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Real problems and uncertainties with vaccinations

Ivor the Engineer

Penultimate Amazing
Ivor the Engineer
Joined
Feb 18, 2006
Messages
10,590
I've started this thread so those with knowledge of vaccine development and/or medical use can tell us about the problems and uncertainties with vaccinations. For example:

How much Thirmosal is safe to inject into a human of a particular age and/or weight? How was this amount determined?
 
paximperium said:
Since Thimerosol is no longer used in vaccines used in infants I don't see the exact point but the best study is this:
http://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/vsd/thimerosal_outcomes/
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Thanks for the link to the study. What I was after was something along the lines of this page:

http://www.ehponline.org/members/2002/suppl-1/11-23clarkson/clarkson-full.html

Abstract

The three modern "faces" of mercury are our perceptions of risk from the exposure of billions of people to methyl mercury in fish, mercury vapor from amalgam tooth fillings, and ethyl mercury in the form of thimerosal added as an antiseptic to widely used vaccines. In this article I review human exposure to and the toxicology of each of these three species of mercury. Mechanisms of action are discussed where possible. Key gaps in our current knowledge are identified from the points of view both of risk assessment and of mechanisms of action.
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So if you already have the Clarkson paper why are you asking? Or do you want more like that to get a consensus?
 
Bedtime reading:
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=9899#toc

Chapter on health effects


(Can you read it so I don't have to?) ;)

I don't really understood why it actually di take so long to phase out mercury from vaccines. It just never seemed to be considered a public health priority, and there were all those assurances that it caused no harm. Despite no evidence that it did cause harm, removal was correct on the precautionary principle, given that mercury may cause neurological damage in infants/fetuses. As has been expounded before, the decision to remove it was one that was agonised over (Smallwood) - The mercury militia would (and did) jump on this decision as an admission thimerosal did cause autism, and I can see why some were hesitant to advise it should be removed for these reasons, given the lack of evidence of harm stemming from its inclusion.
Multidose vials are also a bad idea anyhow - the potential risk for errors, contamination etc being real (albeit small). Why didn't people move to single dose vials earlier? I dunno. As to why thimerosal was originally chosen as a preservative? Not sure. perhaps the alternatives around at the time had even less going for them?
 
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Asolepius said:
So if you already have the Clarkson paper why are you asking? Or do you want more like that to get a consensus?
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Ideally I want sources on the ingredients of vaccines which could not be seen to have a potential bias toward minimising or ignoring risks associated with their use.

I'm also interested in hearing about how vaccines haven't worked as well as we would have like them to, or have lead to unforeseen negative consequences.
 
Hi Ivor,

I just recently read this paper, which I think is quite relevant to this thread. Here is the citation and abstract:

Heffernan JM, Keeling MJ. Implications of vaccination and waning immunity. Proc Biol Sci. 2009 Mar 4. [Epub ahead of print]
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Abstract:
For infectious diseases where immunization can offer lifelong protection, a variety of simple models can be used to explain the utility of vaccination as a control method. However, for many diseases, immunity wanes over time and is subsequently enhanced (boosted) by asymptomatic encounters with the infection. The study of this type of epidemiological process requires a model formulation that can capture both the within-host dynamics of the pathogen and immune system as well as the associated population-level transmission dynamics. Here, we parametrize such a model for measles and show how vaccination can have a range of unexpected consequences as it reduces the natural boosting of immunity as well as reducing the number of naive susceptibles. In particular, we show that moderate waning times (40-80 years) and high levels of vaccination (greater than 70%) can induce large-scale oscillations with substantial numbers of symptomatic cases being generated at the peak. In addition, we predict that, after a long disease-free period, the introduction of infection will lead to far larger epidemics than that predicted by standard models. These results have clear implications for the long-term success of any vaccination campaign and highlight the need for a sound understanding of the immunological mechanisms of immunity and vaccination.
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It is a pretty technical paper. And I don’t fully understand all the details, but the abstract gives a decent insight into the idea. This paragraph may also provide some insight:

Here we have considered the complex feedbacks between vaccination, waning immunity and boosting. In the absence of vaccination, lifelong immunity is maintained through frequent encounters with infection,
which act to boost the waning immune memory (this agrees with the findings of Whittle et al. 1999). However, when vaccination is introduced the prevalence of infection declines, which in turn reduces the amount of boosting
and hence the level of immunity (in agreement with Muller 2001). What is more surprising is that the interaction between vaccination and waning immunity can lead to pronounced epidemic cycles in which the
peak levels of infection can be of the orders of magnitude greater than the mean.
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Thanks Skeptiquette.

I've read similar studies which dealt with chickenpox and the possible effect of mass vaccination increasing the age of infection and the incidence of shingles in adults who had chickenpox as children.
 
Prevnar causing staph infections is an uncertainty/problem:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed&uid=15183627&cmd=showdetailview&indexed=google

A trial with a 7-valent pneumococcal-conjugate vaccine in children with recurrent acute otitis media showed a shift in pneumococcal colonisation towards non-vaccine serotypes and an increase in Staphylococcus aureus-related acute otitis media after vaccination
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These findings suggest a natural competition between colonisation with vaccine-type pneumococci and S aureus, which might explain the increase in S aureus-related otitis media after vaccination.
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http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/292/6/716

Conclusions Streptococcus pneumoniae carriage, specifically of vaccine-type strains, is negatively associated with S aureus carriage in children. The implications of these findings in the pneumococcal vaccine era require further investigation
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http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1482988

Whether the current increase in severe community-acquired S. aureus infections, including methicillin-resistant S. aureus (6), is partially caused by the recent introduction of the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine is yet to be determined
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A rotavirus vaccine caused intussusception.
A respiratory syncitial virus vaccine enhanced disease.

The concern over the chicken pox vaccine has not occurred so far.

Forgot the Cutter incident that prompted use of an inactivated polio vaccine over the live version.
 
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Capsid said:
The concern over the chicken pox vaccine has not occurred so far.
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Which concern? There's this:

http://www.reuters.com/article/governmentFilingsNews/idUSN1429730720070314

And with fewer natural cases of the disease going around, unvaccinated children or children in whom the first dose of the vaccine fails to work have been catching the highly contagious disease later in life, when the risk of severe complications is greater, they said.

"If you're unvaccinated and you get it later in life, there's a 20-times greater risk of dying compared to a child, and a 10 to 15 times greater chance of getting hospitalized," said Jane Seward of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, who worked on the study.
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While 73 percent of the youngsters who became ill in 1995 were under age 7, the rate dropped to 30 percent by 2004 because the children who got chickenpox tended to get it at an older age.

And when vaccinated children were infected, they tended to be sicker, probably because they were older.
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None of which changes the fact that the severity and frequency of lasting impacts of the diseases for which standard childhood vaccinations are recommended far outweighs the risks from the vaccines.

The paper arguing that a vaccinated population does not have regular encounters with pathogens to boost natural immunity against them did not--in the extracted portion, I have not yet read the full article--compare the infection rate and severity of a vaccinated population versus a largely unvaccinated population. Looking at the rate of death and disability from these diseases in developing world countries that lack vaccines is an eye-opener.

I am not familiar with the RSV vaccine Capsid mentioned, but I know the rotavirus vaccine was withdrawn when it was determined that it was causing intussusception in rare cases. A new rotavirus vaccine is now in trials, with the goal of reducing or eliminating that dangerous illness in babies.

--Miss Kitt

ETA: I'm old enough that I remember how these diseases used to be dealt with: We were all sent over to play at the house of the kid in the neighborhood who came down with the mumps (and later, chicken pox) so that we'd get it young. Then the moms rotated who was watching the sick kids while it burned through the neighborhood for a month or so. I was in older elementary school -- maybe 4th or 5th grade?--when the rubella vaccine was finally approved. We were all given it in the library at school (unless someone's family had religious issues), lined up like new recruits for the Army with one sleeve rolled up...there was a big public information campaign on that one, because rubella is not so dangerous for the person who has it, but it causes horrible birth defects in the infants of mothers who catch it while expecting.

It was just assumed that you would, by 10 or so, have gotten all of the following: "hard red" measles; "German measles" (rubella); chicken pox; and mumps. You got vaccinated against the often-lethal diseases: diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, polio, and small pox. (Yep, I'm old enough to have been vaccinated against polio and also smallpox.) Even then, it was known that getting the SCDs (standard childhood diseases) younger was safer--but lacking a means of vaccination, the means of getting protection for later life was deliberate exposure at a young age.

I'll take vaccines, even with the side effects they sometimes have, over risking the rigours of the diseases.
 
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There are actually almost too many examples of vaccines being replaced by safer/more immunogenic products to list them all. You name it, it will have had problems, reactions, whatever.

I hardly think Ivor is a Generation Rescue mole compiling a list of horrible vaccine toxicities to trumpet to the Daily Mail (but one can never be 100% sure with him!)
 
Deetee said:
There are actually almost too many examples of vaccines being replaced by safer/more immunogenic products to list them all. You name it, it will have had problems, reactions, whatever.

I hardly think Ivor is a Generation Rescue mole compiling a list of horrible vaccine toxicities to trumpet to the Daily Mail (but one can never be 100% sure with him!)
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I am disheartened by your lack of trust Deetee.:D

I have an idea that if this info. was presented in the right way along with the benefits of vaccination, parents who are worried about having their children vaccinated would be able to use the rational parts of their brain to make the decision, which should hopefully get many more of them choosing to vaccinate (though perhaps not precisely to the CDC's schedule).
 
http://www.paul-offit.com/

http://www.cdphe.state.co.us/dc/Immunization/vaccinesafety/Offitpiece.pdf

Methylmercury in the grain caused the hospitalization of 6,500 Iraqis and killed 450. Pregnant women also ate the bread and delivered babies with epilepsy and mental retardation. But they didn’t deliver babies with an increased risk of autism.
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http://www.newsweek.com/id/165644

http://www.csicop.org/si/2007-06/novella.html

The amount of ethyl mercury in vaccines never exceeded the maximum recommended amount for methyl mercury, although it is safer than methyl mercury.
When the mercury containing preservative was still used, a child received up to only 1.9 µg/kg body weight per week when receiving vaccinations, which is well below the World Health Organization’s limit of 2.8 µg/kg per week. (That recommendation is for methylmercury, but the ethylmercury in thiomersal-containing vaccines is cleared by the body, and not accumulated the way methylmercury is. The half-life of ethylmercury is less than a week, and doesn’t compare to methylmercury’s 1.5 months.)

http://www.ncirs.usyd.edu.au/facts/thiomersal.pdf[

These values indicate levels of exposure that can be tolerated and have been deliberately calculated to be much lower than the level at which harm might occur. For example, the EPA level is 10 times below the lowest level calculated as causing harm, so there is a large built-in safety margin. In addition, these levels refer to methyl mercury, whereas thiomersal is converted to ethyl mercury, which is broken down and excreted more rapidly and does not accumulate in the body like methyl mercury
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So, even if there was methyl mercury in the vaccines, it would have been below the harmful levels, but it's not even methyl mercury, it's ethyl mercury and that is not toxic to the body, and gets excreted far more quickly.
 
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Ivor the Engineer said:
I am disheartened by your lack of trust Deetee.:D

I have an idea that if this info. was presented in the right way along with the benefits of vaccination, parents who are worried about having their children vaccinated would be able to use the rational parts of their brain to make the decision, which should hopefully get many more of them choosing to vaccinate (though perhaps not precisely to the CDC's schedule).
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These kind of facts sheets are available, along with ones that show the risk from disease compared to risks from vaccines.
http://www.cispimmunize.org/fam/Compare the Risks.pdf

I think I'd take a risk of an ear infection (which my kids never got after being vaccinated) over the risks associated with the diseases that vaccines prevent.
 
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