20 Replies to “Some People are Just Stupid”

  1. just think of all the foil beenies those parents can make for themselves and their sick kids.

  2. Family doctors are not God, and mass vaccination needs to be subject to a dispassionate analysis. Smallpox and polio – yes, the benefits are clear; measles and whooping cough, not so clear.
    Vaccination is a complex issue, not a panacea. If demanding information pisses of the medical establishment, then they have a problem, not we.
    You may now commence the “if it saves one life” chorus…

  3. “You may now commence the “if it saves one life” chorus…
    Posted by: Tenebris at August 22, 2008 8:57 PM
    Huh??? I am all for parents having the choice whether to vaccinate or not,BUT,and a big BUT,your kid comes down with a communicable disease,then he/she/it and your family are quarantined until either the threat passes,or it follows its logical Darwinian course in that family.Don’t like that way,then don’t scream and hollar for medical help,when you refused it in the first place.And no, Tenebris. I know you didn’t say that,but I have seen way to many cases of it. Refuse treatment(vaccination),then scream bloodly blue hell when your kid dies or becomes handicapped because they were infected by a disease that they could have prevented. Kinda hypocritical,no?But then that is the way of the leftie.

  4. Lance,
    I’m having trouble identifying what, if any, editorial stance you are taking here. Are you saying that parent who won’t vaccinate their children are stupid, or the medical establishment?
    D

  6. Lance, fortunately this is a self-correcting problem. All the morons die of diseases they could have survived if they had been smart enough to get vaccinated, leaving more cake and ice cream for the rest of us.
    Pretty soon that set of idiots is gone from the population, and the measles disappears until a new crop gains their majority.
    Vaccination is and should always be a choice. One that you have to be an idiot to get wrong, but freedom is dangerous for the stupid, the ignorant and the willfully blind.

  7. Phantom – if the parents are going for the Darwin Award let them, but, these fools are putting their kids at risk.
    The mercury issue has been resolved with vaccines not that it was ever proven to be a factor. Autism is bad, so is schizophrenia, they’ve both been around a long time. Both are much too complicated to be the result of a single factor. Whooping cough can kill, severe chicken poxs is linked to MS later in life, why any person would deny their kids vaccinations is beyond me. Thanks to modern medicine our children survive childhood unlike 100 years ago. Accidents are the leading cause of child deaths now.

  8. Statin drugs like Lipitor and Crestor are praised by the medical profession as the way to avoid heart problems, unfortunately they can cause all kinds of other problems. If you are taking these drugs and have any sense that something is not right, start searching the net.

  9. My son got the measles from the vaccination. A mild case mind you, but then along comes the vaccination for menegitis. Yikes, I don’t want him to have even a mild case of that.
    And now the new vaccination to prevent cervical cancer in girls. My daughter will soon be in the age range for that. If you still have to go for a regular pap test then why bother.
    And I always wonder how much influence the pharmaceutical companies have.
    I think I’m passed due for a tetanus shot. And you?

  10. DDH, I’m implying that parents who exercise their right to be idiots and knowingly gamble with the health of their children are stupid.
    Given the risks to their children, given the risks to everyone else, I think they are insane and worthy of disdain.
    That said, I’m not for any sort of gov’t intervention to “solve” the problem.

  11. Kat, I had Meningitis when I was nine. I spent a good amount of time in the hospital. I’m sure it caused my parents a fair amount of grief.
    I’ve apparently blocked most of those memories out, because I can’t remember much.
    What I do remember was the needle in my spine, the ambulance ride to the other hospital (children’s ward) and blood everywhere one morning when I pulled out my IV in my sleep. I also remember everyone wearing masks when they came into the room and not being able to touch anyone.
    But, hey, you weigh the risks for your own children. One in a million of (or whatever it is) adverse effects or one in a thousand of contracting a virulent disease in our age of jet-liners and cross-continent travel.

  12. I’ve been through this issue about 3000 times with my wife over the vaccination of our daughter. It’s not JUST the internet. Its people who read the internet and then spout on Oprah that it happened to their kid Jenny McCarthy comes to mind). There is even a class action suit about this Autism/Vaccination thing. The problem is that Autism can only be accurately diagnosed after the age of two, and that happens to be when certain types of vaccinations are given. Parents who have children diagnosed with Autism want someone to blame and hey ho it must have been the vaccination. Also, the definitions of Autism have been broadened in recent years to include children who would not have been included in that category in the past. Many many studies have been done on this with no evidence of a link between Autism and Vaccinations.

  13. Oh my, I have had the measles and the mumps and chicken pox, as did most of my generation, we are so doomed, oh wait…I’m still alive, and so are all my school-mates, amazing, simply amazing! It must have been all that medical know how!

  14. My son was hospitalized with measles after receiving the measles vaccine. He then had complete kidney failure and was on prednisone for a year and a half. And he was not immune to measles even after that. My doctor recommended that he not receive the Whooping Cough vaccine after that as it could further damage his kidneys. He also stated that the worst cases of Whooping Cough were in children who had already rec’d the vaccine.
    I lived in Hawaii when the Swine Flu vaccine was given. Check out how many people developed Gillian-Barre Syndrome after that vaccine–and Swine Flu never did attack!
    Any doctor who told the truth about vaccines would be committing economic and professional suicide. That is a fact.

  15. There is one very serious complication of having measles that has been virtually wiped out since the introduction of the vaccine.
    “SSPE is a progressive, generally fatal, brain disorder caused by chronic measles virus infection. It follows ~7-10 years after measles virus infection, and generally kills within 3 years from the onset of symptoms. And it’s a nasty way to go: the patient suffers from behavioral changes, cognitive deterioration, vision problems, and eventually, advanced neurologic symptoms such as severe spasms, and finally, severe physical and mental impairment that leads to death. Risk factors for developing SSPE including contracting the measles virus at an early age (especially before age 2). Males also are more commonly affected than females. When the first live attenuated measles vaccine was licensed here in 1963, approximately 8 million deaths per year worldwide were the result of measles infection (or complications thereof), and ~50 cases of SSPE were reported each year in the U.S. Following vaccination, the numbers of SSPE cases have dropped dramatically; we now see only 1 or 2 cases per year, and those are almost always in patients who come from countries where measles is more of a problem than in the U.S. By any measure, the introduction of measles vaccination in the U.S. was successful at controlling the disease.”
    The reason many individuals get away with not vaccinating their children is that the vast majority of responsible people do so. If this begins to change we will see epidemics of infectious disease that will do a good job of reducing the population. The main reasons that we have achieved an increase in our life spans in the first world have to do with a dramatic decrease in infectious disease through vaccination, improved water quality, improved food handling and antibiotics. Infectious disease was and probably still is the major cause of premature death in the world. We in the Western world have become very complacent because death from infectious disease has become quite rare.

  16. Must respectfully disagree.
    1) Vaccines efficacy is far lower than advertised. Look up efficacy rates on Pubmed.com. That’s the National Libary of Medicine site where you can read the abstracts of immunology journals where the authors discuss the annual failure to predict the proper flu strains for the influenza virus, as well as the dramatic increase in atopic disorders (asthma, eczema, rheumatoid arthritis, etc.). Another good source is Catherine Diodati’s book Immunization: History, Ethics, Law and Health. Unavailable at amazon.ca but worth finding or getting through your library. Very enlightening charts on decreases in infection rates pre- and post-vaccine introduction.
    2) Anyone familiar with the timelines for maturation of the infant nervous system and immune system? For simplicity’s sake, let’s just say it is a very bad thing to disrupt either of them (immune system until 2, nervous system – 6). An excellent may to do this is the introduction of substances which create a significant immune system reaction in a child with an immature immune system (the problem is compounded when the mother is not breastfeeding, thus providing a little passive immunity). Vaccines have several components which are specifically designed to elicit a more “robust” immune system response.
    3) As regards the comment “All the morons die of diseases they could have survived if they had been smart enough to get vaccinated, leaving more cake and ice cream for the rest of us.” I guess the human immune system didn’t work until vaccines came along, huh? Thank God for that vaccine for bubonic plague back in the Middle Ages. Vaccines were initially started to try and prophylatically expose the patient to a milder form of serious disease (e.g.: Jenner and cow/smallpox) to prevent the more serious form. That is not the case anymore. The immune system has developed over human history with immunities being developed and passed down over generations, slowly creating a stronger and more adaptable immune system. Look at the mess antibiotics have created with what used to be innocuous infectious agents.
    4) Two words immunoglobulin switching. Like running your gas engine on diesel, except in the immune system.
    5) Obtain the article by Barbara Starfield at this link. Email a request to a university library and actually read it.
    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10904513?dopt=Abstract.
    (Lance, the U of S health sciences library will print and mail it to you for $5) Combine it with the knowledge that perhaps 20% of the procedures and medications in medicine have good studies to support their efficacy, and an argument can be made that you really need to be informed. It should be enough to give anyone pause in totally trusting their doctor. It doesn’t mean they are wrong all the time, but there is certainly a need to do research on your own. Doctors used to be gods because of their training and limited access to information. Now, thanks to the internet and amazon a person can pretty much read anything they need to learn about almost anything. Hope this was enlightening.

  17. The first sentence of the article says that only half of the people with measles were children whose parents had refused vaccines. That the other half may well have had vaccines doesn’t say much for the efficacy of the vaccine. I made sure all my kids got their shots but one year I got a call from the public health nurse asking if I would get my kids done again because there was an outbreak of measles in our area. I declined and I’ve been a bit sceptical about the whole business since. Smallpox and polio were amazing successes, but now they want to vaccinate for everything and it doesn’t seem to work as well.

  18. “oh wait…I’m still alive, and so are all my school-mates, amazing, simply amazing!”
    Yes, quite spectacular, and quite lucky for you. However there were and are many “school mates” that go home sick with preventable diseases and then don’t come back. You just don’t remember them, because they didn’t return and as a kid you didn’t pay attention to it. Or they do come back, but now they’re different because the fever that came with the disease fried a little bit of their brain.
    Also for another subsection of the population with reduced immunity responses, hanging out with little johnny who didn’t get a vaccination is now a death sentance. “Oh, the cancer got him”, wrong it was the chicken pox that he couldn’t fight, that your kid gave to him.

  19. One thing to consider: Vaccines are not 100% effective and also not 100% safe. Some vaccines are there just to give you a boost so that when you get the REAL deal, your reaction is greatly reduced. The number of people who said, “I got such and such vaccine, but then I still got the disease, therefore the whole vaccine thing stinks” don’t get it. Also some of the vaccines contain live samples of the disease, hence the stories about “I got the vaccine and then immediately got the disease, therefore vaccines actually spread the disease”.
    The purpose of vaccination isn’t to make you immune to the disease, but to enable your body to fight it better when you ecounter it in the wild.
    Then there are the people who statisically will be adversly affected by the vaccine. It’s going to happen, there are a lot of people out there. Get a bunch of their stories together and suddenly vaccines are no longer benificial, but downright dangerous. Compound that with the inability of the average person to understand medical information and suddenly you’ve got a group of parents not vaccinating their kids and outbreaks start to occur.
    The issue of anti-biotics and the creation of superbugs is a perfect example of the inability of the average person to A) not follow important medical instructions and B) the consenquences to EVERYONE because of their foolishness.

  20. Chris,
    The driving force behind antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria was/is over-prescription for viral illnesses like colds and indiscriminate use in the food chain (beef, chicken, etc.).

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