RE: Vaccines didn't cause GWS (or autism, or ___, or ...)

Still an idiot.

Since early 2007, McCarthy has been a very public voice for refusing childhood vaccines. Also since that time, the number of people who refuse vaccines for non-medical reasons has dramatically increased. There are web pages (Age of Autism) and slogans (“Green Our Vaccines”). That’s a “movement”.

No, you’re not. You’re pushing an unfounded fear. You’ve got no data, and no research to back up your claims. That’s uninformed.

You anti-vax wackos just love VAERS, don’t you? It’s a crappy datat source, and clearly you don’t understand what the data is saying—or perhaps you’re just parroting someone else’s FUD. Here’s the CDC page on the VAERS HPV data.

First, VAERS is just data collection. Any time someone fills out a form reporting an illness follows the administration of a vaccine, VAERS will report it as an “adverse event”. The existence of a VAERS event does not mean that the vaccine caused it, just that some reaction happened close enough in time after the vaccine was administered that someone—often a parent with no medical training—thought they could be related.

As of the beginning of September 2008, 26 million doses of the HPV vaccine had been administered—it’s entirely normal that thousands of adverse events are reported, even if the vaccine had nothing to do with it. If you take 26 million people and inject them with saline, thousands of them will have events that qualify for reporting in VAERS. People do get sick on their own, after all.

Unfortunately, one of the things that makes the VAERS data so crappy is that there’s no control group. There’s no useful measurement of the magnitude of the placebo effect here.

As of the end of August, VAERS had 15,037 reports of adverse events due to HPV vaccination. There’s nothing suspiciously large about that number—it corresponds to what they get on pretty much any vaccine distributed on that scale. Of those reports, 93% were not serious—fainting, pain or swelling at the injection site, headaches, that sort of thing. Only 7% were serious events—hospitalization, permanent disability, life-threatening illness, or death.

To put those into numbers that are useful for comparison, that means that about 4 in 100,000 people who received the vaccination reported a subsequent serious event. So the next question to ask is whether that’s a “normal” number or not.

Here is an article published in November, 2007, in the Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal. It tries to estimate what the “serious event” rate would be resulting from placebo injections, and the numbers are certainly comparable: 3 per 100,000 would likely present for asthma or allergies sufficiently severe to go to the ER, 2 per 100,000 should present with diabetes, and 10 per 100,000 would probably present with some sort of auto-immune problem.

So, the data show there’s no justification for blaming the HPV vaccination on the problems. They show exactly what I said—that adverse events are rare and mild.

So, it’s a conspiracy, then? Loon.

You fucking pusillanimous imbecile, measles are “not a big deal” because of vaccinations! From 1958 to 1963 there were around a half million cases of measles reported each year, and probably another 1.5 million that went unreported. In 1963, the measles vaccine was introduced and it dropped and by 1967 had dropped to less than 10% of that, and has continued to drop as vaccination rates climbed.

If it weren’t for vaccination, measles would still be a “big deal”.

Ok, so you have no idea what “herd immunity” means. It’s simple math. If 95% of the population cannot catch a disease because they’re immunized against it (through a vaccine or having already had it), then the remaining 5% are much less likely to contract the disease than they would have been if the whole population were susceptible. It’s basic math.

And here you show your true colors. Peer reviewed journals are only a “joke” to people like anti-vax loons and creationists. People who don’t like that science shows their pet crackpot theory to be nonsense.

And why would Brian Deer be an expert on such a thing? He’s an investigative journalist, not a scientist. His claim to fame is having won a British Press Award for writing popular articles in the Sunday Times.

I can certainly see why you might be afraid of such influence, but I can’t see any actual evidence of the influence. Peer reviewed articles put their cards on the table—they describe their methods and the results that they got. If there’s anything suspicious, another research group would happily get another article published showing where they went wrong.

It’s not naivety, it’s having some clue as to what they’re about.

There’s still not a shred of evidence that the “vaccine damage” you so fear exists at all. So, yes, the public has a right to know: that, to the best of our knowledge, the vaccines are safe and effective.

You’re a troll. Pretending you “just want informed consent” as a disguise for pushing unfounded fears. You disgust me.