"Vaccines don't save lives"

[Something Amyss]

True, but then you can feel happy that their lifespan is likely to be considerably shorter than people with a functioning brain.

I don't know. The non-seatbelt wearers I know tend to beat the odds.

 

[BiscuitTrouser]

But yeah, I took a look at a lot of numbers, mostly in America, and cancer rates are up for everyone. Breast cancer in women under 50 was at a record recently. For middle aged men, it's testicular or GI cancers, bowel/colon/stomach, etc. It has nothing to do with longevity as a risk factor and more people living longer when the people getting more cancer are middle aged, young adults and children as well.

Thats weird because the UK graph clearly shows cancer rate only up for the elderly, which we expect with higher age.

Heres the science behind it that DOES explain why a higher life expectancy will see more incidences of cancer, possibly much higher than the increase in life expectancy:

Spoiler

The "Natural life span" of all creatures tends to related to the decrease in telomere length over time as that organisms cells divide. Every division shortens them somewhat. The shorter they get the higher the chance of an error,with such errors causing cancer. Even if a person is killed by nothing else cancer is 100% inevitable if they are kept alive by other means because telomeres shorten to the point where cells cannot divide successfully if at all. The rate of error increase exponentially from the point where the telomere is short enough to start causing problems in division, so an increase in 2 years of our life span from other factors being removed will funnel more people into dying from the single inevitable death relating to their hardwired telomere length, exponentially so because these people will have very short telomeres. Some organisms such as Turritopsis Nutricula, a jellyfish, can lengthen their telomeres again using telomerase and are biologically immortal. Sadly we cannot meaning that you can be 100% sure that if nothing else gets to you first cancer definitely biologically will. The longer our life expectancy the more of us are claimed by our genetics. Its basically the stop gap for anyone who survives the other things trying to kill you on our planet. Which is why id expect to see MASSIVE increases of cancer if those other things are reduced.

So since the UK and the US both vaccinate, but we see the expected increase and you dont surely that shows vaccines are not to blame. Or if it is vaccines its ONLY your vaccines. No matter what its something youre specifically doing and we are not. So it cant be vaccines in general since our nation demonstrates we use them without an increase in cancer.

Or, and this is a little far fetched, vaccines DO cause cancer but here in the UK we have been preventing cancer by removing factors at the same rate its increasing from vaccines meaning we cant pick it up. Thats a bit of a reach though.

As a future (hopefully) doctor i dont trust pharmaceutical companies as far as i can throw them. I reccomend Ben Goldacres bad pharma. It really opened my eyes to the depths companies go to save their asses. I cannot praise Ben Goldacre high enough. He is my hero as a physician. He mixes real skepticism with research and doesnt decend into tin foil hatness at all. With that said in the UK at least the stats show vaccines are pretty damn safe since our cancer is fairly level. At least what we are using. Cant speak for the US of A. Maybe you should start using our vaccines. And if you are using them you should fix whatever else is causing the problem.

 

[xDarc]

Say, do you ever notice that you make a lot of claims while at the same time giving no actual sources for them?

Do you ever notice how many people blindly attack any time I say anything? I'm 31 years old, I have better things to do than to provide sources for someone who would argue with me if I said the grass is green.

 

[Lieju]

My sister (who is a psychologist) works with autistic kids and she has to deal with parents blaming vaccines all the time.
I guess it's a relief to have something to blame and fight against, to believe that the reason their kids are the way they are is because of the doctors and Big Pharma being negligent or downright evil.

 

[Quaxar]

Say, do you ever notice that you make a lot of claims while at the same time giving no actual sources for them?

Do you ever notice how many people blindly attack any time I say anything? I'm 31 years old, I have better things to do than to provide sources for someone who would argue with me if I said the grass is green.

I do, but just maybe could that be because you already start off with faulty arguments like in this thread? Or because more often than not your opinion is a minority in this forum so you're naturally a target for quotes?

If you have better things to do than back up claims you're making then why bother making them at all? You know damn well that you're not gonna incite a reasonable discussion when you start off saying cancer and vaccination rates are correlated or provide a greatly exaggerated summary that hugely favores your side of a paper without ever showing the actual source to anyone. I don't dispute that some people like to just attack your posts for the unsourced theories they sometimes are but when you start off (and continue) like that no wonder your inbox gets heavy.

Surely you'd have a much better discussion if you provided more to your posts that could actually convince others of your points... either that or you could be proven wrong more easily and wouldn't that be the best outcome anyway? Because if you want to tell me you don't want to be proven wrong that vaccines lead to cancer you should seriously rethink your position. Basically, if you source your statements you can not lose!

This is getting way off topic though.

 

[f1r2a3n4k5]

Even the title of this thread is misleading. I don't think there's anyone who really believes vaccines don't work, but there have been recalls, there have been deaths, they are not 100% safe; nothing is. But how safe are they? To even to call that into question, it's just a dog pile of people attacking. I'm not going to deal with that.

It's because people are sick of the attack.

One side has facts. The other side has.... well, I'm not sure.

I'd be ENTIRELY willing to read a study which demonstrated that vaccines could be significantly linked to some illness. ENTIRELY. That would be breaking news. See what it did for that Lancet writer's fame (until it was debunked).

One can't just take two variables and say they are linked. As global temperature increases, there are less pirates! Common sense tells us that's nonsense.

Now, if there was a study which suggested that there was a statistically significant difference in... say, the testicular tissue in vaccinated and non-vaccinated individuals. I'd look into it. Other researchers would look into it. It would open up a new field of study.

Maybe we'll find something like that someday. But for the time being, we have to make the best decisions we can with the information we have. And as of now, the information we have is that vaccines are very safe and the trade-off is so overwhemingly valuable, that we should strongly encourage everyone to get vaccines.

 

[Shodan1980]

The people most to blame for the MMR vaccine scare are the UK media. Bad doctor wrote a badly researched, badly written, very biased paper that should have died in obscurity (there are dozens like it every month). The media picked it up, every credible doctor told them it was bull, they ignored them and ran with the story. Other countries started reporting the controversy, idiots reacted, and now we have small outbreaks of fatal diseases in the UK where before there were none.

As for the cancer thing. Life is a fatal condition, we all die from something. The mortality rate is still 100%. We're getting better and better at curing and stopping dozens of causes of death, cancer is just taking up the slack and we're getting better at quantifying those "died of old age" deaths as cancers or heart failures or whatever as we're simply staying alive long enough for one of them to kill us. Its that simple. The other factors just influence which of those causes get us. Cancer is just becoming a slightly more likely option as cell replication gets more error filled anyway as we age and our immune system gets worse at catching and killing the cancerous cells. So small changes in the environment affect the elderly more than the young.

 

[bullet_sandw1ch]

The vaccines kids get today are not the ones I got in 1982-86. It's obvious that vaccines prevent disease, but it's also obvious that kids today are increasingly defective- not just with autism, but you never used to hear shit about peanut allergies or gluten intolerance either. Then you have have cancer being up 20% from 1990-2000 and expected to be up another 50% by 2020.

So maybe... something is very wrong.

We're also getting more efficient at detecting illness though so it's natural to see a spike.

Cancer is going up though but that's what makes it a mystery, nobody really knows for certain why it's happening. I tend to think it's because of all that packaged food nonsense, the fact that we keep getting less 'food' in our food and more chemicals with longer names that I can count, just because it makes production cheaper.
But who can say for sure.

is it possible that the spike in cancer diagnosis' could be because we detect it more easily now than we did 20 or 30 years ago?

 

[Jacco]

I think the increase in cancer rates may have more to do with vaccines than people may claim, bit for completely different reasons. Because of Vaccines, people are no longer dying of tuberculosis, tetanus, small pox, and all the other things we are being vaccinated against. We're basically running out of things to die of.

I think that's a huge part of it. Cancer, as much as it sucks, is kind of nature's "final solution" to life. Without cell defectiveness, we would basically be able to live forever barring other disease, accident, etc. Our modern society is stable enough that keeping such natural dangers at bay is a very real possibility. Whenever you hear of a historical figure dying of "natural causes" or "old age" it is almost always attributed to cancer.

I honestly believe that in the next 50 years or so, we will have the technology to keep people alive for 200+ years.

 

[Nooh]

There have actually been cases of narcolepsy that have emerged after being vaccinated against the swine flu in both Sweden and Finland the last 3 years. The first batch of vaccines against swine flu sent to Sweden were particularly volatile, giving a lot children what seems to be a chronic disorder.

I didn't take the vaccine, didn't think I needed it and as such the potential risks outweighed the potential advantages. I never got the swine flu, or it was very harmless, and had none of the problems that several of my classmates felt at the time. More than one of them actually had to stay at home for two weeks just because the vaccine made them feel so ill.

 

[NiPah]

Say, do you ever notice that you make a lot of claims while at the same time giving no actual sources for them?

Do you ever notice how many people blindly attack any time I say anything? I'm 31 years old, I have better things to do than to provide sources for someone who would argue with me if I said the grass is green.

I do, but just maybe could that be because you already start off with faulty arguments like in this thread? Or because more often than not your opinion is a minority in this forum so you're naturally a target for quotes?

If you have better things to do than back up claims you're making then why bother making them at all? You know damn well that you're not gonna incite a reasonable discussion when you start off saying cancer and vaccination rates are correlated or provide a greatly exaggerated summary that hugely favores your side of a paper without ever showing the actual source to anyone. I don't dispute that some people like to just attack your posts for the unsourced theories they sometimes are but when you start off (and continue) like that no wonder your inbox gets heavy.

Surely you'd have a much better discussion if you provided more to your posts that could actually convince others of your points... either that or you could be proven wrong more easily and wouldn't that be the best outcome anyway? Because if you want to tell me you don't want to be proven wrong that vaccines lead to cancer you should seriously rethink your position. Basically, if you source your statements you can not lose!

This is getting way off topic though.

I just want to remind you that you're arguing with xDarc here, while it makes for entertainment and maybe even content for a fun drinking game it should never be done to actually educate or prove a point. Never get pulled into his world, he exemplifies why sources need to be checked, he hardly provides links because most of them were made by a schizophrenic who learned HTML for the first time (or at least someone with a major mental disability).

 

[McMullen]

Suppose they do represent an increased risk, as most things do. Are they worth it? YES.

Well at least you admit it. Thanks for that.

When a person says "Suppose that...", they're implying that what follows is either not true or not known to be true. And I'm hardly in a position to "admit" anything.

Cancer causing vaccines would be as big a concern as NSA spying, they're only doing it to keep you safe, to save lives, so who cares.

If we were all so willing to interpret the ability of an invention to save lives as supporting evidence for a conspiracy, then there wouldn't be much point in trying to better the human condition at all. So many lives saved, all those recurring epidemics brought to an end, and yet one fraudulent paper is all the evidence people seem to need to consider it an evil. That's got to be rather depressing for the researchers and humanitarian workers dedicating their lives to helping people. Reminds me of those NGO personnel who got chased out of a few central African towns because of the UN's lack of military intervention in all the fighting there. The same people you're trying to help avoid cholera will stone you to death if they think you're enough like someone who's pissed them off. Thankfully not everyone is like that.

But yeah, I took a look at a lot of numbers, mostly in America, and cancer rates are up for everyone. Breast cancer in women under 50 was at a record recently. For middle aged men, it's testicular or GI cancers, bowel/colon/stomach, etc. It has nothing to do with longevity as a risk factor and more people living longer when the people getting more cancer are middle aged, young adults and children as well.

I'd be interested to see those numbers. Statistics can bite you if you're not careful with them. For example, I've lately been trying to make a map of tornado frequency in the US, but the thing keeps looking more like a strangely weighted population density map than anything else. This is because tornadoes are more likely to get reported in places where there's lots of people around to see them, even if you only use the last decade's worth of data. Cancer and age are related in a different but no less annoying way.

Even the title of this thread is misleading. I don't think there's anyone who really believes vaccines don't work, but there have been recalls, there have been deaths, they are not 100% safe; nothing is. But how safe are they? To even to call that into question, it's just a dog pile of people attacking. I'm not going to deal with that.

And you shouldn't. But others should, and they have. Despite the career boost it would be to show a significant risk, they have not been able to establish that there is one.

You seem to have this idea that there are unassailable ideas in science. That's not how it works. Science is about falsifiability; it's not a valid theory unless it's possible to prove it wrong, and the biggest prizes and credit in science go to those who highlight the biggest errors. This is not to say that it's easy to dislodge an entrenched theory, just that it's the sort of thing that the ambitious crave. In fact, some are willing to commit fraud in order to achieve that sort of recognition. The researcher who published the link between autism and vaccines is a good example.

I will probably vaccinate my kids,

Great.

but I won't follow the recommended schedule which has them taking so many shots at once. I will spread them out so their immune system has time to recover after each.

Well, I think that's a little misguided and, depending on how long you wait, potentially harmful. But at least you're willing, for their sake and for the sake of those who attend class with them.

So there it is, now tell me my kids deserve to die or I deserve to be put in jail for not doing what a doctor says, for not believing in big pharma, or any other institutions that people today act like is the new religion.

I am also 31, and that's too old to be wishing death upon people who are wrong on the Internet, or their children. Especially if the whole reason if they're wrong in the first place is because they're exposing their children to a significant and confirmed risk out of fear of a negligible, probably nonexistent risk.

 

[Dangit2019]

I'm 31 years old, I have better things to do than to provide sources for someone who would argue with me if I said the grass is green.

...

I'm sorry, you just compared scientific statistics to obvious facts of nature; my brain tried to kill itself for a second there.

[sub][sub]Also, who gives a shit how old you are? This isn't a elementary school playground...[/sub][/sub]

 

[Syzygy23]

The vaccines kids get today are not the ones I got in 1982-86. It's obvious that vaccines prevent disease, but it's also obvious that kids today are increasingly defective- not just with autism, but you never used to hear shit about peanut allergies or gluten intolerance either. Then you have have cancer being up 20% from 1990-2000 and expected to be up another 50% by 2020.

So maybe... something is very wrong.

More processed foods are being consumed, just look at the average number of obese people compared to 1982-86. Shitty food leads to shitty nutrition, which leads to shitty health which leads to shitty health problems like cancer. The spike in reported allergies and gluten intolerance can possibly be cultural, as more and more people lately have started becoming health conscious what with all the facotry farm foods and carcinogenic/unhealthy artificial preservatives and materials used in too damn much of our food nowadays. You pay more attention to your childs health and what they eat, you're bound to notice a reaction when they eat something. In the extreme zone they become hypochondriac parents and simply BELIEVE their kid(s) are allergic or intolerant to something.

 

[Naeras]

"vaccines don't save lives"

Yes they do, to the point that not vaccinating your children is incredibly irresponsible. [http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2013/06/06/3776327.htm]

And no, there's no microchips in the vaccines, and the amount of potentially toxic substances in them is lower than it is in a lot of different food types(the mercury dose of the swine flu vaccine was lower than the dose you'd get from eating fresh fish, gg). It doesn't cause autism or down's either. Some people may get allergic reactions to vaccines, but both the chance of this and the severity of those symptoms don't compare to the risk of most childhood diseases.

 

[VanQ]

The claim isn't that vaccines don't save lives -- okay, some people do say that, obviously -- it's the claim that vaccines are bad or inherently unnatural. I think it's a fear that remains after the Autism Trials.

The autism omnibus trails, though it was thrown out of court for having no evidence that a mercury-based preservative in a vaccine caused autism (or that any case of mercury caused any type of autism), are entirely to blame, because people believe what they want to believe, especially if they don't understand what they believe.

It's a big fear of the magic word 'mercury', and that has spread to vaccines in general. Don't waste your time thinking about it. However, feel free to read up on the Autism Trials on Wikipedia, get educated and all the like.

It's really like some people don't realize that whenever they eat fish they're usually ingesting trace amounts of mercury. It's really like they don't realize that trace amounts of mercury aren't going to give you Mad Hatter's Syndrome because our bodies aren't made of glass that shatters on the drop of a top-hat.

 

[Angie7F]

I think it is ok to get vaccinations for the standard stuff.
Maybe the pharmaceutical companies are crooks, but so far I have benefited from vaccinations so I have no complaints.

I always give my dog vaccinations and so far we have been a very happy healthy family

 

[chuckdm]

We're also getting more efficient at detecting illness though so it's natural to see a spike.

Yes, we've come a long way since living in caves in 1990...

People don't necessarily understand the science behind vaccines. They see the eradication of diseases and understand that they work. Yet, when they see a rise in all kinds of other illnesses, they stick their fingers in their ears and go "La La La."

*snip*

I do.

I understand it just fine. I'm a 26 year old computer geek who is 9 years into a 2 year AS degree and even I understand it. Or rather, I understand the Flu Vaccine - I won't claim to understand every vaccine because some of them work differently.

Basically, a virus is an organism with fake DNA. It injects that DNA into your otherwise normal cells, and then when your cells divide, the fake DNA divides with it, creating globs of cells with foreign DNA. This is why treating a virus is so much harder than a bacterial infection - you're not trying to kill a foreign organism, you're killing your own damn cells.

What the Flu Vaccine does is inject you with (usually dead) Flu virus. That is, Flu virus that is either dead outright, or depending on the specific vaccine, modified to be unable to attach itself to your own cells. Then your body can detect it as harmful and your white blood cells basically "learn" the profile of the Flu Virus, so they can effectively kill it before it can inject itself into your healthy cells.

Since this is the escapist, here's an analogy: it's like training SEALs by taking a bunch of evil terrorists, cutting off their balls, taking away their guns, and handcuffing them to a concrete pole, then hanging a big neon sign over their head that says "terrorist/flu" so you can learn EXACTY what to shoot. Well...it's kinda like that, anyhow.

So no, Vaccines aren't complicated, and they are mostly very well understood, both by the scientists who create them, and in some cases, even total laymen like myself. All one has to do to understand this is fucking google it, so anyone who doesn't understand them just hasn't bothered to read. At all.

And since someone brought up Cancer, I might as well say this here:

Cancer is caused by a mutated Oncogene that makes cells divide before they have developed to perform their function, thus causing a runaway division of cells that require nourishment but serve no function. This is what causes 100% of ALL Cancer. This has been known since the mid-80's. This isn't a secret.

As to why we don't just prevent all cancer by hardening the Oncogene before birth - which we know exactly how to do, I should add - that'd be playing god. And god forbid we do that. Yanno, even those of us who die by the millions without ever believing in god aren't allowed to either. Because christians vote to damn much, basically.

 

[J Tyran]

The vaccines kids get today are not the ones I got in 1982-86. It's obvious that vaccines prevent disease, but it's also obvious that kids today are increasingly defective- not just with autism, but you never used to hear shit about peanut allergies or gluten intolerance either. Then you have have cancer being up 20% from 1990-2000 and expected to be up another 50% by 2020.

So maybe... something is very wrong.

There is a lot we live with now we never used to though, massive use of diesel engines, pesticides, plastic polymers in the environment, huge amounts of EM radiation. There so many potential issues its hard to say what the cause is.

One fun thing about vaccines though is even if they are responsible for some problems it out weighs the amount of kids that got killed, disabled or disfigured by child hood diseases. In the 1940s half a million kids got paralyzed or killed by Polio for example.