Immunizations for children

OK so first of all I hope that everyone in this forum can respect one another on such a hot topic, please don’t let this thread get out of hand  Secondly this really isn’t meaningless drivel, so hopefully people won’t take it as such. It was the only place on the forums I felt that I could post this topic.

So my wife and I are expecting our first child and we have come to the conclusion that we do not want to get him vaccinated for sure. We are still researching the eye ointment and we are opposed to the vitamin K shot.

My questions for all of you are:

1. Have you had unvaccinated children and what were your challenges and successes
2. Do you have suggestions on overcoming those challenges
3. Overall how healthy have your unvaccinated children been compared to those who were vaccinated.


Thanks everyone for your serious consideration for this serious topic.

Well, I feel an ulcer building just reading it!

First, I know of a woman with a chatty three year old.  Chatty, chatty, chatty ....  bla, bla, bla all day long ....  And she took him in to get vaccinated.  He stopped talking.  He didn't speak for a year and a half.  He was diagnosed with autism.  As he got older he started to come around more. 

I have run into lots of mothers telling the same story. 

There are mountains of studies that say that the vaccinations are safe and problems from vaccinations are anecdotal and not statistically relevant.  And I just cannot help but think the studies are shenanigans.  Somebody, somewhere is up to no good and is somehow intentionally poisoning kids by the millions. 

There is way too much that I don't know in this space.  But my spidey sense is tingling.  A hundred years from now, history books might have some really scary stuff to say about these "vaccinations". 

Good luck.

I didn't vaccinate mine. 

I had problems with my doctor in the UK, who gave me a stern talking to about how their pay was cut if they fell below a certain percentage of vaccinated children. 

When I emigrated to Portugal and started sending my son to the local school, I soon ran across the fact that all children in government run schools here *must* be vaccinated.  At least, I assume it's they must - what is written and what people believe and what people do are three potentially very different things, but I was assured that vaccinations were compulsory for all school children.  It was yet another reason to pull him out and home-school him. 

Healthwise, he has a touch of asthma which mostly only manifests if he has a cold and/or is exposed to cigarette smoke, and he was allergic to cow's milk for about 12 years.  Other than that, he's fine.  He's had his fair share of 'kid's diseases' like chicken pox, but on the whole I'd say he was healthier than most other kids.  He certainly seems better adjusted than most kids his age, but that might be the homeschooling.  I'm completely batty myself, so it's not my influence per se.

I've heard, but don't have any opinion on it one way or another, that the reason kid's seem to become autistic just after the vaccinations is that autism only becomes apparent just after the age most kids are vaccinated.  But like I said, I'm not convinced of that, though there could be some truth in it. 

If I had another child, I wouldn't vaccinate.  But then, as virtually every other child in Portugal *is* vaccinated, I'd say that it was pretty safe for me to do that. 

Thanks Paul No ulcers please!

Burra
Thanks for your feedback. Usually kids who have asthma and arent vaccinated are the ones who had a bout with Pertussis I believe, but Im glad to hear he is healthy. Just curious about your last statement...are you saying that you would get them vaccinated if the other kids in Portugal were not?

It would certainly seriously influence my decision on whether or not to vaccinate.  With all the other kids vaccinated, I really can't see that there's much chance of my own kid getting any disease that the others are vaccinated against.  But if hardly any of them were, I'd have to have a good think about what diseases were likely to appear and potentially infect my own and then weigh up the risk factors. 

I just googled Pertussis - it's what I call whooping cough.  No, he never had that, but there is a strong family history of allergies, so I wasn't too surprised when he developed asthma.  It never really bothered him, as it *only* caused problems when he had a cold or got breathed on by a smoker.  Despite the doctors attempting to make him take daily medication for it, I did a bit of research and he only takes medication if we think he needs it.  He has one  of those tube things he blows into to measure his lung capacity, and if he thinks he might have a bit of a cold he checks his capacity and if it's significantly less than normal he takes a puff of preventative medication.  For the last five years that's all he's ever needed to do. 

Thats a great start, Im sure its heart breaking to see him go through that. Thanks again for your feedback.

3 seems to be a really statistically meaningless question.

The obvious answer is that they are at least as healthy as the rest of the kids...
unless they happen to get exposed to one of the life-threatening diseases the other kids won't get.

Incidentally, this subject is a really interesting analogue to the Tragedy of the Commons.

If vaccines make normal children autistic then they make exactly as many autistic children normal, because the demographic analysis shows the same level of autism in vaccinated and unvaccinated children.

If you were to take away the vaccines more children would be dead than are currently autistic.
If you were to take away the vaccines more children would have permanent physical impairment than are currently autistic.
If you were to take away the vaccines more children would have permanent profound mental impairment than are currently autistic.
If you were to take away the vaccines the lost time in schools for children who recover would put every child at a greater disadvantage mentally than the vast majority of autistic children.

It's a horrible thing to say, but if you compare a hypothetical society where we do not vaccinate children and a hypothetical society where an evil shadow government executes all the autistic children at age five, the society with the evil government will have less parental anguish, less mental disability, less physical disability, and a higher percentage of children born will grow to be healthy adults. In short the society with the evil inhumane shadow government would be better and have less suffering in nearly every measurable way.

Tragedy of the commons is exactly the problem. However there is one strong disjunction, that is that if everyone gets vaccinated then you don't need to vaccinate any more. If not for the antivaccination movement the vaccine schedule for the globe would be sitting at a quarter of what it is now. Polio? would be gone. Hep b? would be gone. Hep a? would be gone.  Diptheria? would be gone. Rotavirus? would be gone. MMR? would have died decades ago. Haemopholous influenae? would be gone. In 75 years Veracella zoster would be gone.

The only reason you don't have to choose between getting small pox or getting vaccinated now is that the health officials at the WHO told the antivaccers to shut it and quarentined them when they got sick and vaccinated everyone else.

The only only only study that every showed any kind of link between vaccines and autism was done on twelve children (12!) and the researcher who found it had to invent a new disease to explain the pathologist reports coming back normal and he received more than $100,000 from a lawyer to reach those conclusions (i.e. the lawyer made the claim in court then paid him then he did research that found the result) and he was selling a competing vaccine, so it's a bit like a study from papsy coming out that claims that drinking coke will make your children bleed from the eyes.

There is a lot going on in the life of a 2-3 year old, and that is the age when most are diagnosed, so it is literally impossible in any one case to pin anything on the vaccination with out doing a study, and when we do those studies with out fail they come back saying that there is no link (with the one exception, where in the researcher previously mentioned had his license revoked for ethics violations).

ETA: Quackwatch
&
Bull's hit

We have raised our family. We vaccinated back then. We recognize that todays vaccines may be different from those of 20 - 30 years ago, but not necessarily worse. I do want our grandchildren to be vaccinated. I firmly believe there is more danger from the diseases that vaccination can prevent than any dangers from the vaccines.

Today we can identify and name many problems that we never recognized in past decades. 

I believe many of todays issues stem more from what we eat and drink. Do that right and many health problems would not be a factor, in my opinion.


I like Penn & Teller

I've had all my shots and participated in an experimental vaccine study. I am not autistic, and aside from some respiratory allergies (my mom is a smoker) I have no chronic health complaints. My sister has had all her shots, too, and then some since she's a public school teacher. She is also not autistic and has no chronic health complaints.

My uncle had polio as a kid. He's permanently brain damaged. The polio vaccine was developed shortly after it could have prevented his sickness.

I'm for vaccination. Emerson White's post covered my reasons.
I don't know the laws where you are, but here your child must be vaccinated before being accepted into nearly all preschools.

I don't have children of my own, but I am familiar with some families who have never vaccinated their children and the ages range from less than 2 years to over 18 years old. None of them have had any major health issues due to not having vaccines in their earlier years.

I believe in looking at things with reason and logic and so I would suggest the following thoughts to be considered before making uninformed decisions:

* Always check the source of the information and don't take anything to be truth online simply because it looks informative, medical or other fronts. This is not just for those against vaccines, but also for doctors and health people pushing for vaccines as well!

* Look at the history of the diseases versus the vaccines. In almost every case you will find that there was a very big reduction in the number of cases/deaths even before the vaccine was introduced.  The most common factor was the introduction of effective antibiotics that help stop the disease. One example can be seen at:

http://www.healthsentinel.com/joomla/images/stories/graphs/us-measles.jpg

There are other similar statistical trends for other commonly vaccinated diseases. The question then is raised, if the antibiotics are the major factor, why have the vaccines at all?!

* Other inconsistencies have appeared recently that make me question the whole vaccine idea. The first one is the amount of mercury in the vaccines (at least USA ones) are far more than a baby should have. According to health details, the baby should weigh over 200 pounds for that amount to be safe.

Another point that makes me concerned is that 20 years ago the tetanus vaccination was a single shot that would last for approximately 10 years. Now, however, even though technology is advancing in leaps and bounds they require you to have 3 injections over a number of months (Americas only I believe?). Why do they now require 3 when 1 injection used to be enough?!

Just a few things to ponder and as a disclaimer, I was vaccinated with the few basic ones available at the time, but I would seriously reconsider giving a child a vaccination today.

The deaths decreased as we got better at keeping people alive, however the permanent disabilities only rose.

The biggest problem with not getting vaccinated is not getting the disease, it's passing it on. There is something called herd immunity, and parents who do not vaccinate (or cannot vaccinate) their children are taking advantage of the vaccinations other parents get for their children. Those 9 babies who died long agonizing deaths in excruciating pain in California this summer, yes babies who died excruciating torturous deaths) did so not because their parents didn't get them vaccinated against pertussis, but rather because other parents did not have their children vaccinated, and the babies got sick and died agonizing deaths because they were too young to be protected.

I had the misfortune of seeing an infant with pertussis come in from one of the villages a few summers ago, it fortunately lived, but some pilot who wasn't vaccinated up to date flew out with a bit of a cough and because of that a baby was left struggling for life for more than a month in the neonatal ICU, I saw it at 10 days old, and it broke my heart.

The one common thread among the modern antivaccination movement is that they are very unfamiliar with infectious disease. Many of them know autism, but they don't know science (like how we test vaccines) and they don't know infectious diseases. What happens with our strong pressure to vaccinate is that vaccination rates sit just below heard immunity levels, so 85=90% of children will be vaccinated, and the rest will intermittently get the preventable diseases, and sometimes spread them to children who are too young or people who are otherwise sick and can't get properly vaccinated and seeing the occasional sick kid or baby dieing a tortuous death is enough to get all the parents in the area to vaccinate. So you basically get near complete exposure to vaccines but also exposure to illness. It's a stable state, with parents bouncing between the imaginary fears spread by the antivaccination crowds and the real fears of seeing their childrens friends near death, permanently disfigured and disabled, or sterilized, or mentally handicap. Of course the damage from the disease bouncing around in that small fraction is several orders of magnitude larger than the damage from the vaccine, and nothing compared to the damage from no disease and no vaccine which is what we would get if not for the anti-vax crowd working hard to keep these diseases alive.

Seeing that infant struggling really instilled strong feelings in me, just like seeing their autistic child slow down stays with parents, the difference is that I have the studies on my side, they have anecdotes.

Emerson White wrote:

The biggest problem with not getting vaccinated is not getting the disease, it's passing it on. There is something called herd immunity, and parents who do not vaccinate (or cannot vaccinate) their children are taking advantage of the vaccinations other parents get for their children. Those 9 babies who died long agonizing deaths in excruciating pain in California this summer, yes babies who died excruciating torturous deaths) did so not because their parents didn't get them vaccinated against pertussis, but rather because other parents did not have their children vaccinated, and the babies got sick and died agonizing deaths because they were too young to be protected.

Ive researched this event in CA, they had one this year and a few years back …pretty bad. I didn't see in the reports where the actual pertussis came from ,it only states that the babies did get it mostly because they were too young to be vaccinated as you said. I believe the age group was 6 months and under correct?  I am not a scientist or a doctor, but my personal belief is that you can never eradicate disease, so if you are vaccinated you can still carry the disease, your body just isn’t affected by it. This is even debatable seeing that some people who have been vaccinated end up with the disease. If there is some research on whether or not your body still carries the disease despite vaccination, I would like to look at it.

Pertussis is the most concerning disease to me, I know some people that had it as babies. Whatever your view is on vaccines, it truly is tragic to see these young ones die from it and any disease really.

Thanks everyone for your insight.

I should clarify:  the woman I referred to above, the kid was chatty, chatty, chatty on the way to get the shot.  Chatty, chatty, chatty the moments before the shot.  Then there is the shot.  Then there is not a peep for the rest of the day - nor for the following 18 months.  And the kid stopped doing all sorts of stuff. 

And I have run into other mom's that have reported the exact same thing.  Big transformation in their kid the moment they get the shot.  Permanent transformation.  For the worse.

I don't give a damn how many studies prove it is safe - I'm convinced that that the studies are fake.

And the anti-vaccine folks have their mountain of stats too.  Stuff that shows how the vaccines are about diseases that were on the way out anyway. 

And yes, I will admit that my knowledge in this space is slight.  And I have heard lots and lots of stuff about how the studies are right and the anecdotal stuff is crap.  And I've read a lot of stuff that supports the idea that the vaccines are crap.  And I've read some seriously crazy stuff about how the vaccines are loaded with stuff to use the american population as guinea pigs for all sorts of weird things. 

And this is where the ulcer gets started. 

Many people on these forums want to know what I think on a lot of topics.  And to those people I say, that for this topic:  I really don't know for sure - but I have a strong hunch that most of the vaccines are a bad idea.

If you look at the mortality rate for measles for instance in a less developed country you will notice that they were not falling. It's no surprise that dealths were fallings, but deaths are not infections. Polio infections were falling before the vaccine came out, but that's because we were putting people in jail over public swimming pools and erecting fences around ponds.

Who benefits from faking the studies? The pharmaceutical industry makes a lot more money off treatment then they could ever make off vaccination ($15 a head is nothing compared to hundreds of dollars a head off of treatment, which we use a lot of, which is how those mortality rates fell). Additionally there are a lot of people who are involved in these studies? How ,many tens of thousands of people are involved in this conspiracy? 15,000 people? 30,000 people? It's a whole lot if it's one. why are these thousands of people from diverse backgrounds all lying?

Not lets look at Autism, which spiked in the 90's. The spike did not follow any changes in vaccine schedule. The spike is not seen to be larger in fully vaccinated populations, and in fact is higher in populations like that of LA, which has very low vaccination rates (hence the slow tortuous deaths of those 9 babies). Europe had a vaccine schedule like our modern one years before we did, but lagged behind in the autism spike, the US lead them in spite of having fewer vaccinations. The MMR vaccine is the one most often blamed for autism, because it is given at around two years of age, when autism is often diagnosed, but that was in use for something like 20 years before the spike.

The truth is that the spike was proceeded not by any change in vaccination, nor diet, not environment, but by a broadening of the deffinition of autistic. Someone with aspergers 40 years ago was just weird, 15 years ago they started being 'autistic'. which is why 1` in 150 new borns will be diagnosed with autism, but also 1 in 150 50 year olds will be diagnosed with autism if they are looked at.


Yes you have anecdotes but anecdotes are literally the worst way to know anything. Do you haver video of this child from that whole day? How do you know they didn't devleop a bacterial infection and a sore throat? How do you know the friend remembers right? Human memory is extremely faulty stuff, we misremember things all the time, ever hear of the challenger study?


What is your proposed mechanism of action for this brain damage? Autistic people are missing connections in their brain, connections that haven;t got any specific receptors for the ingredients in vaccines, most of them are also missing huge chunks of DNA missing, iun every cell of their body, before they are born. Something else lies in how the brain develops itself. In the womb the brain cells have biochemical tags to help themselves organize, but before they are born those tags disappear. Many different kinds of cells become litarally the same kind of cell (yes in autistic children this happens too) so in order to preferentially kill off those cells you would need to kill off to make them autistic you have to get to the child before that happens, most often before birth.

Even if vaccines do cause autism, the mental damage from measles (which is higher with a higher survival rate) alone is enough to make it look like childs play.

I've not been diagnosed, but I'm probably sitting on the Autism spectrum myself, and would be one of those 1 in 150, but I'm way more with it than some one who has had their brain friend with a fever of 108 which is one of those lovely things you have to look forward to with many cases of measles.

We were so close to being done with polio forever, it was in about 2000 people in africa at one point, had we vaccinated those last two countries completely 15 years ago then no one would need a polio vaccine ever again. MMR is a similar story, if the antivaccinationists shut up for two decades then no one would ever need an MMR vaccine ever again. Antivaccinationists are the ones who are responsible for us needing so many vaccines. complete coverage once would solve the problem forever. Weather they are right about vaccines causing autism or they are wrong about it the answer is still the same, vaccinate completely Autism is small potatoes compared to these diseases.

However they have only anecdotes, and statistics that don;t prove the case they are trying to make. It doesn't matter how high you pile the bad evidence, it will never rival the good evidence for quality.

Edit: Rob, Pertussis is an immunological trickster, the vaccine is only effective for a few years for an infant or small child, and a decade for an adult. The infections picked up in hospitals are predominantly from adolescents, who are strong enough to carry the disease around with them for a couple of weeks with out being too sick to function.

The cough is a result of the a/5b toxin leading to a buildup of cAPM in the cells of the lung tissue and sticks around for months after the organism is dead, for the most part you have to be young to have a really strong cough when you still have the organism. When you are fully vaccinated the disease never takes off, and you never have it long enough to get the bad cough, or to be likely to spread it to someone else (a few dozen bacteria per person for a few hours, you would have to perform CPR to pass it on) but as time goes on the immunity wears off and the potential infection runs for a bit longer, and a bit longer, until you have a full blown infection. In all cases for big people the worst cough comes after the organism is gone, and is just a reflection of how big the infection was (and your chances of having passed it on). The vaccine only prevents the cough by keeping the infection small, and there for less likely to have passed on.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuvn-vp5InE A you tube clip doesn't quite cover it, of course, because instead of seeing the child cough for days you see a few seconds of it.

Pouletic wrote:
3 seems to be a really statistically meaningless question.

The obvious answer is that they are at least as healthy as the rest of the kids...
unless they happen to get exposed to one of the life-threatening diseases the other kids won't get.

Incidentally, this subject is a really interesting analogue to the Tragedy of the Commons.

You are right, the could be at least as healthy as the other kids…Im more interested in how much more healthy they are than the other kids. Kids, whether or not they are vaccinated get sick, to what degree they get sick is very relevant.

paul wheaton wrote:
but I have a strong hunch that most of the vaccines are a bad idea.

http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/recs/schedules/child-schedule.htm Do you know which ones you'd like to have taken out?

[size=3pt][s]I'm going to suggest an exercise. Lets make up some numbers, I'll be really geneours. Lets take the MMR vaccine and say that MMR together accounts for frying the brain 1 child in 2000 (extremely low estimate) and that that is all it does (it's not) and that there will be 2 billion people born every 25 years, all on the same day and a percentage can be vaccinated. Now lets say that 1 in 1000 get autism from the vaccines (again, an extremely generously number on my part) (more reasonable numbers are 1 in 100 and zero respectively).

Now vaccinate a portion of the population, say half, so that's some number damaged from vaccines, and then some number damaged from the diseases. we could say that each person lives 100 years and square the portion of unvaccinated uninfected people every 25 years to get sick, but it'd be easier to just say half of all unvaccinated people even get sick. Now do the same thing again with the next generation, another group damaged damaged. and again in the next generation, again some number damaged, then once more to round out the century.

Now I'll take my carbon copy universe and vaccinate everyone in one generation once, heck I'll toss you a freeby and say that 2 million people object and I, being a despot as I am, have them bashed in the skulls and damaged that way, then vaccinated. The next generation there are no vaccines because there is no illness.

Please crunch the numbers, at the end of the first century who's universe has more damaged brains in it?

Edit: I was too generous with the numbers, I had run my math at 125 years.[/s][/size]

I'm just going to write a spread sheet and load it up to google and stick it in here.

I'm torn on mandatory vaccinations and would proceed with caution on either accepting the norm or bucking the system.
A conspiracy of a few can and if properly managed sway thousands. The nature of a conspiracy is that it is unknown to many but known to those who will profit from or be protected from others finding out. Nicotine in cigarettes ring any bells?
I see the benefit of some vaccines and am glad that they exist.
Thalidomide, estrogen therapy, and I'm sure we can develop a long list of what was thought to be a good idea once is now discovered to be a bad idea.
My other half began osteoporosis treatment recently and the side effects were so horrendous that she now refuses what her doctor recomends and has begun to investigate other avenues of prevention.
Any treatment or suggested therapy should not be taken as gospel.
Broadening of  definitions have gone in favor of the pharmaceutical companies as well lowering of cholesterol levels treatment points as an example.
Procede with caution weigh the risks involved and develop your decision.
Congratulations on your first. Trust me not everyone is going to agree all of your child rearing decisions.

Thanks!

We are very excited for the little guy and yes I imagine most people wont agree with most of our decisions. What is a shame is that I have had friends be really hurtful in their response...I guess the saying is true, with friends like who needs enemies!

It's alarming to me how many parents seem to be saying they would rather see their child die from an infectious disease than be autistic. Autistic kids and adults don't necessarily suffer from autism as much as they suffer from social prejudice about autism. Profoundly autistic people who are very smart but lack the ability to communicate are abused in mental institutions because non-autistic people think they are things and not people. Given a communication assistive device, these folks generally show themselves to be very intelligent and capable. They may need help with motor control, and they may have very different sensory perception. Or they might just be mildly socially disconnected. These are lives worth living, and worth supporting in a better way than we now do.

We have to stop acting like people with autism are living some kind of fate worse than death; that's prejudicial. It's like saying you'd rather have an abortion than risk having a gay kid. That's to say you would hate your child if they were autistic or gay.

If it were a case of choosing between risking a life-threatening infectious disease and risking developing an autism-spectrum condition, I'd go with autism. As it happens, there's no evidence that supports that vaccines cause autism in any form. I know people with autism who haven't received vaccinations, too; where do you suppose they got it? My guess is there have been people with autism since there have been people, but in the past a lot fewer of them lived to adulthood, and a lot of the ones who did were either shunned or shamans. Now we've medicalized it. While more autistic people are living to adulthood, and understanding the differences between the way autistic people and non-autistic people perceive sensory input has been very helpful in making accommodations to support autistic people, I don't know that naming autism a pathological condition has resulted in any improvement in the lives of autistic people.

This is not to say that vaccines can't be made safer. To the extent that there are toxic chemicals in some of them, yes, they can and should be.

Finally, it amazes me that the same people who support taking a minuscule dose of a toxic chemical to improve their body's general resistance if it is called homeopathy will not support taking a minuscule dose of a biological agent to improve their body's specific resistance if it is called a vaccine. I don't understand it. Vaccines are basic homeopathy at its most demonstrably effective.

Emerson,
One of those 2 million children was mine and miraculously he might never have contracted a childhood disease. He never would have been damaged had you not stepped in. Yet he is damaged now because of a mandated treatment. I should have been able to have a say.
I'm not against all vaccines but I am against omniscient control.

Robert Ray wrote:
Emerson,
One of those 2 million children was mine and miraculously he might never have contracted a childhood disease. He never would have been damaged had you not stepped in. Yet he is damaged now because of a mandated treatment. I should have been able to have a say.
I'm not against all vaccines but I am against omniscient control.

Oh yeah, we know we are going to put some children off the path of health and onto the path of disease. I think the actual number shifted down vs number we shift up is on the order of 1:10,000. When ever you make broad policy decisions you have to go with a utilitarian/ consequentialist ethical frame work, there's just no way to take it on a case by case basis.

I'm writing a paper right now, but I'll come back and write up a spreadsheet on the issue later today.

Kerrick wrote:

Finally, it amazes me that the same people who support taking a minuscule dose of a toxic chemical to improve their body's general resistance if it is called homeopathy will not support taking a minuscule dose of a biological agent to improve their body's specific resistance if it is called a vaccine. I don't understand it. Vaccines are basic homeopathy at its most demonstrably effective.

I agree completely about the prejudice when it comes to anything really. For the records my decisions weren’t based on autism at all.

I don’t know much about homeopathy, but Im going to guess that the main differences are:

a. the small dosage from a homeopath is alive(I assume in most cases)
b. it is introduced to the immune system the way it would naturally, which is not the bloodstream

again, I don’t know much about the subject, that is just my hunch. Im actually reading a book right now from a lady who is a mother, pediatrician/MD and a licensed homeopath. She says a lot about the differences in approaches between modern medicine and traditional homeopathy.

And it doesn't matter until it's your case.
Let's not hijack Rob's thoughtful and personal consequential inquiry.

And the thread is just too hot, and people are presenting stuff without giving enough space for others to have an alternate position.

I'm locking the thread.