To vaccinate or not to vaccinate???

You're ingoring the findings of the study comparing the vaccinated with the unvaccinated I referenced in post #73. You are also ignoring the cases of measles outbreaks tracked back to those who were properly vaccinated, and the percentage of those suffering from the outbreak who were appropriately vaccinated.
__________________________________________________________________

From the CDC:

“We are seeing a large number of cases of new outbreaks in populations we thought were already protected, and that to me is kind of a surprise,” infectious disease specialist Dr. Neil Rau told CTV News.

Flu Vaccine Not Effective In Preventing H1N1
Research studies have shown for three years that the flu vaccine is not effective in preventing H1N1 has been widely reported, including a study by the Center for Disease Control (CDC).

In Nov. 13, 2009, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention published a case-cohort study on the effectiveness of 2008-09 trivalent influenza vaccine against 2009 pandemic H1N1, concluding there was no decreased or increased risk of pandemic H1N1 following seasonal flu vaccine for people vaccinated.

http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5844a5.htm
__________________________________________________________________

"The studies published today reinforce the shortcomings of our efforts to control influenza," wrote Dr. Guan Yi, a virologist at the University of Hong Kong, in an editorial that accompanied the papers. The two studies were published early online by the British medical journal, the Lancet, because of their implications for the upcoming flu season.
In one paper, international researchers analyzed all the data from patient studies on the flu vaccine performed worldwide in the past 37 years and discovered that vaccines showed at best a "modest" ability to prevent influenza or its complications in elderly people.
"The runaway 100 percent effectiveness that's touted by proponents was nowhere to be seen," said Tom Jefferson, a Rome-based researcher with the Cochrane Vaccine Fields project, an international consortium of scientists who perform systematic reviews of research data.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/21/health/21cnd-bird.html?_r=0

__________________________________________________________________

Researchers from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the University of Hong Kong collaborated with University of Michigan researchers on the study, with Suzanne E. Ohmit, DrPH, of Michigan as the lead author.
In an editorial commentary accompanying the Michigan study, John Treanor, MD, and Peter Szilagyi, MD, both of the University of Rochester Medical Center, wrote, "As we are currently struggling through one of the most vigorous influenza seasons in recent memory, the apparent failure of influenza vaccine under optimal conditions seen in this study is indeed troubling."
And Edward Belongia, MD, a Wisconsin clinician-researcher and member of the CDC's Influenza Vaccine Effectiveness Network, said he was perplexed by the low overall VE in the study, given the approximate 60% protection levels found in studies by the network the same season. "I don't know what to make of it," he told CIDRAP (Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy) News.
____________________________________________________________________

 

I was vaccinated for everything that was required for me to be vaccinated against for public school and I get a flu shot yearly because they are offered at one of my jobs. Of all the sick people I've ever been around, I'm thankful to say the only thing I've ever gotten (despite vaccination) is chicken pox. Rather that than some of the other shit that can happen to you, especially if you're not vaccinated.

 

I vaccinated mine for polio WITH DEAD VIRUS vaccine. That's a bad one. For a time, the vaccine with LIVE VIRUS was the leading cause of polio. Read that somewhere years ago.

I was around a kid every day in a high school play that contracted polio and ended up in an iron lung. That was before polio vaccinations. Fortunately, I didn't get it.

 

No, I am not "ingoring" the findings of the study you referenced in post #73. I addressed this in post #77. In summary, it was a small study that confirmed the effectiveness of the vaccine against influenza. Even if the study's results had been valid, the study did not demonstrate that subjects would be better off without the flu vaccine. Beyond this, a follow-up study demonstrated that the study that you cited was in error.

If you are referring to the links to abstracts of two studies about a 1989 measles outbreak in Quebec City, no I did not ignore those studies. I addressed them in post #76. I'll try to summarize what I said in that post.

1. The first study conducted in 1991 found that in a population of 8,931 students, there were 563 cases of the measles. At least 84.5% of the cases occurred in students who had received 2 measles vaccines. 99% of the students had been vaccinated.

The link is only to an abstract, but based on these numbers, roughly 5.4% of the vaccinated population got the measles, whereas 97.8% of the unvaccinated population got the measles. So based on this study the unvaccinated population was more than 18 times more likely to get the measles. Still, it was surprising that the vaccinated population did not have even better immunity than it did.

2. A follow-up study was conducted in 2013. This study found that if the first dose of the vaccine was administered between 12 to 13 months of age, this population was six times more likely to get the flu compared to the population immunized at 15 months of age or later.

In other words:

A) Anyone who got the vaccine was way, way, less likely to get the measles

B) The population that got the first dose of the vaccine after 15 months of age was way, way, way, way less likely to get the measles.

It's not even necessary to read past the second sentence of this study to realize that the "vaccines don't work" claim that you are making is nonsense. I'll quote it here:

To understand this sentence, you must understand what the word "antigen" means. Here's a quote from wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antigen

So pandemic H1N1 is distinct in the way the immune system reacts to it from seasonal H1N1. Because of this distinction, it's not too surprising that the seasonal vaccine won't protect against pandemic H1N1. The seasonal H1N1 vaccine still works great for seasonal H1N1.

One can not conclude that "vaccines don't work" from these studies, but rather than influenza vaccines given to the elderly still work, but not as well as they do when vaccines are given to young people. So this is a reason why young people who may come in contact with the elderly should get the seasonal flu vaccine. It might even be a reason for the elderly not to get a flu vaccine, depending on the costs of the vaccine, but since the elderly have an especially high risk of dying from the flu, from a strictly medical perspective, they should still get the flu shot.

There is also no direct link to these studies from 2005, so I can't research whether follow-up studies found flaws with these studies' conclusions.

 

That is ridiculous. Let’s take the example of one hundred students. If five out of ten students who are not vaccinated get measles, while thirty-three students out of that same hundred who are vaccinated get measles, you can say that, statistically, one half of the students who were unvaccinated developed measles, and that only one third of the students who were vaccinated developed measles. The truth would be that thirty-three students who were vaccinated developed measles, while only five students who were unvaccinated developed measles.

So, tell me how many of those 563 were vaccinated, and how many were not. Then we can get to the truth of the matter.
____________________________________________________________________

From one of my links summarized:

A person who received both doses developed measles. Not only that, the patient transmitted the disease to four others who were either vaccinated or had evidence of immunity to measles. Since that time, investigators reported similar transmission of measles by a 22-year old woman who also received both doses of the vaccine. And of the four people who developed measles after contact with her, two had received two doses of MMR, and the other two had positive IgG antibody results.

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices presumes immunity to the illness in individuals who have received two doses of live measles virus–containing vaccine, such as combined measles/mumps/rubella (MMR), or have laboratory evidence of immunity. Although cases of measles have occurred among people who meet these criteria, until now, those who develop measles despite vaccination have not been shown to transmit it to others.

I believe the operative term in the highlighted statement is “until now.”

 

Shoutout to Vaccines for eradicating smallpox, which killed 500 million during the 20th Century alone.

 

^That is correct, more or less. In the example that you give, statistically, half of the unvaccinated students would get sick, whereas only about one third of the vaccinated students would get sick. You would have to make the total student population 109 to make the numbers come out right. 10 students who are unvaccinated, and 99 who are vaccinated. The absolute number of unvaccinated students who would get sick would be 5, and the absolute number of vaccinated students who would get sick would be 33. The real world numbers would be more like 9 unvaccinated students would get sick, and 6 vaccinated students would get sick, but according to your example, yes the absolute number of sick vaccinated students would be higher. I'll talk more about this later in this post.

Ok.

First we have to talk about the percentages listed in the studies. The first study notes that at least 84.5% of the students who got sick were vaccinated. So to find the total number of vaccinated students who got sick, we need to multiply 563 by .845, which is 475.735. Since the stat is at least 84.5%, it doesn't produce a whole number, so we'll have to round up to 476. The number of sick students who were unvaccinated students then, would be 563 minus 476, which is 87.

99% of the 8,931 students were vaccinated. The total number of vaccinated students is then 8931 times .99, which is 8841.69, and rounded up is 8842.

The total number of unvaccinated students then, is 8931 minus 8842, which is 89.

If the number of vaccinated sick students is 476, and the total number of vaccinated students is 8842, only 5.4% of the vaccinated students got sick. This corresponds roughly to the statistic noted in the second study that you listed, that 94% of vaccinated students had immunity, so we can tell that the rounding that we did earlier produced a figure that is fairly precise.

If the number of unvaccinated sick students is 87, and the total number of unvaccinated students is 89; this means that 97.8% of unvaccinated students got sick, or in other words, nearly all of them.

Here's another way of looking at this. Lets say you have a choice of choosing a ball out of a bin, blindfolded.

Bin A contains a total of 8,842 balls; 476 of them are black balls of death, the remaining 8,366 are white balls of life.

Bin B contains a total of 89 balls; 87 of them are black balls of death, the remaining two are white balls of life.

Which bin should you pick from if you don't want to pick a black ball of death? The answer is obviously bin A, even though the absolute number of death balls in bin A is greater than the number in bin B.

The same applies to the percentages that you listed above.

If

Bin A contains 99 balls total and 33 balls of death,

and

Bin B contains 10 balls total and 5 balls of death


You'd obviously want to pick from Bin A to avoid picking a death ball.

Getting a vaccine is like picking from Bin A, and not getting a vaccine is like picking from Bin B.

It's also noteworthy that the follow-up study found that those who got their first measles vaccine at 15 months of age or later had a way higher rate of immunity than other vaccinated students. The awesome immunity from measles conferred by vaccination got even more awesome when it was administered at 15 months.

I already addressed this. It has never been the claim of vaccination supporters that 100% of people who get vaccinated get immunity 100% of the time. Getting vaccinated, however, makes you much, much less likely to get sick in most cases.

Congratulations, Storch! I now realize that you knew that vaccines were safe and effective all along, you've just succesfully trolled me. :sunny:

 

^ Amen, brother

from wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox

 

Scientific and medical research has proved through the VAST PREPONDERNACE of evidence that vaccination reduces the rate of infectious disease occurrence. No vaccine is 100% safe or effective for 100% of the people but the risk of serious illness from vaccination is miniscule compared to the risk of even one case of diphtheria, polio or measles to name a few diseases which have been virtually eliminated by vaccination.
Vaccine deniers, like science deniers, are not operating in a rational universe. They cannot be convinced of their error by any amount of evidence. They must be marginalized by the legitimate scientific and medical community and shown up as the outliers that they are.

 

Actually, there are graphs from the Office of National Statistics that show that death from Measles was on a steady decline long before the introducion of the vaccine. You can see it in the link below, along with some other graphs.

http://childhealthsafety.wordpress.com/graphs/

Also, according to graphs found in the data from the Official Year Books of the Commonwealth of Australia, a similar decline in measles is seen long before the introduction of the vaccine. That graph is also in the link I provided. There is also a graph which shows the same pattern concerning dyptheria and the introduction of that vaccine.

 

How does that compare to the statistic of longer lifespans?

 

This is more or less the same point that you made in earlier posts, though more specific to the case of measles.

If you would like to make the point that "Vaccines alone do not account for the declines in mortality from measles in the United States from 1912-1975", that seems like a plausible conclusion. What exactly the causes are of the decline are not established by the graph. It seems reasonable to me though, to think that you're less likely to die of measles if your health and nutrition are good, and you have clean clothes and a nice warm bed to sleep in, and access to quality hospitalization and medical case, as opposed to living in a cold, dirty, drafty tenament and having to work 80 hours a week in a coal mine or factory whether you're sick or not so you won't starve.

The graphs that you are using here don't support the conclusion that "vaccines don't work", however.

Let's look at the graph labeled "FIGURE 1 -Reported Measles Cases and Death per 100,000 Population, United States 1912-1975"

The solid line representing measles deaths declines more or less steadily with the red trend line, up until about the mid-1960's. Except for the drop in deaths in the 60's, this tends to go along with the idea that non-vaccine factors had a strong effect in lowering deaths from measles.

Now lets look at the dotted line above that line representing measles cases in the same period. There is no steady decline in measles cases. The number of cases varies significantly from year to year, but with rates between about 200 to 600 per 100,000, until the mid 1960's when cases drop to a low of about 10 around 1968.

If the average number of cases is about 400, that's a 97.5% drop in the number of cases. Even if you want to say the number of cases prior to the drop is closer to 200, that's still a 95% drop in the number of cases.

What could explain why measles cases dropped so steeply? One explanation might be the introduction of a measles vaccine.

(from wikipedia)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine


There is also a steep drop in the number of deaths at the same time, though not as steep a drop as there is in the number of cases.

Let's also try to take into account the fact that not everybody gets the measles vaccine.

As I noted in my earlier posts, the only way to fairly evaluate the effectiveness of a vaccine is to compare rates of infection (and adverse events related to infection) in vaccinated and unvaccinated people in the same population.

As the Quebec City 1989 outbreak studies showed, vaccination conferred 94% immunity to the vaccinated population, and even higher immunity to the vaccinated population that received their first vaccination after 15 months of age.

In stark contrast, the 97.8% of the unvaccinated population got the measles.

While it may be possible to make valid statements like "vaccines are not the sole reason for declining mortality rates from viruses", and "vaccines are not 100% effective in every case", there is no foundation for the conclusion that vaccines are not effective at preventing the infections they are intended to prevent.

There is overwhelming evidence supporting the effectiveness of vaccines. The overwhelming majority of the medical community strongly supports vaccination. I can't imagine any remotely reasonable person not reaching the same conclusion.

I'm going to consider this debate over.

Storch, if you would like to try to convince people that the moon landing was a hoax, or that aliens built the pyramids, by all means do so, but please don't try to mislead people into thinking that vaccines don't work, because a lot of people, especially children, could get sick or die as a result of listening to hysterical anti-vaccinationists.

 

You're in the wrong thread.

 

I wish i had half the energy you guys had, to argue points. I dont even need facts to disprove many of these statements but i know i would look stupid if i didnt back what i say up. And i already spend half my free time researching stats about circumsision, the bible, how to solve the conflict in the middle east, who was better the beatles or the stones, and if the moon landing was a hoax.

 

Could have sworn I pushed the right buttons. Do you mean my question is irrelevant to the thread? I think it relevant to the way statistics are parsed.

 

What's that about?
________________________________________________

You're doing a lot of typing to try to convince people that those graphs really don't indicate what they clearly show. Nice try. The measles graph absolutely shows a consistent decline through the years prior to the introduction of the vaccine. Keep talking though. There may yet be people who will take your advice and not believe their lying eyes.

And now, just for the sake of clearing up the issue concerning the need for the measles vaccine, let's put the "danger" in perspective. Prior to the vaccine, 3-4 million cases of measles occured in the United States each year. Of those 3-4 million cases, only about 450 people died each year from it in the years before the vaccine. You've shown yourself to be good with percentages, so why don't you do the math and tell me what percentage of those who developed measles died? Then we'll see who's hysterical about the need for a vaccine.

In the meantime, let's compare the yearly mortality rate of death due to measles to death due to other things. For instance, in 1963, about 12,000 people died from stomach ulcers and over 700,000 people died from heart disease. And you think people who don't want to put shit in their kids' bodies because of a mortailty rate of 450 per year are hysterical? That's hysterical!

 

Somebody watched john stewart yesterday.

 

Not me.

 

Your position on vaccines has as much credibility as the notion that the moon landing was a hoax, or that aliens built the pyramids. Actually, I think the notion that aliens built the pyramids has more credibility, since there is an overwhelming body of evidence that supports the effectiveness of vaccines.

As I discussed above, the graph does seem to show that measles mortality declined prior to the introduction of the vaccine. In other words, things other than vaccines have had an impact on mortality.

However, when the vaccine was introduced in 1963, and especially when an improved measles vaccine was introduced in 1968, both the overall number of cases and measles mortality declined dramatically.

Hooray for those other things responsible for declining measles mortality, whatever they are. The vaccines work though and save lives, so let's vaccinate.

The fairest comparison of how effective vaccines are is to look at infection rates among the vaccinated versus the unvaccinated in the same population. The Quebec City studies, which you yourself cited, showed that 97.8% of the unvaccinated population got the measles in an outbreak, whereas 6% or less of the vaccinated population did. That's a pretty dramatic difference.

Your stats seem to be about right. According to the CDC:

http://www.cdc.gov/measles/vaccination.html

Ok. I'll do the math and tell you what percentage of those who developed measles died. Then we'll see who's hysterical about the need for a vaccine.

Using the figure of 4 million infections and 400 deaths will yield the lowest possible percentage of deaths from measles, so these are the figures that are most favorable to your argument. It also makes the math easier.

So that yields 1 death in every 10,000 cases, or .01%.

According to the CDC (link above) "Widespread use of measles vaccine has led to a greater than 99% reduction in measles cases in the United States"

So if only 1% of the 4 million cases would have occurred had everyone been vaccinated, and the death rate of 1 in 10,000 cases also applied, that means that only 4 people in the vaccinated population would have died, or in other words, you would be about 10,000% more likely to die without the vaccine.

Measles deaths might be rare, but they still happen, and there is every reason to get the measles vaccine because there is still a substantial risk of death and disability associated with not getting the vaccine, and no good reasons not to get it.

Other diseases cause a much higher rate of fatality than measles. If there were vaccines against cancer, heart disease, and stroke, they would be even more important than measles vaccines.

We don't have vaccines for cancer, heart disease, and stroke. We do have a vaccine for measles. It's easy, you just get the shot, then you are spared the risks of death and disability, not to mention the substantial agony of being infected.

People should also get regular, gentle aerobic exercise, have a healthy diet that is low in hydrogenated oils, and avoid smoking.

It's also important to note that children don't typically die from stomach ulcers, or from heart disease (except for congenital heart disease). They are a big part of the percentage of people who die from vaccine preventable illnesses, however.

 

here's a graph of measles rates in the US that includes post 1975 data

http://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/graph-us-measles-cases


It's also noteworthy that many of the vaccine preventable illnesses carry significant risks of death and disability as well. Taken together, the protection provided by vaccines on the vaccine schedule is much higher.