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Vaccines Are Not Going to Kill You
This chart has been floating around Farcebook and other sociopathic media for awhile. I finally saw it a couple of hours ago.
“Hmm,” I said, “that doesn’t look right.”
Let’s do some research, using the same websites that “t. sixx” purports to get his data from: The Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
I’ve been kicking around pediatric medicine for a year or two, so I immediately noticed a couple of anomalies. Very few people are just vaccinated for Mumps or Measles or Rubella. The grand majority, well over 90%, are given a combo vaccine called MMR. The same goes for Diphtheria, Tetanus and Pertussis. Since that’s the case, how do you know which portion of the combo was the cause of death? Also, look at all the coincidences. Mumps, Rubella and Varicella vaccines all caused four deaths each. Well, deaths from those three appear to be incredibly rare, so that number is not out of the realm of possibility. But Diphtheria and Tetanus? Exactly 72 each? Pneumonia and Polio, 85 each? Really?
Well, maybe so. After all, incredible coincidences do happen. So I went to the VAERS database, the same source that “t. sixx” gets his/her/their/it’s data from, and plugged in every combination of Mumps, Measles and Rubella vaccines for 2014. “t. sixx” says those three caused 14 deaths. The VAERS database says three. Well, that’s only off by 79%; maybe “t. sixx” hit the wrong key. Anyone can make a mistake. How about Diphtheria, Tetanus, and Pertussis? “t. sixx” says those three vaccines caused 221 deaths. The actual number, again from the database that “t. sixx” claims as a source, is 36. Just a little bit off.
How about the other column? “t. sixx” claims that the CDC says that only 19 people died of the flu in 2014. Hallelujah! We’ve conquered the flu!!! Oopsy, that’s just a bit off. The CDC actually says that flu deaths in 2014 were estimated to be 51,376. That’s not even close enough for government work. Well, maybe he was just talking about children? 803 deaths in 2014 according to the source “cited” by “t. sixx.” Children under four years old? 396 deaths from the flu in 2014, still off by a factor of 20 to 1.
I did find one thing right: 13 people died of Hepatitis B in 2014. Unfortunately, according to VAERS, there were six deaths from the vaccine for Hep B that year, not 50.
And even supposing that every line on that chart is true, the reason that there are so few deaths from these diseases is because most people have been vaccinated. Does anyone really think that there would be still no deaths from Tetanus if we stopped vaccinating?
So this is the same as all anti-vax propaganda: Blatant lies to fool the gullible. And they obviously know they are lying. As Derek Hunter says about Adam Schiff, “If the truth was on their side, they wouldn’t have to lie.”
Published in Healthcare
That would have been smallpox. I got mine on the upper arm. Still have the scar. Now, imagine every one of the pox leaving such a scar. Those who lived didn’t get away unharmed.
DTP or some version of the combo goes back a while (1948, in fact). Tetanus is given alone as it is recommended to be boosted every ten years. There’s no such recommendation for the other two. If your last one was in 2003, you’re 6 years late!
Nah. They make all expectant moms get the pertussis vax. I got the DTP last in 2014-2015 time frame with my last pregnancy.
That was just my last recalled Tetanus solo shot (sometime early in college). I got a solo pertussis in 2011.
So the bundling is not a guarantee.
First one is generally bundled. The boosters are done on a different time schedule, if at all, so they’re given separately.
Just on a flyer I did a quick search on flight statistics. I guess it could be I dropped a zero some place, but its pretty clear none of these anti-vaxxers are going to be taking a commercial plane flight any time in the next 14000 years.
You are right, of course. My pediatric and ER bias is showing. The only vaccines I actually give are flu and the combo TDaP boosters.
GMOs, good or bad?
What about car repairs? Good or bad?
(You are required to paint them all with the same brush.)
I got the flu shot today.
I ate food today.
Maternal rubella infections used to be a major cause of mental retardation.
Thats why parents used to have “German Measles Parties” for their young daughters.
LOL. Once I had a patient come in to the ER with chest pain. Crushing, radiating to left arm, nausea, covered in sweat, short of breath. I could already hear the fluid in his lungs from his cardiac failure. EKG showed a massive heart attack.
I tell him ” sir I’m afraid you are having a heart attack and will need immediate treatment in the cath lab and possibly a “clot busting” medication.”
His wife goes ” he won’t do any of that doc, he’s a Christian Scientist”.
The patient grabs my coat and says “ doc, do whatever you need to do“.
Polio
You were very lucky. I’ve seen about 5 cases of mengococcemia in my career and all were disastrous for the patients.
We have forgotten. Pretty much the only people now vaccinated for it are the military. The vast majority of people no longer have immunity.
Actually the recommendation by CDC is Tdap for anyone under 65 for a booster. Trying to increase the herd immunity for pertussis as we were seeing some increase in cases.
You can’t paint them with the same brush.
GMO’s are obviously good. Scientific advances in that field have saved more lives than anything in medicine. And they’ve greatly reduced our need for herbicides, pesticides, and other chemicals, thus improving the environment. Win – win. Nothing to debate.
Car repairs – well, it depends. How much is the car worth? Who is driving it? Does the car absolutely have to run every day, or do you have another car just in case? I’ve driven a lot of junk cars over the years, most of which it really didn’t make sense to fix them up. They just weren’t worth it.
But GMO’s – man, I hate to think what the world would look like right now without them.
I’m kinda leery of GMO anthrax.
Someday, we will harvest whatever sprouts up between the cracks in what used to be roads and sidewalks. The new purely natural epidemics will eliminate the need for earth-raping mass agriculture. And as long as we sacrifice a baby or two in the Temple of #Science, our mother the planet will not die.
I knew about chicken pox parties but had not heard that one.
One reason for being discrimin
One reason for making distinctions is that we have the example of the left in hiding behind the GI Bill and the Interstate Highway System. Remember the days when they’d argue that government is a force for good? Our national government was successful in both of those two items, they’d point out; therefore, we should increase taxes and have it do everything else, too.
I had a woman with breast cancer come to me years ago. She said “I lose my breast and my religion at the same time.” The Christian Science “nursing homes:” will not accept a patient who has been treated. I found most Christian Science patients would accept surgery when needed but things that take chronic med use, like hypertension and type II diabetes were likely to be sloughed off.
I’m kinda leery of hammers, if you hit me in the head with one. But if you use hammers to build my house, I’m a fan.
Which, I suspect, is your point. GMO’s are obviously an enormous net good. That doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to misuse them, just like you could misuse a hammer, or a passenger jet, or anything else.
If that’s your point, I’m with you.
If I misunderstood you, I apologise. But I think we agree.
That’s a large part of the point I was making. And you shouldn’t apologize for working to clarify an issue.
BTW, it’s very important that we misunderstand each other in order to get along; I just read a book chapter on how important mutual misunderstanding was in the formation of political alliances in the Ohio valley in the 18th century.
Misunderstanding works on a personal level, too. But there is also a place for clarification and understanding. We call it Ricochet.
Funny
When I was a kid, if you had chickenpox you could count on getting visitors. And a young friend had mumps, got visitors also.
Ironically, some very useful science is being done with modified versions of nasty viruses. For example, I work with a lab that uses a neutered rabies virus for studying nerve connections, and another that uses a similarly neutered herpes virus.
Lentivirus is basically the shell of HIV turned into a “cyborg” or “chimera” with the replication part separated. It is extremely useful in science and therapy. The more modern versions of lentivirus require both a helper virus and a special cell line to replicate.
LOL. Yeah, my comment to my colleagues was “never saw a bedside loss of faith before”…
“A massive rubella outbreak in the United States (1964-65) initially failed to draw serious attention. A Time magazine article encouraged rubella parties, even recommending strategies so that “especially all the little girls get the infection.”
Unfortunately, despite warnings about keeping infected children away from pregnant women, nearly 50,000 women in vulnerable stages of their pregnancies were infected with rubella during the outbreak, leading to thousands of miscarriages and even more children being born with severe damage. At least 8,000 were born deaf, 3,500 deaf and blind; the total number of congenital rubella syndrome cases reached 20,000.
Over the course of the outbreak the country tallied approximately 12.5 million cases of rubella and more than 2,000 deaths. Resulting medical costs reached the billions.”
I, on the other hand, was under strict quarantine when I got the mumps, since (despite having been vaccinated) I got them at age 16. Maybe I missed a booster or something, I don’t know. We don’t know how I got it, either. Didn’t hear of a single other case of it anywhere near us, that year.
Mom knew about the particular risks for men from that disease so I didn’t see the boys across the street we usually hung out with for nearly three weeks. Didn’t see my own bed, either, since I was too weak to climb the stairs to my room. They nearly hospitalized me at the worst of it. “Childhood” diseases are no joke, once you’re out of childhood.
I also managed to get both chicken pox and measles despite being vaccinated but luckily, I knocked those out before age 7. My big sister, on the other hand, was shoved by my mother into every chicken pox sick room up until she was 10 or so, in the hope of getting that one out of the way but she never got infected, which hardly seems fair, seeing as I got “pox’d” over Christmas.
We all remember hearing about Dad’s best friend, Bob, who had “a bit of cough” on their last night out before starting high school, which turned out to be polio. He died before the year was out. It wasn’t a threat to us, of course, by the time my sisters and I heard that story but we could still see what a horrible specter it had been in my parents’ time and before.
So, my own spotty success record with preventative measures notwithstanding, I’m still firmly in favor of vaccines.
Anti-vaxxers are perfectly immune to fact and logic, so they obviously got vaccinated with something (maybe some sort of mad cow prion).
Why people argue against the immune system (i.e., the fundamental mechanism of action of every vaccine plus every disease you avoid getting) is mind-blowing.