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I do believe that as we gain more understanding of individual genetic variability over the next 5-10 years, the defined dangers of vaccines to specific sub-genomic types will be uncovered, and that yes, autism, etc. are complex but definable side effects that do occur in some individuals. We may be better able to predict who will be at risk, and perhaps how to work around those risks to maximize public health protection.
In the meantime, the concept of forced vaccinations is a prime example of how when the state tells you that you must submit 'for the greater good', you need to look behind the curtain, as there is almost certainly more to the story.
They gotcha comin' and goin'....
This picture brings back the highly discounted and disproven link to autism.
And, yes, the people who produce these products make money.
(Could have the side effect of removing the irrational from the gene pool.)
It is astonishing how much anti-vaccine hype is out there. It's probably a tribute to the efficacy of vaccines that we are no longer terrified of the diseases they protect us from.
However with the exception of smallpox which vaccines eliminated from the planet and polio which they are about to, if we vaccinate the last few reservoirs of the virus, the illnesses are only a handful of years away from resurgence if we stop vaccinating.
I've heard different discussions on the school angle and one thing that jumps out at me is that public education has always been a right in America. Now, I think that status is being changed . "Don't want every vaccine? Go home." Last night I chatted with a mother who just finished getting her PhD (along with accompanying debt) and now is faced with the reality that she'll be staying home to home-school her kids for many years (here in California, about to pass SB277). She was almost in tears. Too bad for her, I guess.
To what degree does a group of people have the right to tell someone that they will not associate with someone if that person increases their risk?
Presumably the choice isn't just public school or home school. There are also private schools as well. Of course they might also require vaccinations.
According to the laws being proposed, private school will have mandatory full vaccination. The only exemption other than medical is home-schooling, for now. But, home-schooled kids still go to public places. So...now what? And, please don't get angry about this. I think I understand where you're coming from - from the position that kids who aren't fully vaccinated per the schedule are a risk to everybody.
Now, I am not endorsing a particular law. Private schools should be able to act in the manner that is consistent with the desires of their customers.
That does not mean we can't discuss vaccinations.
And, yes, since a vaccine will trigger someone's immune system there is a risk that the person will have an atypical reaction. Nothing is completely safe, it is, however, safer than going without.
I appreciate your comnent.
Buddy, there are things I could tell you over a beer on this that would blow your mind.
Attorney General William J. Le Petomane quoted as saying, "Let the deniers starve."
If not vaccinating becomes a popular choice, offices and other places people gather may need to adopt their own policies requiring vaccination, and someone will have to develop tests to catch cheaters. This leads to other questions including liability (of individuals and of facilities). These are hard enough problems that "cutting the Gordian knot" by mandating vaccination has some appeal, even if I'd rather we not do it.
I am old enough to remember everyone gathering at the school to get the new polio vaccine and how happy we were. I have a smallpox vaccination from when we used to get them before an aggressive vaccination campaign world wide eliminated that from the planet (except in some labs, damn it.) I spent February of my second grade in a darkened room with one set of measles after the other, fearful that being in the light would damage my eyes (I have no idea if that was true).
I've spent the last twenty years running a software company that works with medical labs. We have customers all over the world and have interacted with the WHO and CDC in their epidemiology efforts. We are relatively well off here compared to the rest of the world.
But that isn't because we are somehow a heartier gene stock. We've used vaccinations to limit the scourges that formerly killed and maimed. We are but a few years of complacency from rejoining the third world.
World War I was devastating, killing over 17 million people. Then the flu of 1918 dwarfed that by killing 50 to 100 million. 20% of the world population was infected.
We have a much better medical system now, but it has its limits. I live in a middle class suburb of Los Angeles. Our valley has a little over 200,000 inhabitants. We have an excellent modern hospital with 234 beds. Or enough for .1% of our population. There are 18 ICU beds. A similar flu would now would fill the hospital and have people dying at home. And this is the good place to be.
When H1N1 was around, one of my employees, a vibrant athletic young woman went camping. She called in sick the next Monday. Within two weeks she was gone.
We should not be complacent about our victory over disease.
How about forced vaccination, injection of id chips, and deportation of all illegal immgrants and all their offspring (after revoking their improperly acquired citizenship?)
It struck me that even an anonymous-but-voluntary process that logged only the illness and the zip code might help in tracking causes and spread of a plethora of maladies.
Any input on that?
They are baaaaackkkk!
This list of vaccines they have added is absurd. Diphtheria and Polio, yes; Small pox if needed due to an outbreak; yes. Otherwise, people should be free to deny these poisons in their bloodstream.
If you want to drink the koolaid propaganda from Big Pharma, inject away!
Other people are not obligated to protect you from your vaccines failure at the expense of the side, or direct effects.
Have you heard of “Measles parties?”
http://vaccineliberationarmy.com/2013/04...
http://vactruth.com/history-of-vaccine-s...
Jan
Let us take a look at that: When you catch a disease, your body has a shot at finding some prominent epitope on the surface of the organism and making antibodies specific to it. (Your body cannot always do this.) When that organism tries to infect you again, the Lymphocytes that are dedicated to that particular epitope go wild and have an orgy and reproduce all over the place. Their offspring then start to produce the antibodies that protect you from that disease.
Sometimes the epitope is unique to a single organism. Sometimes it crosses from one species, or even from one phylum to another. Examples: Getting cowpox protects you from subsequent infection from smallpox. Developing antibodies to Schistosomiasis (a parasitic worm) can protect you from malaria.
When a vaccine is made, it is done in one of three ways (that I know of; I have never been in this part of the medical industry): they can weaken the disease so that it does not cause devastation and death but is otherwise the same and make that into the vaccine, they can kill the organism and make that into the vaccine, or they can take certain epitopes from the organism and combine them with some other molecule (often albumin) and then make that the vaccine. (This last method sometimes lets your body make antibodies to organisms it could not respond to on its own - such as some cancers.) All of these methods are ways of 'delivering the epitope' into your system so that you immune response can develop antibodies to it. It is your own body that provides the immune response and hence the resistance to disease, just as if you caught the disease naturally, but with a lower death rate.
In addition to the epitope, a vaccine often contains artificial substances such as 'the stuff they grew the virus on/in' (eg egg or media), preservatives (Thimerosal is the one that most people are concerned about) and some saline. Some vaccines also have a small amount of antibiotics in them to prevent growth of bacteria. Many vaccines in the US are now available in single dose packages without Thimerosal and other preservatives.
There are undeniably idiosyncratic reactions to vaccines that cause serious problems or death. These were more common when egg was used as a growth medium and horse serum was used as a carrier. Serious reactions still occur, but they are rare. I have never seen a study that presented what I thought was well documented evidence that anything related to vaccination caused autism or a high rate of deaths. I have, however, seen a number of anti-vaccination sites that include pretty ridiculous deaths in their statistics: a girl died of unknown causes nearly 2 years after she had a vaccination; she had no symptoms that would seem to relate her death to the vaccination - but it was attributed thereto statistically.
So we have a numbers game. Let me take the measles vaccine as an example: The rate of fatal reaction to a measles vaccine is about one person per million; the rate of death for measles in an unvaccinated population is about 135 per million. So I really wonder at the resistance against getting vaccinated: it seems pretty logical to me to get vaccinations.
Now 'being forced' to do anything - eat chocolate chip cookies, even - raises my hackles. I would like to propose that most of the people on this list would consider that it is the prerogative of a private organization to require vaccinations to be valid in order to 'attend or participate in that private organization'. So one answer to the question of how to deal with vaccinations in schools and supermarkets and airplanes and Disneyland is to let the private organizations police their own territories. If you consider that the public schools are 'owned' by the populace, then they get to vote as to what to do about vaccinations...which I thought was what had occurred. (If I am wrong, please tell me.) This means that if you want to change the regulations for attendance to public schools we should discuss who 'owns' those schools and hence who has the right to make the rules pertaining to them. (Of course, that can also mean that we have to carry our proof of vaccination around with us from now on.)
Fortunately, we do not have to be perfect in our vaccination strategy. If we get 'good enough' then herd immunity will make it statistically unlikely for a disease to be transmitted through a population. If we get to that point, then the people who have immunodeficiency problems will not be at risk. And I will not be at risk of having no place for me in the hospital if I get in a car accident because all of the beds are filled with influenza victims.
Jan, wanted to be an immunologist at one time
(Ed. for punctuation & clarity)
It makes sense for Disney to require proof of vaccination if Disney could be liable for the spread of disease. Choosing to vaccinate or not can be a choice with some immediate free market consequences, like choosing not to use modern tools and devices as some religions do. You have the right not to vaccinate because it is your body, but you don't have the right to infect others. At the same time, people who can't vaccinate for some reason should take responsibility for their own health, too. If they know there is a risk of contracting a disease by going to Disneyland, and they decide to go, then they should be responsible for the act of exposing themselves to that risk. Sometimes life isn't fair.
And you are correct, if someone who does not have a vaccination contracts a disease, the individual is responsible, not the venue.
I posted my TLDNR message because there seemed to be some misunderstanding as to how vaccines work, and I wanted to try to clarify that. (Thank you for reading it!)
Jan
“One mother, Caitlan Sullivan, has become so concerned about her rights as a parent being taken away that she has made her views on the subject abundantly clear in a letter she wrote to California Governor Jerry Brown:
“Governor Brown, I’m sure you recognize that children today are subject to no less than 3 times as many vaccines as the previous generation. Parents today are facing a much more significant question about vaccines than parents 30 years ago were facing.
Something is broken, Governor Brown. Our children have never been sicker, and our requirement for vaccines has never been higher. I understand correlation doesn’t equal causation, but please point me to a study that shows the benefit of heavy metal exposure on the human body. Children in the U.S. are fraught with auto-immune diseases, deadly allergies, asthma, eczema, perpetual ear infections, and childhood cancers. Autism rates are staggeringly high (1 in 68).
According to the CDC, our infant mortality rate is higher than any of the other 27 first world countries! This wasn’t the case 30 years ago. Don’t you think we should figure out what is happening to our babies? I personally know four people that have lost their baby to SIDS. Is that normal?” (sic)
“Governor Brown, I’m sure you recognize that children today are subject to no less than 3 times as many vaccines as the previous generation. Parents today are facing a much more significant question about vaccines than parents 30 years ago were facing."
Comment: We did not have these some of these vaccines a generation ago; the ones we did have, generally were required. Hep B vaccine was developed in the 1980's, but was used amongst risk populations (hospital workers; IV drug users) at first. This vaccine also protects against liver cancer, since 80% of the liver cancer is due to Hep B. Measles vaccine was put into general use in the 1970's; it resulted in a decrease from >700,000 cases per year to about 600 cases per year in the US. (Remember the death rate from measles is about 135/million.) Rotavirus vaccine is a recent addition - probably ~ 2010. It reduces by 50% the death rate for rotavirus diahorreal gastroenteritis.
"Something is broken, Governor Brown. Our children have never been sicker, and our requirement for vaccines has never been higher. I understand correlation doesn’t equal causation, but please point me to a study that shows the benefit of heavy metal exposure on the human body. Children in the U.S. are fraught with auto-immune diseases, deadly allergies, asthma, eczema, perpetual ear infections, and childhood cancers. Autism rates are staggeringly high (1 in 68)."
Comment: This paragraph conflates several different concepts into one emotional plea. The perceived ill health and allergies of our current generation of children is arguably more closely related to their hygienic upbringing (yes, that is what I meant to say) than to the presence of vaccines in their lives. It is also something of an illusion because 'routine death' of children has been replaced by 'allergies'. I know of no study that indicates that Thimerosal relates to autism. Asking for proof that heavy metals cause health is disingenuous at best, irrational at worst. She is probably right that 'something is broken' but the 'something' is probably not vaccines.
"According to the CDC, our infant mortality rate is higher than any of the other 27 first world countries! This wasn’t the case 30 years ago. Don’t you think we should figure out what is happening to our babies? I personally know four people that have lost their baby to SIDS. Is that normal?”
Comment: Again, an irrational and emotional plea. One of the benefits of capitalism is that it has genuinely and spontaneously raised the standard of living in poor countries at a faster rate than it has raised it in developed countries. This is not to say that our standard of living has not improved, but that the standards of living of poor people have improved dramatically - including their health care. The main factor in the poor rating of the US in terms of neonatal deaths is that the US experiences almost double the rates of pre-term delivery as the countries with the best statistics. If you correct for that factor, the the US doctors are just as good at taking care of a baby of a specific age of gestation and birth weight as anywhere else in the world. So the question becomes: why are women in the US so prone to pre-term deliveries? I do not know the answer, but I doubt that it is due to vaccines because many countries with low neonate death rates also require vaccinations: Singapore's vaccination list looks a lot like ours, and they have the lowest neonatal death rate in the world.
Jan
We are about to build a double fence 4’ high and 4’ apart as a deer jumping barrier and to double as a chicken, or domestic quail, run.
I have a lot of problems with coyotes eating my chickens. I figure that a fence that is designed to keep Fido in will probably keep Coyote out.
It is warm outside today. The run looks quite sturdy, though, and I am pleased (thus far).
Jan
If your up to it, what about the claims in these two links?
http://vactruth.com/history-of-vaccine-s...
http://healthimpactnews.com/2013/the-her...
Perhaps later, I can come back and chime in further.
Jan
The healthimpact news starts with a false statement and then triumphantly tries to disprove it as if it is revealing a hidden truth. The false statement is that if vaccines 'really' worked, they would protect you and you couldn't get the disease.
As Jan has pointed out in technical detail, vaccines do not, in themselves, prevent you from getting the disease. That's a gross simplification. What they do is expose your own immune system to the aspects of the disease so that it can prepare a response. The immune system learns to deal with diseases when it encounters them. Normally it starts preparing to fight the disease while the disease is progressing through your body. If it catches up, you're cured, if not, you can die.
By exposing your immune system to aspects of the disease ahead of time, it can be prepared to face a future encounter with the real thing. By being prepared you are much more likely to defend against it, but it's not an absolute guarantee -- so you would rather not be surrounded by people carrying the disease.
By the time any of this starts to take place there will probably be a federal law in place for adults. I haven't read the draft on that and can only guess at how force will be applied. How do you think it should be applied? My personal favorite is the removal of basic rights, like the right to travel. Imagine ducking the cops while driving to work each day because your drivers license is invalid. That'd get most of us to roll up our sleeves, I'm guessing - maybe even while waiting in line at the DMV.
What do you think will work? Let's brainstorm...
The concept that there will be a federal law that requires vaccinations for adults is interesting, but pretty speculative.
I think that the center point of the discussion is whether the State has the right to require vaccinations for public schools. I think they do, but only if this issue has been voted on and passed by the people.
I keep needing to remind myself to separate my emotional response to being forced to do something (even something I like, such as eat chocolate chip cookies) that I would do voluntarily vs the logic of whether the basic decision to get vaccinations is good. (I do tend to have a button push when someone makes me do something. Or tries to.)
Jan
How do we REALLY feel about forcing people to get medical treatment? For or against? Not "ok public school, not ok private school". That's not the case according to the text of the law and according to the numerous committees it's been through.
Our freedom is worth more than any safety provided by forced vaccination.
As a side note, a few months ago I looked into getting a cell phone holster with shielding, so that it would be at least for the short term, invisible. I figured if they didn't already exist, that might be a good business to start. As it turns out, someone already does manufacture such a product...but you must be either law enforcement or deployed military to legally own one. Doesn't that make you nervous?
Lots of laws make me nervous. Too much central power. Thats why forced vaccinations are a bad idea.
I read somewhere that Congress is presented with something like 1500 new pieces of legislation to consider per year. Even if they worked 8 hours a day for 200 days, that still one new law to be considered each hour! What on earth can we need that many laws for? Gun laws? It's already illegal to wantonly shoot someone!
I think that there should be a sunset provision on all laws. If the law is working, renew it. If it's not working or is just plain stupid, allow it to expire. If nothing else, it'll keep the bastards too busy to create any new mischief.
I agree. I think there should be few laws but very rigidly enforced. So they might set up systems to catch anyone who goes 1mph over the speed limit. If that doesn't work, change the law rather than just having an unwritten rule of looking the other way.
Jan
http://money.cnn.com/2014/06/06/technolo...
http://macdailynews.com/2014/06/10/the-u...
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/201307...
http://reason.com/blog/2013/12/04/police...
All of the shields that are offered on Amazon and elsewhere are for the radiation from the phone as I understand it, and not to block the GPS system and that is specifically what I'd be interested in.
Duh!
(Not you Salty ;^)
Can you give me more info on the illegality of these shields?
Jan
HELL YES!!!
How do we make one of these ourselves?
If someone in the Gulch made them I would buy several of them.
(Maybe jbrenner knows?)
If you find out something let me and all of us know. Thanks.
JC