Beware creating a moral panic about antivaxxers Fiona Fox The Times 2019

For medical systems to respond, and proper long term care and support to be provided, the immunity from claims and prosecution granted to the vaccine producers in the US and the UK would have to be reversed.

Edited to rectify omission of 'claims and'.

 

Randomized controlled trials are also quite helpful here.

 

Do you have any double blinded RCTs that you can quote?

 

Not for measles mumps and rubella. In the 1950s virtually all children in the UK went through these illnesses. By 1990 almost none did. The cessation matched the introduction of vaccination. Sanitation, nutrition and living standards are no protection against droplet borne or contact borne viruses.

 

My understanding is that it's also somewhat the opposite for polio. Before vaccines were available, polio outcomes were worse for more affluent people - at least in the United States. People living in less hygienic conditions would more often contract the virus as infants when still partially protected by maternal antibodies. More affluent people tended to contract it later in life, with greater risk for paralysis the older the patient.

 

A good one to start with is the Salk polio vaccine trials in 1954.

It included a double-blind RCT of polio vaccine in 1st-3rd grade children living in high-polio-incidence counties whose parents consented to them being vaccinated - 200,000 in both the control and treatment group.

The rate of paralytic poliomyelitis in the treatment group group was 16/100,000 from third injection to end-of-year. In the placebo group it was 57/100,000, 3.5 times higher than the treatment group.

More complete reporting is here
https://sci-hub.tw/https://www.rese...OF_THE_1954_POLIOMYELITIS_VACCINE_FIELD_TRIAL

The plan of study is described here
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1622939/pdf/amjphnation00353-0017.pdf

 

Since Measles is in the news, here are some old big trials of measles vaccination for anyone's edification:

United States 1964: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1254040/pdf/amjphnation00184-0117.pdf
Double-blind RCT of 5210 kindergarten-1st grade children.

Britain 1964: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1991884/pdf/brmedj02085-0023.pdf
RCT (blinding not specified) of 36,211 children age 10 months-2 years

Both reported over 80% efficacy.

 

Here are the number of diagnosed cases of vaccine preventable illnesses and number of deaths in the USA from 1950 onwards.
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pubs/pinkbook/downloads/appendices/e/reported-cases.pdf

And I'll also come out and say it: antivaxxers still annoy me because they're free-loaders. They gain benefit of vaccines (herd immunity) without taking on the risk themselves.

 

Of course that is true, but how many people are actually doing this in a calculated manner? My feeling is that most anti-vac people have been misled and manipulated in pretty classic ways. There are cynical people trying to take advantage of people's fear and ignorance for monetary and/or egotistic gains, but that is a fraction.

It is frustrating, but public health will suffer if we are dismissive and derogatory towards all of the regular people who end up 'antivax'. This is not to say that you or anybody else here has been; unfortunately it's rather common on the internet to see 5-minute-hate type circle jerks against antivaxxers.

 

Ironically, the most compelling evidence for the effectiveness of vaccines is that there are people nowadays who argue against them!

My mother's best friend and her sister died from diphtheria when they were 9 in 1939, how many cases of diphtheria are there nowadays?

I am 65 but the attitudes to infections I see now are strange to me. People do not see vaccinations as the lifesavers they are. For instance lots of children with TB spent years in hospital; we have photos of my husband's aunt where you can clearly see the mechanism for the open sided ward where it was turned to face the sun. The snow would be wiped from the beds in the morning. In our families the generation before us had quite a few people with TB, in ours I had some friends with TB (including one who died leaving his wife pregnant and with a toddler). My children do not know anyone. TB has become more common again because of immigrants from countries with poor healthcare systems therefore little vaccination. Yet spitting is not frowned upon the way it used to be (it disgusts and terrifies me as a reflex) and no one does spring cleaning to get rid of spores.

Antibiotics were a short lived gift but people seem to see infections as someone's fault not the outcome of the continual war we fight with infections. We need to be vigilant and use all the weapons we have.

 

Yes, as I said in my first post - all the hate demonstrated against antivaxxers on the internet is hardly going to change their mind. All of those people going on nasty tirades against antivaxxers on the internet, are at best, are wasting their time.

 

Ah, I see our views are as one.

 

They would be if they took proper account of harms. Compare PACE and other BPS trials in 'CFS'. There is no way of reporting harms in the UK for behavioural and exercise regimes.

The recommended programme of vaccinations in the US now totals 71 and starts at birth.

It has been projected that at the current rate of increase, 1 in 2 American boys will have autism by 2030.

 

Deaths from these diseases fell steeply before vaccines against them were introduced.

Vaccination does not create the lifelong immunity that the disease does. Mothers who have not had the disease cannot pass on immunity totheir babies. It is now being suggested in the US that booster vaccinations should be given regularly including to adults.

 

The pro-vaccine lobby is motivated by profits and because of the immunity from claims granted by governments to the vaccine industry, there is not the financial incentive to prioritise quality and safety.

'Vaccine revenues set to soar after anti-vax clampdown
The clampdown on 'anti-vax' stories on social media is producing one big winner Big Pharma. Revenues from vaccines will enjoy "an overwhelming hike" in the next few years, say industry watchers.

Market research group HTF Market Intelligence said revenues from the MMR vaccine will see the hike by 2025, and other research firms have also been forecasting big revenue increases for the global market for all vaccines.

Market research group Research & Markets estimates revenues for all vaccines will increase to $57.5 billion by 2025, compared to just $33.7 billion last year. Another market research group, Transparency, is forecasting vaccine sales revenues will reach $48 billion by 2025.

Government initiatives that are promoting vaccines - and silencing the anti-vaxxers - are one of the big drivers of the increase.

Although North American will remain the largest market for vaccines - where it is compulsory in most states and others are dramatically restricting the types of exemptions they allow - the biggest growth will be in the Asia-Pacific region, which has witnessed an increase in cases of tuberculosis (TB), malaria and dengue fever.

But the global market is also being bolstered by pro-vaccine government initiatives. "This strategy has immense potential to increase patient accepability and also increase the rates of immunization," the Transparency report says.'

What Doctors Don't Tell You, June 2019, quoting:
Markets.businessinsider.com
www.pmewswire.com
www.investoropinion.co.uk

 

'...One of the greatest, and unsung, achievements of mankind has been the defeat of 11 major infectious diseases - including cholera, scarlet fever, smallpox, whooping cough and measles - which accounted for 40 per cent of all deaths in the United States in 1900. In that year, the death rate stood at around 17 people per 1,000 in the population.

By the late 1940s, the rate had dropped by about 40 per cent, to roughly 10 people per 1,000, and it continued to slowly decline through the start of the twenty-first century. Although it's begun to creep back up, from a minimum of 7.9 people per 1,000 in 2009 to a rate of 8.4 per 1,000 in 2016, this still represents roughly a halving of the death rate since 1900.

If you'd searched earlier than 1900 - which you can do with data from the UK - you'd see that the death rate had started to decline from around the 1850s.

Looking at specific diseases, you'll see a similar pattern. The death rate from measles in the UK was more than 1,000 children per million, and it had dropped to less an 100 per million by 1950, a ten-fold reduction. But an early version of the measles vaccine was introduced only in 1963.

Then there's whooping cough (pertussis). In 1890, the death rate was around 900 per million children; by 1930 it was down around 200 per million. But the DTP vaccine was introduced ony in 1940.

Scarlet fever was killing around 600 children per million in 1890, which fell to fewer than 100 per million by 1930. But penilcillin was introduced only in 1942.

So what's really caused this sharp decline? It's a question that has fascinated doctors and edical historians for years. leading the way was Englsih physician Thomas McKeown, who examined the decline in the death rate in England and Wales over three centuries.

He notes the decline started during the eighteenth century, which he attribues fo improvements in the environment, but it became steeper in the second half of the nineteenth century, which was wholly caused by a loosening of the fatal grip of infectious diseases. This drop in infections can be explained by three factors: rising living stanfards, especially better diet and nutrition, improvements in personal and public hygiene, and a "favourable trend" in the relationsip between some micro-organisms and their human hosts.

But, he emphasised, medicine made an insignificant contribution to this decline. The effect of immunisation, such as it was, was to restrict smallpox, and this accounted for just 5 per cent of the reduction in the death rate.

The fall continued throughout the twentieth century, driven by improving nutrition, better public sanitation and "less certainly" immunisation. Nutrition on its own was responsible for half of the drop in death rate, McKeown estimated, with sanitation being responsible for one-sixth, or 16 per cent, and imunisation and other medical therapies combined responsible for just one tenth, or 10 per cent."

What Doctors Don't Tell You, June 2019
PopulStud(Cambridge),1975;29:391-422

[There's more.]

 

Der @Annamaria

None of those arguments are actually relevant to the points people have been making. We are all aware that a number of causal factors contribute to the eradication o of disease. You are entitled to your view but it does not seem to me to be based on sound evidence. Vaccines are not perfect but I do not see any preferred alternative at present.

 

or those who cannot medically deal with certain types of vaccination - live vs non live etc due to underlying conditions