Vaccines: how do I talk to my anti-vac wife about it?

[excaza]

It is my belief that doctors overprescribed antibiotics years ago and because of this many children have weak immune systems because they didn't have a chance to build up a strong one.

No, the problem is that overuse of antibiotics is leaving behind bacteria that are not affected by common antibiotics and thus require stronger medications that may or may not currently exist. It has nothing to do with weakening someone's immune system.

For someone who openly admits to not understanding what you're talking about, you sure are making some pretty strong assertions.

 

[RationalVetMed]

If you think that a flu that is three times as deadly to children and pregnant women and killed far more children and pregnant women, directly killed patients, rather than the typical 40 - 50, 000 elderly or immune compromised people who sometimes die of complications from the flu, I guess it wasn't that bad.

We have studied influenza A viruses for years, we know how antigenic drift works, which is why there is often such a grave concern about it etc...

Brilliant Tatyana, an excellent clarification of flu and vaccination, many thanks. Ashamed to say I'd never heard of a 'cytokine storm' (I think the immune system had only just been invented when I was at college ).

If the cytokine storm is caused by the immune response to flu infection why/how is it that vaccination helps improve this - why does the immune system react without the storm after vaccination?

Yuri

 

[Tatyana]

As I had already answered your question, I presumed I was free to move forward in the discussion. Obviously I strayed from the narrow parameters you felt safe to work within.



Apparently your vaccination only protects you from the disease if no one around you is carrying it. What sort of protection is that?



I'm reminded of the video evidence where firefighters specifically state they heard explosions and described the collapse as a controlled demolition. I'm also reminded of reading numerous official witness statements made by firemen and EMTs. Hell, I can even remember watching video footage of the collapses and all of the evidence of explosions, undeniable (except by see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil monkees.) What's your point? That I should be willing to accept evidence produced by some faceless boffin before that of my own personal experience?



No, my point is that vaccines don't work, have never worked and exist today only because of falsified test results (effectiveness) and death certificates (safety.) My point is that I'm lucky that none of my children were killed by vaccinations although it is now clear to me that their chronic illnesses as well as my own were likely to have been vaccine related. My daughters began a 15 year cycle of ear infections just after their MMR shots although not soon enough after for us to make the connection. I suffered sinusitis during my USAF basic training, aged 20 years old, shortly after having my initial batch of vaccinations. From that point on, I suffered from hayfever and bronchitis until 33 years later when I discovered Natural Hygiene.

My point is also that, for all their arrogance, medical doctors are as clueless as the general public about maintaining health and regaining it once lost. Their years of training teaches them how to treat symptoms and ignore the root causes of disease. Their focus on germs and viruses and genes blinds them to the truth that we are naturally healthy animals and all we need to be and remain healthy is an optimum environment which includes pure air, pure water, wholesome food, sufficient rest, sleep, exercise, sunshine and shelter (to pick out the main ones.) Acute disease is not an attack on the body by foreign influences but an attempt by the body to eliminate excess toxicity often using secondary channels of elimination e.g. mucous membranes, lungs, and skin. Hence, any attempt to fight the symptoms of this elimination process will interfere with it and increase the toxicity level of the body thereby endangering vital organs and eventually leading to a vicious cycle of increasing toxicity and failure of the body's eliminative functions resulting in death.

Think about that next time you hear of a physician trying to bring down a patient's fever or treating a rash or cough with medicine of any type.



Not that I can bothered to produce. You will know that what I'm saying is true unless you've been living the exclusive life of a hermit.



Control groups are for research projects. You don't need one when your symptoms clear up while undergoing a fast or just improving your diet. It's sufficient to know that you're no longer suffering.



Apples and oranges. If we limit your plane crash success criteria to an equal number of safe take offs and landings, it's easy to measure the number of successes. If instead, we add a criteria that all passengers had to be free of jet-lag following the flight, it becomes harder to measure success. Do we monitor each passenger for 1 week post-flight for symptoms and, if we find symptoms, do we conclude that the symptoms were actually caused by the flight and not some other factor? Do we rely on passengers to contact us if they have symptoms and otherwise count them as symptom-free?

If a plane crashes, do we immediately count that as a failure or do we check the records to see if any underlying causes contributed to the crash and therefore state that the flight itself would have been successful if the plane had been strong enough to complete it?

Sounds crazy but such is the outlandish world of measuring vaccination effectiveness and safety.



I completely agree but I also see very little alternative. If my arm's half-severed after an accident, I will see no shame in seeking the assistance of people trained to deal with such circumstances. Once sewn up, I'll be out of there and out of reach of their drugs at the earliest opportunity.

Vaccines work.

I am sorry you have had a bad experience with some people in the medical community, but vaccines do work.

By all means, if you want to self-diagnose and treat, then fine, however, I would question your statements that you and your daughters have been injured by vaccines.

Correlation is not causation, either with the cause you assert (vaccines) or with the cure (natural health).

I have also developed hayfever and have issues with sinusitis, that is just how things go at times, I think I have a genetic predisposition, as my mother is similar.

Some children often have persistent ear infections, again, it is the nature of the interaction of their genes and the environment.

By making such an obvious factual error that 'vaccines don't work' you are going to have people disregard some of your other issues which may be valid and be issues that need to be addressed in the American 'health system'.

 

[RationalVetMed]

It is my belief that doctors overprescribed antibiotics years ago and because of this many children have weak immune systems because they didn't have a chance to build up a strong one.

Jeez, I hate it when people say stupid stuff like that: "antibiotics weaken the immune system" - how can you claim to be giving sound advice on vaccination when you demonstrate a woeful ignorance of even the basics of the subject by coming out with howlers like that

Yuri

 

[Chris Haynes]

How did our ancestors ever survive for at least 40,000 years before the invention of modern medicine (by the ancient Greeks.) ....

By having more children, and hoping one will or two will survive.

Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein, had five children and only one survived to adulthood.

Do you seriousy want us to go back to the days when every family has to bury at least one child? Are you that clueless?

 

[Tatyana]

Brilliant Tatyana, an excellent clarification of flu and vaccination, many thanks. Ashamed to say I'd never heard of a 'cytokine storm' (I think the immune system had only just been invented when I was at college ).

If the cytokine storm is caused by the immune response to flu infection why/how is it that vaccination helps improve this - why does the immune system react without the storm after vaccination?

Yuri

We don't get the cytokine storm as the amount of antigen that we are given is just so small it really is just an epitope.

This is also the reason why adjuvents are in vaccines, as we need to enhance the immune response to the antigen to ensure that we do create memory cells.

The immune response to a vaccination can be cytokine ladened, and it often makes people feel like they have a mild flu, especially the first time they have the vaccine (as I did).

People mistake their own immune system's cytokine response from being immunised for being ill, because basically, it is our immune system that is creating all of the symptoms we associate with having a cold or flu for the most part.

If you have had one of those awful 'I felt like crap after having my flu jab', then you are an individual who is a candidate for the deadly cytokine storm if you encounter a new wild type influenza A virus.

If you felt that crap 'I caught the flu from the jab' from a tiny, tiny, tiny dose of the virus, a rapidly replicating, aggressive and novel virus is really going to cause your immune system to flip out.

Anecdotally, I have had so many flu jabs that now my arm doesn't even get sore, I have to press on the injection site to notice any sort of side effects.

This is the other issue people bring up, that the vaccine has to match the flu for that season.

Yes, this is true, but if you have had previous immunisation, and there are only something like 16 H (haemogglutinin) and 9 N (neuromidinase) spikes on influenza A that affect humans, and every year there are typically three strains of virus in the jab.

So even if the next global pandemic is something like H5N9, my memory cell from previous bird flu jabs would still recognise the H5 spike and start mounting the more effective antibody response to that spike.

Just for those of you who are unaware of this, IT IS STILL YOUR IMMUNE SYSTEM THAT DEALS WITH THE INFECTION YOU ARE INFECTED WITH, it isn't like the vaccine is a 'magic stop infection bullet', it just gives your immune system a jump start.

For example, I am fairly positive I still caught the flu last year, however, it was very short lived and not nearly as miserable and morbid as the previous flu(s) I have had.

A vaccine will not STOP infection, if there is some nasty bacteria or virus floating around in your environment, you are still as likely to catch it, however, if and/or when you catch the pathogen, YOUR IMMUNE SYSTEM WILL DEAL WITH IT IN A MORE EFFECTIVE AND TIMELY MANNER.

This is why the whole argument that 'vaccines weaken our immune system' is just utter rubbish and using it make you look like a science retard.

The immune system does EXACTLY the same thing, goes through EXACTLY the same set of stages if you are exposed to the vaccine pathogen or the pathogen in the wild.

 

[Tatyana]

Has anyone brought up what a lying, scheming, unethical scum bag Andrew Wakefield (the man responsible for a significant proportion of the current anti-vax movement) really is?

If you haven't read some of the little stunts he pulled, the money making schemes he had planned before he even did the research, the number of brutal tests he put the only twelve children he studied had to endure (lumbar punctures and ileoscopies) that were not medically required, I could go on and on, it is truely shocking how callous and digusting this man was, then I suggest you look at the BMJ or Brian Deer's site.

From his rubbish little personal theory of 'autistic enterocolitis' which was never proven, came all the other issues, the thimerosal, the too many too soon, the 'green our vaccines' or moving the goal posts.

http://briandeer.com/mmr-lancet.htm

 

[RationalVetMed]

... A vaccine will not STOP infection, if there is some nasty bacteria or virus floating around in your environment, you are still as likely to catch it, however, if and/or when you catch the pathogen, YOUR IMMUNE SYSTEM WILL DEAL WITH IT IN A MORE EFFECTIVE AND TIMELY MANNER...

So would I take it from what you've said that the vaccine means you get less of a cytokine storm when you are exposed to wild virus - do we know why that is?

Yuri

(sorry, didn't phrase the question well originally)

 

[Capsid]

So would I take it from what you've said that the vaccine means you get less of a cytokine storm when you are exposed to wild virus - do we know why that is?

Yuri

(sorry, didn't phrase the question well originally)

It's due to the replicative capacity and virulence of the wild type virus which is in effect a dose effect. Live virus vaccines are attenuated and have reduced virulence. Killed virus vaccines such as the flu vaccine obviously don't have any virulence.

 

[Tatyana]

So would I take it from what you've said that the vaccine means you get less of a cytokine storm when you are exposed to wild virus - do we know why that is?

Yuri

(sorry, didn't phrase the question well originally)

We will still get a cytokine response from any vaccine or pathogen we encounter.

A cytokine response is a normal part of immune system signalling and response, and if my memory serves me correctly, IL-6 (interleukin-6) typically kicks everything off.

A cytokine storm is a bit of a different animal, it is a uncontrolled, feed forward response, and immunologists are not entirely clear about how or why this occurs, however, a recent clinical trial situation did provide some insight.


http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa063842
Cytokine Storm in a Phase 1 Trial of the Anti-CD28 Monoclonal Antibody TGN1412

 

[RationalVetMed]

Thanks both and for the link - there was s similar disasterous trial in UK a few years back where IIRC one at least of the volunteers died. Not sure if it was this cytokine storm though in the same way as the NEJM paper.

Yuri

 

[Professor Yaffle]

Thanks both and for the link - there was s similar disasterous trial in UK a few years back where IIRC one at least of the volunteers died. Not sure if it was this cytokine storm though in the same way as the NEJM paper.

Yuri

http://www.i-sis.org.uk/LDTC.php

 

[RationalVetMed]

http://www.i-sis.org.uk/LDTC.php

Thanks Prof. - it was the same trial. Glad there weren't two like it and that my recollection that a volunteer had died was wrong. Still a pretty dreadful affair, I'm sure I remember loss of digits in some of the volunteers.

I think the message is starting to sink in now - cytokine storm = bad.

Good example of how researchers are open and honest regarding the adverse effects of drugs though. This was a bad situation and it sounds like mistakes may have been made but any sign of a cover up?.. Nope.

So if 'big pharma' can't manage to cover up one measley little trial involving only 6 people where no one died how in the name of pants are they supposed to be able to achieve a massive, global-scale cover up of vaccines which paranoid conspiracy theorists say are killing millions?

Answer:

They're not

Yuri

 

[ectoplasm]

So if 'big pharma' can't manage to cover up one measley little trial involving only 6 people where no one died how in the name of pants are they supposed to be able to achieve a massive, global-scale cover up of vaccines which paranoid conspiracy theorists say are killing millions?

Answer:

They're not

Yuri

If they were killing millions, wouldn't somebody notice?

Thanks Tatyana for those explanations. They were excellent!

 

[Tatyana]

Thanks both and for the link - there was s similar disasterous trial in UK a few years back where IIRC one at least of the volunteers died. Not sure if it was this cytokine storm though in the same way as the NEJM paper.

Yuri

It is the same trial.

It is quite sad as monoclonal antibody therapy to treat cancer seems like a really good idea in theory.

 

[Kay]

By having more children, and hoping one will or two will survive.

Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein, had five children and only one survived to adulthood.

Do you seriousy want us to go back to the days when every family has to bury at least one child? Are you that clueless?

As I like to observe, the human species I guess survived. But what about most of us?

I'm 21 years old. I would have been killed three times over by now from diseases if I had been born a mere 100 years ago. But thanks to modern medicine, I'm still alive. And that means something to me.

 

[Capsid]

It is the same trial.

It is quite sad as monoclonal antibody therapy to treat cancer seems like a really good idea in theory.

There are about a dozen or so licensed mabs, so the TGN1412 trial hasn't prevented their development and use.

 

[Rolfe]

Thank you to Tatyana and Capsid especially for some very lucid explanations.

I've just recently been handed a short lecture course to deliver, which was produced by someone who emigrated to Australia. It's on the development and use of vaccines in livestock disease control. I delivered the lectures as per the prepared material, but I wasn't happy at all with either the content or the balance of the material. I'm already planning out a complete re-write to exclude some of the errors and irrelevancies and include essential topics such as marker vaccines.

I'm planning a discrete section on side-effects and harm caused by vaccines (vaccine-associated fibrosarcoma, bovine neonatal panctyopenia and the reversion to virulence of the Chlamydophila abortus ovis vaccine as well as the non-specific stuff), and then a slide on the antivax nutters. You have given me excellent material here!

Rolfe.

 

[trusetheeker]

...

Safe-Keeper said: I'm reminded of the CT anecdotes we got after 9/11 -- "I have a friend whose cousin is a firefighter, and he heard that firefighters were talking about explosives"

Trusetheeker said: I'm reminded of the video evidence where firefighters specifically state they heard explosions ...

Safe-Keeper said: Once again you go off on some wild unrelated tangent... my point was that "I've got a friend who is a (insert suitable profession here) who said (insert suitable thing here)" isn't evidence. I have a friend in a suitable profession who told me this, so it must be true.

Strange that when you brought up CT anecdotes it was relevant but when I answer the point, it's a "wild unrelated tangent?"

----

Safe-Keeper said: I'm sorry to hear all this. I'm glad you're doing better.

Thanks.

-----

Safe-Keeper said: No, because your improvement may be due to the placebo effect, other treatment you're undergoing, imagination or sheer coincidence. You need more than anecdotes to determine if something works. You need a control group. You can't just go around and peddle snake oil to thousands of people and remark that some of them feel better after buying your remedy.

I'm obviously not very good at getting my point across. A person who gets well while following any specific regime doesn't really need a control group to confirm that they got better. Whether it was the regimen that worked or they just coincidentally healed is not critical to them.

However, those who wish to advertise their snake oil based on that success should be able to provide reasonable proof that the regimen led to the improvement. But because we're dealing with individuals and living creatures, a control group might neither be possible nor morally acceptable. So, IMO, any marketing of said product should be based on the probability of success as judged by historical evidence and it should also be priced accordingly. Then potential clients can decide for themselves hopefully with advice from professionals they choose to trust.

---

If we're looking into the statistics of plane crashes, obviously we're not going to ask passengers if they feel jet lag or other flight-related symptoms after the flight, no.

You previously said:

Let's say a plane crashes. Can we conclude from the crash that planes are safe? No, we have to look at the number of successful flights, and what they accomplish, and then measure that against the number of crashes. Does every other plane crash? Every thousandth? One in 50 million?

My point was that, following your criteria above, you cannot judge vaccinations safety just on whether the patient lived or died. You have to look at the number of successful vaccinations and what they accomplished. If the patient survived the repeated injection of foreign matter into the body, never showed any sign of the target disease over the next 20 years but then died of cancer after years of fighting off allergies and other complaints that could never be proven to have been caused by the vaccinations, would you count that as a successful vaccination? Of course you would. In fact, it would never cross your mind that vaccinations could have anything other than beneficial effects except on those poor unfortunate individuals who had underlying conditions but were given the vaccine without the precaution of a physical examination.

How bad a case of GBS is required to qualify as a "crash?"

--------

For the record, I'm not peddling anything. I'm trying to "sell" the idea that the medical industry overall may not actually have the general public's welfare at heart despite the many, well-meaning practitioners who provide the frontline services. I don't promote this idea lightly.

The Natural Hygienist professionals that I know do sell their services as well as publishing books and generally trying to earn a crust to keep body and soul together. Many of them make themselves available free-of-charge on-line providing education and encouragement to people who've lost faith in the medical industry and want to have health, not drug addictions and amputations. Non-professionals such as myself freely give our time helping others reap the rewards that come from living healthily.

Natural Hygiene is free to learn and practice with so much free advice and encouragement that a reasonably healthy person might never spend a single penny both getting educated and healthier. The severely chronically ill should consult with a professional and possibly even attend a supervised fasting center as the challenge of addressing decades of accumulated toxicity is not for the fainthearted. Consultation fees and fees for fast supervision vary but would hardly keep a medical doctor in golf shirts.

In closing, you can no more argue with people who think disease is caused by germs and viruses than you can argue with people who think sin is caused by Satan. It's only because some people finally get fed up with the failure of the industry that they will even consider the possibility of an alternative. Unfortunately, there are numerous "alternative" industries waiting to pounce, each no doubt just as convinced that their palliative methods are correct but with the same failing: they ignore the lessons of nature.

Natural Hygiene is nothing more than applying the laws of nature; living in harmony with the laws of life to achieve total health. All of the knowledge required to build and maintain a human being is contained in one fertilized ovum and from that springs a complete organism so complex and resilient that it dwarfs anything that humans have created through our combined intellects. There is nothing that we can teach our bodies about health. The best that we can do is provide it with the optimum environment for it to operate in and then just enjoy living.

Thanks for reading this far.

 

[excaza]

I'm obviously not very good at getting my point across. A person who gets well while following any specific regime doesn't really need a control group to confirm that they got better. Whether it was the regimen that worked or they just coincidentally healed is not critical to them.

But it is critical when attempting to foist said regime on others, like you're doing.