"New Guidelines Issued for Immunization of Infants, Children, Teens, Adults
An Expert Panel of the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) has prepared updated, evidence-based guidelines for immunization of infants, children, adolescents, and adults. The new guidelines, which are published in the September 15 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases, replace the previous IDSA clinical practice guideline for quality standards for immunization, published in 2002."
This apparently officious body now recommends a host of new vaccines:
"New vaccines that have been licensed since 2002 include human papillomavirus vaccine; live, attenuated influenza vaccine; meningococcal conjugate vaccine; rotavirus vaccine; tetanus toxoid, reduced diphtheria toxoid, and acellular pertussis vaccine; and zoster vaccine. New combination vaccines that have become available are measles, mumps, rubella, and varicella vaccine; tetanus, diphtheria, and pertussis and inactivated polio vaccine; and tetanus, diphtheria, and pertussis and inactivated polio/Haemophilus influenzae type b vaccine.
For young children, hepatitis A vaccines are now universally recommended. All children aged 6 months through 18 years and adults who are 50 years or older should receive annual administration of influenza vaccines. The routine childhood and adolescent immunization schedule now includes a second dose of varicella vaccine. The adolescent and adult immunization schedules have expanded to accommodate many of these new recommendations."
The Infectious Diseases Society of America sounds impressive, eh? When you get to the end of the article, you find this:
"The IDSA supported formulation of these guidelines. Some of the guidelines (sic) authors report various financial relationships with Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi Pasteur, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices working group for Influenza and HPV, Astellas, MedImmune, Wyeth, AstraZeneca, the National Institute of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Novavax, Protein Sciences, Novartis, CSL Limited, PowderMed, and/or Avianax."
So we have people who profit from the sale of immunizations setting the guidelines for immunizations. On top of that, they endorse making some immunizations mandatory. How convenient to have the State make your products mandatory. Wouldn't Coca Cola like Congress to pass a law requiring that every U.S. citizen purchase 4 liters of Coca Cola every week?
How about giving us an opinion from a disinterested third party?
If immunizations work, i.e. really make immunized people immune, what do those people have to fear from non-immunized people? In 1922, when smallpox still occurred regularly, Henry Lindlahr, M.D. wrote about vaccinations:
"From England vaccination gradually spread over the civilized world and during the nineteenth century the smallpox disease (variola) constantly diminished in virulence and frequency until today it has become of comparatively rare occurrence.
'Therefore vaccination has exterminated smallpox,' say the disciples of Jenner.
Is that really so? Is vaccination actually a preventive of smallpox? This seems very doubtful when the advocates of vaccination themselves do not believe it. 'What,' I hear them say, 'we do not believe in our own theory?' Evidently you do not, my friends. If you believe that vaccination protects you against smallpox, why are you afraid of catching it from those who are not vaccinated? If you are thoroughly protected, as you claim to be, how can you catch the disease from those who are not protected? Why do you not allow the other fellow to have his fill of smallpox and then enjoy a good laugh on him? The fact of the matter is you know full well that you are not safe, that you can catch the disease just as readily as the unprotected.
I have yet to find a single proponent of vaccinations who can answer this simple question asked more than 75 years ago by Lindlahr. Sometimes they talk of "herd" immunity being the key to vaccine effectiveness. I find this funny. If you actually get a disease, like chickenpox, and let it run its course, you build immunity for life, regardless of whether or not the 'herd' has immunity.
Not so if you get the vaccine. On March 15, 2007, the New York Times reported on a study done by CDC researchers (and published in the New England Journal of Medicine) that found that the chickenpox vaccine "has sharply reduced the number of cases in children but that its protection does not last long." The Times article states:
With fewer natural cases of the disease, the study says, unvaccinated children or those whose first dose of the vaccine fails to work are getting chickenpox later in life, when the risk of complications is higher.
“If you’re unvaccinated and you get it later in life, there’s a 20-times greater risk of dying compared to a child, and a 10- to 15-times greater chance of getting hospitalized,” said Dr. Jane Seward of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, who worked on the study.
Apparently now unvaccinated children have a higher risk of adult chickenpox due to the influence of the vaccine, whereas unvaccinated children did not have such a risk by contact with people who actually had chickenpox. So the vaccination converted a non-life threatening childhood disease into a life-threatening adult disease.
The NEJM authors admitted that vaccinated children still get the chickenpox, and that vaccinated individuals who get chickenpox have a more severe form of the disease:
And when vaccinated children were infected [with chickenpox], they tended to be sicker, probably because they were older. “Children between the ages of 8 and 12 years who had been vaccinated five years or more previously were two times as likely to have moderate-to-severe breakthrough disease as were those who had been vaccinated less than five years previously,” the researchers wrote.
Yet people still "believe" in vaccines. As this article in The Atlantic discusses, many authorities 'beleive' in flu vaccination as a 'public health' measure, despite lack of evidence for efficacy or safety. This reminds me of the 'belief' in high-carbohydrate low-fat diets and cholesterol-lowering drugs, also pushed on the public without evidence for efficacy or safety.
Lindlahr again:
"But," our opponents insist, "you cannot deny that smallpox has greatly diminished since the almost universal adoption of vaccination."
Certainly the disease has diminished. But so have diminished and, in fact, nearly disappeared the plague, the Black Death, cholera, the bubonic plague, yellow fever and numerous other epidemic pests which only recently decimated entire nations.
Not one of these epidemics was treated by vaccination. Why, then, did they abate and practically disappear?
Not vaccination, but the more universal adoption of soap, bathtubs, all kinds of sanitary measures, such as plumbing, drainage, ventilation and more hygienic modes of living generally have subdued smallpox as well as all other plagues.
Lindlahr has part of the answer. Not only hygienic measures, but also the replacement of horses with autos (removing manure from city streets), improved nutrition, and simple evolution contributed to the subsidence of epidemic diseases. When these diseases ravaged populations, the people affected had poor quality nutrition. In every case, the diseases ran their course through the populations, affecting all who had low immunity, causing them to either build immunity or die, and thus leaving in their wake a population having immunity to the disease. As well, the disease entity itself evolves. A disease that kills its hosts will eventually eradicate itself.
So far as I can tell, all the "evidence" in favor of vaccinations is epidemiological, that is, correlative, in this vein: "We gave this population the vaccine for X disease and the disease incidence declined, therefore the vaccine eliminated the disease." This is classic mistaking of correlation with causation, along with the fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc, i.e. y happened after x, therefore x caused y. Lindlahr pointed it out more than 75 years ago.
I formed my opinion after examination of evidence such as this graph posted at Child Health Safety :
This shows that vaccines for measles, pertussis, and diphtheria all got introduced during the natural waning of the epidemics, making it impossible for me to conclude that the vaccine had any dramatic benefit. Child Health Safety has similar graphs referring to other vaccines.
And if you look deeply into this, you will find that changes and fashions in diagnosis also influenced the "decline" of epidemics "observed" after vaccines. Before the vaccine for measles, physicians were on the lookout for measles, and so diagnosed it frequently. After the introduction of the vaccine for measles, for example, physicians believed that the vaccine eliminated measles so they simply were less likely to diagnose an infection as measles. But doctors are notoriously bad at diagnosis. They overdiagnose or underdiagnose based on fashions, such as when the incidence of arteriosclerotic heart disease "increased" in 1948 after this diagnosis was added to the ICD.
And, I notice that if the incidence of infection goes down even in unvaccinated folks, rather than questioning whether the vaccination did the job, vaccine proponents attribute this to herd immunity conferred by vaccination. Its like giving treatment A to one group and a placebo to the other; both groups get better equally, so you conclude that treatment A works so well, it even helps people who didn't receive it by having a “herd” effect. In any other investigation, people would conclude that the treatment works no better than a placebo or no treatment. I understand the rationale given for this explanation in respect to vaccinations, but for vaccine proponents, it conveniently excludes the possibility of a control group, or of concluding that no treatment worked as well as treatment--possibilities necessary for scientific evaluation.
But who cares about science when you can get politicians to force everyone to take your product by government decree, and at taxpayer expense?
Of course I could be wrong. Do the research and think for yourself.
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