Vaccines largely safe, U.S. expert panel finds
Julie Steenhuysen for Reuters:
The panel looked at eight common vaccines: the combination measles-mumps-rubella (MMR), the diphtheria-tetanus-acellular pertussis (DTaP), varicella for chickenpox, influenza, hepatitis B, meningococcal, tetanus-containing vaccines, and the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine.
…
Once again, the [Institute of Medicine] found that the MMR vaccine does not cause autism, nor does it cause type 1 diabetes, [committee chair Ellen Wright] Clayton said.
“The DTaP vaccine, which is the pertussis vaccine, does not cause type 1 diabetes, and the killed flu vaccine does not cause Bell’s palsy (temporary facial paralysis) and it doesn’t make your asthma get worse,” Clayton said.
“The evidence was really quite strong that vaccines don’t cause these side effects,” she said.
Vaccine denial makes me upset.
If it were just about the person, then my position would be far more moderate. The government forcing someone to get juiced up is not particularly appealing to me; if that guy is a moron who wants to get diphtheria or some other horrifying disease we solved a hundred years ago, then let him for all I care.
The thing with vaccines is that they’re not just about the person getting them, but also everyone that person will ever come in contact with. One less person who can catch a disease is one less person who can spread it around. Herd immunity is mathematically a real thing, and it’s the reason that parents with three functioning brain cells who believe everything they read on the internet can decide “oh measles isn’t a problem any more, my kid doesn’t need this shot” (which in turn is why Indiana had a measles outbreak in 2005).
Vaccinations protect everyone, and anyone who thinks we shouldn’t be doing them is a selfish cockmagnet who doesn’t understand science.
And, as shown above, the whole autism thing is just a complete crock of shit. Andrew Wakefield in particular is a fraud who had conflicts of interest (including patenting his own vaccine), manipulated data, and performed unnecessary and invasive tests on children. Wakefield’s “landmark” paper was published by The Lancet in 1998, and ten of his twelve co-authors retracted its interpretation in 2004. In 2010, The Lancet fully retracted the whole paper. And yet somehow there are people who still believe that anything this man says is worth listening to.