Vaccines are a plot by big pharma!

[StealthySkeptic]

Ugh.

Ok, so, hi, I'm back for now, largely because I just needed to talk about how mind numbingly stupid people can get with their pseudoscience and conspiracy theories. Specifically, I'm on a skeptic group on facebook and we have some good discussions, but once in a while, we get a nut with some kinda extreme beliefs.

Let me start by saying I'm glad I don't live near this person. He lives in Canada, so, if anyone's up there, you might watch out. I did a little research on herd immunity and, yes, people like him put the people around him at risk. But I've been taking all kinds of classes in biology, so I've really gotten to learn about this stuff and because of that, the bullshit-o-meter really goes off when I hear the stupids.

So, his claims were as follows.

1) Diseases we eliminated with vaccines were on their way out anyway
Really? Small Pox wasn't on its way out. Polio wasn't on its way out. Yellow Fever wasn't on its way out. Chicken Pox will probably be the next one eliminated and it's not on it's way out. Many of these diseases were killing people before we dealt with them. What's worse, diseases we didn't have to worry about at all 20 years ago, they're starting to make comebacks because of anti-vaccine nut like this. So we might not have to worry about them, but our children and grandchildren might not be so lucky.

2) Vaccines are an attempt by big pharmacutical companies to get money from us; specifically, they get us to pay them for the vaccines, the vaccines make us sicker which results in them making money by curing whatever sickness we get then.
Also flawed. While I don't doubt for a second that pharmicutical companies (or any company, for that matter) will take less than ethical measures to get extra money, I don't think the scientific community is going to let them get away with selling us poisons like that. If they actually were that unhealthy, it would only be a matter of time before they get called on it and their sales completely dry up while they have to pay off a lot of lawsuits. No, that would be a terrible way of making money.

3) Vaccines are weakening our immune system becase it doesn't actualy get a chance to fight diseases.
This is the kind of garbage that shows me this person doesn't have even a rudimentary understanding of how the immune system works. Specifically, it's not like a muscle; you don't have to work it out to keep it working.

4) Vaccines have toxins and heavy metals in them which make them dangerous
This one is actually partially true, but, again, a descent understanding of biology eases things up. Yes, there is a small amount of toxins in there, usually mercury. It's put in there to trigger an immune response, which brings in more memory cells and the memory cells are the ones that create immunity. The vaccine could still work without those, but we'd have to use larger doses. However, the other crazy part is this: they use incredibly small amounts of mercury in vaccines. Specifically, they use so little that you'd be more likely to get mercury poisoning from a tin of tuna than you would in a vaccine.

5) Vaccines use inactivated viruses that aren't always inactivated
Not really. All we need from the viru or bacteria is an idea of what their surface proteins are like and we use those in the vaccine. The memory cells learn to fight off the infection based on those protein markers.

He also linked me to some sites that promote his line of thinking. I'll post a couple of them here.

http://www.healthyaeon.com/2013/11/heavy...pu998RDssR
http://articlesofhealth.blogspot.ca/2013...crets.html

So, I wanted to see if they understood what they're talking about. Specifically, I just did a brief search for the phrase "lymphocyte." I figure, if they're talking about the immune system, they'd kinda have to say something about that, right?

Nope. That word was not used once in either article. Look for yourself. I did a slower search to see if parts of the phrase would be in there anywhere and the most I was able to get is that one of them talked about "lymph tissue" which, actually, just makes it sound worse (in that the phrase "lymph tissue" is, at best, ambigious).

Ugh. Why do people fall for garbage like this? Why do they critique, so harshly, well documnted scientific findings that conflicts with them but they so readily accept some crackpot blog post that could have been written by any nut?

Kudos'd and shared a billion times over!