Disneyland: The Latest Victim of the Anti-Vaxxers

You're not going to get anywhere with these posters. I have literally had these exact same discussions and have yet to get an adequate response explaining the impact of under-reporting.

On one hand, VAERS is the only nationwide adverse events reporting system and is the only place a person can report such an event. Seems like a pretty important tool, right?

And it is useful, except when it actually finds association between vaccination and adverse event apparently. The real problem though is that all passive reporting systems are KNOWN to severely under-report adverse events. The VAERS website even states as much. This is known FACT, admitted by VAERS and other passive systems, will be quickly apologized away by these posters.

The argument quickly shifts, as it already has, to "we can't prove that the vaccine caused the death." Well that sure inspires confidence! 50 years into the vaccine era and we can't tell if it caused the death!

Their other argument is that pranksters go onto VAERS and report that the vaccine turned them into the Hulk, i.e. anyone can make a report and so this means that a portion (apparently a large one?) of reports are bogus.

Both arguments are weak IMO, and do nothing to address known under-reporting.

The discussion generally will make a third shift to focusing on other research, such as that done by the manufacturer themselves (they would be happy to find that their vaccine causes death, right?), and after the fact research, generally epidemiological in nature. Epidemiology CANNOT prove causation or lack of causation and is abound with confounders.

Back to VAERS and passive reporting in general, the rate of under-reporting while somewhat debatable because there isn't much research, has been shown to be significant. For medication adverse events in general, the rate of under-reporting can be over 90%.

Yet, knowing that our main reporting system is severely flawed, proponents of vaccination will continue to claim that adverse events are "very rare."



I tend to think it is more of an honest bind that practitioners and the lay-public find themselves in. Doctors obviously care and want to help their clients, and have bought into vaccination wholeheartedly. That being said, doctors are products of their training and the hype behind vaccinations is obviously driven by the manufacturers, who unfortunately hold significant influence in every stage of training and practice.

As for the lay-person, we just want to believe that the doctors and the science that informs them is accurate. When confronted with the idea that doctors may be in error, and in error over such a big issue, most people will simply find this too difficult to accept, and buckle down in support of the popular belief.


More than $2.8 billion in compensation suggest at least a "mildly" cautious approach to the subject. They aren't giving out that kind of bank on the possibility that the vaccine caused adverse affects.
 
You're not going to get anywhere with these posters. I have literally had these exact same discussions and have yet to get an adequate response explaining the impact of under-reporting.

On one hand, VAERS is the only nationwide adverse events reporting system and is the only place a person can report such an event. Seems like a pretty important tool, right?

And it is useful, except when it actually finds association between vaccination and adverse event apparently. The real problem though is that all passive reporting systems are KNOWN to severely under-report adverse events. The VAERS website even states as much. This is known FACT, admitted by VAERS and other passive systems, will be quickly apologized away by these posters.

Either through ignorance or conscious deceit folks like Box and SR try and portray a VAERS report as if it's something any random, lay joe can independently type up and successfully submit.

Troll: "My child died from an MMR vaccine." VAERS: "Your report has been added to the database as a vaccine fatality."

When, in reality, I have read cases involving parents who were unable to file a report with VAERS, though they tenaciously fought to do so, because the physicians directly involved with their child's care refused to sign off on the forms. So, either these parents are lying about the process or VAERS adds no vaccine injury to the database absent the affirmation of at least one or more licensed, medical professionals.

It's pretty amazing to see educated, otherwise intelligent people willing to say, without hesitation, that vaccines pose a health risk to children so small as to be statistically meaningless, and in the very next breath say that it is impossible to determine a reliable rate of pediatric vaccine injury.

And it's all about having a dog in the fight. Because we see absolutely no significant debate over, for example, the number of adverse reactions and deaths due to peanut allergy per year. But with vaccines, according to the vaccine injury deniers, the data is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.

And let's not forget... the fact that this data is so "hard to shake out" is the evidence that proves how safe vaccines actually are.
 
More than $2.8 billion in compensation suggest at least a "mildly" cautious approach to the subject. They aren't giving out that kind of bank on the possibility that the vaccine caused adverse affects.

I'm honestly more concerned by the fact that vaccine manufacturer's are immune, pardon the pun, to lawsuits.

2.8 billion (if that is the number, I really don't know) most likely represents only a fraction of what might have been paid out if the manufacturer's were actually accountable for their products... after all, that is why the vaccine court was established, because vaccine makers were being sued too much!
 
Either through ignorance or conscious deceit folks like Box and SR try and portray a VAERS report as if it's something any random, lay joe can independently type up and successfully submit.

Troll: "My child died from an MMR vaccine." VAERS: "Your report has been added to the database as a vaccine fatality."

Actually, I am pretty sure it CAN work that way.

Now, I don't know who in the heck would be doing such a thing, other than trolls trying to "prove" VAERS numbers are inaccurate. Even if this does happen, to believe that it happens on a regular enough basis that it has an impact on the VAERS data is laughable.


When, in reality, I have read cases involving parents who were unable to file a report with VAERS, though they tenaciously fought to do so, because the physicians directly involved with their child's care refused to sign off on the forms. So, either these parents are lying about the process or VAERS adds no vaccine injury to the database absent the affirmation of at least one or more licensed, medical professionals.


I am pretty sure you don't need a doctor to sign off on it...


It's pretty amazing to see educated, otherwise intelligent people willing to say, without hesitation, that vaccines pose a health risk to children so small as to be statistically meaningless, and in the very next breath say that it is impossible to determine a reliable rate of pediatric vaccine injury.

Well, vaccine apologists will argue that the "reliable rate" is established through clinical trials and post-licensure study. These are useful to a point, however, a "one size fits all strategy" is flawed from the outset and there appears to be a culture of protecting public confidence in vaccination which trumps an individual's wellbeing.

And if you try to discuss the flaws in these systems (vaccine study and safety) you will generally be waived off and/or called a lot of nasty things...there does seem to be a certain amount of willful ignorance in play.

And it's all about having a dog in the fight. Because we see absolutely no significant debate over, for example, the number of adverse reactions and deaths due to peanut allergy per year. But with vaccines, according to the vaccine injury deniers, the data is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.

I share your frustration, and I do think bias and conflicts of interest play a part in the problem.

And let's not forget... the fact that this data is so "hard to shake out" is the evidence that proves how safe vaccines actually are.

And this is the problem that I have yet to get a satisfactory answer for...
 
The Anti-Vaccine Generation: How Movement Against Shots Got Its Start
Mistrust and misinformation give a shot in the arm to measles vaccine naysayers.

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Measles under the microscope: The airborne disease is one of the most infectious known.

You could call New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Kentucky Senator Rand Paul members of the "vax generation."

Born in 1962 and 1963, respectively, they were in grade school when the newly developed measles vaccine became the life-saving advance that protected millions from a highly contagious childhood disease. Though not as scary as polio, it was potent enough to strike four million kids, hospitalize 48,000 of them with complications, and kill more than 400 every year.

That both men stoked an anti-vax movement this week by suggesting in the middle of a national measles outbreak that parents should be allowed to choose whether to vaccinate their children speaks to a generational shift in thinking about science and politics. Parents should have "some measure of choice" in vaccinating their children, Christie told a reporter, while Paul called the decision not to vaccinate "an issue of freedom."

Even though both men quickly revised their remarks in the uproar that followed—and Paul was photographed getting vaccinated for hepatitis A—their comments moved the topic of vaccine safety out of the fringes and firmly into the arena of presidential politics. Both men are considering running for the Republican nomination in 2016.

Their remarks—and the broader vaccination debate that's followed the measles outbreak that began in California in December—have been a wake-up call for many doctors and scientists who work on the front lines of infectious disease outbreaks. They have watched with growing unease as the anti-vaccination movement has gained voice.

"Chris Christie has a state law requiring car seats for children," says Paul Offit, a University of Pennsylvania pediatrics professor and director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. "Why isn't that a matter of parental choice? This is a dangerous game to play."

Misinformation and Mistrust

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William Schaffner, shown here speaking to the National Press Club in Washington in 2006, says vaccination programs have been so successful that Americans no longer fear measles.

How childhood immunization—once a given—crossed the divide from breakthrough science to public policy debate in the space of 50 years is a complicated picture. But it is rooted in distrust of government and science.

Stir together an even more intense distrust of Big Pharma—the multinational pharmaceutical companies that manufacture vaccines—the Internet as an incubator for misinformation like the now-discredited theories linking vaccines to autism, and celebrity activism that turns small causes into bigger ones.

Then add the rise of citizen science-which has activists doing their own research-and grassroots movements focused on holistic lifestyles, and you are left with the distilled essence of parents who are skeptical and politicians who see opportunity.

But it's unlikely these elements would have come together and flourished if Americans had not become so utterly unfamiliar with the diseases of Christie's and Paul's childhoods.

"We have become prisoners of our own success," says William Schaffner, who chairs the department of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. "Nobody knows what measles is.

"We now have two generations who haven't seen measles," he says. "The mothers were vaccinated. They never saw measles. Their mothers—the grandmothers—barely saw measles themselves. So the grandmother has no influence. The mother is clueless and so the child goes unvaccinated."

A few years ago, Schaffner was invited to speak to a group of 20 young mothers who had reservations about vaccine safety. His task was to educate, not argue, so he began by talking about polio and the vaccine developed in 1954 that practically eradicated it. He had barely begun speaking when one mother, looking confused, blurted out: "Why are you now talking about shirts?"

"She was bright, college educated, computer savvy, and she'd never encountered the concept of polio. She instead mixed it up with Ralph Lauren," Schaffner says. "It's a bit humorous, a bit tragic, and illustrative of the problem today."

A Natural History of Measles

Schaffner calls measles "the most infectious disease doctors know." It's an airborne illness, transmitted with stunning efficiency when an infected person exhales. Unlike the flu, which requires close proximity for transmission, measles can be spread over time and distance.

"An infected person can walk into a room and leave the room, and a susceptible person can walk into the same room an hour or two hours later and breathe in the residual air in the room and become infected," Schaffner says.

In the early part of the 20th century, measles was so common it was considered a rite of childhood. But it was not innocuous. Not only could it be fatal, complications included encephalitis. After the vaccine was licensed in 1963, some 19 million children were immunized over the next dozen years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

By 2000, the CDC declared measles eradicated in the United States. By 2011, the Pan American Health Organization announced that measles had been eliminated from Latin America.

"Talk about stunning," Schaffner says. "We have no measles upriver on the Amazon. None in Chile, Nicaragua, Mexico. The only country that now has measles transmission in the Western Hemisphere is the U.S.

"You see on the Internet [people] worrying about illegal immigrants causing the outbreak we're seeing now," he says. "Hey, they're doing a better job than we are. We have these upper-middle-class parents of means in the U.S. who have decided they don't want to vaccinate their kids."


http://news.nationalgeographic.com/...disney-outbreak-polio-health-science-infocus/
 
Vaccine phobia and the autism ‘epidemic’
February 10, 2015

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The current controversy over whether parents should be forced to have their children vaccinated for measles is one of the painful signs of our times.

Measles was virtually wiped out in the United States, years ago. Why the resurgence of this disease now?

The short answer is that false claims, based on other false claims, led many parents to stop getting their children vaccinated against measles.

The key false claim was that the vaccine for measles caused an increase in autism. This claim was made in 1998 by a doctor writing in a distinguished British medical journal, so it is understandable that many parents took it seriously, and did not want to run the risk of having their child become autistic.

Fortunately, others took the claim seriously in a very different sense. They did massive studies involving half a million children in Denmark and 2 million children in Sweden.

These studies showed that there was no higher incidence of autism among children who had been vaccinated than among children who had not been vaccinated.

Incidentally, the “evidence” on which the original claim that vaccines caused autism was based was just 12 children. But the campaign to convince the public was a masterpiece of propaganda.

The story line was that pharmaceutical companies that produced the vaccine were callously risking and sacrificing helpless children in pursuit of profit.

This is the kind of dramatic stuff the media love. It never seemed to occur to the media that lawyers who were suing pharmaceutical companies had a vested interest in this story line that the media fed to the public.

Unfortunately, it takes time to run careful scientific studies, involving vast numbers of children in different countries. That allowed the propaganda against vaccines to go on for years.

Eventually, however, the results of the studies so completely discredited the claim that the measles vaccine caused autism that the medical journal that had published the article publicly repudiated it. The doctor who wrote the article had his license revoked.

By this time, however, there was a whole anti-vaccine movement, and crusading movements are seldom stopped by facts.

This was not the only false claim involved. What made that claim seem plausible was a highly publicized increase in the number of children diagnosed as being autistic or being “on the autism spectrum.”

What was not so widely publicized was that the definition of “autism” had expanded over the years to include children who would never have been called autistic by the standards set up when autism was defined by its discoverer, Professor Leo Kanner of the Johns Hopkins medical school, back in 1943.

Professor Kanner fought against the expansion of the definition of autism but, after his death, the definition continued to expand — and the number of children who met the expanded definition greatly increased.

There were financial incentives for this expansion. Late-talking children, for example, could get government programs to pay for their treatment if they were designated as autistic or on the autism spectrum.

Despite headlines and hysteria about skyrocketing numbers of children diagnosed as autistic, the number of children who meet the original definition of autism has been relatively stable in recent years, at about one quarter of 1 percent of all children, according to Professor Stephen Camarata of the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, in his recent book, “Late-Talking Children.”

It may be significant that the number of children regarded as mentally retarded has fallen by numbers similar to the rise in the number of children regarded as autistic.

According to Professor Camarata, “This too suggests that changes in definitions and in diagnostic practices are contributing to the perceived ‘epidemic’ of autism.”

Does this mean that vaccines are safe? In a categorical sense, nothing on the face of the Earth is 100 percent safe — including going unvaccinated. But the claim that vaccines cause autism has been discredited by evidence.

Some say the decision to vaccinate or not should be the parents’ choice. That would be fine if their child would live isolated from other children. But that is impossible.

http://nypost.com/2015/02/10/vaccine-phobia-and-the-autism-epidemic/
 
Tough Mississippi Laws Protect State Against Measles

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The measles outbreak that started in Disneyland last month has now affected at least 130 people in 17 states and Washington, D.C., according to the CDC, but has yet to take hold in Mississippi.

"I'm grateful, really grateful that we haven't had any (cases of the measles) and, I'm hoping that it can continue," said Vickie Kendrick, a mom who was at a local clinic.

Last year, 99.7 percent of kindergartners in Mississippi were listed as "fully vaccinated"
 
There is something very suspicious about this measles outbreak, seems to be the new bird flu, swine flu, ebola, anthrax, etc... there are at least two sides to every "coin"

Here's an article raising some questions about the situation

https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2015/02/13/measles-outbreak-13-reasons-to-reject-the-hype/

Yeah, the comparison between that "article" and the others in this thread should spell things out for anyone that cares about forming a rational, objective and informed opinion.
"Power Outside The Matrix" indeed...
 
Yeah, the comparison between that "article" and the others in this thread should spell things out for anyone that cares about forming a rational, objective and informed opinion.
"Power Outside The Matrix" indeed...

At least it's not aliens or Illuminati.
 
At least it's not aliens or Illuminati.

Nah, I usually find that stuff way more entertaining than the usual: Wake up! Stop taking the blue pill. You're all sheep. I'm one of the special few that can see how things "really are". etc etc.
I've got the audio book of the Illuminatus! trilogy on random in my MP3 player for whenever I'm riding the bike. Love it.
 
California vaccine exemption bill faces crucial first test on Wednesday
04/05/2015 04:25:26 PM PDT

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On Wednesday, a controversial bill proposed by three state lawmakers to abolish all vaccine exemptions in the Golden State -- except for medical reasons -- begins an uphill journey through the Legislature.

Senate Bill 277, co-authored by Sen. Richard Pan, a pediatrician, would repeal the state's personal belief exemption and require that only children who have been immunized for diseases such as measles and whooping cough be admitted to a school in California.

The legislation would also require schools to notify parents of immunizations rates at their children's schools.

The nine-member Senate Health Committee is only the first legislative panel required to vote on the bill. If it passes there, it must make its way in the coming weeks through the Senate education, judiciary and appropriations committees, then wind its way through committees in the state Assembly. Ultimately it must clear both Democratic-controlled chambers and be signed by Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown.

EARLY POLL OF SENATE HEALTH COMMITTEE ON SB 277

Chairman Ed Hernandez, D-West Covina: undecided
Vice Chair Janet Nguyen, R-Garden Grove: undecided
Isadore Hall III, D-South Bay: undecided
Holly Mitchell, D-Los Angeles: yes
Bill Monning, D-Carmel: leaning yes
Jim Nielsen, R-Gerber: no
Richard Pan, D-Sacramento: yes
Richard Roth, D-Riverside: undecided
Lois Wolk, D-Davis: yes
Source: California Senate offices

http://www.mercurynews.com/health/c...ccine-exemption-bill-faces-crucial-first-test
 
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The so-called happiest place on Earth is the source of a continuous outbreak of a rare but potentially serious disease.

A measles outbreak began at Disneyland in Anaheim, California, when an infected person visited the park in December. It has now infected at least 20 people in three different states, with two new cases reported in Orange County on Friday, according to the Los Angeles Times. As the airborne disease spreads, so too does the debate about the need for vaccinations in America.

While the virus with flu-like symptoms is still common in many parts of the world, measles was declared eliminated from the United States in 2000, owing to a highly effective vaccination program. But the formerly eradicated disease is now increasingly on the rise in the U.S., with a record number of more than 610 cases reported last year. That number is nearly triple the previous high in 2011, and the majority of those cases involve unvaccinated patients.

According to the Orange County Health Care Agency, half of the original six cases of Disneyland measles were contracted by unvaccinated children who were all old enough (at least four years old) to be vaccinated in two full doses. Of the three adults who initially contracted the disease, only one was fully vaccinated.
Those numbers are indicative of a larger trend in which many parents are choosing not to vaccinate their kids. While she
 
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