I think that if you stay healthy and let your body become naturally accustomed to the environment it will be able to produce its own antibodies.

No. That is very dangerous thinking. You acquire immunity by 2 basic mechanisms – by vaccination or by becoming sick. Becoming sick may lead to permanent disability or death. Vaccination shows your body the protein coating of the virus. It is hoped that the body will produce antibodies based on that exposure to the vaccine. This is an attempt to fool the body into thinking that the body was sick. The goal is that the body will develop immunity to the illness represented by the vaccine. Vaccination is the safest method of developing immunity.

Diseases may not be prevented by staying healthy and working out. If you want to stay healthy, one of the best things you can do is keep your vaccinations up to date. Vaccines create immunity without the sickness, disability, or death that the diseases cause.

Plus if everyone is vaccinated why do we need to keep doing it? Isn’t the disease gone by now?

If everyone were vaccinated to the point where the disease no longer occurred, you would be correct. We would stop vaccinating people for the now extinct (except in a test tube) virus. Smallpox vaccine had not been used for decades. With concerns about terrorism, those likely to be exposed to a smallpox weapon are getting vaccinated again.

Polio may soon be gone from the planet (except in a test tube). Unfortunately, the people creating vaccine scare stories are preventing the elimination of this disease. Polio should have been eliminated years ago, but it still kills people because of people like Jenny McCarthy.

When the illness is completely eliminated, vaccination will no longer be necessary. The anti-vaccinationists are preventing this. The anti-vaccinationists are requiring more people to get vaccinated, because the anti-vaccinationists keep delaying eradication of these illnesses. As global travel is more readily available to more people, these diseases will resurface in areas that had not seen any cases for years. This is why only smallpox has been eradicated, so far. Polio is close to eradication, but those opposing vaccination keep the disease alive.

The anti-vaccinationists are responsible for a lot of preventable deaths. The anti-vaccinationists are also prolonging the need for vaccination. Bizarre behavior for people who claim to distrust vaccines.

Here is a bit from the CDC about the eradication of smallpox.

Smallpox outbreaks have occurred from time to time for thousands of years, but the disease is now eradicated after a successful worldwide vaccination program. The last case of smallpox in the United States was in 1949. The last naturally occurring case in the world was in Somalia in 1977. After the disease was eliminated from the world, routine vaccination against smallpox among the general public was stopped because it was no longer necessary for prevention.^[1]

So, even after a quarter century of not having any smallpox cases in the US, we were still vaccinating, because smallpox still existed elsewhere. As long as people could come into the US and spread smallpox, the unvaccinated would be at risk for any exposure to smallpox. One of the things that killed a lot of Native Americans was that they had no immunity to smallpox. They were living the healthy life style that you suggest would protect you. This did not provide any immunity for them. Without immunity they died by the millions. Without immunity, disease spreads quickly.

I also stay healthy by going to the gyms in Dallas.

Exercise is also important to good health. Lifting heavy weights will not do much to improve your aerobic capacity. Similarly, working out will not really improve your immunity. It does nothing for specific immunity to any one illness. Some diseases have paradoxically been more deadly to young healthy people, than to the weak and debilitated. The pandemic influenza of 1918 and polio are a couple of examples of this.

If you exercise vigorously, afterward your immune system is a bit depressed. In other words, for a while after exercise, you may be at greater risk of getting sick. Part of the way that exercise works is by damaging the muscles/cardiovascular system, then repairing the damage, so that the body is stronger than before exercise. Depending on the length and intensity of the exercise, it can take from less than a day to more than a week, to fully recover.

A healthy life style is important. Eating well and exercising are important, but so is immunization. As an adult, there are not many vaccines that are relevant, since we have most as children – when we need them most. Tetanus is one that requires a booster every 5 to 10 years. Suppose you wish to travel to a country, where some disease is endemic. A vaccination may be required to obtain a visa to travel to that location, or to return to the US without being quarantined.

Footnotes:

^ ¹ Smallpox Fact Sheet
Smallpox Disease Overview
CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)
Article

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This is an excellent interactive post.

Thank you.

My take on the entire situation is that you have to remember who is making the money behind the closed doors. This is an easy way to set paranoia in to the parents.

You also have to look at who is making money with the unsupportable scare stories about vaccines. At least the corporations have some independent oversight from the government.

Jenny McCarthy and the rest of the anti-vaccinationists are making a lot of money off of this. Selling books, natural cures, and charging a lot for their time. They have no independent oversight.

I know we all love our children more than anything, however, we must not blindly pump strange chemicals into their bodies to “protect” them just because others are doing it.

Nobody is suggesting that the reason to vaccinate children is, just because others are doing it. The reason to vaccinate children is to keep them from getting sick with these horrible preventable diseases. Not vaccinating children is bad for children. You might as well tell children to play in traffic.

The suggestion that we blindly pump strange chemicals into their bodies is very misleading. This suggestion presumes that the alternative is something good. The alternative is something bad. By describing vaccines as strange chemicals, the suggestion is implicit that something strange is bad. Strange may be good. Strange may be bad. A lack of familiarity is not something that has any meaning by itself.

A lack of familiarity suggests that we should learn more. There is a lot of research on vaccines. This research shows us that vaccines are safe.

Antibiotics are strange chemicals. If you have a bacterial infection, taking these strange chemicals may save your life. Do you need to be familiar with them? No. It is OK that they are strange. Antibiotics are also made in laboratories by large corporations.

Alternative medicine uses this technique to create suspicion about medications and vaccines. The alternative medicine proponents claim that they use only natural treatments. Being natural does not mean that something is safe. Many very deadly poisons are all natural. How does being natural make any difference?

Natural does not mean safe.

The big pharma money makers want to instill the phsycological tactic known as “follow the leader” into us. That is just my take on the situation at best.

The anti-vaccinationists are trying to instill that idea in your head. While they do not have any evidence to support their claims that vaccines are bad, they create scare stories about big evil corporations. They tell parents to endanger their children by not protecting the children with vaccines. Should I choose a life saving vaccine from a heavily regulated big profitable corporation? Is there any reason to believe that an alternative treatment from a big profitable corporation, that is essentially unregulated, is any better? There is no choice. The alternative medicine pushers want you to believe that they are small, honest, and altruistic. This is not true. They are as interested in profit as Enron was. Do not trust them.

The alternative medicine pushers want you to believe that they are safe. Do not believe them. Where is the science to demonstrate safety? Where is the science to show a benefit from their treatments? The research does not exist. These treatments are not safe. Do not trust them.

The ones playing follow the leader are the anti-vaccinationists. They do not have any science to support their accusations. The scientists use the method which gives them their name – science.

When it comes to medicine, science is the best, least biased source of information. Nothing else is trustworthy. The follow the leader tactic of the alternative medicine practitioners and anti-vaccinationists is just charismatic double talk. These alternatives are frauds.

The anti-vaccinationists are contradicting science, because they do not know what they are talking about. The anti-vaccinationists are wrong.

When it comes to medicine, the ignorance of the anti-vaccinationists kills people.

Vaccines save lives.

Millions of lives

Anti-vaccinationists will continue to kill children, until they are stopped.

The best way to stop them is for intelligent parents to look at the science, listen to doctors, and to vaccinate their children. I did. My grandchildren will all be vaccinated, because my child understands science.

Why would any caring parents not protect their children?

Vaccines are protection against disease.

Anti-vaccinationists don’t understand science, but they will not let their ignorance stop them from putting other parents’ children at risk.

Science is objective.

Science is independently verifiable.

Science is self-correcting.

Science is the way to truth.

Science tells us what nature approves of.

Science supports vaccination.

What could be more natural?

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I have struggled to come up with a logical unemotional response to your vaccination posts and the comments that others have left. This is why I have taken so long to come up with something. My older two kids (12 & 14) have had all their shots and are normal healthy fun loving kids my younger two (4 and 5) have not had any shots and are both normal healthy fun loving kids.

Your younger children are still vulnerable to the illnesses that they are not vaccinated against. As long as they do not have any exposure to the illness that they should be protected against, they should be fine. Of course, you are depending on your neighbors to vaccinate their children to protect your children. And you are counting on nobody traveling to your community, or returning home, from places where these diseases are still a problem.

I do not disagree in any way that vaccines have saved the world. We are a much better place now than just even 50 short years ago.

I agree.

Now having said that let me remind everyone of a few facts. Vaccines are invented by scientests that are looking to prevent disease. They are produced and sold my large corporations that are looking to make a profit.

I work to make a profit. I work in the health care industry, so I profit off of the illness of others. I have even been known to ask for the occasional raise, so apparently I am unrepentant in my profiteering.

Everybody needs to make money somehow, just to be able to care for themselves. If it is a corporation charging money for their product or the government taxing us to do the same thing. The corporation is in business to make money delivering a service or product. The same is true for the government, they just call it operating within a budget, but they try to operate at a profit. If they are not taking in more money (taxes) than they spend, they have to raise taxes, print more money, borrow more money, or some combination of these. If they don’t, they risk going out of the government business.

Case in point my partners daughters RSV shot is $1,662 EACH MONTH from November to March. Thats $8,310 a year. (she was a premie and super tiny)

I would guess that making vaccines for super tiny premies is not something that can be done cheaply. I expect that, if this vaccine could be made for significantly less, other companies would come out with their own competing version. There are a lot of premies at risk for RSV.

No small company will be able to do this, although technology may improve to the point where everyone can have a high quality lab at a small cost.

In the hospital, there are probably other significant costs – the hospital room (NICU?), the neonatologists, the nurses, the respiratory therapists, the medications, . . . . How much of this is provided for free, or even at low cost? Everybody is profiting off of these premies. If the government pays for it, then they just tax everyone at a higher rate to pay for it. If you try to move to a country that does not charge for health care, but pays for care out of taxes, they may refuse to allow the premies to immigrate. They do not want to pay for the care of any more patients than they need to.

It isn’t profitable.

Another case, I grew up in southern Georgia and remember vividly lining up with all the other kids in the county at the health department waiting in line for hours it seemed for our sugar cube with our polio vaccines. In later years it was reported rather obscurley that all of us were still at risk because none of us were actually given an actual vaccine it was just a sugar cube and water. somebody made a lot of money off that deal and i wonder how many kids for sure were left out in the cold.

I cannot tell if this was done maliciously, or whether it was due to a mistake. If done maliciously, there are laws against that. I hope the people involved spent a lot of time in prison. If this was a mistake, I expect that a lot of law suits were brought against everybody involved.

Isolated cases, such as this will happen in everything. Some people are just bad people. Unfortunately, many businesses and politicians reward this kind of behavior, if they think that it might help them. Some people are not as competent as they should be. Unfortunately, they may do a lot of damage before somebody stops them. I do not know which is the case, here.

Sometimes bad things happen to good people. Bad things happening to good people does not require a conspiracy, to explain it. Bad things happening to good people is to be expected.

I Dont trust corp america and the FDA to have our best interests at heart.

Then you are out of luck for food, health care, toys, books, housing, schools, . . . pretty much everything comes from corporate America or from the government. Yes, you did specify the FDA, but there is not really a difference between branches of government in competence or quality or ethics. They all have excellent people and they all have dangerous people.

The same corp america and FDA that said that a certin weight loss drug was safe (that i took) and now how many people are walking around with heart problems.

As I wrote, everybody makes mistakes. The FDA has to try to balance between the benefits and risks. Benefits, that might be delayed, if the FDA does not approve a drug/treatment.Treatment that might improve quality of life, or even save lives. Risk of an unrecognized, or downplayed, effect of treatment that may decrease the quality of life, or even kill patients. It is not an easy position to be in. You have people claiming that they are being denied treatment, but they may be the same ones to turn around and sue, because not enough time was taken to find all of the potential problems.

My advice. Stay away from new drugs. They have not been used on enough patients to demonstrate all of their problems. The true incidence of side effects is far from clear. It is better to take an old drug with significant, but well known, side effects. There are ways to observe for known side effects. With a new drug, all of the problems will not be known. How do you watch out for everything?

An example of this is clozapine, an anti-psychotic. It seems to be very effective, but it has 5 black box warnings. One black box warning is enough to scare off most people, but this one has five. One of these risks is agranulocytosis, the destruction of the immune system. It is one of the worst side effects a drug can have. EMS-wise, procainamide also has this side effect. As long as the patient’s doctor monitors for this and the other side effects, clozapine is safer than the newer drugs with their surprise side effects. The side effects that nobody saw coming, or the side effects that did not appear to be serious during testing, but in Phase IV testing prove to be serious problems.

We generally do not hear much about phase IV testing, just I, II, and III. These are the ones that lead up to approval, or denial of approval. Phase IV is post-approval monitoring of adverse reactions in the general population. More is learned about every drug after approval.

But the biggest reason for not vacinatiing my youngest two is 4 years old and his name is Chase. I see him every week just about when i pick up and drop off my kids at lifechurch then go to lifegroup with his parents. He was a happy playful little boy before his MMR shots, got sick when he got home and ever since then has not been the same. Autism gains another victim.

There is no reason to believe in a connection between autism and vaccines. This has been tested in the US. It has been tested in other countries. It has been tested by government organizations. It has been tested by corporations. The result is the same each time. No reason to believe in a connection.

That is actually one of the definitions of science. Research provides us with the ability to predict the results of further tests. We have no reason to believe that further tests looking for links between autism and vaccines will find any connection, because this has been thoroughly tested.

Unvaccinated children develop autism at the same rate as vaccinated children.

Unvaccinated children with autism are still at risk for the illnesses they have not been vaccinated against. As the anti-vaccinationists convince more and more people to not vaccinate, or to delay vaccination, more children will become sick and more children will die.

One thing happens, then a second thing happens. That does not mean that the first thing caused the second. I will write a bit about cause and effect, but not today.

I am not going to jump on the bandwagon and say that all vacines are bad and everybody is going to become autistic if they have them.

When you claim that some vaccines cause some problems, you don’t have to claim that all vaccines cause a problem. This is not much different from screaming Fire! in a crowded theater. Many parents will respond instinctively. Many of these parents will not understand the science. Many of these parents will listen to the sympathetic mother with the sick child. Many of these parents will ignore the science. Many of these parents will then create the biggest danger their children will face – lack of protection from preventable illness.

I do think that both sides need to take their blinders off and look at the entire picture.

That is what science is. As objective an appraisal of the available information as possible.

The science, unbiased information, is clear on several things. There is no reason to believe that vaccines increase the chances of developing autism. Vaccines save lives. Continual improvements can, and will, be made in vaccines, but waiting is not in the best interest of the child.

We have time now and are not in a race against these diseases anymore.

That is not true. Polio should have been stopped years ago. However in Africa, the resistance has not been some claim of autism, but that vaccines would cause infertility and AIDS. Apparently the Nigerian version of Jenny McCarthy felt that autism wasn’t scary enough. Remember, this is all about feelings. These claims have nothing to do with science. Different culture, different voodoo medicine. Many people, in many cultures, react to science with fear, denial, and scare stories. It helps them to make sense out of the world, but it kills them. Science saves lives. Scares kill.

Lets look at how they work, how they can work safer and make all of them available to everyone not just those who can afford them.

That is already being done. Science is about not leaving something alone as good enough. Science is about continually learning more and continually improving things. Some do this purely for profit, some are driven by curiosity, some have other motivations, but most probably have some combination of these motivations. There are charities that try to see that these vaccines are available to everyone. Rotary International is doing a lot to try to reach the last places that have not been vaccinated, so that polio can be eliminated from the human population. Their main opponent is the scare stories from these Preachers Of Doom.

Some say that its just an acciptable risk. Which one of your sons or daughters are you willing to give for the cause.

Science protects my child, now an adult. My child was vaccinated on schedule. I would not have done anything differently. Because I love my child.

Vaccination protects against many of the nasty things that we would do almost anything to protect our children from. Vaccination is the safest way to protect our children.

I vaccinated my child because it is the right thing to do and because I love my child.

I would not want my child to get sick, or die, for the cause. The cause being the Jenny McCarthy scare tactics. This anti-science is an evil cause. This will sicken and kill many children, with absolutely no benefit.

Tell Amy (chases mother) how grateful you are that her son was the one and not yours.

The parent of any autistic child has my sympathy. I know some and have occasionally baby sat for one, which is hardly the same as trying to raise an autistic child.

Where is the evidence that autism has anything to do with vaccines?

So, Amy has not given up anything to protect other children. She is asking other children to go without protection, just so she can feel better about her son’s illness. How many children will she harm before she is done? While I have sympathy for the parent of an autistic child, that does not mean that parent should make reckless, irresponsible claims. Claims that will lead to the illness and death of other parents’ children. Having an autistic child is not a Get Out Of Jail Free card for that parent. Encouraging others to endanger their children is wrong, no matter who does it.

She has studied this backwards and forwards and her best info is that chase probally had the autisum trait recessive and that the vaccine just pushed it over the edge.

She has studied this and come to conclusions that are not supported by science. She thinks she knows what she is doing, but she doesn’t. She is just another member of Jenny McCarthy’s Preachers Of Doom. They will kill a lot of children before they are through.

Which leads to more study and accurate information for all parties involved.

Research is still being done. That is science. Unfortunately, these anti-science fear mongering Preachers Of Doom are diverting resources from engaging in good science, to pointing out the flaws in the claims of the anti-vaccinationists. The anti-vaccinationists are holding back improvement in vaccines.

The death threats, from the Preachers Of Doom, do not help, either, but what do you expect from people who have abandoned science. What do they accomplish by trying to drag America down to third world status?

My children will be vacinnated eventually when they are older and spread out not all bunched together.

That just puts your children, and your neighbors’ children, at risk for a longer time. Delaying vaccination does nothing to protect your children, other than to avoid the minor side effects. These side effects are much less significant than the illnesses the vaccines protect against. These side effects do not include autism.

I am confused however how my being a christian means that i am trying to destroy science but thats another topic for another day.

OK.

I will contiue enjoying your blog and keep up the lively debate on a wide range of subjects. Stay safe and go home at the end of the shift.

I am glad you enjoy the blog.

I wish you well, too.

Raymond

please ignore the poor spelling i am at work trying to compose this while running ragged

I rely on a spell checker a lot. It is too easy for me to hit a bunch of keys at once.

Rather than put a bunch of footnotes throughout, Google seems to have been acting up on me. I wrote this on 2 computers. Both times the post was deleted as I was finishing up. The second time I had saved it to a notepad file, first. So, I refer you to a long, thorough examination of the science that refutes the anti-vaccination movement at The Skeptic’s Dictionary.

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