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Are there areas where the antivax crowd have a point?
I was thinking it would be possible that they actually stumbled across something factual. But it's really hard to ask about this on todays web, because everything is so polarized, with Antivax versus "debunkers" whose sole goal is to win the debate. I sort of wished that there were some highly intelligent people who didn't care about this at all who could look into it from a fresh perspective. Some martians or something.
The reason I'm asking this is because my mother is heavily into antivax. And I really can't deal with any of her sources, but if they're right about about something, I'd like to know.
The problem often is that something can be broadly factual without being true because of what they claim (even if only implied). So it's factual that there are a lot of adverse reactions to vaccines documented in VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System). But those are for any post-vaccine health issues. There's no requirement or expectation that every incident reported is caused by the vaccine. If I get a vax and then have a heart attack, that doesn't mean it was the vax that caused it. But over time if a large number of people have a particular vax and heart attacks, causation could be reviewed.
So when someone says that people have had heart attacks after being vaccinated, that's factual, but what they're usually implying or claiming, is that causal relationship. And that's false. When someone claims thousands of adverse reactions to vaccines as reported in VAERS that's factual, but it isn't true that those are all actually caused by vaccines.
There have been vaccines where it was worth giving despite higher risks because the outcome of the disease was so severe. But those have been pretty rare through history, and the actual risk of most vaccines is quite low and we have a very short memory as society when it comes to how bad things like chicken pox, measles, mumps, etc can be.
I find this idea of factual vs true to be the issue with a lot of medical/science reporting. My non-science way of debunking this is that it would require nearly every doctor to be in on it and much like secret cures to cancer - I cannot believe that every oncologist would want to let their patients die in service to Big Chemo - I find it hard to believe (nearly) every doctor will let their patients be harmed by "Big Jab" or whatever. That may not be as compelling to others and there are numerous scientific debunkings of most anti-vaccine claims.
It's easier to address specific claims rather than "anti-vax" broadly because there are a lot of different angles - is all medicine bad but crystals are good? Is some medicine bad but medicine some guy on a radio show recommends is good? Is homeopathy the answer along with a "cleanse" but pills are bad? Is it all a plot for the government to track us using 5G towers and implanted chips which are the mark of the beast?
Also literally anyone can contribute to VAERS. If you actually download the dataset, the things people put in there are beyond stupid. I'm pretty sure I saw one where someone's friend died in a car crash so they blamed that on the vaccine. It's open to the public so you can expect every stupid and malicious thing that comes with unmoderated public access.
Right, that's another wrinkle, but even if it was all from surveys and medical reports it still wouldn't be inherently causal!
I think it comes down to experiences for your example. If you have a poor experience with North American healthcare, which is sadly common, it is probably easier to believe that all doctors are bad. However, humans are really bad with scale, so to your point, the leap people make from those bad experiences to thinking that millions of doctors are all "in on it" is just wild to me.
I have had some really awful medical experiences, and so has my partner, and I still don't think every oncologist wants to see all their patients die. That sounds horrifying.
But yes it's very easy to "all or nothing" doctors. You don't even need a bad experience, you just make your personal "good" doctor an exception, the way that racists will make "exceptions" because so and so is "a good one". Avoiding cognitive dissonance so hard your mental car skids into a wall of anti-vax stuff is quite a mental image though.
It's sort of where most conspiracy theories breakdown... How many people have to be in on it for it to work?
Yeah I find it fascinating only because my mind doesn't work that way so I have a hard time coming to the same conclusion.
Like, just apply Occam's Razor. Why are you the smart person to see through the conspiracy. Isn't it more likely some doctors are bad and some people have bad vaccine reactions.
Short answer: No. The others here have covered in more detail why.
The antivax movement went from fringe nutjobs to mainstream nutjobs because Jenny McCarthy needed to blame someone for her son's autism diagnosis, so she chose MMR vaccines. COVID antivaxxers wouldn't really have been a thing if not for a playboy model starting to spout junk science on Oprah's show over 15 years ago. We've been talking about Measles outbreaks in Flordia since Obama's first term, and Oprah and McCarthy share a lot of that blame.
My brother is now an antivaxxer, and moved to Florida. He's not allowed anywhere near my home until he gets fully vaccinated. I hope more people are able to apply this pressure. Don't visit antivaxxer parents or let them see their grandkids. Make fun of people whom espouse antivaxxer beliefs. We've known for over a decade that legitimate evidence won't sway them...it's going to take rules and the threat of dying alone and unloved.
It's a bit worse than that. There's a predatory ecosystem of misinformation peddlers - think Joseph Mercola, Alex Jones, et al., who profit from fear of conventional medicine.
But I don't think shunning and blaming family members for getting suckered is ultimately helpful. Ostracizing them just pushes them deeper into the rabbit hole. If you've got vulnerable household members, sure, take whatever precautions you need to. But see if you can rebuild enough other bases for trust that they've still got something to lose by hanging with the conspiracy crowd.
To each their own, but ultimately I'd rather let the conspiracy crowd rot together, from the seclusion of their homes where nobody bothers to visit because they're a hazard to everyone around them. They can die of easily preventable diseases, feeling themselves martyrs of their own making, while everyone else treats them as the laughingstock they are. I am well aware the misinformation peddlers, I grew up with Rush Limbaugh on the radio constantly...but while they are morally reprehensible, the people whom listen to them are not absolved of guilt, especially when their actions are actively making everyone else's lives worse. "If everyone else was jumping off a bridge, are you going to too?"
If there's anything I've learned about addiction, in a family full of addicts, is that people won't get better till they've hit rock bottom. Treating conspiracy nuts with kindness has to me mostly turned out like handing a gambling addict $200 while he's sitting at a roulette table. The Infowars consumers won't get better until they don't want to consume Infowars anymore.
My door is always open to my brother....he's just gotta eat humble pie and get stabbed a few times by a doctor before he's allowed to walk through it. Much like my parent's mental health problems.... I empathize with why they are the way they are....but it's not my responsibility to fix them, and it's not my responsibility to tolerate their intolerable behaviors.
Understood that's it's not simple - your experience probably involved trying every possible strategy already.
One of the most evil things about the conspiracy con artists is that they encourage their victims to recruit, and it's also legitimate to protect those you love from further exposure to the zombie contagion.
You are correct. There is the carrot, and there is the stick. And they've torn up the garden, complaining that I didn't give them enough carrots.
I'm not sure making fun of anti vaxxers, at least to their dumb faces, is the most productive course of action.
I dunno, in my experience, when someone of that mentality is confronted in that way about their wrong-ass beliefs, they tend to just get angry, dig their heels in and double down.
I live in Florida. I'm also a person of science, and believe in the benefits of vaccines. There's a family that lives down the street from me that has kids that my toddler has expressed interest in playing with. We learned from the father that his wife, a nurse, moved to our state from NJ because she didn't want to "force vaccines on people".
As soon as we learned this we've distanced ourselves from this family. The dad drills his kid and makes him do pushups for sports practice. I can't help but feel like if I made fun of him to his face, he'd punch my lights out.
If it helps... I dunno, lessen the negative perception of my state, my kid's pediatrician requires all patients to be vaccinated, as does their pre school. Not all Floridians are crazy, just some of the loudest ones.
Time to start working out then, and be ready to file assault charges. Letting people beat the crap out of people for mocking them is how you enable monsters who beat their kids.
I once watched, in public, as a grown-ass man hit his kid...like to the ground. And I felt helpless and small because I was holding my own young child. I vowed that next time I'd rather take a beating than watch another kid get hit while I sit by and do nothing, like everyone else on that street.
I was later Lyfting for a bit of side cash. Ended up calling CPS on a fare because it turns out they had left a 4 year old alone in a seedy motel as they went back to their old motel to get their stuff, and then hit her as they were unloading their stuff from my car for not locking their cat in the bathroom. I weep that I only felt empowered to do that because it was for side cash, not my main job. How many service workers turn a blind eye to abuse because they fear for their own livelyhood for reporting?
I've made the decision that I won't tolerate intolerable behavior anymore. My responses will vary based on need and ability, from polite arguments, to mockery, to physical intervention if needed. I have not the patience for the methods described by @patience_limited in their great post, but I can at least be a thorn in the side back at those whom would be thorns in the side to others.
Here is a blog post from Katelyn Jetalina (Your Local Epidemiologist) about vaccine hesitancy. She talks about what factors moved the needle, what demographics are most hesitant, etc. and cites the relevant studies.
Bearing on the original question, there is a flyer as part of the post, "Top Six Concerns Answered" that directly addresses the most common concerns of the vaccine hesitant. This was written a while go, so I don't know how well these line uo with current anti-vax rhetoric, but it should at least be a starting place.
Dr. J is not a Martian, but she is a trained epidemiologist and science communicator. If you read through her posts, she has been pretty open about the ways that the scientific community's response to COVID (including her own) was lacking.
I also appreciate the fact that this post (s most of her writing) is centered in good faith communication and trying to correct bad information, not demonizing people for their viewpoint.
You're right in asking for a "Martian" viewpoint, because it often does take an impartial mediator to get both entrenched sides (however right or wrong) to listen to each other and understand the true basis for the dispute.
Whether or not they're fed with reliable evidence, emotions are an evolved heuristic system for making decisions quickly. We create rational explanations and build narratives after the feeling happens. You can try to steelman the anti-vax side for evidence, but it's more important to understand and acknowledge the emotional basis for your mother's adherence to the belief system, and the narrative she's built to explain it.
If you set yourself into the Martian viewpoint, as someone who loves her and wants good things for her, but has never heard her story before and wants to understand, you can build a trust that lets her hear you properly in turn. She's probably coming from a place of deep, caring concern for the people she loves, just as you are, but was handed an explanatory narrative that conflicts with the preponderance of available evidence. But you need to listen to that narrative actively and attentively, without interrupting your mother to pick at its seams and ragged edges.
I can say that my spouse used this approach with his best friend, a conservative steeped in anti-vax sources, to the point that his friend got the COVID-19 shot because he felt that he was genuinely cared for by someone who'd listened and built trust before presenting reliably sourced evidence.
The reasoning behind anti-vax is very easy to understand, because there isn't much.
In the 90s a British doctor claimed the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine caused autism. It then came out that a) his study involved a dozen children, b) he falsified the information, c) he had a significant investment in a competing vaccine for those diseases. His paper was withdrawn by the journal that published it, and he super lost his medical license.
Jenny McCarthy and Oprah spread the MMR myth a few years later, and COVID brought it even more mainstream because people saw a fire and got suspicious of firefighters for showing up with equipment to deal with it.
There are legitimate medical concerns about side effects/etc. but that's true for everything from tylenol to chemo and people are actively studying them. Like most things, the average person has enough education to understand some of the basic problems with a specialty, but none of the context from working on a thing for years/decades and seeing progress being made.
Personally I think the question is too broad. It's a collective of both moderate and crazy ideas.
I think the moderate ideas are what they're asking for.
The thing is, virtually none of the moderate ideas are opposed by anti-anti-vaxxers, taken in isolation, but those moderate ideas are used as ammunition to support the crazy ideas by the anti-vaxxers.
It'd be like if I used a basic fact like "1 + 1 = 2" to justify why polygamy should be illegal.
Vaccinations are safe and effective. If you're offered a covid or flu vaccination you should take it.
Pandemrix did cause narcolepsy: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/history/narcolepsy-flu.html
People with anti-vaccination beliefs are often terrible at assessing risk. That's fine, everyone is terrible at assessing risk. But it can lead them to weird conclusions. Some vaccinations very slightly increase the risk of Guillain-Barré syndrome. For every million people who get the vaccination we'd see maybe two additional cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome. (Here's a CDC link that has a higher rate for GBS after vaccination: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/guillain-barre-syndrome.html )
My mother is also an extreme anti-vax movement member, and no, their arguments hold no water as others here have mentioned.
This is a great book that covers the dishonest origins of the modern anti-vax movement: The Doctor Who Fooled the World: Science, Deception, and the War on Vaccines by Brian Deer.
If you prefer a more casual video format, hbomberguy made a video on the contents of the book here: Vaccines and Autism: A Measured Response.
As a side note, for a long time I struggled with your question as well. In particular, I was concerned that rebutting anti-vax arguments had to be done carefully and with a sensitivity for their fears, since there can be (and are) real issues with vaccines. I eventually realized that this was completely wrong; anti-vax arguments have to be treated like right-wing politics, which means even being willing to hold a conversation around their talking points is lending credibility to their lies. The correct strategy is to refuse to engage. You can only have a rational discussion about actual problems with vaccines with people who are not part of a crazy conspiracy theory against them.
We can look beyond Covid for an example:
Before I went onto a trip through South America many years ago, I got a lot of vaccines. In some areas, it's still a very... infectious place. On the list of recommended shots is the rabies vaccine.
After a discussion with my doctor, I decided not to get this one. It's 3 rather large shots administered over a month, each as a pretty high chance of experiencing side effects, and in the end, having the vaccine only gives you a little more time to make it to a hospital, where you will need immunoglobulin therapy (and more shots of rabies vaccine) anyway.
I decided to not pet street dogs and not sleep outside instead, and never going to places farther than a 24h dash away from a hospital.
So, as with every vaccine, you have to weight the risks with the benefits. Some vaccines have lower benefits than others. Where the Covid vaccine falls on that scale is a more complicated question. In 2023, the benefit for healthy adults seems to be on the lower side of things, from what I read.
I have a handful of MDs among my circle, and I've never been someone to shut down a conversation, so some facts from both camps have trickled my way. They're always accompanied by non fact opinions because, like you implied, everyone is hot on this issue, but I just ask for the paper where they got their info. These do exist, and of course the papers on the efficacy of vaccines abound. Papers on the dangers of vaccines also exist though, and you just have to read them to get an idea of the risks.
This was the most recent one on heart problems associated with certain covid vaccines: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9905103/&ved=2ahUKEwiosuKZzJuDAxVpl2oFHVh7C9cQFnoECDcQAQ&usg=AOvVaw11OM8TU0auQearxMfxG-Je
Here's a paper on one of the other issues my doc friends have talked about-- "the spike hypothesis" :
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9021367/
Here's a survey of the older "vaccines cause autism" stuff. Original paper is from '98 and was debunked by later ones: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3136032/
Basically, if you want the facts, then you have to read the original research. Educate yourself about some statistical methods/issues (sampling techniques, confidence intervals, p-values and p-hacking) and look up words you don't know. In just a few days you can be more prepared than any of the talking heads to make up your own mind.
As far as I can tell, there are some real risks associated with some vaccines. With COVID specifically, the early mrna vaccines can cause some irritation of the pericardium (sack of flesh surrounding the heart) which has led to some folks getting sick. I haven't looked much at the spike hypothesis stuff, and I've also heard there have been issues with one of the live virus delivery methods for the mrna vaccines, but personally I believe the more common vaccines (Moderna and Pfizer) to be safe for most people. The childhood vaccines like MMR are safe and do not have any meaningful influence on ASD.
Forcing folks to get vaccinated is where most of my "anti Vax" MD friends get upset. Because for some folks the risks do outweigh the benefits, they feel it's unethical to require a vaccine to return to work. But even the most republican, on the kool-aid, and loathsome of academia among them got the shot and are grateful for their development.
Understatement of the century. That thing was rightly called out as junk science when it was published.
I don't believe there were live virus mRNA vaccines, I think those are two different delivery types. The mRNA doesn't work that way and I don't believe the other available types in the US were live virus. Do you have more info? I absolutely could be wrong.
The rebuttal on the "spike hypothesis" is that young adult males who suffer COVID-19 infections have higher risks of heart complications than those who receive the vaccine, through similar mechanisms. In a perfect world, no one who's vulnerable would suffer either exposure, but with current COVID prevalence, getting vaccinated is still safer than not.
And you're thinking of the adenovirus-vectored vaccines, one of which was withdrawn from the market because it had a risk of an extremely rare but deadly side effect (regulation works!), and overall lower effectiveness against COVID than the newer mRNA technology.
TBH, people take relatively dangerous medicines (by comparison with vaccine risks) all the time, with varying degrees of risk vs. benefits. The bread and butter of the anti-conventional medicine crowd is based on exaggerating the risks and minimizing the benefits of anything they can't profit from, and exploiting the gaps where conventional medicine can't provide easy, definitive cures.
An important thing to keep in mind is that while the myocarditis safety signal is real (i.e. there is a measurable increase in symptoms related to the vaccine), the risks of myocarditis due to COVID are much higher.
Source
I guess their main take was that it was forced upon us, that the pandemic was staged to gain something from people getting vaccinated (e.g. chipped, tracking, control).
While I can see how governments were struggling with coming to grips on the situation that they might not always handled things correctly, it doesn't necessitate some sort of conspiracy.
Where I can see how the antivax movement might have some points is that despite the testing of the vaccines, it was clearly not in the usual fashion (testing and regulating vaccines can take up to 10 years normally). But then again, a crisis demands swift action and cutting corners might be a less-ideal solution to prevent spread and inevitable deaths.
From my understanding, they didn't cut corners, it was fast tracked. Anything COVID related was given top priority. If reagent was needed for a COVID and nonCOVID work, the COVID work got it. When the results of the trials were ready, the FDA review team was waiting for the results and did nothing else but review the results. Everything else was put on hold.
And all these new mRNA vaccines that appeared out of nowhere did not appear out of nowhere. They had been developing that delivery method for over a decade and scientists had been researching how mRNA could be used as a delivery method for 50 years by the time the vaccines were available.
I think this is a really important point. It's something I have observed myself and find to be somewhat concerning, as it ends up driving people that are on the fence to the anti-vaxx side. Many fears people have, instead of being addressed considerately, often end up getting attacked due to strong anti-anti-vaxxer sentiment. This means the only people willing to actually listen to various fears people have are anti-vaxxers, which is not wonderful.
At the same time, by allowing those sorts of pseudoscience debates and discussions to occur on a site, you're also potentially enabling the spread of dangerous misinformation. Especially since a lot of people on the anti-science/conspiracy theory sides of those debates are very skilled at using underhanded tactics, like gish gallop and appeals to emotion, which take considerable effort, and expertise to properly, and (more importantly) convincingly debunk. So in a lot of ways it's a lose-lose situation, especially for an online community without exceptionally strong moderation, and well behaved/well informed/debate practiced users with lots of free time on their hands.
I posted a comment a few days back about how appeals to "shut up" or "your mom is fat" end up being tools to clown on rhetorically-skilled windbags. Debunking one wall of text line-by-line with another textual wall is ineffectual rhetoric—especially if you're writing with the silent audience in mind. There's often a first mover advantage in these kinds of arguments, too—not just in the form of the lie circling the globe before the truth is out the door, but also that people latch onto the first person who sounds "reasonable."
Yes. My dear first cousin is a recently retired Intensive Care nurse with many years experience. She got the mandatory vaccine for SARS [edit: it was for the flu, not SARS] was infecting health care workers. She knows for a fact that it damaged her heart and weakened it. It took a long time to recover and she feels she's still not quite back to where she was. But when the Covid 19 vaccine came out and was mandated there was no way she was going to take the chance of damaging it again and she refused. Thus, part of the reason she's retired.
She's not stupid, she's not a conspiracy theorist, she's not uneducated and she's spent most of her professional life HELPING the very people who, against high odds, end up being hurt by something that's supposed to protect them and she just couldn't risk it again. It's rare, but yes, sometimes there IS a valid reason to not want to take that chance.
Does she really though, or was it simply due to a confounding variable and coincidental timing? Just because her heart damage and her taking that SARS vaccine were close together doesn't necessarily mean there was actually a causal connection between them. That's the problem with anecdotal data, and individuals using their own intuition to determine causes. Sometimes they're right, but often they're not. E.g. Most people don't realize that food poisoning can take anywhere from 8-24 hours to have a noticeable effect, and so they often blame the very last thing they ate for giving it to them, despite that not being the case.
There's a lot of post hoc, ergo prompter hoc reasoning around side effects.
It's natural that people would believe, if thing X happens after incident Y, that Y caused X. This is why research studies, with controls, have to be done to determine if it's more likely that Y caused X, or if X is unrelated. And if a relationship does exist, why, and if that can be prevented...
The problem is, if a side effect happens one time in a million incidents, it's difficult and expensive to find that relationship, especially in the absence of a known mechanism for that side effect to occur. It's a fair argument that mass COVID vaccination was a great big experiment. However, the serious side effects (heart inflammation, blood clots) that did occur seem to have followed the known patterns and prevalence of previous rare vaccine injuries, and were also more likely to happen from infection than the vaccines.
I trust her extensive years of knowledge in ICU to know when she's been hurt. That's entirely the problem with proving the damage that a vaccine CAN cause - it's difficult to make a direct correlation unless there's a direct and drastic reaction, like collapsing in the moment after injection. And even then, it could be argued that the person had a unknown pre-existing condition.
But the fact that SOME people are indeed hurt proves that it can and does happen. And there's little incentive to fully investigate, which may or may not be conclusive, unless you're planning to try and gain some kind of financial benefit - and she's not that kind of person. But like any science experiment, if you only change one variable, and get a significant reaction, it's more than likely caused by that variable.
I don't mean to cast aspersions, but I am generally very very skeptical of nurses' opinions when it comes to vaccines in particular. Largely due to how many nurses I know of who lean very heavily into the outright misinformation and insane conspiracy theory side of the vaccine debate (think Bill Gates microchip implantation / 5G bullshit). So I personally don't consider a nursing degree, even with ICU experience, to be sufficient to trust any nurses' opinions on this particular subject. They're still just people, and vulnerable to misinformation, logical fallacies, and cognitive biases, just like even doctors are, and every other human being is, myself included. And when it comes to isolating confounding variables and determining definitive causal connections between health complications and vaccines, that's especially difficult for an individual to do on their own, especially someone not trained specifically for doing that (like an epidemiologist is).
p.s. I'm not saying vaccines are perfect, and they absolutely can't cause issues, even serious ones. Or that your cousin is even necessarily wrong in their assessment of there being a legitimate casual connection between her heart issues and the SARS vaccine she received. One of my friends required an Epipen shot due to experiencing anaphylaxis immediately after getting a vaccine shot, so I know for a fact they can have serious risks (albeit typically exceptionally rarely). And I'm not unwilling to be convinced about your cousin's heart issues being connected to the SARS vaccine either... so if you would be willing to ask your cousin how exactly they came to the conclusion that the SARS vaccine caused their heart problems, I would be genuinely curious to hear their reasoning.
We've had a long discussion about it. Re-reading it, I erred on the vaccine - it wasnt for SARS, it was the flu vaccine.
I would love to post the entire convo, but its highly detailed info about her personal medical records. To summarize, she never had a flu shot before and only got one, in 2008. Within two weeks she had contacted the worst roster respiratory infection and developed bilateral pneumonia and also had massive inflammation in her lungs which eventually affected her heart. She ended up with SVT and got disability for two years. Still has SVT and reduced lung capacity and thus retired early.
Her belief that her medical problems are related to the vaccine come from direct communications with the epidemiology lead for influenza and emerging respiratory pathogens at BC CDC, Dr Danuta Skowronski. That doctor's research proved that the flu shot not only made an infection of a pandemic strain or viral strain much greater it actually facilitated entrance of the virus into your cells and made the infection much worse. Skowronski had done lots of research with pigs and ferrets to prove her hypothesis and it had been a huge struggle to publish her unpopular findings and obviously it wasn't fitting well with the general narrative about vaccine safety.
If you want to dig, Im sure you can look up Skowronski's research and credibility. Im a layman (although two of my kids are Dr's so my only credibility comes from the fact that we're not a family of blind followers) so I can only recount what my cousin said. But our conversation was extensive and knowing how long and hard she researched to find the cause of what damaged her, I think on the balance of probabilities she's correct. As she said, there's definitely a push not to shine too much light on what she discovered. What she experienced was even labelled ‘The Canadian Phenomena’ in the media in attempts to downplay it and make it seem a one time thing.
I believe this article is related: https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/flu-shot-linked-to-higher-incidence-of-flu-in-pandemic-year-1.1287363
If you love research, have at it :) https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=EbWuYkIAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao
I don't have the time (or energy) right now to give your reply the full attention is deserves, but I just wanted to let you know I have read it, and say thank you for clarifying, being willing to delve deeper into this touchy subject with me, and providing some sources for me to look into later. I genuinely do appreciate it. :)
p.s. Quick search lead me to this study, which appears to be the one in question:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24475142/
That does look like the correct study. Wish it was easier to decipher exactly what the abstract was saying, but from my understanding, it does appear to confirm what my cousin said.
Yeah, I gave the abstract a read too, but it was well above my comprehension level too... so I will just have to take your cousin's word for it. But I think it is worth noting that it was a ferret study, and AFAICT was specifically about trivalent inactivated influenza vaccines and potentially increased A(H1N1)pdm09 risks after receiving that type of vaccine. And I haven't yet had the time to dig into more of Skowronski's research to see if she found anything else to back up that connection, but I would think potentially not, or that the issue has been resolved with newer vaccines of a similar nature, since the BC CDC still approves of and recommended several trivalent inactivated influenza vaccines for the 2022-2023 flu season, like FLUAD. Although worth noting is that it looks like they're now only approved of for people 65+.
Again though, I haven't had much time to really dig into it yet, so can't say for certain, or provide more links yet.
Edit: Actually, if I'm understanding the Discussion section of the study correctly, it looks like they have potentially "solved" that issue already, if there was one.
Which is why they had to do a ferret study in the first place, so they could give them a TIV without that new antigen, and avoid running into ethics issues regarding human testing of obsolete vaccines.
There probably are newer, less problematic vaccines - but that doesnt change the fact that in 2008, when she got THAT vaccine, it severely changed her life for the worse. Her heart and lungs are damaged and there's no reversing that damage.
I haven't delved further but the CBC article seems to indicate the reaction was also found in other countries so that might be something worth checking if you're keen on a deeper dive. Given a research labs propensity not to bite the hand that feeds it, it's somewhat amazing that Skowronski got published at all so Im not sure how easy they would be to find.
So, to the point of this thread "Are there areas where the antivax crowd have a point?" (I do much prefer the term vaccine hesitant to 'antivax') I would have to say yes, some do. If its more than likely a vaccine gave her double pneumonia, SVT and permanently reduced her lung capacity, it seems more than reasonable to say that such a person has every right to be absolutely emphatic about not taking another vaccine - the risk to her future health is far too great to risk it. She did have a very logical, reasonable grounds for saying, no, I don't want to take that risk again.
Unfortunately that was not her hospital's stance and once the Covid-19 vaccines came out, she was in the same position: Take the vaccine or be sent home without pay. Instead she resigned early.
Yeah, as I said above, I'm not denying there are risks to taking vaccines. And based on that study it certainly seems plausible that your cousin did get a potentially worse infection, which eventually lead to her heart issues, because of that particular flu vaccine. But I would personally still hesitate to definitively attribute it to that based solely on that one study. Although as you rightly pointed out, studies like that are difficult to find funding for so any follow up, especially on a now obsolete vaccine like that, is unfortunately unlikely. So we may never know definitely if it caused majors issues for some people. :/
And while I also totally understand her position, not wanting to get the COVID vaccine based on her past experience with another vaccine, I personally don't think it's logical to avoid all vaccines in the future because of that. Nor is it entirely fair to criticize the government or her hospital's vaccine mandate for healthcare workers considering how serious the pandemic was. It's genuinely unfortunate that she felt it necessary to retire early because of being put in that situation, but I also imagine if she had actually gotten COVID due to not being vaccinated against it, and then infected some patients, friends, or family who later died, she probably would have felt even worse about everything. At least I know I would have were I in that situation.
So her position and choice is totally understandable, and you've definitely made your point about there being legitimate concerns, and made it well... but IMO the government's and her hospital's position on mandatory vaccination was also totally understandable and justified too. It was tough situation full of tough calls all around.
Anyways, thanks for the conversation on an interesting subject. And sorry if I came across as overly dismissive or at all insulting towards your cousin at any points. That was genuinely not my intent.
I just wanted to say that I really appreciate this dialogue here and the sharing of further research/resources. I was watching this particular thread closely to see if it would devolve, but really happy to see a productive discussion with articles and further clarifications.
I work in Pharma and I'm well aware that side effects of vaccines (though that's not my area of research) is definitely a thing. So kudos to both of you!!
Precaution is always warranted with things you introduce into your body, and to the extent amti-vax is promoting that principle, they have a point.
There is also, I think, a case to be made that babies should not be vaccinated immediately upon birth unless they are specially at risk.
Well, good news, the only vaccine that is given at birth is Hep B, which all babies are at risk for. Testing the mother's and vaccinating only the children of those who tested positive resulted in persistent high incidence rates.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3092064/
And a key point....the whole reason it's important for everyone capable to be vaccinated is because it's dangerous for newborns to get vaccinated. Herd immunity is the only way they don't get exposed to stuff.
To leverage the Nazi Bar idiom: Antivaxxers using "babies can't get vaccinated" is as much a hook as a Nazi wearing regalia sitting alone in a bar saying "hey man I'm not causing any trouble."
Your article does not support your causal assertion that the limited vaccination of newborns caused any change in the incidence of hep b infection, nor that wider adoption resulted in any reduction.
I'm not making a statement on either of these propositions, merely pointing out a deficiency in your scholarly offerings.
My claim was almost word-for-word from my link.
The issue with this philosophy is that we're constantly surrounded by infectious agents that introduce themselves to our bodies whether we want them to or not. There's very strong evidence that viral infections, many of which are common in early childhood, significantly increase the risk of autoimmune diseases and cancers. That's in addition to the immediate risks of lasting neurological injury, hospitalization, and death.
My dad got measles as an adult, and nearly died - he lost most of his senses of smell and taste permanently, and suffered fertility problems that meant my parents took a decade afterwards to have kids. A close friend was hospitalized and severely scarred from chickenpox contracted "naturally" as a young adult. My brother's babyhood chickenpox woke up as adult facial nerve shingles that nearly blinded him. If I had kids, they'd never miss a recommended vaccination, on schedule.
Chicken Pox is one example that astounds me. I had it as a small child in the early 90s, back when the vaccine wasn't widely available yet. Growing up, it was common to hear about periodic outbreaks of the disease.
Now, decades into the varicella vaccine being available, it's not something that happens on that scale anymore. Kids get the vaccine, large outbreaks aren't common, and they don't have to worry about shingles down the line. Or not catching it until they're older and risking more severe complications.
I got to watch an endemic disease be cut down to 10% of the infections (according to a Wikipedia reference) it used to have when I was a child, thanks to widespread vaccination.
Honestly, of all the diseases that could make a comeback in the wake of anti-vaxxers, I'm rooting for chickenpox. It's much less-bad than most of the others like Measles and Polio, while still providing sufficient suffering to comprehend why vaccines are important.
I think part of the problem we're seeing is that not enough people's friends and family have someone who was crippled or killed by Polio anymore. There's gotta be a better way than having waxing/waning movements of people whom are being directly affected by the consequences of doing/not doing a thing.
Sadly, Measles is probably one of the most likely. There have already been pocket outbreaks in schools, and its level of contagion makes COVID look good by comparison.
Polio has potentially been limited enough now that simply controlling travel to and from affected regions, requiring vaccination documentation like we already do for some diseases and regions, would be enough to prevent an epidemic in developed nations. That's kind of where we already are right now: we're close to eliminating it entirely, but resistance to vaccination in some countries is stonewalling it.
I believe Afghanistan and Pakistan are the only remaining countries with endemic Polio, and vaccination efforts have been hindered by US foreign policy. e.g. distrust of foreign vaccination pushes after they were used as a cover for intelligence purposes, such as when the CIA organized a fake vaccine drive to obtain Bin Laden family DNA.
At this point, I'm not sure even knowing people injured by Polio or Measles would have an affect on things, with the state of the US right now. We passed 1.1 Million confirmed COVID deaths and 6.5M hospitalizations in three years, with even higher excess mortality figures, which is like 1-in-300 for the population. I don't think the largest Polio outbreaks in the US ever came close to that level of lethality or infectiousness. Wikipedia suggests that the worst outbreak in the US was in 1952, where "Of the 57,628 cases reported that year, 3,145 died and 21,269 were left with mild to disabling paralysis." While we don't really have data on post-COVID disability, the number of annual deaths and known cases eclipse Polio even when you account for the 1952 population being approx 150M. (Though we had annual Polio outbreaks for most of the first half of the 20th century. COVID hasn't had as long to rack up a larger sum.) Forty years of the worst year of Polio wouldn't touch COVID for hospitalizations or deaths in three.
It's not entirely cut and dry, numerically, but...yeah. I don't think the average person is less likely to know someone severely impacted by COVID now than they would have in the 50s with Polio. We just have a deep social problem, stemming from anti-intellectual behavior. People will blindly insist that someone they knew died of anything other than COVID, up to accusations of grand conspiracy, and increasingly seem to reject the entire concept of germ theory.
I am fully vaccinated, and generally opposed to them. But being generous and introspective:
"Pharmaceutical companies have captured too much government/regulatory power. You should be naturally suspicious of anywhere you see them working closely together." I actually kinda agree with this. I'm glad there's at least a few antivaxers to keep things honest on this front.
"Big Pharma might have perverse incentives to give you vaccines that cause other conditions they can sell you the cure for." Same as above. I'm glad someone is at least asking the question.
"You should be suspicious of governments telling you how and where you can interact with people. They will keep one set of rules for you and another set for themselves". My first reaction to this would be "you dipshits shoulda just put masks on" but look at things like the Boris Johnson scandal and (I lover but) the Pelosi haircut. Hard to say they're 100 percent wrong on that.
I have some additional thoughts on this issue, or perhaps more specifically, a question. And that is, why is there such resistance to vaccinations?
Disclosure-I have an emotional resistance to vaccinations (and western medicine in general). I also have a reasoned resistance to some parts of western medicine.
I received all my vaccinations on schedule as a child, and continue to take recommended vaccinations including flu and covid. I was a professional scientist, and am pro science, and train my kids to be critical observers and thinkers to the best of my ability.
And yet, I feel very uncomfortable about vaccinations, especially around newborns. For myself, the answer may lie in some degree in the childhood trauma I endured, some of which may have centered around medical practice. This is no doubt true of many in the anti-vax movement, but could it be at the root of all their resistances? I mean, it's obvious to me that the root is fear, for me and and for them, irrational fear, but whence that fear? I don't quite understand.
I think my mistrust of the pharmaceutical industry of today is generally well-placed. While most of them more or less operate according to "the rules," it is they who primarily have authored the statutes and regulations with which the comply in the last two-four decades (longer?). It is obvious that the financial incentive is for the pharmas to provide treatments, not cures, as treatments are analogous to subscription model pricing for software and guarantee a more generous economic future for providers. It is also not incentivized to promote wellness at all. It is easy to make a leap that vaccines, especially new vaccines, are included in that perverse incentive.
A related worry is that science is suffering from this debate. I suppose its nothing new, the less educated populace resisting scientific advancement (I have heard a woman say that the Challenger explosion was God reminding humanity that "they shouldn't be poking they[sic] nose up there."). But if there is a study that warns about a particular risk of vaccination, it will be suppressed from both the pharma side, for profit reasons, and from the well-meaning advocacy side, for fear that the rabid anti-vaxxers will run too hard with it, like they did with the autism and mercury studies. In both cases, overall harm is increased.
One thing is sure, though, the government and educational institutions need to get more frank, more detailed, and more honest. The mask debacle probably did more harm to institutional credibility across the board than any single circimstance in the alst 5 years. We may be unwashed pedestrians, but we can handle some nuance and respond positively to real authenticity at least some of the time on really important issues.
You're treading into the fog-bound territory of institutional trust. You've been a working scientist, and likely have objective knowledge of scientific reasoning and evidence acquisition. But you may not have subject matter knowledge that lets you know how vaccines work and are manufactured and tested, or what risks could arise. In that respect, you're similar to the vast majority of people who have to invest trust in the institutions of health.
It's reasonable to wonder whether the mystery liquid in a jab is actually what it says on the label, and whether it's safe. At the same time, there's minimal cumulative evidence of suspicious results, over decades.
It's reasonable to believe that Big Pharma has been acting in ways that increase profit at public expense. At the same time, those companies were doing research that brought about rapid COVID vaccine development. [And while my arthritis meds may be monopolistically expensive, I wouldn't be writing this without them.]
It's reasonable to believe that the CDC's early position on masking was manipulative and lacking in transparency. At the same time, it was managing pandemic response resources after decades of grievous underfunding, in the face of political interference.
I can write these "buts" with a clear appreciation that there are flawed institutions involved. And yet the evidence to date is that they're more functional than we generally appreciate - after some years of horrible flailing around in the face of extreme human suffering, we've got tools for improved life. We can take collective responsibility for reforming these institutions, making them more effective and diminishing their opportunities to abuse their power. But populists attempt to claim that they're so corrupt or inept that these institutions should be ignored or destroyed.
And this is where the current trust model is thoroughly exploitable. Science and health institutions have been over-romanticized in the public mythos on the basis of their record of success - but they're not perfect. The new demand for black-and-white, either wholly trusted or wholly untrusted institutions is practically unachievable. Populist ideology leverages flawed institutions into demands for rebuilding the entire institutional framework under the supervision of an Übermensch who serves "the people"... you can see where this goes.
Concrete, tangential example: Medicated eye drops. There's two generic drops, doing two different things, costs like $5 or less a bottle at retail. There's a patented version which does both that costs $350 a bottle (and my insurance won't cover)...but it's the only one eye doctors would prescribe and hand out coupons and free samples of. Because they sit down with the nice pharmaceutical rep who buys them dinner, and gives them coupons and free samples. Took me two different doctors before I figured out that I could have them write two scrips for two drops instead of one, with the same result, but costing me approximately $1. Their response was "but then you have to give your kid 2 extra drops a day."
There's plenty of reasons to distrust the pharmaceutical industry...but they mostly are financial-incentive related, not because they're trying to kill us with medicine. It helps when we have functioning institutions like the FDA that help counter any bad-behavior for the medicine itself.
It's why I'm immensely distrustful of any meat packing facility that has been allowed to "self-regulate" instead of having sufficient full-time USDA inspectors onsite.
No.
No.
It's kind of hilarious that OP just kinda dropped this topic out there, and hasn't re-engaged with it since.
Yeah. The last few days I was in the hospital getting my broken arm operated, so I have an excuse of sorts, but the truth is that I'm super bad at engaging in the threads I create. I had a few halfwritten replies in my head, but it never got any further.
I honestly figured it was because you aimed to stir the proverbial pot. It's easy to drop a "controversial" topic and cut-and-run.
I suppose, time will tell? That's usually the crux of all these arguments. Whether it be a baseless prediction, or some elaborate hypothesis based on literature no layman has time to comprehend.