[bad_user]

A vaccine is a virus in latent form, forcing your B-cells to produce antibodies for it. So yeah, personally I never take a vaccine that hasn't been in circulation for some time.

Also, considering that medicine is at the stage of alchemy and that doctors simply have no idea what long-term effects these vaccines have on our immune system, some questions do have to be asked.

Like, isn't it possible that with the prevalence of vaccines, our own capacity for generating antibodies gets affected?

And remember here that an exaggerated response of the immune system may be even worse than a lazier response. Such an exaggerated response may even kill you (e.g. Influenza). So either way, the long-term effects of over-reliance of vaccines may be quite bad.

[ars]

> A vaccine is a virus in latent form

Not exactly, it's not a virus in latent form, it's either a killed virus, a piece of a virus, or a different virus that is weak, but provokes the same reaction as the more important one.

(Do you know what latent means? It means that it shows up later, which vaccines do not do.)

> So yeah, personally I never take a vaccine that hasn't been in circulation for some time.

Yah, me too, but let's not overreact with nonsense.

> Like, isn't it possible that with the prevalence of vaccines, our own capacity for generating antibodies gets affected?

No, it's not possible. That's completely ridiculous. Do you know anything about vaccines at all? Seriously, that really makes no sense whatsoever. A vaccine does not do anything at all to our capacity to generate antibodies. All it does is take the exact same virus you would get if you got sick, and expose you to it in advance, that's all. It gives you a head start in making antibodies, but does not affect the generation of them in any way.

> And remember here that an exaggerated response of the immune system may be even worse than a lazier response. Such an exaggerated response may even kill you (e.g. Influenza).

And a vaccine creates a muted response, quite the opposite. Compared to a simple cold a vaccine consists of a minuscule number of virus particles. The entire trouble with making a vaccine is trying to get enough of a response, most of the time the body ignores it.

> So either way, the long-term effects of over-reliance of vaccines may be quite bad.

And how do you figure that? I'm not following your logic at all. Unless your logic is that the vaccine somehow changes the bodies response, which it doesn't. So hopefully now that I've cleared that up you will no longer claim this.

[bad_user]

On "latent" ... English is not my primary language and this was just a bad translation.

     Do you know anything about vaccines at all?

I guess not, but I can't help to not get worried about the rise of autoimmune disorders and I haven't heard yet a plausible explanation for the phenomenon.

     Unless your logic is that the vaccine somehow changes
     the bodies response, which it doesn't.

And how in the world would you know that?

[ars]

> but I can't help to not get worried about the rise of autoimmune disorders and I haven't heard yet a plausible explanation for the phenomenon.

The most plausible explanation is the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis see also http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/disease-prone/2012/02/15...

> And how in the world would you know that?

How could it? If a vaccine could cause such a change so could any illness. A vaccine is just a piece of virus put where your body can notice it. Everything after that is entirely from the body.

For example rabies: Lethal right? But the body can actually clear the rabies virus with no trouble - almost. The trouble is that by the time the body gets rids of the virus it's too late.

So what do you do? You give the body the rabies virus ahead of time, and you do it in a way that prevents the person from actually getting sick. Then next time the body encounters rabies it's ready.

All vaccines work exactly this way: You let the person encounter the illness ahead of time. You make no change whatsoever in the person - all you are doing is making them slightly sick, but in a way that doesn't kill them.

Whatever change the vaccine causes, the illness also does - except the illness also causes damage as the virus replicates.

[phren0logy]

>Also, considering that medicine is at the stage of alchemy and that doctors simply have no idea what long-term effects these vaccines have on our immune system, some questions do have to be asked.

What the hell are you talking about? There is probably no single more life-saving intervention in medicine than vaccines. It is true that a small number of people have a bad reaction to them, but more people have a bad reaction to tetanus.

Those who do not vaccinate are risking re-emergence of preventable epidemics: http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/whooping-cough...

[tomjen3]

If some people have bad, even fatal, reactions to vaccines shouldn't the physicians first duty (do no harm) mean that they should separate the people who would suffer sideffects from those who wouldn't?

[Confusion]

No, not if 1 in 10000 people suffers that reaction, while there are equally negative consequences for 2 or more of those 1000 people if they don't get the vaccine and there is no known way to detect who will have the bad reaction.

And the ratio is much worse for actual vaccinations. You don't want to see what not vaccinating kids against polio results in...

[tomjen3]

I have seen the pictures, and the interviews.

But those are hardly data and the kids who got the live version (due to a fuck up) are hardly better of.

[phren0logy]

In the US, we do a screening for risk factors for reactions, and review information needed to give informed consent.