On Mon, 4 Feb 2019 at 01:50, Heather Madrone <[email protected]> wrote:
> It's also the reason to question science and its findings, warts and > all. It's the scientific method all the way down. Checking past work and > assumptions is part of it. > > "Measure three times and cut once" is from carpentry, not science, but > it's a valid practice when making any irreversible change. New evidence > comes in all the time. It's worth taking a breath to ask whether we are > on course. > > This gets muddier when you have interested actors (and we always do) on > both sides of the scientific equation. There are always people who try > to force-map available data to get the conclusions they want, and it can > be very difficult to tell when they're doing so. > > Pharmaceutical companies have a long history of massaging, suppressing, > and manufacturing results so they can bring drugs profitably to market. > > I did my vaccine research after my daughter had a life-threatening > reaction to the whole-cell pertussis vaccine. > > I discovered that vaccines are not a monolithic issue. The tetanus > vaccine, for example, is a safe and effective preventative of a horrible > disease that lies in wait in the soil everywhere around us. It's usually > quite long-lasting as well. WWII soldiers who were vaccinated against > tetanus exhibited immunity over 50 years later. > > The crowd disease vaccines, on the other hand, share the distinction of > being much less effective at conferring immunity, shorter-lived, and > with more side effects. Many of the crowd diseases are largely benign in > healthy children and confer lifelong immunity. The diseases are bad news > for pregnant women and people with immune disorders, but it's not clear > that vaccinating healthy children against these diseases is our best > public health option. > > Some public health officials agree that it might be better policy to > vaccinate against many diseases at puberty and again in early adulthood, > but they can't enforce vaccination of teens and adults. Young children > are a captive audience, though, so they are repeatedly vaccinated > against the crowd diseases, which don't pose a particular threat to > their health, and also against hepatitis B and HPV, which they are > extremely unlikely to contract. Meanwhile the adults who should be > vaccinated against those diseases mostly aren't. > > We don't yet have longterm data on the effects of our current aggressive > vaccine policy. How do repeated doses of a wide variety of vaccines > affect the health of individuals over 50, 75, 100 years? How long do the > vaccines confer immunity? What percentage of the population remains > susceptible to the disease after aggressive vaccination as opposed to > after natural immunity to the endemic disease? > > About 15 years ago, we discovered a bat colony inside our chimney as > well as a bat bite on my shoulder. The rabies vaccine is not > particularly safe. It requires 6 doses that cause flu-like symptoms over > the course of a month. Rabies was then invariably fatal. The whole > family received all six doses of the rabies vaccine, and we were > grateful for it, flu-like symptoms and all. > > When I was a child, doctors ordered up x-rays for every minor mishap and > handed out antibiotics like candy. "Better safe than sorry," they'd say, > completely unaware of the effects of overindulgence in those particular > kinds of medical technology. > > So let's see, what is the experiment and what is the control? In > adopting a new medical technology, should we err on the side of over- or > under-prescribing it? How much data do we need before we decide that a > technology is safe and effective? How long do we need to follow patients > to determine whether there are deleterious side effects? > > These aren't easy questions to answer. > > It's not unscientific to want new medical technologies to prove > themselves before submitting one's self and one's children as > experimental animals. We do our research and make the best choices we > can, knowing that Mother Nature always bats last. > > --hmm It is not unscientific, but then we are faced with the question of whether we have time. While an individual might hold oneself responsible for making choices for their children, I'm not sure there are serious enough repercussions if they cause the death of somebody who is immune compromised because of their decision. So are the individual parent(s) the best place to make the decision on whether to vaccinate or not? We could legislate so that vaccination is mandatory like Australia, but legislation numbs the debate paving the way for somebody to make that their campaign platform against government overreach. They might win, and over time get the legislation revoked and then round and round we go. I agree there aren't easy answers, but unless everybody is as concerned about the rest of humanity as they are about their own children - all kids should be vaccinated. We can debate individual vaccines and should protest if the science is wonky, but that is not an excuse to distrust vaccines as a whole or extend that doubt to science as a whole. That grounding is what I'm advocating with my post. Beyond that, it is scientific method and healthy skepticism all the way down as you've said. Kiran
