I am struggling with the anti-vaccine movement right now.
My daughter - 18 months - has had her basic vaccinations, but is late for her MMR due to my wife's concerns.
I find it incredibly difficult; for every rational argument, there's an irrational "What about X" counterargument.
The fact that every rational explanation is greeted with another absurdity reveals the sad truth: she -and the other anti-vaccine people I've met - aren't interested in the truth, only following their faith that all vaccines are bad. We're based in Poland, and there's a huge amount of plausible-looking anti-vaccine information out there.
Most unhelpfully, a child in our social circle recently had to be hospitalised after a one-in-a-million allergic reaction to their MMR.
I'm close to breaking point; my marriage and life is otherwise healthy, but I can't idly stand by and leave my daughter and wider society vulnerable. God knows what'll happen when I she gets vaccinated behind her mother's back; I don't hold out much hope.
Wow, this turned out longer than I expected. Has anyone ever successfully convinced a anti-vaccine spouse? I'm at my wit's end.
I was in the same boat. My daughter is now 20. My decision, which might not work as well now, was to hold fast for the ones I thought were vital (and I apologize for not remembering which these were), to trust herd immmunization for some of the others, make sure she was strong and healthy (lots of fresh vegetables, jiu-jitsu, you know, eat well, exercise, plenty of sleep), and to have a private talk with her on her 18th birthday or soon thereafter.
She is now pretty much caught up on her vaccinations.
I don't know if I would make the same decision now, given apparently lower herd immunization rates, I might argue more vociferously.
It was easy to pick vaccines to reject, e.g., Gardasil (protects against only 2 of 4 major strains, covering ~%40 of cases, was not being given to boys, so seemed like corporate welfare for sure and could give a false sense of security), or the flu, which is useful for those at risk, less so for the strong and healthy, and by conceding on one or two I was able to get some of the more important ones.
Nowadays, now that I know the term catastrophic thinking, I might start the conversation in a general and helpful way, talking not about vaccines at all, but about how my wife reacts very strongly to bad news - or potential bad news. Over time, talk about this as a couple. With luck, her reactions will mitigate. If and when they do, discuss vaccination.
Good luck, my friend, it is a tough issue, an emotional one, and appeals to facts are not your friends (because of the emotionality of the issue - the underlying emotions must be acknowledged first).
My wife didn't want to have her daughter vaccinated with Gardisil for this reason either until she got cervical cancer. Since then she has changed her mind. ~40% is still pretty significant.
Here's the issue. The article says "In the US, the CDC reports that one in 3,000 children will have febrile seizures after an MMR shot." At least 3 million babies are born every year in the US [1], this equates to at least 1k kids having a visible reaction (seizures) to the shot every year. With numbers like this, there will be some push back as someone will most likely know someone who had an issue with the shot.
Understanding Febrile Seizures
“Febrile” means “relating to a fever.” In some children, having a fever—even fever that comes with typical childhood illnesses like ear infections or the common cold—can bring on a seizure. Measles was a common cause of febrile seizures in the United States before the disease became rare due to the success of the vaccination program.
During a febrile seizure, a child often has spasms or jerking movements and may lose consciousness. Febrile seizures usually last only a minute or two.
They are most common with fevers that get up to 102°F (38.9°C) or higher, but can also occur at lower temperatures or when a high fever is going down.
Febrile seizures often result in a visit to an emergency room for the child and can be very frightening for parents and caregivers. However, most children who have febrile seizures recover quickly and have no lasting effects.
Which implies to me that the problem is MMR can cause a fever, and fevers can result in febrile seizures.
You should think really hard before trading off this risk for the increased risk of measles and mumps. Rubella I'm not so sure about (I think the #1 reason for that is to protect pregnant women).
In the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, diseases like polio, measles, mumps, etc were very common. Everyone knew people who had them, knew how awful they were, and vaccines were a clear way of solving this imminent and pressing issue.
I'm 30, and I've never had any of those. I've never even seen a case of measles in anyone I know. I'm obviously still going to vaccinate my children, but the benefit is not immediately obvious. They are very unlikely to get measles no matter what I do.
A few weeks after the news of an outbreak came around, a vaccine was available in Finland.
I refused the vaccine under the premise that I didn't believe it had been properly tested. People called me a nut, claiming I was "anti-vaccine" and some kind of right wing wacko and that Bush was the devil, etc.
A couple years later, it turned out the vaccine gave a bunch of Finnish kids narcolepsy, but by this point nobody was focused on pig SARS and my "See? I told you so!" fell on deaf ears.
I think vaccine-hesitance is too readily labeled as anti-vaccine, and there is a confirmation bias where it is easy to point out that someone is sick with an XYZ infection but it is difficult to show correlation between a vaccination that occurred 5 years ago and some symptoms that end up appearing as a result of that vaccination.
I know this is going to get massive downvotes, but it really comes down to this decision:
Are you willing to potentially (under non-trivial odds) sacrifice your child's health in some serious, potentially life-altering way, in order that the whole community will be helped in some amorphous fashion?
Whether pro- or anti-vaccination, that's really the question.
You can put emphasis more heavily on the first or the second part as your biases and experiences warrant, but that's still the question.
All medical interventions have a risk, vaccinations included. That is, there is a risk that the intervention itself will cause some harm.
But all medical interventions also have a risk of doing nothing. It's when the risk of the intervention is less than the risk of doing nothing that we say it's best to do the intervention. As humans, we irrationally place greater emphasis on risks from doing something over the risks from doing nothing. To the point that some who read your point won't even notice the risk on the other side. But this is irrational, and if we want to evaluate what courses of action are most likely to yield good health, we must always consider the risk of doing nothing as well.
Aren't the vaccines supposed to protect us from the anti-vaccine movement? Oh right, they don't always work so we need herd immunity. How about this:
Make eradication a priority rather than endless vaccination programs that look like corporate welfare. I know this is actually very very hard.
Stop telling people the mercury really isn't a problem and just quit putting it in there as a preservative. This OTOH is not hard. I'm not going to debate weather the mercury passes through, just pointing out that we don't even need to have the discussion. I know cost is supposed to be a factor, but when my employer is having someone come to give flu shots "for free" I don't think the cost difference is too much for a first world country. Eliminate the concern rather than worry about convincing people.
Thiomersal is a mercury compound. Mercury is know to be bad for you. The research only tells us that the compound is out of the blood stream in X hours, it does not tell us that all the mercury is gone - i.e. the compound could break down and the mercury stored away. This is not certain, but given there are alternative we may as well use them - that was my point and it has nothing to do with autism.
> Oh right, they don't always work so we need herd immunity.
The problem here isn't vaccines, it's the human immune system, which is imperfect. People who've had the chicken pox as a child can and do get it later in life. Vaccines only work by manipulating the existing machinery of the immune system, and so can only do so much. They're not meant to be some kind of magical potion that confers perfect immunity.
Herd immunity is a key part, however, of how vaccines keep POPULATIONS healthy. By giving a large number of individuals (say, 95%) a significantly reduced chance of catching a communicable disease, the entire population is at less risk of a disease outbreak because it's harder for the infection to spread. This is why polio, measles, mumps, etc. have been exceedingly rare in the US in the later half of the 20th century - because large numbers of people were more resistant to catching the diseases and therefore much less likely to spread the disease to others.
> Make eradication a priority rather than endless vaccination programs that look like corporate welfare. I know this is actually very very hard.
Yes. It's been done once with a human disease, and that was through a massive, worldwide vaccination campaign. What other means do you suggest we employ to eradicate a disease? Massive quarantines? Airstrikes on areas with outbreaks?
Vaccinations are the cornerstone of any eradication effort!
Further, there are people who can't get vaccinated for a variety of reasons (the CDC has a list here for various vaccines: http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd-vac/should-not-vacc.htm). Those are the people that we need the herd immunity for.
The mercury isn't primarily in there as a preservative. The vaccines have mercury or aluminum or other irritants for the designed purpose of provoking a strong immune response.
The "CDC whistleblower" story first appeared on CNN's iReport section, which is user-generated, and subject to all sorts of random submissions. Unfortunately, people have used the CNN name to bolster the supposed legitimacy of this story.
CNN, for its part, initially pulled the story. Then it reran the story, with the caveat lector that it has been unable to verify the story's claims.
What the Snopes article doesn't say is that Thompson is a senior scientist with CDC, a key figure in this controversy. His work has been cited in congressional testimony, the study in question -- the one he just admitted suppressing data on -- a major tool used against claims of those who for years have publicly stated their children developed autism after vaccination.
Given what the Snopes article does admit however, their conclusion seems odd. One must wonder what proposition their "FALSE" rating attains to, because it clearly isn't:
Thompson's own statement qualifies him as a whistle-blower who admits to suppressing significant data on the vacine-autism link.
Snopes does, however, appears to agree with these 2 points:
a) A phone call was recorded without Thompson's knowledge, after which he lawyered up.
b) Shortly after that, Thompson issued a press release with the following admission: "I regret that my coauthors and I omitted statistically significant information in our 2004 article published in the journal Pediatrics. The omitted data suggested that African American males who received the MMR vaccine before age 36 months were at increased risk for autism. Decisions were made regarding which findings to report after the data were collected, and I believe that the final study protocol was not followed."
What do you think "statistically significant" means? It seems obvious that if Thopmson could have stated something like "the data my team deleted would not have changed the outcome or validity of this research"... that he definitely would have... wouldn't he act in his own best interest to control the damage? That he did not make such a claim in his confession, and that it implicates the whole team, is palpable. One would be naive not to suspect that the suppressed data set must be discoverable at this point.
So... Snopes reprints what is fact a direct confession of precisely what the vaccine skeptics have been saying. That is an objective fact. By definition Thompson is a CDC whistle-blower who has admitted grievous scientific fraud on key research -- unless you think he is a delusional nut, which would raise other interesting questions about CDC.
If he were just being misquoted by a vaccine nut, as implied by Snopes, wouldn't CDC
i) back him up, and
ii) provide any legal protection needed for him on their own dime?
iii) coordinate any media response.
Because that's not what has happened. At all. Instead, after the recording was exposed Thompson issued a press release making his personal role in scientific misconduct even more clear, and he got his own lawyers. Are you naive jonnathanson, or what can you say to explain this? If a nut twisted your own work, would you then schedule a press release admitting fraud in clear terms, making it clear you weren't along while you were at it? Obviously his hand was forced on this, and he now sees a conflict between his own interests and CDC's.
CNN could easily verify everything I just said... e.g. the statement is posted on Thompson's lawyer's website. That would be why they reposted it, obviously... if the press release with Thompson's stunning admission hadn't been real, they would not have done so. Surely you don't equate some disclaimers about ultimate science -- which should not be decided on this story alone -- with the idea that Thompson's revelation is unimportant? This should be more widely covered... and I'd have to bet we'll see more on it.
Summary: Snopes doesn't deny at all that a high-level whistle-blower just admitted tainting one of the key studies used to "debunk" the vaccine-autism link. The site confirms that, then goes on to reiterate the PC position that the vaccine-autism link doesn't exist. Well, if you look at Snopes as a whole they clearly have a position on the science, but none of what has been said here is sufficient reason to ignore the very real Thompson incident.
Snopes also does not use the word "hoax" -- jonnathanson does. So, jonnathanson, beyond an apparent need to soothe yourself/others by quickly Googling something that says "FALSE" in big letters, can you respond to the specific points above? Particularly why you think Thompson felt the need to double down on his confession and get his own legal team after the recording surfaced? Surely he isn't part of the "hoax" (conspiracy?) you envision on the anti-vaccine side?
Even if that story weren't throughly debunked, why have health organizations around the world failed to find any link at all between vaccines (or components thereof) and autism? Or is every single government official, researcher, and pharma employee involved just that deeply committed to the conspiracy?
"That story" was not debunked, as you can confirm for yourself even by reading the Snopes article.
"Use your brain" is not an argument. Please see my above comment. Since Thompson has now personally admitted to working with others at CDC to suppress the science on this for 10 years, citing the lack of government publications would be circular logic... rright?
"Everyone knew people who had them, knew how awful they were..."
I wonder how you substantiate these claims if you've never been part of that generation?
While I'm not against vaccines and only possess a healthy skepticism of modern medicine--I recognize that it's as much commercial as about solving problems, and therefore will be pressured by corporate politics in some fashion--I was also a kid when measles were prevalent.
In our community, before the vaccinations were prevalent, it was commonplace to have a "measles party." If someone got the measles, you went over and exposed your whole family to get it done, since it's much more damaging to adults (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measles#cite_note-15) and better to get "immunized" early.
So speaking from experience, I can't say how "horrible it was;" they were treated no differently than influenza and are certainly no more dangerous, at a rate of 0.3% deaths, compared to usual influenzas at 0.1%.
My daughter - 18 months - has had her basic vaccinations, but is late for her MMR due to my wife's concerns.
I find it incredibly difficult; for every rational argument, there's an irrational "What about X" counterargument.
The fact that every rational explanation is greeted with another absurdity reveals the sad truth: she -and the other anti-vaccine people I've met - aren't interested in the truth, only following their faith that all vaccines are bad. We're based in Poland, and there's a huge amount of plausible-looking anti-vaccine information out there.
Most unhelpfully, a child in our social circle recently had to be hospitalised after a one-in-a-million allergic reaction to their MMR.
I'm close to breaking point; my marriage and life is otherwise healthy, but I can't idly stand by and leave my daughter and wider society vulnerable. God knows what'll happen when I she gets vaccinated behind her mother's back; I don't hold out much hope.
Wow, this turned out longer than I expected. Has anyone ever successfully convinced a anti-vaccine spouse? I'm at my wit's end.