How I feel about vaccination: Part Two - Immunisation and children

Click here for Part One


For the last few days, I have been pondering how to approach writing about vaccinations and children for this second part. This morning, quite unexpectedly, it pretty much fell in my lap, when I randomly stumbled across a group on Facebook who have not vaccinated their children, and want to inform others of the reasons why. On their page, they have a note, which outlines some things to consider before/if you choose to get your child vaccinated. I have always just assumed that it is the right thing for the child to get them vaccinated. That is, unless there was some genuine medical reason why they shouldn't be, such as a severe allergy to certain components of the vaccine. So I have decided to take each one of the things on the list, and quite simply see if they are proved true or false after investigation.




1. Thimerosol is not the only concerning factor in vaccination.

True. Hopefully the next few statements will be more descriptive, but no matter. What is thimerosol anyway?

So I left off the Part One with fact that immunising your child can not ever cause autism. One thing that I did forget to mention is that the mercury that was present in the MMR vaccine, as well as in a variety of other vaccines, was thimerosal. Why it was present was not as a part of the vaccine, but instead it was to kill off any bacteria that may attach itself to the vaccine during storage and transportation. Also, when the thimerosal enters the body, it breaks down to ethylmercury, and thiosalicylicd. Sounds scary huh? No, not really when you understand what ethylmercury is made up of, and how it reacts in the body. Firstly, ethylmercury's chemical composition is C₂H₆Hg, or in simpler terms, two carbon, six hydrogen, and one mercury atom. So you can see that there is far more of the other two substances than mercury.

Back in 1999, concerns were raised that infants may not be able to eliminate the mercury from their body, so tests were undertaken on infants who recieved the routine thimerosal in their immunisations. This is what was found:

Blood levels of mercury did not exceed safety guidelines for methyl mercury for all infants in these studies. Further, mercury was cleared from the blood in infants exposed to thimerosal faster than would be predicted for methyl mercury; infants excreted significant amounts of mercury in stool after thimerosal exposure, thus removing mercury from their bodies. These results suggest that there are differences in the way that thimerosal and methyl mercury are distributed, metabolized, and excreted. Thimerosal appears to be removed from the blood and body more rapidly than methyl mercury. (From here)

So yes, I guess thimerosol shouldn't be the only consideration, seeing as it is only doing the same thing that other digestible thing does when it goes into your body; comes out as poo. I, for one, am glad it's not one of those annoying guests, hanging around and messing up your house, long after you thought they were gone.


 2. There are no safe levels of formaldehyde


False. Everyone, even babies has formaldehyde in their body. If there was no safe levels of formaldehyde, then I'm thinking that we might be constantly sick, or even dead. But why is it in the vaccines for things like polio, DTaP (the diphtheria whooping cough and tetanus vaccine)? I mean, we all know that formaldehyde is the stuff in things disinfectant, but why a vaccine? In these vaccines, it works to eliminate the harmful side effects of the bacterial toxins, and makes the viruses unable to replicate or reproduce themselves. The truth is, the amount of formaldehyde in the vaccines is far less than the amount naturally found in children, and much less than the amount given to animals in research studies. If you are interested just how much is in each dose, this table provides a good overview. So I guess we can safely say that there are safe levels of formaldehyde. Just don't go chugging down containers of disinfectant.


3. Vaccines contain foreign DNA/RNA

True. At least in the case of the hepatitis B injection babies get soon after birth, then  The Hepatitis B vaccine does contain synthetic recombinant DNA. The DNA is extracted and purified from other cellular molecules, such as ribonucleic acids (RNA), proteins and structures like cell membranes. In the case of the hepatitis B vaccination, the DNA is extracted from yeast cells (as in the yeast which bakers use for bread), which have been synthetically modified to have the gene of the hepatitis B virus.

Interesting fact: The vaccine was originally prepared from plasma obtained from patients who had long-standing hepatitis B virus infection. How far we have come. For more information about Hepatitis B and the vaccine click here or here




4. Attempting to eradicate disease has created new diseases.


Okay, I am going to be a bit of pedant with this one. Eradication is sometimes confused with elimination. Eradicating a disease, by definition, means that the disease is gone, never to return, while eliminating the disease means that it is completely gone in a certain region, and perhaps negligible worldwide. English lesson over. That said, only two diseases have ever been successfully eradicated - smallpox and rinderpest. Polio still exists. Measles, mumps and rubella still exist. That's why there are vaccinations against them.

After searching the internet, including through scientific and medical journals, I have not found anything to suggest that attempting to eradicate disease has caused new diseases. The only case where I think you could call that even remotely true is in the case of infections that have mutated into different versions which are resistant to antibiotics that worked on other strains of them. Infections are not diseases though.

An infection is a growth of an infectious agent (s) where the body immune system is under control for fighting the infectious agent (s) or participating in the injury repairs or responding to tissue insults so that physiological alterations at local or at systemic level will not sustain long enough to constitute symptoms. However, the disease state is associated with the manifestation of symptoms such as fever, pain, aches etc., due to failure of immune system to control in the first round of the growth of infectious agent (s). (Wiki Answers)

So I am going with false on this one in the face of lack of supporting evidence. That is, unless and until I am provided with evidence to the contrary, which I would gladly accept.


5. If vaccines truly work, why would the parent of a vaccinated child be worried that an unvaccinated child could infect their child?


This statement is very aggravating. It shows that the person issuing it has little idea about the way that vaccinations work. Then again, although I am deep into a exploration of vaccines, and have yet to explain how they work. Allow me to take the opportunity now.

When babies are born, even though their lung, kidney, heart, liver and so on are fully developed, their immune system is not. The immune system is there, it just isn't fully functional, because it has not been exposed to antigens yet. You might say that it is still learning, and that is the reasoning behind getting children immunised when they are young. This mean their immune system can learn about potentially health threatening bugs, and build a memory bank of how to deal with them, storing it away for maybe weeks, months, years, until it needs to knowledge to fight the bugs.

Quite simply, vaccines work by simulating the body's immune response, without actually triggering the disease.  Instead of being therapeutic and useful when you already have the disease, like for example antibiotics, vaccinations prevent the disease from occurring in the first place.

To address the question of why parents of vaccinated children are worried that their child might catch something they have been immunised against from an un-vaccinated child, I'll tell you a story. When I was about six, I got chickenpox. Now, children are routinely immunised against it, but in the early 90s in Australia, it wasn't common. I caught chickenpox from another child in my class at school, who had caught it from another child and so on. Anyway, it was very itchy and unpleasant, and I was glad when it was all over. I had been back at school for a little while, then I got sick again. This time it was measles, and my memories of this are sitting in a chair being too weak to even lift my own arms.

Why did I get measles? I had been immunised against them only a few years beforehand, so surely I should not have got it? The thing is, vaccines are effective on a sliding scale. Sometimes the vaccination does not work as well in some people as well as others. This could be based on age, weight, sex, genetics, or even the way the vaccination was prepared and stored. The reason I got the measles, is that obviously the measles vaccination did not work as well on me for some reason. It worked perfectly fine on my sibling, and even on most of my classmates, just not on me. What it did do was give me some immunity, so that the dose of measles that I got was a milder dose which meant the difference between being able to be cared for at home, and being seriously ill in the hospital.

The reason why the parents of vaccinated children are worried, is because it is still possible for their children to catch whatever the un-vaccinated child has. For a vaccination program to be effective, all children need to vaccinated, so that the children whose bodies don't take the vaccination as well, or are allergic to the vaccine, are protected by herd immunity.


6. Vaccination is not mandatory.


True. Vaccination is not mandatory in Australia or the United States. It is highly encouraged though, and in Australia there are incentives like maternity payments to encourage parents to get their children vaccinated. It may not be mandatory, but parents will not be able to send their children to daycare, preschool or school without being vaccinated. There are some loopholes on the basis of religion, but it is getting harder to prove these claims. Also, if you travel overseas, a lot of countries will not allow you to gain entry unless you have had certain vaccinations.


7. If you have started vaccination schedules, you can stop at any time.

True. Of course you can. Your child will still be vaccinated against anything you have had them vaccinated against. Some vaccines like Hepatitis B, polio and tetanus need booster shots at given periods, otherwise their effect will wear off, so if you don't continue the schedule, then the child's immunity to those particular diseases will lessen.



8. If vaccine reactions are denied, then understanding of vaccine injuries is hampered. 


Very true. As far as I can tell though, reactions to vaccines are not being denied. A simple Google search will give you thousands of results about reactions to vaccines. Though, that said, I personally like to sift through such results to make sure I am getting the right, current information, rather than things that have now been disproven, such as the supposed link between autism and the MMR vaccine. Parents should be given as much information as they want about possible vaccine reactions, so that if their child suffers a reaction, that they know what to do. That way, there can be no accusations of cover ups and denials



9. If vaccine reactions are denied, then documentation or diagnosis of potential vaccine related injuries will never happen.


Also very true. Yet again, there is no reason for vaccine reactions to be denied, as very few children who do not have severe allergies to the vaccines get reactions that could threaten their lives. Any reactions should be documented and investigated so that there can be an understanding of why they happened, and how to prevent such reactions in the future.

In fact, each October is Vaccine Injury Awareness Month, whose aim is to raise awareness of injuries that have occurred through vaccination, and who are seeking to make sure such things do not happen to other children.



10. The 6000% rise in autism cannot be attributed to genetics, as it has occurred in less than one generation.
If you haven't already, read Part One, and see how autism can be attributed to genetics. To address the second part, where the statement says that it has happened in just one generation (though where they got the 6000% statistic, I don't know), I would like to present you with a scenario.

So say we are living in early 1920s. We go to school, but there is this weird kid who lives in our street who doesn't. Our friend has told us it's because the kid is crazy and screams all day. We have also heard that he sits on the ground and spins for hours for no reason. We're kinda scared of him, so we often walk on the other side of the road, just in case he comes outside. One day, when we are walking home from school, we see Dr Browncake's car parked outside the weird kid's house. We hear screaming going on inside, then we see Dr Browncake come outside dragging the weird kid behind him. Dr Browncake puts the kid and the kid's mother in the backseat of his car, and drives off. A few days later, our mother tells us that the weird kid has been taken away to a special place where they can fix his problems. We don't see the kid again.

It's a clunkily put scenario, but you can see that I mean that what was once termed as the 'weird child', was actually a child who had autism. The truth is, there has been no increase in the amount of autistic children. It's just that now doctors are better able to recognise the symptoms, and diagnose a child with autism. Statistically, there has been an increase, but practically, the numbers would actually be fairly similar.


11. The simultaneous infection of diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, haemopholis B, pneumococcol and meningococcal in an infant does not occur in nature

Agreed. Neither does it happen in infants. I think this extract explains it better than I could:

The idea of vaccine overload is flawed, for several reasons. First, vaccines do not overwhelm the immune system; in fact, conservative estimates predict that the immune system can respond to thousands of viruses simultaneously. Moreover, despite the increase in the number of vaccines over recent decades, improvements in vaccine design have reduced the immunologic load from vaccines, such that the number of immunological components in the fourteen vaccines administered to U.S. children in 2009 is less than 10% of what it was in the seven vaccines given in 1980. Furthermore, vaccines constitute only a tiny fraction of the pathogens naturally encountered by a child in a typical year, and common childhood conditions such as fevers and middle ear infections pose a much greater challenge to the immune system than vaccines do. Second, studies have shown that vaccinations, and even multiple concurrent vaccinations, do not weaken the immune system or compromise overall immunity. From here

12. Vaccines do not treat disease.

True. As I said above when talking about how vaccines work, vaccines help stop the disease from happening in the first place. The disease is introduced to the body, and then the immune system says 'Ah ha! I know what you are! Kill, kill, kill.' Even if the disease does catch a hold, (like my measles), it will be a lesser dose, and so therefore more easily treated by the thing that does treat disease - antibiotics.


13. Vaccine reactions can occur days/weeks/months/years after a vaccination is given


True, but usually only the measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) vaccination can cause this. Sometimes a rash appears days after the vaccine, and sometimes 1-2 weeks after it, a child can develop a fever, but that is just the body processing the vaccine. As for developing reactions months and years later, the evidence is low. Unless of course you mean that the child gets one of the diseases they have been vaccinated against. But that has already been discussed.


14. No other form of medicine manufactured by a pharmaceutical company is considered benevolent, i.e. without toxic characteristics. 

By the dictionary definition of benevolence, which isn't usually to do with toxicity, I would personally say that I see vaccines as benevolent. It's doing your children a kindness to protect them against diseases that may permanently injure or shorten their life. By that notion, giving your child antibiotics is also benevolent, as it shows them you care about their well-being.






15. If a vaccine affords long term protection, then the side effects must be considered long term too.


What, like the side effect of not getting the diseases you have been vaccinated against? The logic in this statement is like me saying, I have a cat with brown hair, therefore all cats have brown hair. I am not sure why the side effects must be considered long term. My sister got a rash after she got her one four week injections, and she still doesn't have a rash in that spot. Neither has she got a rash from subsequent immunisations. To me, this argument feels like scraping the bottom of the barrel to find something that doesn't exist.

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So, I guess it has come down to my summation of the debate. It will hardly be a surprise to know that I am in complete favour of immunising children from birth. You may be lucky, and your non immunised child will go through life without catching any of the diseases other children are immunised against, but there is also a chance that they don't. Many children have died because their parents thought they were protecting them from having 'poison' put in their bodies by not getting them immunised. That number is higher than the number of children who have died from reactions to vaccinations. The Jenny McCarthy body count shows clear evidence of those children who have died because of a forged link between autism and the MMR vaccine.

Firstly as a person, and secondly as a teacher, I do not want children to suffer due to misinformation. That is why I chose to write about this topic. I could no longer stand the misinformation that was being put forward to parents and members of the public, which was directly affecting their children's lives. I'm not going to apologise for coming on strongly, as this is an issue that needs to be aired. We live in times where there is such a lot of information and truth out there, yet so many people feel the need to ignore it. As my excellent best friend once said, you can't make up your own facts.

How I feel about vaccination: Part One - Vaccination and autism.

So last year I was reading Jodi Picoult's book 'House Rules'. One of the main characters has Asperger's Syndrome, which at one point of the book his mother explains she thinks is caused by the measles, mumps and rubella vaccination toddlers receive at 12 months.

Okay, so this is an argument that I have heard before. In fact, during my teaching degree, we had a woman of a profoundly autistic boy come and talk at one of our Special Education lectures. She told the story of her son, who up until the age of about eighteen months, was a happy and communicative child. A few weeks after his two year old vaccination injections, her son began to change. First he stopped talking. Then he stopped making eye contact and began endlessly twirling things. The parents were naturally concerned, so took him to doctors, and to cut a long story short, he was eventually diagnosed with autism. This story ended up being common in her autism support group.

At the time, my first thought was not, oh I guess vaccines cause autism, but instead, maybe the vaccination starts the autistic process in children already genetically prone to autism. That is pretty much the point that I left my thinking about it. That is, until I read 'House Rules'.

I apologise that the next few paragraphs will mostly be quotes from the book, but it is important to the story, as Jodi Picoult puts forward the argument that you tend to hear from parents with autistic children.

Ask the mom of one autistic kid if vaccines had anything to do with her child`s condition, and she will vehemently tell you yes. Ask another, and she`ll just as vehemently tell you no. The jury`s still out, literally.

Here are the facts: 1. In 1988, the Centers for Disease Control recommended a change to infant immunizations schedules in America, adding three hepatitis B shots (including one at birth) and three haemophilis B shots, all given before the baby is six months old.

2. Drug companies stepped up to the challenge by providing multiple-dose containers of vaccines preserved with thimerosal, an antibacterial made up of 49 percent ethyl mercury.

3. Although the effects of mercury poisoning had been identified in the 1940s, the Food and Drug Administration and the CDC didn`t consider the effects of the dosage that newborns would receive because of these shots. The drug companies didn`t raise a red flag, either, even though the new regimen meant an average two-month-old at a well- baby checkup got a single-day dose of mercury one hundred times greater than the government`s long-term safe exposure level.

4. The symptomology of autism looks an awful lot like the symptomology of mercury poisoning. To give you an example: when scientists studied the migration of mercury into primate brains, they noticed that the primates began to avoid eye contact

5. Between 1999 and 2002, thimerosal was quietly removed from the majority of childhood vaccines. There`s the opposing argument, too. That ethyl mercury--the kind in the vaccines--leaves the body faster than methyl mercury, the kind that is a poison. That in spite of the fact that most vaccines are now mercury-free, autism is still on the rise. That the CDC, the World Health Organization, and the Institute of Medicine completed five large studies, none of which have found a link between vaccines and autism. Those facts are compelling, but the next one is all I needed to convince me there`s some sort of connection: My son looked like any other two-year-old until he had a round of shots that included DTaP, Hib, and hepatitis B.

I don`t think it`s a causal link. After all, out of 100 children receiving the same vaccine schedule, 99 will never become autistic. But just like we probably all have markers for cancer in our genes, if you smoke two packs a day you're more likely to develop it than if you don`t. Kids with a certain predisposition in their genes can't get rid of mercury as easily as most of us can and, as a result, wind up on the spectrum.

So what Jodi Picoult was saying fitted into the idea that I had come up with myself. Emma, the mother of the boy, then went on to say that she is not one of those mothers who rejects vaccination, as she got her second son immunised, because she still thinks immunisation is a good idea.

After reading what I have quoted above, I couldn't get the idea out of my head. For some reason, having Picoult agree with what I thought made me suddenly doubt it was actually true. Being a nerdy still-student-at-heart, the next few hours involved a lot of research. I wanted to know if there really was a link between autism and vaccinations, and if so, what was causing it and why?

Out there in the information world, there are a lot of articles claiming that there is a link between children's measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccination and the onset of autism. Millions even. One of the biggest supporters of the idea is ex-Playboy model Jenny McCarthy, whose claims to have cured her son of the autism the vaccine gave him. Ex-Playboy model you say? Yes, that got my attention too, so I dug a little deeper, and lo and behold, there is many problems with this claim; none of which are related to her career. It seems that her son's 'autism' may actually be Landau-Kleffner syndrome (to read more about the misdiagnosis: Fanning the Vaccine-Autism link)

But finally, after long searching, I got my answer from an article in the Journal of Psychology and Psychiatry which showed, that the suspension of the MMR vaccine in Japan did not have an effect on the number of autistic children. If you can't be bothered reading the whole article (I admit, it is quite dry and statistical) then here is the conclusion:

Accordingly, it is possible to conclude that it is extremely unlikely that MMR has been responsible for the rise over time in the incidence of diagnosed autism. It follows that it is similarly unlikely that it causes autism frequently or at all. It cannot have caused autism in the many children with ASD in Japan who were born and grew up in the era when MMR was not available. Because this frequency is at least as high as in populations in other countries in which most children were vaccinated, it implies that MMR could not cause a substantial proportion of cases of autism.

Epidemiological data, however, cannot test the very different hypothesis that MMR might involve an increased risk of ASD in a very small number of children who, for some reason, are unusually susceptible to damage from the vaccine. There is no evidence in support of such a hypothesis and no indication of how such a postulated susceptibility might be manifest. Hence, the burden of proof must be on those who favor such a hypothesis.

So at this point I began wondering if autism was more genetic than I had previously suspected. As it turns out, it is. Research has shown that siblings of children with autism quite often have language delays and show autistic characteristics, which made a lot of sense when I thought about children I know. While the older brother is diagnosed with autism, it has always seemed to be that his younger sister might have a slighter version. Her tantrums are legendary in the child care centre, and while tantrums are typical of three year olds, hers are something special, which I have only usually witnessed with autistic children.

(Not actual child. Child for display purposes only)

Of course, this debate I am putting forward is largely by the by. It has now been conclusively proven that there is no link between autism and the MMR vaccination. In fact, the truth is the appearance of the link was constructed in a London medical school, and that no study since has been able to replicate the results that the Lancet study did. If you are still in any doubt, (and even if you're not) please read this article by Eileen Costello, which I think beautifully sums up the whole debate for me.

Yes, it is true that autism appears at the age around children receive their MMR vaccination, so the idea is linked in parent's heads, but it is also true quite simply that around two years old is the age that the signs and symptoms of autism start to become more prominent. Like Eileen Costello says, if you know what you are looking for, you can see the early signs of autism in small babies. The vaccinations are the equivalent of the kid who gets blamed for talking in class, who just happened to be sitting next to the kid who actually was the gabbler.

(Baby chosen for 'what the?' expression)

What it all comes down to for me is that autism is a challenging enough syndrome for children and families to live through, without misinformation making it more upsetting. I can completely understand why parents would want to jump on the MMR vaccine causing autism bandwagon, just like Jodi Picoult's character Emma did. All most parents want for their children is to have happy, easy and healthy lives, and autism doesn't make living in the everyday world easy. As the woman who came to talk to our Special Ed tute said, she pretty much had to throw her plans for her son's life out the window with the diagnosis of his autism.

The point is, now we know for sure that it isn't the vaccine, time, money and resources should be put into genetic research, instead of scare campaigns blaming a vaccination that is protecting children and adults from the horror of having measles, mumps and rubella. I speak from personal experience about the horror of having  measles. I had mild dose of measles as a child, and even that mild dose was horrible and left me only able to sit in a chair all day being spoon fed.

But more on that in the second part of my thinking about vaccinations.

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Alright. So the next blog I make will be about my opinion of vaccinations in general. Probably I should have started with the general one first, but it was really Jodi Picoult's book that got me wondering about autism and vaccinations, and then about vaccinations in general. I hope to have it up within the next few days, but in the meantime, please comment on this blog and tell me what you think. I would love to hear feedback.

Until next time!

Once more into the unknown I go.

Well, the title is a slight fib. I have had at least three blogs before, all of which I have outgrown. Can someone outgrow a blog? I think so. My previous blog chronicled my life as a university student, but now I am supposedly grown up and a vague part of the working world, a new blog is called for.

Still, it is an unknown. I have little idea as to what I will write about, only the compulsion to write. I am sure that this blog will contain rants against the world, and insights into the twisted sinews of my mind. So not a 'Today the train was late and it rained. FML" kind of blog. That's like so 2004, my dear.

So until I have something more interesting to say, I shall leave this introductory ramble here. Or maybe here.