Vaccines are a plot by big pharma!

[Ravenshire]

And you yourself cannot change your mind, you wear the blinkers of false science, you believe you know it all because you have been told, but you never look outside of your little box, you never investigate independent studies, you my friend are a fundamentalist dogmatic sheep.

You are a fucking asshole! The one person here who hasn't dismissed your bullshit out of hand as it so richly deserves, and you shit on her as if she were calling you names or calling you out on your bullshit. Grow the fuck up ass-wipe.

Provide some evidence of your claims or shut the fuck up.

---

Great as if I wasn't already terrified to send my oldest baby to kindergarten this month.

*Losty runs away crying

Don't worry yourself even one little bit over dipshit's claims. He hasn't got a clue what caused anything that happened to him. He's just taken a correlation as a causation and run with it. If there were any truth at all to his claim, he'd be spewing it all over the forum.

[Losty]

I was actually already worried and then another post made me worry more. But it wasn't p'slice. I don't really take anything he says seriously. The guy is allergic to logical thinking.

[Ravenshire]

Now your being silly, just admit that you are wrong, or at least investigate more instead of just believing what the very ones who make this crap say.

Evidence or shut the fuck up. Ass cracks like you will do more harm "warning" people about vaccinations than a billion vaccinations will ever do.

Your "advice" may someday put someone's life at risk from an easily preventable disease. I really hope you get an invite to the funeral of the child that died from the mumps because you gave fucked up advice to someone stupid enough to listen to you.

---

I was actually already worried and then another post made me worry more. But it wasn't p'slice. I don't really take anything he says seriously. The guy is allergic to logical thinking.

I realized my mistake about three posts too late.

[Cato]

The guy is allergic to logical thinking.

There's probably a shot for that. Nevermind....

[Esquilax]

Care to summarize the strongest evidence presented in either?

Na, I think they had all that you need to know, you probably didn't even watch it all, your mind was already made up.

I think it's particularly telling that the guy who accuses others of having their minds already made up decided that we didn't watch the documentary, or, indeed, prejudged it... without actually knowing any of us, our reactions to it, or whether we watched it at all. The only one here with his mind already made up is you, Pslice, given that you're the only one here coming to that conclusion on zero information. I get that it insulates you from ever having to think about your beliefs if you just presume everyone else is biased against you, but that's some world class projection you just pulled.

And I guess you have no response to my clear, unambiguous demonstration of just how fallacious and ridiculous your logic is, either.

[Michael]

This is a subject that causes strong emotions in people, and it can be difficult to just focus on what we really know. (By chance I did a little work with Andy Wakefield around the time he was looking at the link between measles, measles virus and Crohn's disease.)

So what do we really know? Well, the people who do the most thorough and respected reviews of all the available evidence are the good people at Cochrane, who have developed thorough methods for reviewing a wide range of evidence on any particular question.

You will find their summary on MMR here: Cochrane review on MMR

It may be a little frustrating for people because what it says in the abstract is "Exposure to the MMR vaccine was unlikely to be associated with autism, asthma, leukaemia, hay fever, type 1 diabetes, gait disturbance, Crohn's disease, demyelinating diseases, bacterial or viral infections", but also that "The methodological quality of many of the included studies made it difficult to generalise their results."

So the risk of a link to autism or Crohn's disease (Andy Wakefield's original concerns) appears to be low, but that we don't have the necessary quality of study to be absolutely sure how low it is.

A couple of related things I would say are:

1) Andy's work initially identified a link of the measles virus itself to Crohn's disease. He then suggested it could also be caused by the vaccine (now considered unlikely). Even if Andy was right (which very few people now think), we wouldn't help people by withdrawal of vaccine if they then got measles itself, because Andy's hypothesis was that both could lead to Crohn's disease (by the time he moved onto autism he wasn't really looking for links to the virus itself, by then he'd got the bit between his teeth on looking for potential links with the vaccine).

2) Any vaccination carries some very small risk. The Cochrane review highlight's known risks. And here is where the issue is. So long as 90% or more people are being vaccinated than the disease spread is blocked by 'herd immunity'. Those that don't have the vaccine are effectively protected by those that do. So a small number of people can avoid the very small risks of vaccination without being at significant risk of the infectious disease itself. It's not 'fair', but it's real. But as vaccination drops below about 90% then the disease can start spreading again and suddenly people are now at a much more significant risk of contracting the disease. Now the balance of risk is such that vaccination is much the better option. Where we seem to be on the MMR virus is generally just the right side of the required vaccination level; those who are particularly worried about the vaccine can get away with not using it because they are protected by the majority of others that are vaccinated. But we are seeing some occasional local outbreaks of the viruses. That is usually enough to cause a reflex increase in vaccination rates. It is, to some extent, a self-correcting system - fewer people object to vaccination when the disease is present in the community, though of course it can be too late for some by that point who may suffer long term effects of infection (or, in the case of Rubella it is of course the unborn child who suffers the consequences of the lack of vaccination).

[Losty]

Thank you so much for posting here Michael.

I'm curious, do you think people/groups who spread fear an misinformation about vaccines are dangerous or harmless?

What do you think would happen if the majority of people stopped getting vaccinated?

[Michael]

I have no doubt that if vaccination rates drop significantly below 90% then there will be a very significant risk to people's health; much greater than the very low risks of vaccination. Rubella, for example, can have dreadful effects if the child is infected in the womb. And measles and TB can cause very serious harm. These are just a few of the harmful conditions prevented by vaccination programmes.

[Bad Writer]

There have been many voices of reason on this thread, but, so far, Michael's voice by far outweighs our own due to his history with Dr. Wakefield and the unique position into which that places him.

Sir, thank you for choosing to post here.

[Michael]

That's very kind Bad Writer, but I should say that I am a physiologist and pharmacologist. I am not a virologist or immunologist, so I am not an expert in this area. I am lucky enough to have access to most journals though, and good databases.

One interesting aspect of vaccination rates is that there is evidence [1] pointing to outbreaks in local clusters of people who together have low vaccination rates, even though the population around them are well vaccinated. There seems to be peer influence going on here. In these groups there can be outbreaks of measles even when the overall population coverage is good. These small clusters of deliberately unvaccinated people (or, more usually it is the children who are deliberately unvaccinate) may be unaware of the risk within their clustered peer group.

[1] Sugerman et al. (2010) Measles Outbreak in a Highly Vaccinated Population, San Diego, 2008: Role of the Intentionally Undervaccinated. Pediatrics. 125:745-755 http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/co.../747.short