we don’t actually know how many of those 157 cases were compensated, settled, or dismissed. It’s still a relatively small number though.

Vaccines are safe. The flu, like other vaccine-preventable diseases, is deadly. If you don’t believe the estimates, go visit an ICU during flu season and verify just how deadly the flu can be.

Get a flu vaccine each year and get protected against the flu.

Do Vaccines Cause Bell’s Palsy?

We don’t usually know what causes Bell’s Palsy, so that makes it a perfect candidate for some people to think it’s a vaccine injury.

Mercola cites a study that looked at VAERS reports, so none of the cases were verified to see if they were actually caused by a vaccine. And he fails to mention all of the real studies that found no association between vaccines and Bell's Palsy! — Mercola cites a study that looked at VAERS reports, so none of the cases were verified to see if they were actually caused by a vaccine. And he fails to mention all of the real studies that found no association between vaccines and Bell’s Palsy!

And for anti-vaccine folks to use in their propaganda to scare you away from vaccinating and protecting your kids.

What Causes Bell’s Palsy?

Although we may not always know what causes it, Bell’s Palsy is fairly easy to diagnose.

“Bell’s palsy is a nerve problem that affects the muscles of your face. It causes weakness or partial paralysis of the muscles on one side of your face. With Bell’s palsy, your eyelid may not close properly and your smile may seem uneven.”
What Is Bell’s Palsy?

So what causes it?

“Bell’s palsy occurs when the nerve that controls the facial muscles is swollen, inflamed, or compressed, resulting in facial weakness or paralysis. Exactly what causes this damage, however, is unknown.”
Bell’s Palsy Fact Sheet

Most experts think that Bell’s Palsy is caused by a viral infection, which leads to swelling and inflammation of the facial nerve. That’s likely why steroids and antiviral medications, like acyclovir, are often helpful treatments.

“The prognosis for individuals with Bell’s palsy is generally very good. The extent of nerve damage determines the extent of recovery. Improvement is gradual and recovery times vary. With or without treatment, most individuals begin to get better within 2 weeks after the initial onset of symptoms and most recover completely, returning to normal function within 3 to 6 months.”
Bell’s Palsy Fact Sheet

Fortunately, most people with Bell’s Palsy, which mainly affects adults, get better.

Do Vaccines Cause Bell’s Palsy?

Bell’s Palsy was first described by Sir Charles Bell in 1821.

There are reported cases before that though, with the earliest by Cornelis Stalpart van der Wiel (1620-1702) from The Hague, The Netherlands in 1683.

And no, we didn’t have any vaccines in 1683.

That’s not to say that vaccines couldn’t cause Bell’s Palsy.

One vaccine, an inactivated intranasal influenza vaccine that was only used in Switzerland during the 2000-01 flu season, was associated with an increased risk of Bell’s Palsy.

Why? It was likely because of the enzymatically active Escherichia coli Heat Labile Toxin (LT) adjuvant that was used in the vaccine, which is not something you find in any of the vaccines we now use.

While you might find an occasional case report about a vaccine and Bell’s Palsy, remember that a case report published about one patient isn’t strong evidence that it wasn’t a coincidence.

It should be reassuring to everyone that plenty of studies have been done confirming that other vaccines we use do not cause Bell’s Palsy. And even in the case of that flu vaccine, the association was quickly discovered and the vaccine was discontinued.

In fact, since vaccines, especially the chicken pox vaccine and Tdap, can prevent infections that actually cause Bell’s Palsy, if you are worried about Bell’s Palsy, get vaccinated!

What Are the Side Effects of the Flu Vaccine?

Like other vaccines, flu vaccines can have side effects.

Fortunately, most of those side effects are mild.

What Are the Side Effects of the Flu Vaccine?

Not surprisingly, a lot of things that get blamed as being caused by flu vaccines are not actually side effects.

Did you actually get the flu in the days or weeks after your flu vaccine?

That’s not a side effect of your flu vaccine. Neither the inactivated flu shot, nor the attenuated FluMist can actually cause a flu infection.

Did you get a little sore at the site where you got your flu shot?

That’s a common side effect to getting a flu shot.

So is having some redness and swelling at the site, all of which begin soon after getting the shot and go away in a few days. You can also get a headache, fever, nausea, and muscle aches or signs and symptoms of an allergic reaction.

Do you have a runny nose or a cough? Side effects of the nasal spray flu vaccine can include a few days of runny nose, wheezing, headache, vomiting, muscle aches, fever, sore throat and cough.

Again, a bad cough and cold after a flu shot isn’t a side effect of the vaccine though.

Remember, correlation does not imply causation.

If you found out you were pregnant shortly after getting a flu shot, you wouldn’t think they were associated, would you?

What about narcolepsy?

“An increased risk of narcolepsy was found following vaccination with Pandemrix, a monovalent 2009 H1N1 influenza vaccine that was used in several European countries during the H1N1 influenza pandemic.”
Narcolepsy Following Pandemrix Influenza Vaccination in Europe

Although the focus has been on the Pandemrix flu vaccine as a trigger for narcolepsy in some countries (the vaccine wasn’t used in the United States), interestingly, several countries that weren’t using the vaccine also saw a spike in narcolepsy cases as the 2009 H1N1 pandemic hit.

Doctors and pharmacies rarely give away flu shots for free. They might not charge a copay sometimes because they are getting paid by your insurance company!

What about all of the reports of severe reactions and deaths after getting a flu shot that you might hear about? In addition to vaccine injury stories, those reports are to VAERS and typically are not causally related to getting a vaccine.

Why are there so many reports to VAERS and the NVICP about flu vaccines? Since 2006, over 1.6 trillion doses of flu vaccine have been distributed in the United States, which equals about the total of all other vaccines we use.

What Are the Side Effects of This Year’s Flu Shot

Even when folks understand that flu vaccines don’t typically cause serious side effects, the question always comes up whether or not this year’s flu shot is causing more side effects than usual.

That’s actually not unreasonable, even when you consider that the biggest change in most flu vaccines from year to year is the strain of flu viruses they include, and not any of the other ingredients.

In addition to the Pandemrix flu vaccine, in 2010, the use of one brand of flu vaccines in Australia was suspended because they were causing more side effects (fever and febrile seizures) in young children than expected.

“The studies flesh out preliminary findings from CSL in June 2012, which said that the manufacturing process retained more virus component than that of other manufacturers and that the 2010 virus components triggered an excessive immune response in some young kids.”
CSL studies shed light on 2010 flu vaccine seizures

So are there any more side effects this year?

No, there is no evidence of increased side effects from this year’s flu vaccines

Making Sense of Anti-Vaccine Arguments

Have you ever tried to understand or make sense out of the things anti-vaccine folks say?

How did it go?

Making Sense of Anti-Vaccine Arguments

Consider what a group of anti-vaccine folks did with the above post about a child with severe complications to a chicken pox infection…

It's always a vaccine injury... — It’s always a vaccine injury…

What are some of the big complications of chicken pox infections? Complications that help make chicken pox deadly?

That’s right, secondary skin and soft tissue bacterial infections (cellulitis and necrotizing fasciitis). In fact, bacterial super-infections of the skin are the most common complication of chicken pox infections.

“Necrotizing fasciitis can lead to sepsis, shock, and organ failure. It can also result in life-long complications from loss of limbs or severe scarring due to surgically removing infected tissue. Even with treatment, up to 1 in 3 people with necrotizing fasciitis die from the infection.”
Necrotizing Fasciitis: All You Need to Know

No, chicken pox is not necrotizing fasciitis, but all of the breaks in the skin from chicken pox lesions give bacteria, including group A Streptococcus (group A strep) and Staphylococcus aureus, plenty of opportunities to enter a child’s body and quickly spread.

No one in the Netherlands dies with chicken pox???

We often hear that chicken pox isn’t serious in other countries that don’t routinely use the chicken pox vaccine. Don’t believe them.

On average, about two young children die in the Netherlands each year due to chicken pox.

“Based on the results presented in this study we estimate that between 3 to 8% of all Dutch patients with varicella, depending on age, consult a GP due to a complication. Our findings are similar to data from Germany, France and the United States of America, were it is estimated that in approximately 2 to 6% of cases attending a general practice. Furthermore of these varicella patients 1.7% experiences complications severe enough to seek hospital care.”
Pierik et al on Epidemiological characteristics and societal burden of varicella zoster virus in the Netherlands

And folks in the Netherlands have similar rates of complications as we did in the United States in the pre-vaccine era and many are hospitalized.

Do you understand what’s happening in these comments? When folks choose to skip or delay their child’s vaccines, they will work hard to justify their decision.

Escaping cognitive dissonance explains a lot of anti-vaccine arguments.

That’s not surprising.

“the state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes, especially as relating to behavioral decisions and attitude change.”
cognitive dissonance definition

If you aren’t going to vaccinate your kids, do you want to think that you are leaving them at risk for such a serious complication, even if it is rare, or will you make up reasons for why the story can’t possibly be true?

Sure, these folks believe every vaccine injury story on Facebook without any proof, but all of a sudden they all become skeptics when faced with a story highlighting the known complications of a vaccine-preventable disease.

That’s the modern anti-vaccine movement.

VAXOPEDIA

Why Would Vaccines Be Designed to Kill People?

Why Would Vaccines Be Designed to Kill People?

More on Why Would Vaccines Be Designed to Kill People?