SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the have-you-ever-seen-a-single-mump? dept.
Kami Altenberg Schaal has been a professional nurse for 22 years. She is pro-vaccine. She gets the flu shot every year as a requirement for her employment, and she vaccinates her family.
[...] Her entire family has been vaccinated with the MMR vaccine, and yet 4 out of 5 members of her family came down with the mumps. Her daughter is a freshman in college, and got the mumps from school.
[...] She isolated her daughter for 5 days ("I know how to isolate a patient, I'm a nurse"), and reported her case to the department of health.
All the members of her family also got booster shots of the MMR vaccine.
17 days after her daughter's exposure, her husband and son woke up with mumps.
After notifying the health department, Kami notified her son's school district as well.
What happened next was apparently something she had not anticipated. Even though her family was fully vaccinated and she followed all the proper medical protocols for dealing with the mumps, many people in her community began to blame her, including some of her medical colleagues, for not vaccinating their children (even though she had!)
[...] Finally, Kami herself woke up with the mumps. She had been tested and was supposedly immune. She had taken the booster. But she ended up getting the mumps anyway.
[...] The department of health nurse was required to send out another letter to the school district, so Kami asked the nurse if she could "put the truth" in the letter to the school district that her son was vaccinated, because she feared being blamed in error, once again, for not vaccinating her children.
The nurse allegedly replied "no."
They will not put that in a letter, because it could give the anti-vaxx movement some fodder.
So they would not protect my family by saying we did the right things, so I had to protect my family. I'm the one who has to defend my family.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 30 2019, @11:00AM (11 children)
The vaccine is not 100%, and measles can be deadly, particularly in newborns, but since 2000, the death rate in U.S. measles cases is about 1/270, including infants. Since 2015, the measles death rate is 0/1000 in the U.S.
Monitor, yes, inform, yes. Panic? Outrage? I guess if you've really got nothing else to be concerned about in your life, it's a cause - not a very good cause, but sure, everybody should believe in something. I believe I'll have another Margarita - and one of those per week is probably putting myself and everybody else at more increased risk of bodily injury and/or death than any vaccine decisions presently could - drink two and go driving within an hour, even once, and I'll definitely lay money on the alcohol as being a higher risk factor.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 30 2019, @11:13AM
Measles is not deadly in newborns as long as the mother was immune, since the newborn gets maternal antibodies that are supposed to last for a year (less if the mother was vaccinated).
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 30 2019, @11:19AM
And if the measles death rate was like 1 in 10k cases in 1963, but has increased to 1 in 270 since 2000, that would mean these vaccinations are doing something very bad. Your numbers are probably BS though.
(Score: 2) by schad on Tuesday April 30 2019, @02:04PM (8 children)
What happens when the measles (or mumps or...) virus mutates in such a way as to become resistant or even immune to the vaccines? That's something that's far more likely to happen when it's widespread. Look no further than the flu for evidence. Multiply your 1/270 death rate by five million cases a year and see how you feel about that.
Now bear in mind that if this happens, it won't just affect people who chose not to get vaccinated. I'm quite libertarian, but choosing not to vaccinate yourself (or your children) quite definitively harms others. The science is quite easily understandable even by laymen. Choosing not to vaccinate is saying that you have no problem imposing your personal preference on other people regardless of their wishes, which is the polar opposite of what libertarianism is about. So, since we've established that either solution -- mandatory vaccination, or voluntary vaccination -- requires forcing other people to do something they may not want to do, I prefer to err on the side of forcing them to do something that's good for them. It's an imperfect solution, but... well, it's so obviously the correct one that I struggle to understand why anyone argues with it.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 30 2019, @02:32PM
If you are in favor of government mandated medical procedures you are not at all libertarian. Please come up with a new term for your political leanings.
Not at all, in fact the data does not exist for us to make a clean comparison even between the risks/costs of measles vs risks/costs of MMR. Here is the best I have seen (which I had to make myself, the cdc/fda/merck do not want you to do this apparently):
Measles_1963: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1815949/ [nih.gov]
MMR_2018: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6343620/ [nih.gov]
There are other societal risks of vaccination that should be considered as well. Eg,
The original plan from the CDC was to "end measles", ie eradicate it, by 1967.[1, 2] This didn't work out because measles is much more contagious than they thought (at the time it was not believed it could survive long in the air).[3] So the plan morphed into the current one of vaccinating a high percentage of people for perpetuity.[4, 5]
The population is now basically addicted to their vaccine, and if the supply is ever lost for an extended period of time (war, disaster) measles will be a worse problem then ever before. There are a huge number of adults that have accumulated who are not immune because the antibodies waned, or the vaccine didn't take to begin with.[6, 7]
It may not even take a disruption in supply lines either, since vaccination rates just below the eradication threshold are expected to cause a "honeymoon period" followed by a large rebound epidemic.[8] Basically the current strategy is the worst possible one in theory.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1919891/ [nih.gov]
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1522578/ [nih.gov]
[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6939399 [nih.gov]
[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1228954/ [nih.gov]
[5] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15106085 [nih.gov]
[6] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15106101 [nih.gov]
[7] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22966129 [nih.gov]
[8] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12176860 [nih.gov]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 30 2019, @04:14PM
bs, motherfucker. nature and diseases are not in my direct control. i don't cause you to get sick just b/c i don't get shot up with a bioweapon from an wholly untrustworthy industry and government.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 30 2019, @07:02PM (5 children)
Not entirely true, though I will grant you that a 50% vaccination rate would be just about ideal for "viral training" against the vaccine. If the vaccination rate were near 0%, the virus would have little chance to practice on the vaccine and little incentive to take on costly changes to help circumvent it.
We're destroying the efficacy of our antibiotics through overuse, pointless prescription, and use of active antibiotics as a placebo against viral disease. We may well be accelerating the evolutionary arrival of the next super-bug that wreaks historically unprecedented havoc in our ecosystem through our broad application of highly developed antibiotics. But, that's of little consequence if we knock the CO2 balance far enough off kilter.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 30 2019, @08:03PM (4 children)
Not sure where you are getting this. To maximize selection for resistance you want to kill off as many of the non-resistant strains as possible so that the resistant ones make up the vast majority of what remains. Ie, vaccinate at just below eradication levels (also known as the current measles vaccination policy).
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 30 2019, @09:00PM (3 children)
If you're vaccinating at the current rate, there are barely 100 cases per year, 100 chances for the virus to mutate to a resistant form.
If you vaccinate 50% of the population, infection rates will be something just over 50% that of an unvaccinated population, you'll have hundreds of thousands of chances per year for a mutation form and spread into the vaccinated population. Seems faster, to me.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 01 2019, @12:11AM (2 children)
The mutation can form, but why would it spread without selection pressure? Presumably any meaningful mutation would have some negative impact on the viruses ability to reproduce, and so won't propagate unless there is selection for it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 01 2019, @01:08AM (1 child)
No Joe's right. Any virus that mutated to be immune to the vaccine* is going to have a vast new field to spread into, whether that is 50% or 97% of the population. Either way it will spread like wildfire. Reducing the number of actual cases reduces the chance of forming a vaccine-resistant strain.
*not really immune to the vaccine, but changed enough that the vaccine doesn't provoke immune protection. Same effect.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 01 2019, @02:14AM
So now I am bothering to discuss this with people who use the concept that a virus is "immune" to a vaccine... Good god. Sorry, waste of my time.