Dejunk your brain: out with the trash from vaccine naysayers
In
some quarters, vaccine refusal for one’s children may be
looked at as irresponsible behavior. It is really important to understand how people are being used for selfish gain and selfexpression by adults (parents or not) who somehow feel there is a grand conspiracy to make more people sick through vaccines. I will not belabor the fact that these are unfounded claims and may have ulterior motives behind them. Rather I will take a few minutes to once again debunk some of the most outrageous of the false claims about vaccines.
That is why leeching and bloodletting are no longer part of modern medicine, as they once were.
M
MR Vaccine and Autism: In 1998 a fraudulent study which
was later debunked and in fact redacted was published. It had 12 subjects and the author was alleging that the children received MMR which destroyed intestinal lining, allowing abnormal proteins to enter the system and later cause autism. When investigative reporters reviewed the paper, certain things became know. the children in the study were recruited by an anti-MMR organization the study was part of a larger plan for litigation
three of the children did not have autism five of the children had developmental concerns before they got MMR some others developed developmental concerns months after the MMR rather than days as the paper claimed colonoscopy reports were altered to reflect a problem even though the changes noted were unremarkable (in other words nothing of any remarkable clinical or pathological significance) ten of the 13 authors of the paper published a statement retracting its interpretation
Refusing vaccination of your child is just plain irresponsible especially after reading this
M
easles virus in the intestines of children with
developmental disorders (autism is a form of developmental disorder): A different study of 91 children with disorder with up to 70 normal children as controls published findings that demonstrated higher levels of measles virus in the intestinal tissues of the developmental disorders affected children when compared to the controls. This again was found to be a poorly reported study. there was no information about the type of virus (vaccine strain versus wild strain) that was detected in the intestinal tissues the paper was silent about the timing of MMR vaccination, if at all in the subjects and the controls. In other words were the developmental delay children tested within say 4 weeks of
receiving the vaccine while the controls were tested years after they had received the vaccine? the study was not blinded (a standard in medical research) meaning that the person(s) testing in the lab knew exactly which type of subject owned the tissue they were testing so there was a very reasonable possibility of bias in the reporting. Indeed there is a possibility of measles virus being engulfed by the human protective cells and these may be detected in the intestines. Thus this medical possibility does not reflect an anomaly, but rather a normal phenomenon based on how our immunity works.
T
he Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) vaccine has refusers
erroneously believing that it may encourage sexual activity: This is absurd as we know the discussion when getting the shot is on the benefits of preventing cervical cancer in females. Granted many parents are concerned about their children becoming sexually active and this concern gets heightened as the children develop more externally. A scientific study looked at this presumed problem and the conclusions were that the HPV vaccination did not make it more likely that teenagers would engage more in unprotected sex, compared to those that did not get the vaccine.
O
ther objections to the HPV vaccine include the perception of
undue and excessive influence by the pharmaceutical industry. This is also a rather twisted look at the industry. While we understand that the pharmaceutical industry is part of a huge forprofit system, these businesses invest billions of dollars in research and marketing, trying to provide solutions for our most pressing needs. As it stands now, genital cancers were wrecking
havoc and continue to devastate older men and women who never benefitted from this vaccine. The HPV vaccine is the first anticancer vaccine and indeed should be celebrated. Cervical cancer is the third most common female cancer worldwide, with an estimated incidence of 530,000 and 270,000 related deaths in 2012 and 100% of these cancers are linked to the HPV. It is both unfair and irresponsible to assume there is no urgency in the need to prevent further deaths from this infection.