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Suzy, this is a clear case of the fox guarding the henhouse and I'm not surprised that you refuse to acknowledge it. I've never encountered someone as dogmatic as you and so protective of the people who profit from vaccines. When I presented a study that you didn't like you refuted it by calling it "pseudoscientific hogwash" and then made some snide comments to me about my lack of understanding. That was how you countered it. Nothing more then that. So don't lecture me here on not going beyond the very obvious conflict of interest in the study and demand that I dig deeper when you were unwilling to do the same.
When Merck employees and shareholders write a study funded by Merck to show how great their product is I'd call that an advertisement rather then a study to be trusted. We need independent studies on vaccines and other pharmaceuticals that do not have ties to the industry that is profiting from them. That is hugely important if you want to gain the trust of the general public. Merck is the same company that is facing a lawsuit for manipulating data concerning efficacy for another vaccine. That is not their only lawsuit either highlighting potential issues with the integrity of the company overall. People have reason not to trust a study with such major and obvious conflicts of interest. If you want more people on board then maybe you too should demand that the studies we get are not industry funded or with other financial conflicts of interest. It's a big problem.
Regarding the Japanese study. What's interesting is that this study was conducted in Japan when only 18% of the population was vaccinated meaning that study participants were not only vaccinated but re-exposed to natural varicella throughout the 20 year period and we do know that re-exposure provides an exogenous boost so showing that they were still immune at that time period makes sense. In a country like ours where chicken pox has become rare we no longer get that exogenous boost from being re-exposed so who knows if people will maintain their immunity without it.
From the Japanese study.
You can nitpick all you want, but live virus vaccines like varicella, smallpox, and rubella provide lifelong immunity. The reason that people who receive the varicella vaccine sometimes contract shingles is that, just like a natural infection, the virus is dormant in the nervous system.
There are different levels of immunity. Your natural immunity to everything will protect you against minimal challenges. It takes more than contact with one virus to give you a cold, or you would go through life hacking and wheezing continually. On the other end of the spectrum is full immunity. If someone shot your bloodstream full of the disease, your body would deal with it and you would not get sick. In between is where most of us sit; pretty good immunity. We're unlikely to get sick, and if we do our immune system is already sensitized, so we get a mild case and get well fast.
It has been 60 years since my last smallpox immunization. I probably still have good immunity, but nobody knows because nobody is testing. If there were an outbreak, codgers my age would probably sail through fine, but the carnage among younger people would be horrible. Besides killing people, the disease blinds and disfigures many victims for life. Nobody gets vaccinated any more because the disease no longer exists in the wild. In the future we may do the same for polio. We are close.
You can nitpick all you want, but live virus vaccines like varicella, smallpox, and rubella provide lifelong immunity. The reason that people who receive the varicella vaccine sometimes contract shingles is that, just like a natural infection, the virus is dormant in the nervous system.
I'm not nitpicking by pointing out obvious and serious conflicts of interest for one study and in the other pointing out the conclusion of the article. If you have a source that shows that varicella provides lifelong immunity I will be sure to look at it. I can save you some time by letting you know that there isn't such a study. Your insistence is not based on anything at all.
Your husband's cardiovascular problems have nothing to do with his immune system. He can certainly catch zika from a mosquito bite, but won't give birth to any deformed children. Should he become infected, his risk is to pregnant women around him. If a vaccine becomes available, it would be wise to immunize everyone regardless of age or sex.
They are planning to immunize everyone at first. Later the concentration would be on children of both sexes, especially since Zika may cause problems besides birth defects.
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There have been some weird decisions in the vaccine world. The oddest one was only allowing girls to get the HPV vaccine, on the theory that boys don't have a cervix, so can't get cervical cancer. They ignored the fact that a boy who is immune can't transmit HPV to his girlfriend.
At least that oddity has been fixed; they now recommend it for boys. HPV causes other cancers, too, including penile cancer in men and throat cancer in both sexes. Genital cancers in women are not the only concern.
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Originally Posted by Larry Caldwell
Yes, adults under 50 can get the vaccine. In my case it only cost $175, but that was 25 years ago. I had to go to the county health department, because it's a live virus vaccine with very short shelf life. It's also not always available. I think they offer it during a two week window twice a year. Costs may have gone up. Trust me, if you can avoid shingles by paying $300, it's money well spent.
The shingles vaccine was only released about ten years ago. Perhaps you got it more recently?
I took it, too, knowing how awful shingles is. DH procrastinated and did not take it until after he actually had it. It was on his face and scalp but fortunately he had no eye involvement. After he recovered he got the vaccine.
You can nitpick all you want, but live virus vaccines like varicella, smallpox, and rubella provide lifelong immunity. The reason that people who receive the varicella vaccine sometimes contract shingles is that, just like a natural infection, the virus is dormant in the nervous system.
There are different levels of immunity. Your natural immunity to everything will protect you against minimal challenges. It takes more than contact with one virus to give you a cold, or you would go through life hacking and wheezing continually. On the other end of the spectrum is full immunity. If someone shot your bloodstream full of the disease, your body would deal with it and you would not get sick. In between is where most of us sit; pretty good immunity. We're unlikely to get sick, and if we do our immune system is already sensitized, so we get a mild case and get well fast.
It has been 60 years since my last smallpox immunization. I probably still have good immunity, but nobody knows because nobody is testing. If there were an outbreak, codgers my age would probably sail through fine, but the carnage among younger people would be horrible. Besides killing people, the disease blinds and disfigures many victims for life. Nobody gets vaccinated any more because the disease no longer exists in the wild. In the future we may do the same for polio. We are close.
But don't you see you are between the lines making our case? You say your small pox vaccination from 60 years ago is probably still good, but since you are that old, will you agree that your measles, mumps, etc., disease immunity is also still just as good? Were you ever around other children who had those diseases growing up, or your own children? Did you get any a second time? Were your parents terrified of you catching them again? This is the divide we are now having. Vaccinated children's parents terrified of them being around unvaccinated children who might catch the disease and give it to their children. Our parents were not afraid for their own children who had those diseases before to be around other children who had them, let alone POTENTIALLY have them. They TRUSTED that the diseases gave immunity. The vaccinated today do not trust their immunity. You are right with the fact that "nobody is testing", especially when it comes to the millions of us Boomers who had these diseases in our childhood, who are given a "pass" when it comes to vaccinations for these diseases.
Suzy, this is a clear case of the fox guarding the henhouse and I'm not surprised that you refuse to acknowledge it. I've never encountered someone as dogmatic as you and so protective of the people who profit from vaccines. When I presented a study that you didn't like you refuted it by calling it "pseudoscientific hogwash" and then made some snide comments to me about my lack of understanding. That was how you countered it. Nothing more then that. So don't lecture me here on not going beyond the very obvious conflict of interest in the study and demand that I dig deeper when you were unwilling to do the same.
When you choose to post studies that are hogwash I will continue to call them hogwash. I have studied epidemiology. I can actually look at a study and see where the strengths and weaknesses are, though I often quote others whose fund of knowledge is deeper than mine. You consider the suggestion that you study epidemiology to be an insult. If you are going to allege that any study was biased by industry funding it is your responsibility to tell us why. Go through the study line by line and tell us what the authors did wrong. Did they properly select the study population? Was the proper statistical method used? Keep in mind that before the article was published, someone with no connection to the authors or Merck did just that.
Current research studies must disclose financial affiliations. That makes the peer reviewers look even more closely at the results of the study. Remember that it was Wakefield who did not disclose his conflict of interest - not a potential conflict but a very real one.
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When Merck employees and shareholders write a study funded by Merck to show how great their product is I'd call that an advertisement rather then a study to be trusted. We need independent studies on vaccines and other pharmaceuticals that do not have ties to the industry that is profiting from them. That is hugely important if you want to gain the trust of the general public. Merck is the same company that is facing a lawsuit for manipulating data concerning efficacy for another vaccine. That is not their only lawsuit either highlighting potential issues with the integrity of the company overall. People have reason not to trust a study with such major and obvious conflicts of interest. If you want more people on board then maybe you too should demand that the studies we get are not industry funded or with other financial conflicts of interest. It's a big problem.
There have been stacks and stacks of studies on vaccines that were funded by sources other than industry. Researchers around the world have contributed to the vaccine literature.
Whether the data was manipulated on the mumps vaccine has yet to be proven. Perhaps we should see how the suit turns out before assuming the company is guilty, especially since the government decided there was not enough evidence to pursue the case on its own.
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Regarding the Japanese study. What's interesting is that this study was conducted in Japan when only 18% of the population was vaccinated meaning that study participants were not only vaccinated but re-exposed to natural varicella throughout the 20 year period and we do know that re-exposure provides an exogenous boost so showing that they were still immune at that time period makes sense. In a country like ours where chicken pox has become rare we no longer get that exogenous boost from being re-exposed so who knows if people will maintain their immunity without it.
That is a point that I already acknowledged. The fact remains that the vaccinated subjects still had high levels of antibodies to the vaccine virus some twenty years after getting the vaccine. That's the vaccine virus, not the wild virus. They were part of the original study before the vaccine was approved for general use.
Note that the study you are quoting came from a Japanese university.
But don't you see you are between the lines making our case? You say your small pox vaccination from 60 years ago is probably still good, but since you are that old, will you agree that your measles, mumps, etc., disease immunity is also still just as good? Were you ever around other children who had those diseases growing up, or your own children? Did you get any a second time? Were your parents terrified of you catching them again? This is the divide we are now having. Vaccinated children's parents terrified of them being around unvaccinated children who might catch the disease and give it to their children. Our parents were not afraid for their own children who had those diseases before to be around other children who had them, let alone POTENTIALLY have them. They TRUSTED that the diseases gave immunity. The vaccinated today do not trust their immunity. You are right with the fact that "nobody is testing", especially when it comes to the millions of us Boomers who had these diseases in our childhood, who are given a "pass" when it comes to vaccinations for these diseases.
Immunity to infectious diseases is not something to "trust". Everyone who is immune by virtue of having the disease had to get sick to acquire that immunity, often very sick, and the ones who died from their illnesses are not around to "trust" anything.
Do you really think that before there was a vaccine for smallpox that parents would not have been afraid for their children to be around someone with smallpox? Do you actually deny the fear that parents had about polio? For other diseases, like measles, it was not a lack of fear about exposure so much as the realization that exposure was pretty much unavoidable.
I know you seem to think that no one was ever quarantined for any infectious diseases because despite your roaming the streets of NYC you do not remember ever seeing a quarantine sign. I assure you quarantine was very real, and before vaccines it was a cornerstone of epidemic control.
Immunity to infectious diseases is not something to "trust". Everyone who is immune by virtue of having the disease had to get sick to acquire that immunity, often very sick, and the ones who died from their illnesses are not around to "trust" anything.
Do you really think that before there was a vaccine for smallpox that parents would not have been afraid for their children to be around someone with smallpox? Do you actually deny the fear that parents had about polio? For other diseases, like measles, it was not a lack of fear about exposure so much as the realization that exposure was pretty much unavoidable.
I know you seem to think that no one was ever quarantined for any infectious diseases because despite your roaming the streets of NYC you do not remember ever seeing a quarantine sign. I assure you quarantine was very real, and before vaccines it was a cornerstone of epidemic control.
I trust my own childhood experiences far more than what you say happened. I also knew my parents far better than YOU. Maybe they weren't TERRIFIED of Polio as you think all parents were back then? Hey, maybe your "Anti Vaxx" Parents go back farther than some Jenny McCarthy or Andrew Wakefield? I can tell you that when I had Scarlet Fever with a temp of 105 my Italian Nana put me in a tub of cold water with Ice Cubes. Old enough to remember. So you would deny my childhood memories of that too? Again, I grew up in Manhattan where there was a Hospital (St. Vincent's Greenwich Village) where my parents could have literally carried me to, but they DIDN'T. I suppose they trusted my Nana's "Folk Medicine" more.
So please do not attempt to tell me that ALL parents in those days were so terrified of diseases. Perhaps, certain Ethnic and Racial Cultures discounted them even 60 years ago, as they still do in 2016.
You can deny it all you want, but it remains a fact today, that your Anti Medicine still exists today, not just with your preconceived notion of Uber Rich, but also among Ethnic and Racial Groups in the US today.
I trust my own childhood experiences far more than what you say happened. I also knew my parents far better than YOU. Maybe they weren't TERRIFIED of Polio as you think all parents were back then? Hey, maybe your "Anti Vaxx" Parents go back farther than some Jenny McCarthy or Andrew Wakefield? I can tell you that when I had Scarlet Fever with a temp of 105 my Italian Nana put me in a tub of cold water with Ice Cubes. Old enough to remember. So you would deny my childhood memories of that too? Again, I grew up in Manhattan where there was a Hospital (St. Vincent's Greenwich Village) where my parents could have literally carried me to, but they DIDN'T. I suppose they trusted my Nana's "Folk Medicine" more.
So please do not attempt to tell me that ALL parents in those days were so terrified of diseases.
Scarlet fever is caused by strept. There is no vaccine for it, since it can now be treated with penicillin. People with it were quarantined, though. The danger from the disease is that it could cause permanent heart and kidney damage. Treating it prevents that.
We know your family is special. Maybe your parents did not fear polio (and other infectious diseases), but maybe they just did not share their fears with you, and millions of parents did fear it.
Did you not get any vaccines at all? If you did, does that not say your parents had enough concern about infectious diseases to do so?
Last edited by suzy_q2010; 05-01-2016 at 02:48 PM..
I find all this extremely boring knowing what pill is for what condition. Do you think I watch those commercials on TV for all those illnesses, with their letter codes, and to ask you doctor if bla, bla, bla is "Right for YOU". Should we all become Pharmacists today?
When I brought his entire box of pills to the hospital when he had his heart attack, the Nurse said to me, "This is great, thank you." She went through the entire box writing everything down, including the dosages, and how many were left in the pill bottles. They knew precisely what he was taking rather than having me memorize all of this and getting something wrong.
I think he himself should carry around with him some kind of list of his medications and their dosages. Both of us go out of the state alone several times a year. Then what? A LIST on his person solves the problem wherever he goes.
Knowing what treatments your husband is receiving for illnesses or chronic conditions seems like it would be pretty important.... It was for me in my first marriage.....
You are right about one thing, though.... it would be wise for him to carry a list of his medications with him in the event of an emergency..... Apparently, you would be of no help as it is all too boring for you....
When you choose to post studies that are hogwash I will continue to call them hogwash. I have studied epidemiology. I can actually look at a study and see where the strengths and weaknesses are, though I often quote others whose fund of knowledge is deeper than mine. You consider the suggestion that you study epidemiology to be an insult. If you are going to allege that any study was biased by industry funding it is your responsibility to tell us why. Go through the study line by line and tell us what the authors did wrong. Did they properly select the study population? Was the proper statistical method used? Keep in mind that before the article was published, someone with no connection to the authors or Merck did just that.
You are a random poster on the internet. If you say that you have studied epidemiology I have no clue if you have or have not nor do I care. I stand by my comments regarding the very obvious conflict of interest. No one needs special training to understand the conflict. It's basic common sense for anyone with the capability of critical thought. I noticed that your "studies in epidemiology" did not cause you to go through the study I shared line by line and tell me what was wrong. You simply said, "hogwash". Good comeback.
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Current research studies must disclose financial affiliations. That makes the peer reviewers look even more closely at the results of the study. Remember that it was Wakefield who did not disclose his conflict of interest - not a potential conflict but a very real one.
Results can be omitted or manipulated in ANY study and get past peer review. If you really want to win over the anti-vaxxers you would support independent studies only. I don't remember that about Wakefield as I didn't follow his case as closely as you did. Sorry to burst your bubble.
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There have been stacks and stacks of studies on vaccines that were funded by sources other than industry. Researchers around the world have contributed to the vaccine literature.
Of course there are non industry funded studies and I take them more seriously then the one's who are funded by the company who makes the vaccine and who is written by the employees and stockholders of the same company.
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Whether the data was manipulated on the mumps vaccine has yet to be proven. Perhaps we should see how the suit turns out before assuming the company is guilty, especially since the government decided there was not enough evidence to pursue the case on its own.
Right, time will tell. So ridiculous that you keep twisting what was said about the government in regards to the lawsuit. Did you read the Statement of Interest that I provided? The truth is that the government is interested in the outcome of the case but they are not taking an active role nor are they taking a side. They absolutely did not say anything about whether there was or was not enough evidence. I suspect you know this but are so desperate to manipulate the narrative that you stick to your false claim and repeat it over and over and over. The truth seems secondary to winning and protecting industry for you
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That is a point that I already acknowledged. The fact remains that the vaccinated subjects still had high levels of antibodies to the vaccine virus some twenty years after getting the vaccine. That's the vaccine virus, not the wild virus. They were part of the original study before the vaccine was approved for general use.
No Suzy, they had anti-bodies and researchers suspect it was do the exogenous boost. I actually read the study. You may be able to fool those who didn't by twisting what was said but you are not fooling me.
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Note that the study you are quoting came from a Japanese university.
Yes, I did note that and it's a study without any obvious conflicts of interest.
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That pretty much debunks your idea that no vaccine research is done without industry funding.
Suzy, I've never said that "no vaccine research was done without industry funding". Quit lying. It's ridiculous.
Last edited by MissTerri; 05-01-2016 at 04:11 PM..
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