Are anti-vaxxers liable if their children spread preventable diseases? (female, schools, facts)
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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?
Yes, I know all about "Bubble Gum" Penicillin, for which my Dad was deathly allergic to (lucky me), which they gave me as a child. Problem? It did not WORK after being given over and over again. Same thing happened with my own daughter 30 years later. Stronger and stronger antibiotics for strep over and over which eventually did not work. Come on, "medical professional" you should know this. Show your studies that antibiotics are ALWAYS effective given many times over a period of many years. I have said on multiple threads that I was very sickly child, teenager, and young adult. It changed for me in Middle Age for the better. Impossible, right? You get sicker the older you get?
I got DPT and Polio on a Sugar Cube in School at 7. Oh, my parents, were THRILLED about that one. Non issue. Ok, fine, was their attitude. Unfortunately, they are long dead so I cannot ask them to verify it for you. Too late for Measles in the 60's since I was a teenager when that came out and already had Measles and all those other diseases before I even reached school age. Do you think they should have given those vaccinations to teens who already had the disease? You probably do.
I stopped going to the Pediatrician at 10 in 1958 because I am became a "woman" then. Did YOU? Of course, I am WRONG about that too since that does not agree with "studies" and I cannot remember. lol I went to a GP at a Clinic once a year after that. Nah, never happened because YOU, and your studies, say so? My Great-Grandma lived to be 94 and never had ANY of your vaccinations, including DPT or Small Pox. Mom and Nana looked to her far more than your medicine back in the 40's and 50's. Again, you may not like that but it happened, and is still happening today as I said with certain Cultures. Do you deny this too?
You like to think this is a Wealth Divide, and refuse to acknowledge it is also a Ethic/ Racial Divide as well. Cite you studies which say that isn't the case. It is ONLY the Rich refusing vaccinations, and all medical preventive care.
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.
No one is saying your experiences are not your experiences. However, many of us from that era had different experiences. Yes, you can recover from Scarlet Fever w/o heart or kidney damage, which apparently you did. That is a good thing.
My parents never talked about polio to us kids, but I found a letter my mom wrote to her mom in 1949, where she expressed concern about it. There is certainly much evidence that parents were quite afraid of polio. Heck, they still are now. That is one vaccine a lot of "anti-vax" parents want their kids to have, speaking from my own experience as an immunization provider.
Anyway, as soon as the vaccine came out, my mom whisked my bro and I off to the doctor to get it; I was just turning 6. When the Sabin came out in 1961, we all went to the center to get our drops on the sugar cube. My mom and dad, who would be 95 and 102 if still alive, took it along with us kids. I even remember my dad making some comment that while he didn't believe in "socialized medicine" he thought these immunization clinics were a good idea.
Has any law been established regarding non-vaccinated children who become the center of an epidemic?
If polio, mumps, rubella, whooping cough, etc begin to claim lives again, can the parents of the children who began spreading the disease be held liable to pay financial restitution to the families of those they made ill?
I haven't paid much attention to this anti-vaxxing phenomenon until a couple days ago Robert Deniro mentioned that his wife noticed their child develop autistic symptoms overnight after receiving a vaccine with mercury as a basic ingredient in it.
Robert Deniro is a fairly level-headed man.
Perhaps some children in very rare cases really are developing autism after vaccination.
As for my kids, they've all been 100% vaccinated with no problems. I'm pro-vaccination.
If indeed some children are developing autism over this, I hate to say it but isn't it better to have a rare child here & there with autism than an epidemic outbreak of horribly crippling, deadly diseases?
if you want to go the route of what your title claims, then it should also be that if a child is killed or damaged by the vaccine that does happen, then the company should be sued and the executives imprisoned.
I did vaccinate my daughters, I just waited until they were over the age of 2 before I did it.
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.
It seems the author I accused of writing hogwash was Lucija Tomljenovic. Let's look at one of her studies for example:
First, what are her credentials: She has a PhD in biochemistry. Not medicine, not immunology, not infectious disease. She is a chemist. She does not take care of children with autism, and she does not take care of people with infectious diseases.
The journal the article is published in has an impact factor of 3.44, which is a measure of how often the average article in the journal is cited by others. In contrast, the factor for JAMA is over 35. The editors of the journal are chemists interested in human physiology at the molecular level. They are not immunologists, they are not physicians, and they do not take care of patients. What this suggests is that the article is perhaps in the wrong journal. The editors have no background in autoimmune disease or autism.
From the abstract:
"Aluminum(Al), the most commonly used vaccine adjuvant, is a demonstrated neurotoxin and a strong immune stimulator."
At this point, the article should have already been sent to the trash. It is unconscionable that someone publishing in a chemistry journal would say that the adjuvant used in vaccines is aluminum. Metallic aluminum is not used as an adjuvant. Adjuvants contain aluminum as salts. The behaviors of metals and salts are totally different. [You might want to compare the difference between what happens when you put metallic sodium in water compared to what happens when you put sodium chloride (table salt) in water, for example.] Aluminum salts used as adjuvants are indeed immune stimulants. That is why they are used as adjuvants.
The abstract continues with a discussion of Hill's criteria, during which the author makes a major error: correlation is not causation:
"children from countries with the highest ASD prevalence appear to have the highest exposure to Al from vaccine"
The problem: countries with low vaccination rates may just diagnose autism in fewer children. In the US, the diagnosis may be sought to gain access to financial and educational aid. In order to do a comparison at all, you would have to choose countries that followed exactly the same criteria for diagnosis of autism.
"the increase in exposure to Al adjuvants significantly correlates with the increase in ASD prevalence in the United States observed over the last two decades (Pearson r =0.92, p b 0.0001)"
The increase in sales of organic foods also significantly correlates with the increase in ASD prevalence, (r= 0.9971, p= 0.0001) That correlation is just as valid as the one in the article.
"a significant correlation exists between the amounts of Al administered to preschool children and the current prevalence of ASD in seven Western countries, particularly at 3–4 months of age (Pearson r=0.89–0.94, p=0.0018–0.0248)"
Again correlation is not causation.
The authors state they show that inflammation from "aluminum" is similar to autoimmune inflammation. The fact is that it would be quite strange if there were not similarities. Many conditions produce the same cytokine profiles in the article, including surgery, for example.
They state that it is accepted that Gulf War Syndrome is caused by vaccine adjuvants. No, it is not. It is probably a set of conditions with multiple different causes.
The fact is that the authors are working from a standpoint that aluminum adjuvants are an accepted cause of autism, despite the fact that the evidence against that is massive.
Now for the epidemiology. The authors have produced an example of the ecological fallacy, in which correlations for a group (all cases of autism) are imputed to the individuals in the group. This makes it easy to produce what looks like impressive statistical correlations. The analysis the authors did was too simplistic and did not sufficiently account for confounders. The way they did the analysis results in spurious correlations, just like the one between organic foods and autism. Lots of other things are now more common than they were in the past. Strong correlations based just on comparing incidence numbers could be found easily.
The authors assert they have met Hill's criteria for causation. The problem is that those criteria apply to the body of evidence, not a single study.
I called Tomljenovic's writing hogwash before. It's still hogwash. Her other studies are all done with an anti-vaccine bias and are just as poor as this one.
You say you do not care whether I have studied epidemiology or not. The fact that you chose to make that comment indicates you must care or why bother to say anything at all. I guess we will have to see which of us the readers of the thread believe understands epidemiology.
You demonstrate an inability to understand the difference between a potential conflict of interest and a conflict that produces bias in a study. The potential for conflicts is what makes it required for everyone whose name is attached to a study to disclose them. These days, once a pharmaceutical company gives a researcher money, the company has no control over the money or any say in the design of a study or the analysis of its data or whether the study is published or not.
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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.
Sure, researchers can lie and get past peer review. They eventually get caught. You seem to have conveniently missed that Wakefield was paid by a lawyer to find evidence that vaccines cause autism. His goal was also to discredit the existing measles vaccine so that he could market his own. That's what a real conflict of interest is. He got caught. Journals really, really, really do not want to have to retract articles, though. they have a large incentive to not publish bad research.
Researchers who lie get found out because other researchers cannot replicate their results.
Your rejection of all industry funded vaccine research ultimately implies that you believe in a worldwide conspiracy of astronomical proportions.
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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.
You do realize that the Japanese study on the duration of protection of the chickenpox vaccine supports the findings of the US study of effectiveness at fourteen years, don't you? You remember, the study financed by Merck that is so obviously biased that anyone should be able to see it?
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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.
Mark, who is an attorney, has already explained that the government is interested in the legal process, not whether Merck is ultimately found guilty of anything or not. Perhaps you can explain to us why the government reviewed the material charging fraud and declined to prosecute Merck.
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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.
Actually the researchers said that exogenous boosting may contribute to the antibody results, not that it was the sole cause. Since similar results (about 89% with protective antibody) were obtained in the 14 year Merck study, the presence of exogenous boosting may at most increase the antibody level by about ten percentage points. Since the lower level is still protective, that difference is not clinically significant.
Despite your attempt at deflection, the fact remains that the varicella vaccine remains effective up to twenty years, a number that is supported by a study that even you find acceptable, not eight years, as you stated in a previous post: "We do know that the efficacy rate declines from year one (97%) post vaccination to year two( 86%) where it remains stable through the 8th year (81% to 86%). After that we just don't know."
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Yes, I did note that and it's a study without any obvious conflicts of interest. Suzy, I've never said that "no vaccine research was done without industry funding". Quit lying. It's ridiculous.
It's interesting that you interpret sarcasm as lying.
Since you acknowledge that research without industry funding exists and such studies are totally acceptable to you, what does the fact that the studies not funded by industry come up with the same conclusions that the ones funded by industry do mean to you? Does that now mean that at least some research done with industry funding is trustworthy?
After all of this, what we are left with is that the varicella vaccine is still working at twenty years. Not eight, twenty. We also know that some other live virus vaccines, like the one for measles, appear to produce lifelong immunity. The high antibody levels at twenty years bode well for the varicella vaccine doing the same, even if we cannot know for sure yet because the vaccine is too young.
I am 68 years old. I was fully vaccinated according to the schedules that existed in the late 1940s and early 1950s. I did get the measles and chicken pox as a child. All the neighborhood kids did, and we all recovered fine. I did not get mumps or whooping cough. I was innoculated against polio.
One thing that I definitely notice between then and now -- kids were a lot healthier back in my childhood. There was either no autism, or the rate of it was so far below today's that it seemed there was none. Childhood diseases were not considered "life-threatening". It wasn't much worse than the flu, and when one of us came down with something, parents sent their kids over to "visit" hoping they'd get one more childhood illness out of the way.
We never had any of this ADD or ADHD, either. Kids sat still in school, and paid attention. Ritalin and other such drugs for kids, was unheard of. Sending a kid to a mental health doctor was considered silly. We didn't need it.
Today I look around and see a vastly different childhood landscape. Kids everywhere are sick, disabled, obese, or on medications. What the heck happened??? Children are supposed to be healthy. They were back in my day.
Whatever it is, we're somehow failing our kids. I'm glad I'm not a kid today!
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.
Very relevant to that Merck failed Mumps vaccine, apparently Harvard (40) is not alone in that outbreak. Neighboring schools, BU and Tufts, are having their own Mumps cases on campus. Sports teams playing each other probably spread it to other colleges; just like it did throughout the vaccinated players in the NHL.
Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Ct., has had 8 cases, and investigating others. The school issued a statement saying that all 8 students had received their full dose of 2 MMR vaccinations. When my daughter played hockey in Maine, they played against colleges in both Boston and Ct. Athletes are notorious for just grabbing a water bottle, drinking, and not paying attention to whose it is.
Not connected to those, but the University at Dayton has reported 10 cases of Mumps among students. They issued a statement also saying that the school requires their students to have received 2 MMR vaccinations prior to admission, unless they were born before 1956.
Sounds to me like this vaccine is not working for Mumps. Hello, Merck. 80% effective is not very good, especially when nobody can tell where a college student goes on their Winter or Spring break.
I am 68 years old. I was fully vaccinated according to the schedules that existed in the late 1940s and early 1950s. I did get the measles and chicken pox as a child. All the neighborhood kids did, and we all recovered fine. I did not get mumps or whooping cough. I was innoculated against polio.
One thing that I definitely notice between then and now -- kids were a lot healthier back in my childhood. There was either no autism, or the rate of it was so far below today's that it seemed there was none. Childhood diseases were not considered "life-threatening". It wasn't much worse than the flu, and when one of us came down with something, parents sent their kids over to "visit" hoping they'd get one more childhood illness out of the way.
We never had any of this ADD or ADHD, either. Kids sat still in school, and paid attention. Ritalin and other such drugs for kids, was unheard of. Sending a kid to a mental health doctor was considered silly. We didn't need it.
Today I look around and see a vastly different childhood landscape. Kids everywhere are sick, disabled, obese, or on medications. What the heck happened??? Children are supposed to be healthy. They were back in my day.
Whatever it is, we're somehow failing our kids. I'm glad I'm not a kid today!
Plus everyone lives in fear of catching these diseases, including the Flu!!! They shut down an entire school if a couple of kids get measles or chicken pox?
Do you remember quarantine signs for Measles on people's doors? Yes, go "visit" your sick friend so you will catch measles or mumps, and get it as young as possible.
I am very happy my own are adults today since they received nothing in comparison to what is given today, let alone what we got back as kids.
Very relevant to that Merck failed Mumps vaccine, apparently Harvard (40) is not alone in that outbreak. Neighboring schools, BU and Tufts, are having their own Mumps cases on campus. Sports teams playing each other probably spread it to other colleges; just like it did throughout the vaccinated players in the NHL.
Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Ct., has had 8 cases, and investigating others. The school issued a statement saying that all 8 students had received their full dose of 2 MMR vaccinations. When my daughter played hockey in Maine, they played against colleges in both Boston and Ct. Athletes are notorious for just grabbing a water bottle, drinking, and not paying attention to whose it is.
Not connected to those, but the University at Dayton has reported 10 cases of Mumps among students. They issued a statement also saying that the school requires their students to have received 2 MMR vaccinations prior to admission, unless they were born before 1956.
Sounds to me like this vaccine is not working for Mumps. Hello, Merck. 80% effective is not very good, especially when nobody can tell where a college student goes on their Winter or Spring break.
LOL! 40 Harvard students, out of 20,000 got the mumps. That's 0.2% of the student body! Even if they were all vaccinated, which I doubt, that's a pretty good efficacy rate.
LOL! 40 Harvard students, out of 20,000 got the mumps. That's 0.2% of the student body! Even if they were all vaccinated, which I doubt, that's a pretty good efficacy rate.
LOL. 100 Disney Measles cases out 300,000,000 MILLION!
LOL. 100 Disney Measles cases out 300,000,000 MILLION!
Not the right comparison. In that case, Harvard's is out of 300,000,000 as well. I agree the CA outbreak was small compared to others. The Amish outbreak in Ohio was about twice the size of the Disney outbreak. However, the Disney outbreak did show a crack in herd immunity that was a wakeup call.
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