In the news lately has been a measles outbreak. Some 100+ cases linked to a start in California.
Now The Media have seized on it as a Big Deal that some folks are not vaccinating their kids. Fine. But now Fox has had a couple of shows with all sorts of high handed moralizing about how we must force parents to vaccinate their kids for the good of the community and other kids. Um “Logic Fault!”.
I expect this kind of thing from CNN (who has done some of it, though with more high moral snobbery and less moralized shouting…) but Fox? WHERE is your sense of liberty and freedom, folks?
The Logic Fault
The thing that shouted at me, but seems lost on Talking Heads with Opinions, is the simple fact that if a cohort of 90% of the kids have been vaccinated against measles, then the “at risk kids” are exactly the ones NOT vaccinated.
Either that, or the vaccine does not work, so it’s a load of crap anyway.
Yes, I know, some vaccinations ‘wear off’ over time, so some forty-something folks might be at risk. But THEY are already at risk, by definition.
So which is it? Vaccination works, so the ones at risk are the ones who have chosen, for their own reasons, not to vaccinate? Or it doesn’t work, so everyone is at some risk, and it is a bit daft to be forcing folks to inject foreign stuff into their bodies?
(And yes, I know the “herd immunity” argument. So have the ‘forty somethings’ get a booster and keep the under 9 month ones at home until vaccinated IF an outbreak develops. You don’t need to take a 6 month old to Disneyland… just as easy to do those things as to have Yet More Government Mandates)
My Bias
I have a couple of biases here.
First off, a friend was put in a wheel chair by polio vaccine. She died a couple of years ago after a long, sometimes painful, and often difficult life. It ought to be the person or their parents who choose to take that risk, not a law forcing it. Many vaccines have side effects. Forcing people to do what YOU think is rational makes YOU responsible, especially when it goes wrong. The ‘bad reaction’ rate is often far higher than folks think.
If you do not own your own body, what do you own? Yes, I’m also against forced blood alcohol tests and any kind of extraction of part of your body by force for any purpose. Why? Simply that first question. If I have no jurisdiction over what is inside my skin, I am at best a pampered slave to someone else. There is no liberty. They own my blood, guts, bones, skin and all; I’m just allowed to use it at their discretion…
I had a couple of neighbors who had what I thought were a bit silly beliefs, but it was THEIR belief. They did not want to go against God’s Will or Nature or some such, so tended to eat “pure foods” and vegetarian non-GMO, no pesticides, etc. etc. Now I may think that “over the top”, but it is THEIR choice to make. They did not want mercury injected into their children, so didn’t ‘go there’. Now I may think the amount of mercury is trivial and not an issue (especially now that it is gone from many vaccines), BUT, it is their decision to make. Now, IFF they are right, there is a reservoir of folks who were not damaged by “whatever” from which population can recover. IFF they are wrong, they are happy to be wrong and I don’t care. Where is the “do no harm”? In just leaving them alone.
I vaccinated both my kids with MMR. Both are fine. Was that a ‘wise choice’ or just ‘dumb luck’ (since very early MMR puts a big load on poorly developed immune systems and has been connected with potential issues, that have not been completely put to bed, IMHO.) Now if it IS an issue, we have everyone exposed so no ‘control’ to measure against. If some folks opt out, we have two populations that can be compared. I’m fine with that. My bias is to think that three vaccinations spread over a time in a slightly older infant would be easier on them, and less risk to all, but didn’t care enough to push it 26 years ago. Now I likely would. Little risk in spreading them out, and 12 months vs 9 months is not a huge risk increase either.
One Size Fits All doesn’t. Never have seen it work out well. So I’d rather live in a world of diversity. More robust society and more robust lives that way.
In particular, each of us is a unique biological entity. “One man’s meat is another man’s poison” is very true. So, say, I have a clear family history of “issues” of allergy or sensitivity. I’m justified in being much more careful about what gets injected into me, or my kids. The spouse must avoid horses. Want to inject her with horse serum based drugs or vaccines? No, thank you. Insist? HELL NO, no thank you. I have “issues” with several plants. Yes, I play “20 questions” about most foods, drinks, and injections… “Is corn starch used in that capsule?” Now once you start to “mandate” injections and pills, you start killing “me and mine”, since substantially never will Central Control have allowed for all the various sensitivities and reactions of everyone. Notice how many side effects show up in drug commercials? That’s one example.
So it is not only a question of individual liberty and control of their own body, it is also a question of who knows best what is right for folks in my family. We live in our skins and know more about them than anyone else.
The Paranoid Corner
Now I don’t believe this will happen at all. I’m listing it only out of a sense of completion.
It is important to NOT have 100% of everyone injected with ANYTHING. IFF there is a generic failure of production (or a deliberate buggering of it), you risk a 100% loss of population. Anything from failure to completely sterilize the virus, to a mutant infecting it, to a Crazy Prince Of England wanting to sterilize or kill everyone, to Muslim Nutcakes wanting to kill off Infidels. This could, in very low probably, happen. When that happens, you want an unexposed cohort who can keep things from total collapse and ruin.
I’d be less willing to list this as a possible if it were not for the Crazy Prince Charles Phillip having said he wants to kill off most of the people as a virus, if the Jihadis were not trying to kill off the infidels, and if production where always perfect and killer viruses never mutated. But since all those ARE true, they ought to be listed…
Diversity is your friend.
UpdateNote that I changed Charles to Phillip. While Prince Charles shares many of his Daddy’s nutty beliefs about population elimination, he was not the one of the virus quote. See comments for more detail.
In Conclusion
I have no idea why Measles has become the News Du Jour. I had them as a kid (both kinds). Just about every kid in town did. And contrary to the Scare Story Du Jour saying that up to 50% of kids can die, we had no such statistic in my town. The Wiki lists a 30% mortality for immunocompromised folks, but not for normal folks. They list a 1 in 100,000 cases of a usually lethal complication, and I think that is closer to the actual rate.
Those rates coming from long before the existence of modern treatment and antivirals. I’d expect it to be closer to 1 in a million now. (In any case, lower than your risk of death from the drive to / from the doctor’s office and sitting in a room full of sick kids for a few hours to get your shot…)
To me, this is looking one heck of a lot like a “Scare Story to Increase Authority Power”, and not much at all like a real issue. Total US cases is about 100 ish. There were more than that in my home town when I was a kid (and I was one of them… most of my 30 kid school class was out with measles at about the same time…) So we are to toss individual choice, liberty, and responsibility out the window to protect against fear of something no worse than total risk in an ordinary year in ONE small farm town of a few thousand folks back in the ’50s? (that were a very pleasant time…) Really? How many folks died in car crashes in this same couple of months? How many suicides from too much crushing authority driving people around the bend? How many were shanked in prison, tossed there for stupid things like smoking a joint that harmed no one? How many died in wars this week, often with US participation, funding, or advocacy? In all that, 100 kids with measles, who will universally recover if the stats are correct, that’s worth a good panic and yet more Nanny State Mandates? More power grab to the Central Authorities? Really?
To me, the whole measles story ought to rank just behind reporting the status of road stripe paint in Texas and the state of disease among illegal immigrants. Both of them put more people at risk of death and injury… Heck, I’d wager more death and injury have come from the process of arresting folks for drug use. So maybe we ought to stop arresting folks to improve community health…
Musings from the Chiefio 
E.M.
FYI
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/restoring-scien-8.html#comments
“then the “at risk kids” are exactly the ones NOT vaccinated”
You mean those too young to have received the vaccination?
I don’t have a problem with parents choosing to not have their kids vaccinated, it’s their right to do so. But they should at least be aware that it’s a low risk freedom they’re exercising only because the majority choose to vaccinate.
Pre vaccination there were around 500 deaths from 400,000 to 600,000 cases annually in the US. So it’s not exactly Ebola, though it might as well be if its your kid that dies…
Reblogged this on abraveheart1.
Reference your comment about the effectiveness of the MMR vaccine, according to what I have read, it is not a particularly effective vaccine, Even after the 2 recommended doses about 9% of the vaccinated population can still catch the measles.
Like you I am of an age that I was exposed to almost all the “child hood” diseases. People also forget that those vaccinated with live virus vaccines can be contagious and spread the disease to other who have not been vaccinated. Those who have been vaccinated with killed virus vaccines do not develop a full immunity only partial immunity.
This was one of the issues which came up in the nation wide polio vaccination program. The killed virus did not provide full protection and the live virus caused some secondary cases. After they had achieved well up into the 90% range of vaccinations, it was more dangers to take the vaccine than it was to avoid it because you had less likelihood of catching polio naturally due to herd immunity and elimination of endemic infection vectors than you did from taking the vaccine.
Personally I was vaccinated against polio 3 times. I was one of the early cohort that got the injection version then I got both of the oral versions both live and killed virus vaccines.
I also had a neighbor boy that was lame due to polio and knew another adult in the 1990’s who was still fighting the effects of his bout with polio.
There is some evidence coming out now that the MMR vaccine trials were tampered with and their lack of efficacy and risk of secondary infection was hidden by big pharma. It is too early to judge the credibility but 2 or 3 researchers have outed manipulation and poor practices in the studies.
People need to understand that ALL medical procedures have risk, and sometimes the risk of prevention out weighs the risk of not preventing, but that needs to be an informed decision by the parents and patients involved.
I saw today a possible workable solution to the debate in that a California school system is proposing that children who have not had vaccinations should pass a 21 day quarantine before they are admitted back to class.
As an adult I have no way of knowing exactly what I was vaccinated against. My parents are dead and the doctor we went to when I was young also long since stopped practicing. I know my Mom took me in for some shots but I have no clue what they were (back then the childhood series was only 4 shots not the 16 or so recommended today).
With a great deal of effort I could find out what I was vaccinated against in the military, the only two shots I recall were plague and yellow fever (that shot administration made me sick for a day or two)
Sorry to hear about your friend. I am old enough to remember real polio outbreaks. Those outbreaks resulted in people killed and paralyzed and didn’t have any residua, too; but the numbers of killed and paralyzed were significant back then. Yes, the government forcibly vaccinated us, in part, because schools were points of transmission and government forced us into the same schools (because some thought compulsory schooling educated people, well it did, but not necessarily the lessons desired :P). Oh how soon we forget.
All of that said, I, too, prefer the ‘leave us alone’ approach to government. History suggests that governments are dangerous ;).
In 2010 Finnish authorities tried to get everyone vaccinated for the H1N1 swine flu virus. The vaccine name was Pandemrix, and it was made by GlaxoSmithKline.
GSK made EU authorities to sign an agreement that GSK would not be responsible for any side effects resulting from the vaccine.
The authorities started an unprecedented scare campaign, where those suspicious of the untested vaccine were labelled as responsible for all those deaths that would occur if everyone would not take the vaccine. This was done even after it was obvious that the virus was not nearly as deadly as was first thought. In the end more than 50% of the population was vaccinated.
35 people died with antibodies for the H1N1 virus in their system. Some 20+ of them had received the vaccine only days earlier, but it “did not have enough time to cause immunity”. All but one of those that died were already on their last legs.
The death rate was much higher than in Poland (which did not vaccinate) or in Germany (which vaccinated only about 5% of the population).
But then the fun started. It was discovered that the vaccine caused narcolepsy in children ranging from 5-19 years of age. Directly the vaccine caused more than 200 cases of narcolepsy in a country that usually has 1-3 cases of narcolepsy in children each year.
Pandemrix has now been officially declared as the cause for the increase of narcolepsy in Finland.
But it doesn’t end there. There were also a lots of reports of other cases of autoimmune diseases that appeared within two years after taking the vaccine. After it was revealed that Pandemrix caused narcolepsy, another study was started that was supposed to tell us whether other autoimmune diseases also had similar increases.
They cancelled the study before it was finished.
@ Larry, if you’re about my age, and it sounds like you are, then as a child you should have had the Polio vaccine 3 times, the tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis vaccine 3 times and a few tuberculosis tests. MMRs are much later (my children had them, but I caught the natural disease either from neighbors or school or both. Boosters of the DPT you may or may not have had (recommended every 10 years if you are at risk) since then. Vaccines like pneumovax and the flu shot are mostly optional (again, where an institution can be a transmission vector, they may not be so optional).
The only other school related mass forced immunization I recall, today, was the mid 70s flu shot. I want to say that episode changed some things. Where I live, you can home school, so parents can pick and choose immunizations for the offspring. However, if they have to use the government school for special things, the government school can (school being a transmission vector) force the issue, of which I’m thinking these days would be the state supported college or university. Employers can, I think, offer these to employees where there are occupational risks. I don’t know if employers (other than the government when you’re in the military) force it. Given that a number of my past workplaces did have significant occupational hazards, I always took any recommended vaccines.
I have looked high and low, and I don’t seem to find double blind, placebo controlled, long term studies that demonstrate the safety and effectiveness of vaccines. I am led to believe that such studies are “the best and most reliable form of research” in the medical field.
Many of the diseases that vaccinations are supposed to protect us against were in steep decline from better sanitation long before vaccines came into use. It seems to me that a double blind, placebo controlled study (and not a few weeks either) would help to settle the question. Ah, but the doctors say that would be “unethical”. Reminds one of the climatologists who refuse to debate “deniers”.
@Another Ian:
Yeah… I ‘m a ‘conservative science type’ so every possible vaccine was taken. The neighbors were more liberal touchy feely types and didn’t accept any. Still their choice, though.
@Steve Crook:
No, mostly I mean the kids and adults who have not been vaccinated. The under one year cohort is not going to school, nor running rampant in the general population.
WHEN and IF an outbreak develops, it isn’t that hard for folks with unvaccinated infants to keep them at home and not exposed (presuming that the family has been vaccinated for those families who choose vaccination but have infants).
Oddly, I remember “measles parties” where local Mom’s would take their kids to be exposed to a kid with measles to ‘get it over with’… so YMMV on what Mom’s choose.
Also note that vaccination has it’s own risks.
http://business.financialpost.com/2014/04/16/lawrence-solomon-the-untold-story-of-measles/
so to some extent vaccination has lead to a false sense of security among those adults… Boosters anyone?
@Larry:
My older sister had a friend in braces from her polio, and we had March Of Dimes collection stations / cards on display in our restaurant. I remember the advent of the vaccine. I think I got only 2 types (both of the oral versions) mostly as we were in a poor rural area and the shot didn’t get that far before it was replaced. ( We ran a few years behind the world on most stuff ;-) But I might have had the shot and then two oral types. Not real sure.
But a couple of years later the Iron Lungs were no longer on pleas for money and in movies… and some were being removed from hospitals.
Like I said, I’m pro-vaccination. Just pointing out that side effects to exist, and that the friend was considered “acceptable damage” for the benefit. Though I don’t think that made her or her parents feel better about it all…
I know I had small pox vaccination (scar on arm and remember my sister hollering about how it would make her arm look bad ;-) and have had a couple of kinds of measles, one mump, chickenpox, and a few other virus spot diseases, so no vaccination for them ;-) We got whatever the county was handing out for free at the public vaccination clinic… then the polio sugar cubes at school.
Don’t know what all I had, and got vaccinated for, but pretty much one way or another I’ve “had it all”. I think that’s part of why I have a pretty good immune response to stuff these days… Had flu a few times, one in about ’57? or ’58? that was brutal (fever of about 105 to 106 F) and not had anything as bad since. Not had any flu vaccination at all, nor got much of anything in the way of flu, until this year. Went ahead and got the shot, no reaction at all. Mostly since it had H1N1 in it and that was one I’m not sure I’ve had. Now won’t bother to get it again.
@cdquarles:
I remember them too, though dimly. After about 8? years old they faded away.
The virus for polio tends to be spread in warm fresh still water, and lots of us went swimming in such places… the live vaccine tended to displace the wild type from such ponds and vaccinate the general public; much like kids kissing granny tended to give her the vaccination too. That was considered a feature of the live attenuated virus.
I’m not against vaccination. I’m against sane and normal people being forced against their will to have their bodies invaded by anyone; and especially so by a system of public medicine that has not always been that honest and definitely isn’t perfect…
In my view of things, adults have authority over everything they choose to put in their body, from food to drugs to medicines, and government ought to have no say. Adults have authority over their children until they are old enough to decide for themselves; or run away ;-)
The Community has no right to the body of the individual. Period.
In short, be FOR the vaccine, and against the FORCE.
At least, in my perfect world…
Another favorite blog also has a vaccine post. I had forgotten about the smallpox one. I still have the scar.
I remember “childhood diseases”. I got all the usual ones. Measles. Mumps. Chicken pox. Our kids got all the usual ones. They did go to public schools. But we got the special schools – advanced placement – so they were pretty good.
I was never much of a school guy. But I had special treatment in the public schools. Homework was mostly optional if I was doing very well on the tests. I even had my own private physics lab.
Worked my way up from bench technician to aerospace engineer. Some day if I get really good I’ll be a rocket scientist. ;-)
I meant – our kids got all the usual vaccines.
Having traveled to the various armpits of the world I have been vaccinated, boostered, and vaccinated again. There are some places where you can’t leave unless you carry a shot record. If I try to give blood a get a polite, “thanks but no thanks”. While I am not for a forced vaccination, I can see a requirement to attend public school. You don’t want to vaccinate little Johnny? Home school him.
I thought this was all settled 40 years ago. Did we not have SCOTUS rule about our “right to privacy”? I believe the case was Roe v. Wade. Where they determined it was your body to do with as you wanted. But now we have the state FORCING a minor (who has the right to abortion) to undergo Chemo Therapy (which even under the most rosy scenario is a crap shoot). And the government threatening to jail parents who do not vaccinate their children.
Like you, I got the Measles (never got the mumps, but as I have 5 children, I no longer fear that one). And got my scar to prove I got the Small Pox vaccination. But whether to get it or not should be left the parents. As someone above noted, even vaccinated kids still run an almost 1 in 10 chance of getting it. Due to modern medicine and understanding, there is a very low mortality however from it. Just as there is for the vaccination. But it is STILL a small risk. And that should be left to the individual, or in lieu thereof, the guardian. And that is NOT the state. At least according to SCOTUS.
And yes CD, Polio is a nasty one. My godmother and Aunt had it. She has been a paraplegic since she was 15. As soon as the vaccine was available, we all got it. And my children did as well. And that was OUR choice.
And – – – this morning we see that the Obama administration has granted immunity (how ironic) to a CDC scientist who will testify regarding omitted data in study on vaccination, that showed a race based risk of child hood diseases and vaccination.
http://dailycaller.com/2015/02/03/obama-admin-grants-immunity-to-cdc-scientist-that-fudged-vaccine-report-whistleblower-plans-to-testify-before-congress/
@M. Simon:
Just remember that even ‘Rocket Science’ isn’t rocket science… ;-)
(It really isn’t that hard. I did a lot of model rockets at one point. If you can do engineering, you can do ‘rocket science’…)
@PhilJourdan:
Yeah… Notice how Obamacare carefully avoids mentioning that it violates the privacy guaranteed by Roe v Wade? IMHO, if Obamacare mandate to share with the govt your med record stands, then abortion via Roe v Wade gets tossed out. Don’t see how you can mandate both.
@Larry Ledwick:
Interesting…. Off to read link…
@Ralph B:
Well, in my perfect world all schooling would be via voucher and you could ‘pick your school’ accordingly. The enforced child prison we call public school did little but harm to me. The library, however… that was my citadel…
Upthread a ways, a couple of comments that were in moderation…. both interesting.
@MarkStoval:
Yeah, there’s a lot of ‘fast and loose’ in many medical studies, but especially in vaccination and the lack of double-blind testing is not surprising… Mostly they depend on differential studies of populations that are subject to all kinds of bias and as large swaths of folks are compulsory put in a group, the comparison pool goes away…
@Hannuko:
Interesting story on Finland. Part of why my hackles get raised at the “Everyone Must” mandates. By definition there is no way to know what happens in widespread usage of any relatively new drug. The studies are just not broad enough to find the 1 in 10,000 scale reactions.
By definition, they make us all guinea pigs. Now I don’t mind that if it is informed consent ( I’ve volunteered for such things…) but do object when it is compulsory.
Also, your example shows the usual kind of ‘study’ where two populations are compared. One hopes that the other factors (food, environmental exposures, general health, genetic stock, etc.) are “close enough” between countries for such comparisons to have accuracy.
There’s a clear “something wrong” in what we are doing to our children with the rates of various diseases like Autism and Obesity rocketing up, but as to what is causal, we have no clue. So, IMHO, we ought to be looking closely at anything with correlation. (Recently a strong correlation of artificial sweetener with obesity was tracked back to how it changes your gut bacteria. Likely the “avoid sugar” lead to the “obesity epidemic” and the “diabetes epidemic”..)
Given that it is known that viruses have impacts on the brain and metabolism, and we are injecting 20 to 30 cocktails of it into very young infants, I’d expect it to be more closely researched… but it isn’t.
Part of this, IMHO, comes out of the public health training where if you have a 90% win and a 10% dead, you “go for it” as it is better for ‘the population’… I understand the logic, and were I working triage I’d sort the ‘going to die anyway’ out like the next triage nurse… but it doesn’t mean I can’t ask for us to do better.
E.M. re: “rocket science” – I was being facetious. Working in aerospace is in fact “rocket science”. Shuttle Parts were made in the next lab over. The only difference was that they could only use “S” rated parts where as I could use ordinary “MIL rated” parts. The main difference was rad hardening or at least qualification.
But here is a good one for you from NIH
Clinical endocannabinoid deficiency (CECD)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24977967
One part of government puts you in jail for it and another part tells you it is medicine. (I have studied it. It IS medicine.)
Re: autism
http://www.autismsupportnetwork.com/news/autism-treatment-marijuana-madness-8763721
Followup in: https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2016/05/02/gdp-government-growth-and-the-incredible-power-of-stupid/#comment-68163 -E.M.Smith
And this will really make you nuts:
http://healthland.time.com/2011/09/08/marijuana-slims-pot-smoking-linked-to-lower-body-weight/
If I was to hazard a guess about all this I’d say not enough omega3s in the diet.
Followup in: https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2016/05/02/gdp-government-growth-and-the-incredible-power-of-stupid/#comment-68163 -E.M.Smith
Two comments in moderation.
Anyone that has read all of Justice Roberts’ “Opinion for the Majority” should realize that Roe v Wade has been superseded by Federal mandated intrusion. At least that was what I got from reading all of it. A lot of Liberal Court decisions were vacated through the back door in his decision opinion. I wonder what happens when someone actually tries to site them in an argument? pg
re: the Crazy Prince Charles having said he wants to kill off most of the people as a virus…
I thought that was said by his father- the Duke of Edinburgh.
@Tony Hansen:
Oh Dear, you are right! I’ve mixed up my idiot Princes with my crazy Dukes! How could I?…
I’ll fix it in a while, maybe ;-)
@P.G.:
Will be interesting to see just how far logic can be distorted before it breaks entirely in that moment…
@M. Simon:
Likely due to M.J. words. If so, they will also likely stay there. As I’ve pointed out, I don’t want threads full of non-thread advocacy for M.J.
Notice I had a smiley on my statement about rocket science…
EM, I actually had a good experience in public school and feel I got a very good ejumakashen. But I did have college level courses available and was forced to read the “classics” which are all spurned in todays schools. Even though we home schooled our youngest for a while she got all her shots. I did spread the course of immunizations out further than the recommendations.
@Tony Hansen:
Yup. While both Charles and Phillip share similar crazy ideas about population elimination and being ‘green’ eugenics advocates, it was Phillip who made the virus statement.f I’ve updated the posting.
In researching it, I stumbled on an interesting page. (Not any particular endorsement, just found it an interesting read). See:
http://1god1truth.blogspot.com/2009/09/his-royal-virus-prince-philip.html
There were lots of other references. What caught my eye on this one was this quote:
Looks like things have not changed much in human nature for a couple of thousand years…
It then goes on into Prince Phillip and Charles:
and more…
There’s this connection to the WWF and friends:
And folks get grumpy at me when I suggest a “royal” connection to Agenda 21, Global Warming hype, and related attempts to herd humanity into a small tight pen and lead us to ruin…
@Ralph B:
I enjoyed college. Even had a decent time at the Community College where I was taking some night classes on things like semiconductor theory while a senior in high school… this, when our TV still had tubes in it and I was building tube radios for fun, so such theory class was ‘new’ and ‘high tech’ – i.e. not easy.
It was grammar school where it was a dead weight loss for me, as the idea of GATE then was “they bright ones can fend for themselves”… So I sat for bored to tears year after year waiting to graduate or die… stealing moments in the school library to learn things, and spending hours in the evening at the town library reading Scientific American and science books. Yes, in grammar school… Back when Scientific American had decent science articles in it. Oh Well.
My kids had GATE (Gifted And Talented Education ) programs available, and did not have the “bully du jour” problem as folks had decided maybe it was a bad idea to let kids get beaten in school by then… so had an OK, if a bit boring, time of it. YMMV…
I’d have been better off with a set of encyclopedias (my favorite read in the library) and a mentor for a couple of hours a day…
Well,
You brought up autism. I was just pointing out a treatment for it that appears to work. There are more than enough anecdotes. Why No Studies? Well we have a government….
Obesity – you brought it up. And it is well known these days that the human body’s system whose name can be mentioned only with possible dire consequences (comment permanently in limbo) regulates it.
It has gone pretty far when on a blog supposedly devoted to information of a scientific nature certain realms of science are unmentionable. This is not the first place that acts that way. I am always amused.
Apparently dust ups of the nature the Pope had with Galileo are still a feature of human nature.
It Does regulate every system in the body. Well that is not entirely true. So far no system has been found that it doesn’t regulate. And of course mentioning that fact and ancillary facts – you treat xxx with…” is advocacy.
And cancer? Well a recent study shows the incidence of cancer is lowered by smoking the unmentionable. (I’d give a link but it has bad words in it) That adds further weight to the idea that unmentionable cures cancer and without the cancer inducing potential of current treatments. .
M. Simon, if you want to keep beating that drum, be prepared for more restrictions.
I incline to agree on all major points. When it comes down to permitting substances or things into my body (or removing anything come to that), I want the final say. (Ditto for kids and other dependents, if any.) External agencies may advise, but no more: Gov’t warnings are worth as much as most of their output, while, e.g., having been registered with one doctor for over 40 years, I tend to weight her advice more heavily. She and I know how to keep me going!
I recall one or two vacs (my single-digit age years were the 1950’s), but also having had what were then just “the usual childhood diseases” – mumps, measles, chickenpox, German measles (rubella) – and surviving largely unvaccinated. (“Don’t scratch your spots, dear, or they won’t heal properly!” and you sit there in bed itching and trying not to and practicing your trainee cussing skills …)
Very sorry to hear about your friend with the lifelong polio-vaccine induced problems. I have a strangely unpleasant memory of catching polio itself in 1956 – I’ll spare you the vomit-based details. About two years of half-remembered hospital experiences and intensive physiotherapy followed that, and to everyone’s surprise I ended up decently fit for most of my life. I know whereof I speak.
The damage to the nervous system remains though, even in apparent recovery, and it can come into play as the remaining nerves succumb to wear and tear, usually between 30 and 50 years on, about 45 in my case. “Post polio syndrome” is an odd one to diagnose – it’s “just another” degenerative condition which gives pain and weakness, and is usually diagnosed by eliminating all the other likely candidates – plus having had polio, of course. So yes, I have great sympathy with anyone who had worse results from the condition – never mind from the vaccination, which really is shocking. Thank God, in my case the damage is only moderate yet.
PS – Check strikethrough at the Charles/Philip intersection. Him go too far.
I too grew up before the era of most childhood vaccination and was nearly a teen before receiving the polio vaccinations. I have had to deal with the effects of Autism all my life and feel that it is an inherited condition that has nothing to do with vaccinations. The reason that it has become rampant is due to expanded diagnosis. In the old days most Autistic behavior was within “normal” behavior. pg
I have no problems with ‘vaccination’ per se. The military ensured I had those that I hadn’t had before. However, I do have problems with the MMR idea. Any query on why it is necessary to hit an infant immune system with three diseases at once is deflected seamlessly into an argument justifying vaccination. The actual research done on the effects of MMR by Andrew Wakefield was never actually falsified he attacked as he was an MMR denier an area where there is a lot of worldwide bread and butter funding for pharma and was struck off for paperwork issues and found to have fiddled with some too. But the research that showed the impact of the measles part of MMR on gut lining and the gut flora in some children and the subsequent impact on assimilation of nutrients required by their developing brain has, as far as I am aware never been shown to be false. The time that the MMR vaccine is given is precisely the time that the brain, the hippocampus and the frontal and prefrontal cortex are developing fastest. Skew the nutrient supply to the brain for a critical couple of weeks in _some_ children and their brain development may be put on a path from which they can never recover. All this appears due to someone deciding to vaccinate with a cocktail of vaccines rather than one at a time. I suspect this is to please beancounters rather than clinicians.
@PG – Yes, back in the day you’d just have been “very focused when he gets interested in something” and probably earned a bit of extra praise from the teacher for that focus. Now, nothing is normal unless everybody does/has it, and anyone who goes beyond that has a “condition” that must be “treated” (usually at great profit to the meds manufacturer). Not an improvement, unless you have a lot of pharma stocks and shares.
@Steve C:
Thanks for the heads up on the strike… I usually do a post change QA check. But sometimes the spouse is expediting and pushing and… well, I skip it. Usually that’s when wordpress decides to do something a bit odd. (Sometimes it adds a repeat of the tag just after the close tag, then at the very end of the article adds a matching close tag since ‘you forgot it’ after that added one… no idea why. In this case it ate the open angle and turned it into a & lt ; series. Then added a close strike at the very bottom as it was ‘missing’… Sigh.)
Yeah, I remember friends who had polio and recovered ( my sister’s friend had braces for most of her childhood. Took them off somewhere in high school. Walked normally by senior year. ) But it’s always a ‘sort of a recovery’… That’s a large part of why I’m “for the vaccine, against the force”.
@P.G.Sharrow:
YES! I was “bright, smart, and a bit quirky” as a kid. Now I’d be “on the spectrum” (though just barely). Why “on the spectrum”? Because I remember a lot, concentrate well, and tend to be a bit sensitive to some kinds of stimulation ( i.e. like a library more than a disco…) and speak proper English with a slightly formal tilt. (Reading those encyclopedias and classics as a kid…) IMHO, we’ve gone too far in “diagnosing” normal as an issue.
Back @Steve C:
I was also a bit ‘defiant’ of stupid authority and wanted to work on interesting things instead of stupid stuff… so now I’d be medicated into stupidity until I was more ‘compliant’ and found the stupid stuff interesting…. How do I know this? The spouse is a special ed teacher and is on the teams that decide what kids need ‘meds’… and “we talk”… I meet the triggers. Especially being ‘resistant’ to guidance into stupid stuff…
I once ( 3rd grade, IIRC) had all books and materials taken away and was put at a desk in the back of the room, away from everyone else. This went on for months. My “crime”? Not looking at the teacher and instead reading way ahead in some book other than the one she was teaching from at the moment; or sometimes staring out the window. OK, months later, with NOTHING, and still staring out the windows… test time came. Getting one of the higher scores on the tests, she decided it wasn’t working and gave me the books back… I think it was from embarrassment that neither her, not the materials, mattered. Didn’t want to have to explain how that worked…
I’d have done much better had I been given the book and a quiet room for about a week. I’d have read the whole thing and “had it all”; with about 9 months left over…
Later, in about 5th grade, we had a “summer school enrichment class” for bright kids. It was fun, and they were trying to get the stigma off of summer school as being for slow kids. We went on all kinds of field trips, including to a bank and to the treasury office in Sacramento where we saw bails of currency headed for destruction. We had a page of paper with name, date, where we went and a big space for “notes”. Back at class, the teacher collected our papers. I was called up to his desk. In stern tones “WHY have you not taken any notes!?” I simply said “Because I remember it all and writing it down is kind of stupid”… After a short ‘why you ought to take notes’, he asked a question like “What do you remember?”. Several minutes later, after a precise list of where we went, who we saw, what they did, what the location was, what the building looked like, the time of day were were there, the… He decided it was OK that I’d not taken notes ( i.e. no punishment) but still stated “I ought to take notes for later reference when I would need them”. Now, some 50 years later, I can still see the visuals of the bank and treasury building, but I’ve forgotten the names of the people we met and the exact day of the month… but would not have those notes anymore anyway…
Now is that “normal”? No, not at all. But is it a disease? Absolutely NO, and certainly not at all. But I’m certain my “defiant” resistance to doing “stupid things” would have me medicated were I a kid today…
@Ian W:
Nice summary of the “issue” and why now I’d have my kids get the three as distinct shots spread over time. Also, not just bean counters but the drug company that had the patent on MMR was pushing it. Lots of lucre involved. Benefit not so much… ( is it REALLY that much better to have them in one go instead of each a month apart?) Now that we’re up to nearly 30 vaccines, expect even more “combined frontal assault” on the infant immune systems…
@SteveC;”@PG – Yes, back in the day you’d just have been “very focused when he gets interested in something” and probably earned a bit of extra praise from the teacher for that focus.”
Wrong conclusion, Teachers HATE to be ignored! As Mr Smith observed. I too spent several months in detention to “break” my “willful bad behavior” caused by Autism and Dyslexia. The ‘Good Sisters” of the Catholic school used every kind of mental and physical torture they could think of to make me conform to their idea of a normal student. After several months they gave up. I got to move to the back of the classroom and started to read every book in the school 8-) School was hell no longer. I have had school teachers tell me my intellect was wasted because of my difficulty with writing and that school was supposed to be hard work, learning was not something to be enjoyed!
After 60 years, writing is still very difficult, but a computer with a spell checker helps a great deal.
Autism and Dyslexia are not entirely bad things. I can block out confusion around me and concentrate on the task at hand and I think in 3 dimensions, both great benefits when you have to solve problems under duress. pg
I probably would have been a “problem child” too if I had been born later. In 4th grade I got in lots of trouble for talking in class. The teacher was not very interesting (or very bright) and I tended to comment to the kids sitting next to me since I was bored.
I sometimes have great difficulty shutting out background noise and chatter, I hear everything going on around me and can’t help but try to follow 3 different conversations at the same time, on other days I can shut off the outside world with no problem and go completely into a bubble of my own thoughts.
I work in a cube environment and when I am trying to focus on some complex problem (like why my script is doing something silly), I sometimes absolutely cannot ignore things going on around me. Had that happen just yesterday. I was trying to restore files from tape and was bombarded by outside input while I was trying to get the right fills off the tapes. The guy beside me was chatting with another worker about some computer game and the new computer system he was building, and just over the cube wall some other folks were talking about their weekend plans. My boss was on the phone with someone. I literally could not shut it out and focus on the task I was trying to do.
I finally put on my head phones and connected to a web site that streams white noise and dialed up the volume until I could barely tell those distracting conversations were taking place. If you really need blanking you can stream both of these at the same time and have a roaring rain storm to wipe out the external distractions
http://simplynoise.com/
http://rain.simplynoise.com/
In a quiet room I have no problem focusing, and growing up spent lots of time reading in my room, everything from Popular Science to Scientific American so grew up in a quiet undisturbed environment when I wanted to focus. I recall my father also saying he liked a quiet place to read.
Today if I was a kid in modern school I would probably get tagged as a kid with an inability to focus on the task at hand in today’s team learning environment where they want the kids to do everything in groups as teams. z
When I worked for the State they would send us to FEMA trainings where they would do those team work group trainings and it would drive me nuts. I would sit on my hands and keep my mouth shut while the other folks in the group fumbled around with no plan, no concept, no goal of what they were trying to accomplish then when we got down to about 10 minutes to go in our time allotment I would reach the point that I was ready to scream because they were just floundering. I would then finally speak up and outline a plan in about 2 minutes and everyone would nod their head that it sounded like a good plan, I would then get tasked to be the team presenter to present the plan and would spend the next 3-4 minutes filling out the flip chart. Result, it took me about 5 minutes to do a 30 minute exercise, so normally I was bored out of my mind by normal school assignments and would drift off to day dreaming to keep my brain active and sort of tune out the teacher.
I also have a pathological hatred for stupid home work. It seemed to come in two varieties. Type a home work was so brain dead and stupid you could do it in a coma, I would usually do that sort of home work on the fly the next day in class as the teacher was walking us through the homework assignment answering the questions one or two questions ahead of her. (I almost never took my books home from school). The second type b homework was so poorly structured and explained you had no clue what the teacher wanted and it was a waste of time and you ended up practicing mistakes if you tried to do it, — that sort of homework assignment I simply ignored. Nine times out of ten the next day the whole class said they could not figure it out and after an hour or so the teacher would toss it out and go back and discuss the topic again because it was obvious the whole class did not understand the concept or the problem in the home work.
Proof that most people – parents and doctors and even politicians – regarded “deadly” measles outbreaks as nothing back in the fifties and sixties: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDb0ZS3vB9g