"Vaccines don't save lives"

[idarkphoenixi]

I saw someone make this comment earlier and it reminded me that apparently there's a number of "anti-vaccine" people out there, people who think it's all nonsense and even causes a number of very serious illnesses.
If I remember right, Michelle Bachmann said something similar and since then a lot of people seemed to really rally against it - claiming everything from mental illness, mind control or even death as being the end result of getting these simple injections.

If it were people arguing against evolution or something then I wouldn't really care. I mean, you're ignoring a massive pile of evidence but nobody is getting hurt if you think everything just popped into existence. But with vaccines, peoples lives are actually at stake. I can't imagine how many children might have died because of these nut-jobs.

I just don't understand what goes through peoples head sometimes.

 

[Pink Gregory]

People don't like considering viewpoints other than their own. With the internet, they can find a community of people who are equally ill-informed or delusional, rather than learning to consider opposing viewpoints. Thus nothing changes.

That being said, the pharmaceutical industry have been known not to be transparent with their information.

It's unfortunate. Worrying that it's getting into schools due to celebrity endorsement.

 

[TheYellowCellPhone]

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.

 

[Foolery]

Well, I feel fairly comfortable saying that the flu-shot is somewhat pointless. But damn people, get your tetanus and what-not. That's important. Pharmaceutical companies aren't exactly trustworthy either. Doctors have been known to be paid to give out new types of brand-name meds for things like depression.

 

[idarkphoenixi]

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.

Yeah, I heard about all that autism business. Pretty sure I first heard about it when Penn and Teller did an entire show debunking that claim.
Also I checked, it was Michelle Bachmann that said vaccines gave her kid autism, not Palin. Not like that's much better though, replacing one crazy with another.

It's kind of what I meant to say, that vaccines cause more illness than they save.

 

[xDarc]

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.

 

[InsanityRequiem]

Well, on a technicality, said person is correct that vaccines don't save lives. They help protect lives. Saving and protecting are two different ballparks. A medical procedure for someone who is dying is saving, a shot to help boost up one's immune system to prevent and protect from a disease isn't saving. /pedantic

Anyway, on the front of people that don't trust vaccines? I'm one of those people, but instead of the 'they cause autism/behavior problems/cancer' route most go with, I do not trust/get vaccines because they do not work on me. Heck, most medical creations do not work on me at all. Tylenol, ibuprofen, prozac, even flu shots. Anything subscription or not tends to either make what I'm taking the medical item for extremely worse, or gives me horrible side effects without treating the problem. For flu shots, I get the flu two or three months down the line for 2-4 weeks.

 

[DoPo]

So maybe... something is very wrong.

And correlation does not imply causation, as we all know. Although, I don't know how good is saying that as we don't even have correlation.

 

[Xeorm]

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.

A lot of that is that some things work too well. Allergies in general happen when a body's immune system sees something harmless as a threat, and reacts against it triggering normal defenses against disease. A usual culprit is that the person wasn't exposed to much when they're young, and so the body wasn't trained to detect it as normal. Our houses are too clean, basically.

We're also getting great medical care when we're young. Go look up statistics of baby survival (and survival of the mom as well if you're interested) and you'll see a dramatic increase since then. It looks like people have been getting worse recently, but realistically, we've been able to save more from immediate death, though not always terribly successful at getting them back to full strength.

Part of what makes cancer more frequent now is more awareness. We're better at spotting it. We're also better at keeping people alive long enough that cancer gets more chances to be seen. It's sad to say, but from an evolutionary sense, we weren't really tested against surviving against cancer. People just didn't live long enough for it to be a big threat.

 

[idarkphoenixi]

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.

 

[GonvilleBromhead]

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.

 

[Quaxar]

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.

Not only thrown out of court but actually the person who wrote that one paper later admitted to having completely fabricated the whole data.

And there's quite a lot of vaccine ingredients the nutters claim are bad. Mercury-containing thiomersal was actually pulled from most vaccines altogether ages ago despite showing no particular health effects, but of course now the crazies have jumped at Aluminium instead.

 

[Jarek Mace]

Y'know OP, it's funny that you also happen to talk of arguing against evolution because the same people who argue that vaccines don't save lives are going to be the same people that prove evolution to be correct (or at least natural selection)

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Sure, and guns don't kill people!

 

[Quaxar]

Y'know OP, it's funny that you also happen to talk of arguing against evolution because the same people who argue that vaccines don't save lives are going to be the same people that prove evolution to be correct (or at least natural selection)

I'm not sure if you're making a case against vaccines or evolution but I'm pretty certain you're opposing one of those two... do tell me if I'm wrong though.

 

[Jarek Mace]

Y'know OP, it's funny that you also happen to talk of arguing against evolution because the same people who argue that vaccines don't save lives are going to be the same people that prove evolution to be correct (or at least natural selection)

I'm not sure if you're making a case against vaccines or evolution but I'm pretty certain you're opposing one of those two... do tell me if I'm wrong though.

In simples, I was saying that those who argue that "vaccines are dangerous" will prove the theory of evolution to be correct when they die as as result of this irrational belief, therefore proving the theory of evolution.

 

[xDarc]

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."

It's very real and the cause is a mystery because scientists either can't or won't do the research. By the time they actually admit what caused the increase in certain disease and cancers, they will have something new which they will assure you is safe. That's how it works.

 

[xDarc]

You do know vaccines have been around longer than 20 years, right?

And you would know that the vaccines I got as a baby/infant in the early 1980s are not the same ones kids get today, right?

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

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."

It's very real and the cause is a mystery because scientists either can't or won't do the research. By the time they actually admit what caused the increase in certain disease and cancers, they will have something new which they will assure you is safe. That's how it works.

We HAVE actually come a long way since the 1990s.

Remember how in the early 1990s people didn't believe in/understand/use DNA evidence?

Technology develops faster now than it ever did, and that includes medical technology. We can do things now, and test for various diseases in ways that we never dreamed of doing even 20 years ago.