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 All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday April 30 2019, @08:15PM (6 children)
How about not being shot with a .22 (Measles) or a .45 (Mumps) because one was vaccinated against both? Especially when the odds of receiving a vaccine-related complication are far more miniscule to that of receiving a disease related complication? That's one of the reasons (not the most important) why I'm vaccinated - I understand the odds.
Aside from "miniscule" chances of not contracting the disease aside, this is the tip of the iceberg is what epidemiologists are warning. More people decide to not get vaccinated and you get an epidemic and a hell of a lot more than 700 cases in the first four months of a year.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 30 2019, @08:38PM (5 children)
Did you just ignore the entire response to you. The odds of a complication are similar.
Also, due to antibody waning you have about russian roulette odds of not getting measles in the next real epidemic if you were vaccinated ~30 years ago, worse if it was longer or you haven't been exposed to "natural boosters" in the meantime.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15106101 [nih.gov]
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22966129 [nih.gov]
Many vaccinated people are going to have great fun with adult measles (which is much worse than childhood measles).
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 30 2019, @08:47PM (4 children)
My childhood diseases kept me home from school for a total of almost 5 weeks, but never hospitalized me.
My eldest son was hospitalized with a 107 fever about 8 hours after receiving his HepA shot, aged ~3 - and I bet that never made the adverse reaction database, just like millions of other vaccine reactions that aren't recognized as such or aren't acknowledged by the admitting staff as such.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday April 30 2019, @10:29PM (3 children)
First of all, I'm sorry your son had an adverse reaction. The CDC estimate is that about one in one million doses have an adverse reaction to HepA (source [cdc.gov].) That data does not just come from voluntary reporting but safety trials and other sources where reporting is absolutely mandatory. I cannot guarantee that your son's case would or wouldn't be listed in that database, but I would think it would be if you mentioned he was vaccinated and he was hospitalized with high grade fever. As I say, I can't be sure.
I went looking for HepA complication frequency and struck out in the time I had to search. The data is out there somewhere, just couldn't lay my hands on it. This reference [immunize.org] states that the fatality rate of HepA was 0.7% of all cases reported in 2016 and I read a different source which said there were 2,007 cases in 2016, which would mean 14 people died of HepA in 2016. That translates to 7,000 cases out of 1,000,000 die from the disease. This next math and conclusion is questionable, but if the HepA vaccine is 95% effective that means that 6,650 deaths in 1,000,000 cases are prevented by the vaccine. We can also reverse the complication numbers and see that way less than 1 of 2007 immunizations 1have an adverse complication , compared to 0.7% who die from HepA per year.
That's why we vaccinate. I'm so sorry your boy had to hospitalized, that his life was at risk, and with that high of a fever I'd be surprised if there weren't severe post-febrile complications. But vaccination saves more lives (life itself) than it harms people who still live. That probably isn't comforting to you, because it's your boy who was harmed. But it's why we do it, and we can estimate but we cannot know whose lives were saved because we vaccinate.
And, given your history, I'm sorry that I was flip with you earlier about it. I should be more careful because I know you've got more on the ball than average.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Wednesday May 01 2019, @12:35AM (2 children)
I hate to do this as I am pro-vaccination, but this comparison assumes that everyone will contract HepA if not vaccinated. You really need to factor in the rate of catching HepA when not vaccinated.
For the individual : (probability_bad_outcome_vaccination) vs (probability_bad_outcome_HepA * probability_of_catching_HepA)
It's a lot more complicated really as you need to factor in vaccine effectiveness and, on a society level, the effects of herd immunity. It is quite likely that the best solution for an individual is that everyone else gets vaccinated, but that he/she doesn't.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 01 2019, @01:20AM
It is strange you present this as in some sort of conflict. People are perfectly able to make decisions that benefit their larger social group at their own personal expense. But once you are lied to over and over about the supposed benefits of various things it is rational to stop doing that...
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday May 01 2019, @04:04PM
Except that what we're looking at is for 1,000,000 confirmed cases there will be 7,000 deaths. (Will there absolutely be? No. I'm just extrapolating from the known numbers of viral caused deaths to confirmed cases for a single year of 2016, which isn't valid statistical technique). There are also many people who get HepA and aren't diagnosed because one can have the virus and present no symptoms, which is why confirmed cases are talked about. There are some statistics which can estimate how many are known from inadvertent discovery during other diagnostics, but that's a subject for another day.
But if we know 7,000 deaths would occur per 1m confirmed cases then it's a matter of knowing vaccine effectiveness, which for HepA is 95% for single dose and 97% for two doses. That means in what would have been 1,000,000 confirmed cases 95% of them (6,650) that would have died did not.... although the minutiae really would be that 950,000 cases of 1,000,000 infections would not have gotten the disease and that of that remaining 50,000 that get the virus in spite of vaccination there could still be 348 deaths. And 7,000 out of 1,000,000 are actually pretty good odds - as an individual I'd bet every time on being on the side of the 993,000 that aren't going to die if I was forced into betting.
My math was crap for a couple of other reasons, too. I only counted death and not other serious and adverse complications. I think those numbers are hard to come by because when HepA gets serious any number of bad things happen. But also for all the reasons you stated, too.
So my math is crap but the reasoning still stands. The thing is, for those who are actually paid to know the math and crunch the numbers on virology you hear one thing and only one thing which is truth: The value of vaccination to a group outweighs the adverse effects done to a vaccinated group. (Note that those adverse effects don't look at whether it was the vaccination's fault but are all adverse reactions causative or not).
It often isn't phrased that way because people already are predisposed to not listen (or to listen uncritically as well) - if the nurse was told they wouldn't publicize the family's mumps vaccinations because of giving antivaxxers ammunition such fears are not without a pretty solid grounding. Because enough individuals are selfish enough to bring down the system. Because people refuse to trust the system which is already poised to stop vaccinations where it is learned that the adverse reactions to a given vaccination outweigh the disease's pathological impact. Google "vaccination trial stopped" and you will see that there are vaccination formulas that are stopped in trial. They get stopped for many reasons but here is a Lancet article [thelancet.com] about one in particular for Dengue that got stopped because there were cases where giving the vaccine caused exacerbations and it outweighed the benefits. There's a lot more to say on the topic but what numbers show is that vaccinations are approved when the overall benefits outweigh the risks or complications, the same as any other medical therapy.
And I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir in your case. But the reality still is vaccination works better than not, and the system is primed to terminate a vaccine which fails to meet that standard.
This sig for rent.