Viewing 40 posts - 81 through 120 (of 182 total)
  • Measles outbreak, MMR and cretins who don't get their kids vacinated
  • midlifecrashes
    Full Member

    Another decliner of MMR here. As has been said before, at the time of Wakefield,(my eldest is 15 and we were exactly in the frame, normal MMR in our town at the time was 15months) there was enough credibility put through the media to raise the doubt in our minds. This was following other significant public health problems like CJD. We went with separate vaccines done privately at a travel vaccinations clinic as no NHS facility had stock or would offer them. In fact only measles and mumps as Rubella isn’t a massive risk to a child, and protection has often worn off by the time you want to have kids, so rubella vacc. as a teenager is a much better bet. I still don’t fully understand the reluctance to offer separate jabs(perhaps even paying) through the NHS.

    The argument to say it will mean lower uptake falls immensely flat when you have a parent in the room saying “No, not MMR, but if you have separates, go right ahead.” and that has happened a LOT in the last fifteen years. Most of those parents won’t have gone for private jabs, but done without. Cost of ours privately was about £80 per child.

    Also, without the relative risks being either outlined or understood to and by the majority of parents, if it was a straight choice between measles and autism, most would choose measles every day. It might be clear as day that Wakefield is junk now, but it certainly wasn’t for several years from 1998, maybe even a decade. That’s a long time for things to rumble along in the back of the minds of people who later become parents and are then faced with a choice.

    Cougar
    Full Member

    I still don’t fully understand the reluctance to offer separate jabs(perhaps even paying) through the NHS.

    a) it’s less effective

    b) (I’m guessing) it’s more expensive

    c) it undermines faith in the combination vaccine; to wit, “why would you offer separate ones, is there something wrong with the MMR jab?”

    The argument to say it will mean lower uptake falls immensely flat when you have a parent in the room saying “No, not MMR, but if you have separates, go right ahead.”

    The solution there (now, not ten years ago) isn’t to pander to their ignorance, it’s to re-educate the populace. It’s a shame the Daily Mail et all haven’t run a huge “the MMR scare was a load of shit” campaign; can’t think why.

    littlemisspanda
    Free Member

    I didn’t have the MMR – my parents, at the time (and this was the 1980s) had worries about the vaccine, so I didn’t have it, and when I was born it was pretty new, so uptake was low. My younger brother and sister have both had it. My brother (the youngest) has autism. My Dad to this day feels guilty that he gave in to his wife and let the youngest two have the triple vaccine – he’s convinced there’s a link, despite my sister being fine, and me not having had the vaccine, but having Crohns disease!

    What my dad thinks isn’t rational at all, it was most likely nothing to do with the vaccine that my brother became autistic, he was probably born that way, and it’s not always evident until the toddler stage. But all the science in the world won’t stop him wondering “what if”. Science cannot necessarily dispel all fear and emotion, and that’s what we’re dealing with.

    Unfortunately it’s had such terribly bad press and the scaremongering was so great that all the reassurance in the world won’t cut it for some parents, and you’re not necessarily dealing with “rational heads” when it comes to parents and children’s health. There are strong views both for and against, but it has to come down to parent choice, and as a parent, what you can live with. And I do think parents should take into account the health of others when making that decision about whether to have their kids vaccinated, as well as their own kids.

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    gwaelod
    Free Member

    No consolation to your dad now of course…but

    http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/48/4/456.full#sec-4

    Conclusions

    Twenty epidemiologic studies have shown that neither thimerosal nor MMR vaccine causes autism. These studies have been performed in several countries by many different investigators who have employed a multitude of epidemiologic and statistical methods. The large size of the studied populations has afforded a level of statistical power sufficient to detect even rare associations. These studies, in concert with the biological implausibility that vaccines overwhelm a child’s immune system, have effectively dismissed the notion that vaccines cause autism. Further studies on the cause or causes of autism should focus on more-promising leads.

    Ben Goldacres bit n the grauniad from a few years back is circulating again. Another good read

    Ben Goldacre
    The Guardian
    Saturday August 30 2008
    Dr Andrew Wakefield is in front of the General Medical Council on charges of serious professional misconduct, his paper on 12 children with autism and bowel problems is described as “debunked” – although it never supported the conclusions ascribed to it – and journalists have convinced themselves that his £435,643 fee from legal aid proves that his research was flawed.
    I will now defend the heretic Dr Andrew Wakefield.

    The media are fingering the wrong man, and they know who should really take the blame: in MMR, journalists and editors have constructed their greatest hoax to date, and finally demonstrated that they can pose a serious risk to public health. But there are also many unexpected twists to learn from: the health journalists themselves were not at fault, the scale of the bias in the coverage was greater than anybody realised at the time, Leo Blair was a bigger player than Wakefield, and it all happened much later than you think.
    Before we begin, it’s worth taking a moment to look at vaccine scares around the world, because I’m always struck by how circumscribed these panics are. The MMR and autism scare, for example, is practically non-existent outside Britain. But throughout the 1990s France was in the grip of a scare that hepatitis B vaccine caused multiple sclerosis.
    In the US, the major vaccine fear has been around the use of a preservative called thiomersal, although somehow this hasn’t caught on here, even though that same preservative was used in Britain. In the 1970s there was a widespread concern in the UK, driven again by a single doctor, that whooping-cough vaccine was causing neurological damage.
    What the diversity of these anti-vaccination panics helps to illustrate is the way in which they reflect local political and social concerns more than a genuine appraisal of the risk data, because if the vaccine for hepatitis B, or MMR, is dangerous in one country, it should be equally dangerous everywhere; and if those concerns were genuinely grounded in the evidence, especially in an age of the rapid propagation of information, you would expect the concerns to be expressed by journalists everywhere. They’re not.
    In 1998 Wakefield published his paper in the Lancet. It’s surprising to see, if you go back to the original clippings, that the study and the press conference were actually covered in a fairly metered fashion, and also quite sparsely. The Guardian and the Independent reported the story on their front pages, but the Sun ignored it entirely, and the Daily Mail – home of the health scare, and now well known as vigorous campaigners against vaccination – buried their first MMR piece unobtrusively in the middle of the paper. There were only 122 articles mentioning the subject at all, in all publications, that whole year.
    This was not unreasonable. The study itself was fairly trivial, a “case series report” of 12 people – essentially a collection of 12 clinical anecdotes – and such a study would only really be interesting and informative if it described a rare possible cause of a rare outcome. If everyone who went into space came back with an extra finger, say, then that would be worth noting. For things as common as MMR and autism, finding 12 people with both is entirely unspectacular.
    But things were going to get much worse, and for some very interesting reasons. In 2001 and 2002 the scare began to gain momentum. Wakefield published a review paper in an obscure journal, questioning the safety of the immunisation programme, although with no new evidence. He published two papers on laboratory work using PCR (a technique used in genetic fingerprinting) which claimed to show measles virus in tissue samples from children with bowel problems and autism. These received blanket media coverage.
    The coverage rapidly began to deteriorate, in ways which now feel familiar and predictable. Emotive anecdotes from distressed parents were pitted against old men in corduroy with no media training. The Royal College of General Practitioners press office not only failed to speak clearly on the evidence, it also managed to dig up anti-MMR GPs for journalists who rang in asking for quotes. Newspapers and celebrities began to use the vaccine as an opportunity to attack the government and the health service, and of course it was the perfect story, with a charismatic maverick fighting against the system, a Galileo-like figure. There were elements of risk, of awful personal tragedy, and of course, the question of blame: whose fault was autism?
    But the biggest public health disaster of all – which everyone misses – was a sweet little baby called Leo. In December 2001 the Blairs were asked if their infant son had been given the MMR vaccine, and refused to answer, on the grounds that this would invade their child’s right to privacy. This stance was not entirely unreasonable, but its validity was somewhat undermined by Cherie Blair when she chose to reveal Leo’s vaccination history, in the process of promoting her autobiography, and also described the specific act of sexual intercourse which conceived him.
    And while most other politicians were happy to clarify whether their children had had the vaccine, you could see how people might believe the Blairs were the kind of family not to have their children immunised: essentially, they had surrounded themselves with health cranks. There was Cherie Blair’s closest friend and aide, Carole Caplin, a new age guru and “life coach”. Cherie was reported to visit Carole’s mum, Sylvia Caplin, a spiritual guru who was viciously anti-MMR (“for a tiny child, the MMR is a ridiculous thing to do. It has definitely caused autism,” she told the Mail). They were also prominently associated with a new age healer called Jack Temple, who offered crystal dowsing, homeopathy, neolithic-circle healing in his suburban back garden, and some special breastfeeding technique which he reckoned made vaccines unnecessary.
    Whatever you believe about the Blairs’ relationships, this is what the nation was thinking about when they refused to clarify whether they had given their child the MMR vaccine.
    The MMR scare has created a small cottage industry of media analysis. In 2003 the Economic and Social Research Council published a paper on the media’s role in the public understanding of science, which sampled all the major science media stories from January to September 2002, the peak of the scare. It found 32% of all the stories written in that period about MMR mentioned Leo Blair, and Wakefield was only mentioned in 25%: Leo Blair was a bigger figure in this story than Wakefield.
    And this was not a passing trivial moment in a 10-year-long story. 2002 was in fact the peak of the media coverage, by a very long margin. In 1998 there were only 122 articles on MMR. In 2002 there were 1,257 (from here). MMR was the biggest science story that year, the most likely science topic to be written about in opinion or editorial pieces, it produced the longest stories of any science subject, and was also by far the most likely to generate letters to the press, so people were clearly engaging with the issue. MMR was the biggest and most heavily covered science story for years.
    It was also covered extremely badly, and largely by amateurs. Less than a third of broadsheet reports in 2002 referred to the overwhelming evidence that MMR is safe, and only 11% mentioned that it is regarded as safe in the 90 other countries in which it is used.
    While stories on GM food, or cloning, stood a good chance of being written by specialist science reporters, with stories on MMR their knowledge was deliberately sidelined, and 80% of the coverage was by generalist reporters. Suddenly we were getting comment and advice on complex matters of immunology and epidemiology from Nigella Lawson, Libby Purves, Suzanne Moore and Carol Vorderman, to name only a few. The anti-MMR lobby, meanwhile, developed a reputation for targeting generalist journalists, feeding them stories, and actively avoiding health or science correspondents.
    Journalists are used to listening with a critical ear to briefings from press officers, politicians, PR executives, salespeople, lobbyists, celebrities and gossip-mongers, and they generally display a healthy natural scepticism: but in the case of science, generalists don’t have the skills to critically appraise a piece of scientific evidence on its merits. At best, the evidence of these “experts” will only be examined in terms of who they are as people, or perhaps who they have worked for. In the case of MMR, this meant researchers were simply subjected to elaborate smear campaigns.
    The actual scientific content of stories was brushed over and replaced with didactic statements from authority figures on either side of the debate, which contributed to a pervasive sense that scientific advice is somehow arbitrary, and predicated upon a social role – the “expert” – rather than on empirical evidence.
    Any member of the public would have had very good reason to believe that MMR caused autism, because the media distorted the scientific evidence, reporting selectively on the evidence suggesting that MMR was risky, and repeatedly ignoring the evidence to the contrary. In the case of the PCR data, the genetic fingerprinting information on whether vaccine-strain measles virus could be found in tissue samples of children with autism and bowel problems, this bias was, until a few months ago, quite simply absolute. You will remember from earlier that Wakefield co-authored two scientific papers – known as the “Kawashima paper” and the “O’Leary paper” – claiming to have found such evidence, and received blanket media coverage for them. But you may never even have heard of the papers showing these to be probable false positives.
    In the Journal of Medical Virology May March 2006 there was a paper by Afzal et al, looking for measles RNA in children with regressive autism after MMR vaccination, using tools so powerful they could detect measles RNA down to single-figure copy numbers. It found no evidence of the vaccine-strain measles RNA to implicate MMR. Nobody wrote about this study, anywhere, in the British media (except for me in my column).
    This was not an isolated case. Another major paper was published in the leading academic journal Pediatrics a few months later, replicating the earlier experiments very closely, and in some respects more carefully, also tracing out the possible routes by which a false positive could have occurred. For this paper by D’Souza et al, like the Afzal paper before it, the media were united in their silence. It was covered, by my count, in only two places: my column, and a Reuters news agency report. Nowhere else (although there was a post on the lead researcher’s boyfriend’s blog where he talked about how proud he was of his girlfriend). [EDITED to disambiguate]
    Journalists like to call for “more research”: here it was, and it was ignored. Did the media neglect to cover these stories because they were bored of the story? Clearly not. Because in 2006, at exactly the same time as they were unanimously refusing even to mention these studies, they were covering an identical claim, using identical experimental methodology: “US scientists back autism link to MMR” said the Telegraph. “Scientists fear MMR link to autism” squealed the Mail.
    What was this frightening new data? These scare stories were based on a poster presentation, at a conference yet to occur, on research not yet completed, by a man with a well-documented track record of announcing research that never subsequently appears in an academic journal. This time Dr Arthur Krigsman was claiming he had found genetic material from vaccine-strain measles virus in some gut samples from children with autism and bowel problems. If true, this would have bolstered Wakefield’s theory, which by 2006 was lying in tatters. We might also mention that Wakefield and Krigsman are doctors together at Thoughtful House, a private autism clinic in the US.
    Two years after making these claims, the study remains unpublished.
    Nobody can read what Krigsman did in his experiment, what he measured, or replicate it. Should anyone be surprised by this? No. Krigsman was claiming in 2002 that he had performed colonoscopy studies on children with autism and found evidence of harm from MMR, to universal jubilation in the media, and this work remains entirely unpublished as well. Until we can see exactly what he did, we can’t see whether there may be flaws in his methods, as there are in all scientific papers, to a greater or lesser extent: maybe he didn’t select the subjects properly, maybe he measured the wrong things. If he doesn’t write it up formally, we can never know, because that is what scientists do: write papers, and pull them apart to see if their findings are robust.
    Through reporting as shamelessly biased as this, British journalists have done their job extremely well. People make health decisions based on what they read in the newspapers, and MMR uptake has plummeted from 92% to 73%: there can be no doubt that the appalling state of health reporting is now a serious public health issue. We have already seen a mumps epidemic in 2005, and measles cases are at their highest levels for a decade. But these are not the most chilling consequences of their hoax, because the media are now queueing up to blame one man, Wakefield, for their own crimes.
    It is madness to imagine that one single man can create a 10-year scare story. It is also dangerous to imply – even in passing – that academics should be policed not to speak their minds, no matter how poorly evidenced their claims. Individuals like Wakefield must be free to have bad ideas. The media created the MMR hoax, and they maintained it diligently for 10 years. Their failure to recognise that fact demonstrates that they have learned nothing, and until they do, journalists and editors will continue to perpetrate the very same crimes, repeatedly, with increasingly grave consequences.

    The media’s MMR hoax

    mefty
    Free Member

    (i) If the Medical Establishment rails against any proposed cut in their budget, it reinforces the premise that expensive is good. They should not then be surprised when the public distrusts a remedy which is sold to them as both more effective and cheaper.
    (ii) In the modern world where deference has largely disappeared, the most effective expert is often the one who is able to communicate his expertise to the non-expert – not the most qualified one.
    (iii) I am somewhat surprised no one has complained about the use of the word “cretin” as a term of abuse.

    bentudder
    Full Member

    Mefty, when you capitalise Medical Establishment, what’s that supposed to mean? Are you talking about doctors, or about the NHS, or about pharma companies, or about something else?

    Cougar – to the credit of Private Eye, which supported Wakefield for a very long time, it did publish a Mea Culpa and apology. The only media organisation to do so, from what I can see.

    TiRed
    Full Member

    cough Thalidomide

    As a point of information, thalidomide passed all available toxicity screens prior to being launched. It was only after subsequent reproductive toxicity studies were introduced, that its effects were observed in preclinical experiments. For many other serious diseases (including leprosy and cancer), it’s proving to be an effective therapy.

    My wife suffered adult chickenpox when the kids caught it, as there is no catch-up vaccination available in the UK, despite a vaccine. Whilst benign in children, it can be serious in adults. About 30 people a year die from preventable chickenpox. Measles deaths are just as preventable.

    vickypea
    Free Member

    Thalidomide is not a relevant comparison. That happened before there were decent standards for conducting clinical studies, and was an important contributor to a complete change in clinical testing.

    nick1962
    Free Member

    I thought that the reason single vaccinations were discouraged wasn’t only cost but because evidence showed that people didn’t turn up for the other vaccinations.

    Sandwich
    Full Member

    Death is not the only side effect of measles. I am short sighted due to catching it in the 60’s from my sister. She didn’t get spots behind her eyes, I did. Shame the vaccines weren’t that effective fron that era and people want to go back to offering it as an alternative. Then having lived in S. Wales in Cardiff the locals regarded the Swansea dwellers as a little “special”.

    bwaarp
    Free Member

    I wonder if there’s a typical type of person who refuses MMR. Do some people not really understand the potential dangers of having measles?

    Hippies and Daily Mail Readers. Opposite ends of the spectrum political spectrum but they all have one thing in common, they’re stupid air heads. These people are a **** disgrace to human intellect.

    The really hilarious thing is that there is a statistically insignificant relationship between having the MMR vaccine and having a lower chance of developing autism.

    mightymule
    Free Member

    I wasn’t vaccinated against anything except polio and diptheria as a small child. My Mother said that here was quite a lot of speculation in the seventies about the safety of the vaccines for measles, mumps, rubella and whooping cough, so my parents decided against it.

    Mind you, what would my Mum know about it, she’s just your average namby pamby middle class parent… who holds a medical degree.

    geetee1972
    Free Member

    And yet turned out she was wrong.

    Aristotle
    Free Member

    An interesting read:

    nonk
    Free Member

    i had a vaccination as a child and promptly had a massive seizure and spent the rest of my childhood heavily medicated for epilepsy which has caused me no end of health problems so with all due respect get of the bloody high horse angry man.

    aracer
    Free Member

    Apologies I’ve not read the whole thread, so don’t know if this is redundant, but for those who don’t get herd immunity:

    (hotlinked from FB 😉 )

    aracer
    Free Member

    …and here’s what a friend of mine who’s a nurse in Tassie wrote (I’m sure she won’t mind me copying):

    This is why we vaccinate. Its got little to do with us! It’s about doing our bit to protect those that can’t be vaccinated. If you love others particularly tiny babies, vaccinate yourself and your children! Its called Herd immunity, we need you to protect the most vulnerable in the herd! Wake up Tasmania, 2.5 times more whooping cough than the rest of Australia as a direct result of non immunisers! It’s not acceptable….
    http://www.mamamia.com.au/health-wellbeing/malakais-story-whooping-cough-symptoms-in-babies/

    rattrap
    Free Member

    To be fair, the MMR scare has to be put in the context of its time

    Its was only a few years after the whole vCJD fiasco, when public trust of government scientists was at pretty much an all time low!

    For what its worth – our eldest daughter got separate injections, and has confirmed diagnosis of ASD, and our youngest got MMR, and they are assessing her at the moment…

    Cougar
    Full Member

    i had a vaccination as a child and promptly had a massive seizure

    I’m sorry about your illness but, respectfully, that doesn’t imply a causal link in and of itself. Chances are it would have happened regardless of the vaccine.

    IMHO from everything I’ve read, anyway. You may know different of course, but anecdotes like that just fuel the MMR myth.

    nonk
    Free Member

    and responses like that fuel the resolve of people who think they are being lied to.
    go to your doctors pick up a leaflet on vaccinations turn to the back pages and you will find a page that gives advice on what to do if a child has a seizure after the jab .
    its the mercury that does it apparently 😕
    anyways the whole autism thing is not the only issue in peoples minds is i think what i am getting at.

    aracer
    Free Member

    Its was only a few years after the whole vCJD fiasco

    Ah, yes, that well known mass killer. Are you just trying to provide examples of other scare stories?

    voodoo_chile
    Full Member

    Geetee ,it is a parents informed choice whether or not to vaccinate their children, who are you to call people cretins

    kja78
    Free Member

    Even if ‘Herd Immunity’ did work the way its claimed to, you simply cannot acheive the vaccination rates required to completly wipe out a disease. I’ll say it again, the biggest group of unvaccinated children are the ones that are too young, followed by the ones that cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons. These groups will always exist and will always be potential carriers and spreaders of the disease. These groups will always be the primary ones that compromise ‘Herd Immunity’.

    The demonization of the few parents who choose not to vaccinate, is simply a convenient scapegoat, to blind the populace from the fact that actually Human medical science is not capable of completly wiping out diseases (althought to get it as low as 0.003% is pretty good going). How many parents who have vaccinated have actually bothered to read for themselves the packaging insert that came with the vaccine? How many, like nonk has said, have actually bothered to read the leaflet about vaccines from their doctor? Are you content with the levels of mecury in the vaccines? Are you content that they contain material from aborted foetuses?

    geetee1972 – If a child does die in Wales, and I sincerly hope one doesn’t, it doesn’t help either side of this debate at all. Did that child have both MMR jabs, or just one? Did it not have the jab for medical reasons? Was it too young for the jab? Did its parents decide against the jab? Did it have a genetic weakness that made it particularly vulnerable to measles? Too many questions.

    This is not as black and white as people are trying to make out. To call non-vaccinating parents ‘cretins’ and ‘a **** disgrace to human intellect’ is in itself disgracefully cretinous, because these parents have probably done a lot more reading and research around the subject than those that just blindly accept what the government and NHS tells them. *And breath*

    Cougar
    Full Member

    and responses like that fuel the resolve of people who think they are being lied to.

    I meant no offence, just that “x happened then y happened” doesn’t automatically mean “x caused y.”

    I’ll look into your comments before responding, if that’s ok.

    Cougar
    Full Member

    Geetee ,it is a parents informed choice whether or not to vaccinate their children, who are you to call people cretins

    It’s their choice, certainly. Whether it’s “informed” or not appears to be a matter of debate.

    mattjg
    Free Member

    gt, udder etc, lots of chicken pox going around down our way too, one of my daughter’s friends and cases at her nursery so worth keeping an eye

    gt healing vibes to your little lad

    mightymule
    Free Member

    Its was only a few years after the whole vCJD fiasco

    Ah, yes, that well known mass killer. Are you just trying to provide examples of other scare stories?

    I rather think that the point was not the number of cases of vCJD, but the fact that the government of the day had stated, absolutely categorically, that there was no risk whatsoever to humans from eating meat from BSE infected animals, when it turned out that there was, in fact, a risk. I’m not sure that people can be blamed for bearing that case in mind when the government of the day stated that there was no risk from the MMR vaccine.

    rattrap
    Free Member

    indeed!

    Cougar
    Full Member

    you simply cannot acheive the vaccination rates required to completly wipe out a disease

    How many polio cases do you hear of these days? Globally you may be right, but we can get bloody close, and we can wipe some out within a given community.

    Are you content with the levels of mecury in the vaccines?

    Yes. Read up on the “thiomersal controversy.”

    Are you content that they contain material from aborted foetuses?

    Yes, because they don’t. Vaccines are cultivated in human cells which were originally grown from foetal stem cells back in the 60s, but they don’t “contain material from aborted foetuses” any more than homeopathic remedies contain an active ingredient. The human cells used in every single vaccine today, the world over, are reproduced from cultures derived from just two abortions.

    You could argue whether it’s morally just to save billions of lives by using cells from two unborn children forty years ago, but that’s a whole other argument. Seems to me to be a pretty noble thing to do, plenty of organ donors in the world, and they typically only save one or two lives.

    galactus
    Free Member

    This won’t be liked/agreed with.
    I think that as a race humans need less vaccinations and more people who can naturally come through such epidemic problems.
    Much rather lose a percentage of the population and carry forward with a naturally strong (without vaccines) race.
    Less like running down an ever narrowing alley..
    My twopence worth

    Cougar
    Full Member

    Here. kja78, you’ll like this, it was written by a “Christian scientist.” It explains it far better than I just did.

    http://www.drwile.com/lnkpages/render.asp?vac_abortion

    aracer
    Free Member

    Even if ‘Herd Immunity’ did work the way its claimed to, you simply cannot acheive the vaccination rates required to completly wipe out a disease.

    There be weasel words here. Just because you appear not to understand how herd immunity works, doesn’t mean it’s not working. There’s a nice picture I posted up there which might help you. Why don’t you have a look at that and come back and explain to me why it’s wrong?

    I’ll say it again, the biggest group of unvaccinated children are the ones that are too young, followed by the ones that cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons. These groups will always exist and will always be potential carriers and spreaders of the disease. These groups will always be the primary ones that compromise ‘Herd Immunity’.

    It’s quite bizarre. The reasons you propose for herd immunity being a waste of time are the very reasons why it’s important. Though I’d question your numbers anyway – from the BBC report, 1 in 6 children in the Swansea area have never had the MMR vaccine, meaning that by far the largest group without resistance are those who’s parents elected for them to be carriers. Even using the 1 in 10 figure for the whole of Wales, that’s still more children who’s parents have chosen not to have resistance than the number of children too young.

    aracer
    Free Member

    I rather think that the point was not the number of cases of vCJD, but the fact that the government of the day had stated, absolutely categorically, that there was no risk whatsoever to humans from eating meat from BSE infected animals, when it turned out that there was, in fact, a risk.

    Indeed. Thousands of people die each year from diseases related to eating red meat. How ridiculous of the government to state that there is no risk to eating beef.

    chipsngravy
    Free Member

    IMO Pharmaceutical companies will do anything for profit. Incentivising GPs to give jabs being one of them.

    Do I trust my GP? Do I ****!

    GPs are up there with bankers as upstanding members of society. Patients = £

    TiRed
    Full Member

    you simply cannot achieve the vaccination rates required to completely wipe out a disease

    Google Hib and Finland. Not just disease, but carriage of the bacteria has been virtually eliminated from a country. And don’t get me started on Smallpox…

    Cougar
    Full Member

    IMO Pharmaceutical companies will do anything for profit. Incentivising GPs to give jabs being one of them.

    Do I trust my GP? Do I ****!

    Whilst that may be true, it has zero bearing on the efficacy of vaccination.

    You might want to have a look here, I think it’d be relevant to your interests. http://www.alltrials.net/ In fact, everyone should, and sign the petition, it’s Important.

    tazzymtb
    Full Member

    you simply cannot acheive the vaccination rates required to completly wipe out a disease

    smallpox

    boxfish
    Free Member

    you simply cannot acheive the vaccination rates required to completly wipe out a disease
    smallpox

    Better still, catch cowpox like I did in 1994, and no smallpox vaccine is required. 😆

    Euro
    Free Member

    OP, hope your baba gets better soon. It’s very easy to feel frustrated and useless when you child is unwell. They are tough little creatures though.

    Cougar – Moderator
    The human cells used in every single vaccine today, the world over, are reproduced from cultures derived from just two abortions.

    I hope that link isn’t your proof for the above statement. The only apparent prevention is federal law (or good old fashion normal law), which only comes into play when i/you/they are caught.

    vickypea
    Free Member

    I doubt that pharmaceutical companies make much out of vaccines, except new ones that are still on patent, like flu jabs?

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