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by jjjensen90 2679 days ago
Can you clarify your point? Are you implying that the alternative of pre-vaccine history (which is very clearly documented) is preferable to the miniscule and heavily studied risk of negative vaccine effects? Back when many children routinely died from diseases which cause huge suffering which don't even exist in statistically significant rates in the US now?

In medicine, we understand that there are risk calculations to every treatment and preventative decision. You weigh them against each other. When public health at large is the question, you certainly do have to consider the risks that come with public health policy.

For example, diabetics with retinopathy receive injections of medication that can help stop the condition from causing blindness. There is a 1/3000 chance that the injection can cause an infection which can lead to permanent blindness in the eye that was treated. You have to weigh the risks in this case personally when you're a diabetic with retinopathy, but imagine that the decision was instead that refusing the eye injection because of the tiny, well studied risk to yourself meant you were risking blinding someone else's child. It's not a perfect analogy but I hope it may help some understand that we aren't talking about a sacrifice in the way you seem to portray it in your questions.

Also, regarding your health issues, I am truly sorry. I also have some debilitating medical issues that have affected my daily life for almost 20 years, but when having discussions about policy or philosophy around medicine I try not to use them as an appeal to emotion because that can cloud your judgement and logic.

4 comments

The reason I'm resorting to appeals of emotion is because the opposing side will only listen to emotion. They are so convinced the science is settled that you can't get a single word in to present a logical argument.
Here is Coleen Boyle, Director of the National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities, testifying before congress that a double-blind placebo-controlled trial has never been done to evaluate the safety of any vaccine. This is the gold standard of clinical trials that every other drug on the market must complete before FDA approval.

https://youtu.be/uNWTOmEi_6A?t=145

You can't placebo-control because that would be highly unethical leading to sickness and death that would not have otherwise happened. You can't double blind as soon as you cant placebo control. You can't do crossover because the dead from your first trial cannot be un-dead, and those who lived now have a different baseline. This argument is exploiting the lack of specialized education in the general population to know what those terms mean.
Another issue is that physicians flat out deny that there are any risks associated with vaccines. And the one's that do admit this risk losing their license.

Yet it's widely known in the medical industry that all medical treatments carry risk, like you said.

Anyone trained in medical carries out appropriate screening to not vaccinate people with contraindications. This brings the rate of actual risk very close to zero.
The point I'm making is that it's not okay to force others to inject things they do not want in their bodies so that you don't have to make any effort for dealing with diseases. Forcibly injecting someone is violence, but it's so abstracted in our society that most do not see it that way.

I generally don't bother to argue logical points because no one will listen. But here are a couple of the big ones:

Measles is not a deadly disease for all but in the most rare of cases. Yet the claims of vaccine injuries are skyrocketing. It doesn't make sense to protect people from a non-deadly disease at the cost of giving millions lifelong debilitating illness.

There has not been one double-blind placebo controlled trial to evaluate the safety of any vaccine. All studies that have been done compare a newer vaccine to an older vaccine. Those are the kinds of studies people are referring to when they claim that there is no link between autism and vaccines. These studies only prove that the new vaccine is AS safe as the old vaccine.

The measles vaccine was introduced in 1963. Deaths from measles were already minuscule before the vaccine was even introduced.

Likewise, most diseases were well under control before the introduction of vaccines. This is due to advances in sanitation.

Of course, vaccines for polio are probably worth the risk/reward. But no one is actually talking about polio. We are talking about non-deadly diseases.

This is a decent summary with sources to these claims: http://www.jannyorganically.com/blog/2019/1/27/your-industry...

How would you suggest a placebo-controlled study (we can easily make it double blind once placebo controlled) for any disease be structured? Please tell me your study design, because an ethical study design that doesn't put lives at risk is the issue.