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.
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:
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.
__________________________________________________________________________
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.
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.
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 denials9. 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.
__________________________________________________________________________
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.
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