Vaccines are unquestionably good for society, are they also unquestionably good for the individual?

I think you have presented the case pretty well. It, like so many things with a civilization, is a community endeavor. We all have to pitch in for the good of the whole. You don’t talk here about the risks of the vaccine, but from what I understand, they are quite low—so vaccinations would be kind of a win-win for the individual and society.

Reluctantly I got a regular flu vaccine two weeks ago and have had lingering and unpleasant reactions for days….It seems a better choice than the actual flu, but not by much.

I just found this video about Jenny McCarthy’s non-scientific efforts to end/green vaccinataions

I had the measles as a toddler, and pneumonia at 9. Both could’ve been avoided with vaccines. The measles left no permanent damage, but the pneumonia did.

For these reasons and other family members reactions to various illnesses (such as polio) I choose to vaccinate myself & my son after reading up on each individual vaccine.

It is my opinion, that in many cases, the vaccine benefits out weigh its risks. There are exceptions to this rule

Here in Wisconsin, we’ve had large Pertussis (whooping cough) outbreaks due to adults and children not being properly vaccinated. It’s a shame to see infants/children die of a preventable illness. It’s also terrible that a few people can cause large outbreaks of a preventable illness.

Part of the problem (on the whole) is that vaccines are so amazingly good for the herd (in terms of the individuals in the herd) that it’s hard to justify anything else.

The 2002 Netherlands study I’m sure also concluded that the rate of infection is far less if you are vaccinated and living in a vaccinated society than being unvaccinated and living in a vaccinated society.

E.g., the anecdote of the 500 person church—2 out of 450 (less than 0.5%) saw vaccination failure, while 64% of the unvaccinated got the measles.

I think your conclusion that “If it’s actually safer for one individual to choose to NOT be vaccinated as long as everyone around them is vaccinated…” is a bit fallacious, although your entire statement is correct. And this is the problem we’re facing with the irrational fear over childhood immunizations is that we are weakening the herd immunity.

@grumpyfish – good point, my conclusion may be correct but fallacious if only because it ignores the case you raise – being vaccinated in a community that’s vaccinated – which may trump all others in terms of individual and public health.

That said, still looking for evidence that a) that’s true – being vaccinated in a community that’s vaccinated is optimal for the individual as well as the community, and b) what the recipe for success is when living in a community afraid of vaccinations (who don’t see the benefits partly because we’re now largely vaccinated).

I think you may be misinterpreting the quote. She is not saying that the individual being unvaccinated is better than the individual being vaccinated. She is saying that the community being vaccinated is better than the community being unvaccinated. I believe it is safe to say that:

individual unvaccinated + community unvaccinated is worse than
individual vaccinated + community unvaccinated is worse than
individual unvaccinated + community vaccinated is worse than
individual vaccinated + community vaccinated.

According to the CDC, the flu vaccine is dangerous to individuals who may be allergic and individuals with Guillain-Barré syndrome. For all other people:

The viruses in the flu shot are killed (inactivated), so you cannot get the flu from a flu shot. The risk of a flu shot causing serious harm, or death, is extremely small. However, a vaccine, like any medicine, may rarely cause serious problems, such as severe allergic reactions. Almost all people who get influenza vaccine have no serious problems from it. CDC.

Here’s a fun website regarding the notable scientist Jenny McCarthy.

@nikipedia I agree with that, and I think that’s what @chocomonkey meant, but I wanted to emphasize that there’s a better case than being unvaccinated in a vaccinated society. =)

@chocomonkey As to the first part, just taking the MMR vaccine: “The first 20 years of licensed measles vaccination in the U.S. prevented an estimated 52 million cases of the disease, 17,400 cases of mental retardation, and 5,200 deaths.” (From http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3931045 via wikipedia).

Considering the rate of death from a motor vehicle accidents are 1-in-100, the rate of death from measles (in developed countries) is 0.3% (of those infected…), and the rate of mental retardation can be extrapolated to about 1%.

@shilolo GA!

There are no credible studies showing that vaccinating is dangerous, which is why you could not find them.

People persist in pointing fingers at vaccinations even though many credible studies have been done showing there is no risk other than known allergic reactions, which are very rare.

Even if I accepted your herd premise, which I don’t, there is no way to move everyone else in your community to get vaccinated so you don’t have to. Thus, the only logical action is to be vaccinated yourself for maximum possible protection.

The fact that the majority of children born today generally reach adulthood safely is a good argument in favor of vaccination. However, this article raises points against vaccination.

Personally, I vaccinate myself, my children and my pets. I knew people who got things such as polio or gave birth to a child damaged by German Measles, and I have known pets that died painfully of Parvo, Distemper, and Feline Leukemia, and I do not want to risk my family’s health.

I often wonder if my children and their children will view Chicken Pox in the way that my generation fears Measles. The campaign to get people to vaccinate with the MMR was quite ridiculous. They said it would be completely eradicated if everyone was vaccinated. Obviously that didn’t happen.

In that article the OP linked, they mention RotoTeq. I am personally against giving that to my own children. I do find it to be an unnecessary vaccination for healthy children. There is a vaccine for RSV, which is only given to children who meet specific criteria. My son got a minor case of RSV when he was six months..I know it can be extremely severe for certain babies, such as preemies and those with asthma. Those are babies high on the list for the vaccine, otherwise it’s not even mentioned to the parents. That’s the way some vaccines should be, in my opinion.
I will actively seek to infect my child with Chicken Pox. I really prefer immunity in that form, than in the form of a vaccine.
Honestly, I don’t remember the last time I got vaccinated for anything but tetanus. It always amuses me that the adults who throw fits over this are probably not up to date on their boosters (not referring to anyone here!)

@casheroo I have several family members that have had severe Shingles outbreaks. Chicken Pox is not that bad for kids, but adults suffering through bouts of Shingles…not good, IMHO

@casheroo And I know a young man who got chicken pox when he was 24 and ended up in the hospital for several weeks. The lesions were forming inside his lungs and he almost died.

@SpatzieLover My father gets Shingles twice a year. Shingles exposed (aka, you have to rub the person on the open blister) gives a person who has not had Chicken Pox, the Chicken Pox. So the next time my father gets Shingles, which he had just recently…but we couldn’t expose my son because it was in an inappropriate spot on my father lol) we will expose my son to it.. Also, anyone can suffer from bouts of Shingles throughout adulthood, even if you had CP as a child.
@Darwin That’s an adult getting Chicken Pox. We will get the vaccine if our son has not had the Chicken Pox by the time he is 10 years old, because at that point, the benefits outweigh the risks.

@casheroo There is a vaccine for Shingles, too..but it doesn’t work for everyone.

@SpatzieLover I didn’t know that! Interesting. I think my father is more susceptible because he’s immunosuppressed because of other things…my mother has never gotten anything from him, and they obviously share a lot.

@casheroo I only know about it because two family members get Shingles regularly…one of them has had it in the eyes. That is horrifically painful!

@Darwin – thanks for the link. Happily it cites original sources. Unfortunately, it includes of a mix of what looks like credible sources (JAMA, Medical Journal of Australia, Community Disease Surveillance Centre) and what looks to me like not-so-credible sources (The Lancet, The Vine); which makes me doubt the credibility and bias of the article and site.

It did include this concluding paragraph, though, which was interesting food for thought:
So what are some of the true reasons why disease decreased and disappeared in the last century?

“From his book `Health and Healing` Dr Andrew Weil said it best with the following statement:

“Scientific medicine has taken credit it does not deserve for some advances in health. Most people believe that victory over the infectious diseases of the last century came with the invention of immunizations. In fact, cholera, typhoid, tetanus, diphtheria and whooping cough, etc, were in decline before vaccines for them became available – the result of better methods of sanitation, sewage disposal, and distribution of food and water.””

@chocomonkey This article is a few years old but it was this is how long whooping cough has been increasing in Wisconsin due to lack of vaccinations. We’ve had hundreds infected and a handful of deaths for a completely preventable illness.

In another couple of months, our local news media will be reminding people why they should vaccinate. And a month or two after that, they’ll be reporting which schools are closed, or which counties have outbreaks. It’s been a yearly occurrence here since about 2005.

@SpatzieLover – thanks for making it tangible.

@chocomonkey Sure. Both my SIL and I have had phone calls to each other each winter about whether or not she will bring her baby (she always has an infant) to an outing due to an outbreak.

@SpatzieLover: Do you mean increasing? Probably not declining.

@chocomonkey – Perhaps the article is also failing to consider the cases of polio and smallpox, both still quite active even though better methods of sanitation, sewage disposal, and distribution of food and water had been in existence for many decades.

@gailcalled I edited inclining to increasing. Thanks for catching my brain glitch

@Darwin Yes. The article definitely failed to mention that one. My uncle suffered permanent damage to his leg, and my mother had two cousins die from MS all due to Polio. They all lived with proper sewage, hygiene and food safety.

As children, we were regularly vaccinated for smallpox and up until the mid-seventies, I went for a booster every seven years. I note that during the last chickenpox outbreak, I didn’t get it, nor my husband – he’s from West Africa – but our teenage daughter did.

@SpatzieLover – How could you describe the Lancet as one of the not-so-credible sources? Published by Elsevier, it is a leading medical journal.

@bea2345 – That was @chocomonkey that said The Lancet and The VINE appeared to be not so credible, not @SpatzieLover. I suspect @chocomonkey isn’t as aware of British publications as some of us.

Beg pardon, @SpatzieLover, @Darwin. This thread is of particular interest, given the debate over the safety of vaccinations, see this CDC site. To some, CDC might not be considered disinterested, but it has earned its good reputation for sound, evidence based medicine. One thing we can be sure about: the risks of death and disability from measles, say, are greater than those of the vaccines themselves.

I really need to find the poster of the ad they ran in the 80s, promising that if everyone got vaxed,measles would be erradicated.

@casheroo What would that prove? Smallpox has been eradicated, and polio is nearly gone. I only wish we could eradicate measles (and many other diseases).

@shilolo That the mass marketing was a campaign, a scheme to get people to vaccinate and they went about it in a way to use scare tactics and lies. It’s just what is done with this sort of thing. Also, they did the campaign towards parents, so less people would miss work. What a reason to mass vaccinate. And I just think the poster is amusing.

The poster doesn’t say “Eradicate measles globally.” It says “Stop measles with just one shot.” And this is what it does – kids who get the shot don’t get measles or they get a much reduced form.

Globally, approximately 410,000 children under the age of 5 years die of measles each year. Do you really want to chance that your unvaccinated child might be one of them? The complications of the disease include pneumonia, diarrhea, encephalitis, and corneal scarring, which can lead to blindness. Again, do you want to risk that your unvaccinated child might end up with these side-effects?

And they did the campaign towards parents because the very young and the very old are the ones who are most likely to die or suffer severe side effects from measles, not so “fewer people would miss work.”

Now you are using scare tactics.

@Darwin LOL. I’m not even going into that. What I was talking about was NOT referring to just the poster alone. All I said was that I found the poster amusing. And that it was part of the campaign to get parents to vaccinate.
Measles used to be the Chicken Pox of my childhood (and I’m only 23) and now parents are told their children will die without the Chicken Pox vaccine. It’s just fascinating to watch and experience what is happening.

Well, I certainly wish there had been a chicken pox vaccine when I was a kid. All three kids and my father got it and it nearly drove my mother out of her mind. Even my kids were too early to get the shot. While my daughter’s case wasn’t too bad, my son had a horrible case and was too young to understand what was going on. In addition, a friend of mine caught chicken pox as an adult and almost died because the “poxes” occurred inside his body as well as outside.

I also wouldn’t have minded a measles vaccine, too, or even a German measles vaccine. I never got either disease, so as an adult I had no immunity to either. Think about trying to get pregnant and finding out you could get German measles.

Consider the 1940’s actress Gene Tierney and her daughter Daria. Would you want that for anyone you know?

@Darwin You had your titers checked and weren’t immune as an adult? I know of plenty of people with a natural immunity to Rubella (German Measles), which I know is important for pregnant women.

Also, I can’t imagine not having Rubella immunity, and learning that I am being forced to get a shot that contains MMR and not just Rubella, because they decided money was more important than helping people, and refused to give out separated vaccines. this was very recent, they seemed to have gotten so much flack that the separated vaccine is coming back in 2011 (I believe it’s 2011, could be 2010..)

Yup. I had my titers checked, and I was not immune as an adult to either measles or German measles. Or mumps, for that matter, although my brother had all three illnesses as a child, my sister had two out of three, and my mom encouraged us to play together so we would all get it “over with.” So I was glad the MMR shot came all in one. Fewer holes in my skin.

i think that vaccinations are good for us in such a way that once the vaccine enters our system, it activates our antibodies. and so, the next our body encounters the virus(or whatever it is) we were vaccinated for, we’d be more or less immune or if ever we do catch that, its gonna be at the most minimal costs.