Catholic Teaching and Immunization Policy

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The problem is is that “unbiased” sources are routinely seen as biased no matter how much evidence is presented.

Research is the only unbiased source. Careful consideration isn’t anti-vax propaganda, and not one person here has said it’s not.

As I said, Norway is your best source for proving that vaccines do not cause autism. It’s unbiased, straight numbers. They have mandated vaccines. Their rates of autism are identical to ours. If it were vaccines, they would be higher.

An immunologist will tell you that some people seroconvert (show antibody numbers) at high rates. It’s not because of autism. It’s not because of the vaccine. It’s because of human physiology.

Children are routinely given those shots around the world in the same way. Not every child who does becomes autistic. I am very very sorry it happened to your son, but it wasn’t the vaccines. Autism rates are unaffected by vaccinating or not vaccinating.

Those studies HAVE been done. Here’s one: https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/48/4/456/284219

Here’s another: New Meta-analysis Confirms: No Association Between Autism and Vaccines | Autism Speaks

Here’s another, where the CDC says there is no difference in antibodies in kids with ASD and without ASD: Autism and Vaccines | Vaccine Safety | CDC

There are more. There are many. I daresay there are hundreds, likely.

The problem isn’t questioning vaccines. The problem is automatic dismissal by a very vocal minority that is putting public health at risk. What was posted here video-wise is indeed propaganda and bunk science.
 
pnewton said:
…my own mental trash heap of kookiness
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This is the phase I use. If this is vitriol, then I am pleased that standards are so high. Was the phrase “my own” confusing or was it missed? I do have a lot of topics, scientific; political, left and right; theological; and conspiratorial that I consider rather extreme enough to write off once and for all. When someone comes here and pushes, and pushes, and pushes, and pushes, something as science that is so outside real science, and that belief endangers children, I will at least explain why I do not give that view the time of day any more. What else am I to do to the charge that I should not post because I do not watch the latest video posted here?

I think the OP had a valid point as to the law, though I totally disagree with the conclusion. I have no problem with laws that reflect basic morality, including our responsibility to society at large, even for our children. I also believe in seat belt law, imagine that. I am pretty much in the majority on most of these points.

The one thing I am on the fringe is this. While a parent may have the first obligation to the protection of their children, that natural impulse cannot extend past the point where others are in danger. I have tried to teach my son, successfully I hope, that while he means more to me than all the world, I want him to have the love of others so that he values the lives of others more than his own, you know, the Jesus thing. It is not easy when it comes to real matters, but I believe to do otherwise would border on idolatry, placing family above God.
 
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I grew up a mini-SJW, defending kids from the playground bullies. I’m wired that way. But then, you must have a little of that in you, too, the way you stepped in to defend pnewton from correction. 😉
 
BTW, I’m not arguing that vaccines cause autism, just that it’s not as cut and dry that research = non-bias.
 
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Pup7 said:
Which ones? Ones on thimerosal? Something that was never in the oft demonized MMR that was blamed for autism (and later debunked?)

Do you really think the industry went back and recalled every single ingredients listing from every previous year’s MMR from every vial distributed and reprinted them to eliminate the offending ingredient?
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Again, it all comes down to trusts. It’s one thing if it was just rumor on the Internet. The people who have raised vaccine safety concerns are doctors, scientists, researchers, and pediatricians in the trenches. And yes, ingredients in pharmaceutical products are coming from places like India and China.

It’s one thing to go to the doctor when a healthy body becomes ill, it’s another thing to just fill the body with all kinds of pharmaceutical products in the name of preventive medicine just because the CDC and Pharmaceutical suggest we do it. Robert Kennedy report details the corruption and fraud at the CDC on the part of employees and consultants that has resulted in untrustworthy science behind vaccine safety.

For example, the evidence of criminal activity by the coordinator of multiple CDC studies which was used to dismiss thousands of petitions by families who claimed that their children resulted in brain injuries from vaccines. These claims would have resulted in payouts totaling in the billions.

The problem is when multinational companies are caught falsifying, editing or interpreting data in ways that obfuscate findings, they have a dream team of hired personnel to spin the facts and explain them away because there are stockholders to think about.

So yes, anyone who raises concerns is labeled a quack, snake oil salesman, conspiracy theorist and ignoramus. We see this method used in court cases, where the integrity of people become the target for elimination through slander, and the facts are credibility of the evidence…
 
Gab123 said:
It’s one thing to go to the doctor when a healthy body becomes ill, it’s another thing to just fill the body with all kinds of pharmaceutical products in the name of preventive medicine just because the CDC and Pharmaceutical suggest we do it…

The problem is when multinational companies are caught falsifying, editing or interpreting data in ways that obfuscate findings, they have a dream team of hired personnel to spin the facts and explain them away because there are stockholders to think about.

So yes, anyone who raises concerns is labeled a quack, snake oil salesman, conspiracy theorist and ignoramus. We see this method used in court cases, where the integrity of people become the target for elimination through slander, and the facts are credibility of the evidence…
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Someone with a typical science background can understand why and how immunization works. It is possible to accept that the immunological effect is accomplished with an extremely small dose, rather than, say, the substantial ongoing intake such as a patient on Ritalin would be looking at.

Someone who knows history knows how many children would be dead or disabled, if not for immunization against the diseases being targeted. If we could go back 50 or 100 years, we’d know how many people were praying for the kind of protection that came about because of the talent and sense of purpose Providence gave to the likes of Pasteur and Salk.

The problem with taking opting-out as the default decision is that immunological protection takes group cooperation. Vaccines do not protect everyone, because not every body mounts an effective immune response when exposed to a vaccine. If the group develops an effective response, however, the spread of these diseases is greatly reduced, such that those who cannot mount an effective immune response on their own can also gain a measure of protection because those around them are so much less likely to be carriers.

I wish the same standards being applied to those who claim safety were applied to those who claim damage. For some reason, one family can make a connection on belief, and their story is believed when epidemilology does not support the causal connection they are making. They don’t have a reason for the connection based on known physiology. They have a correlation in time, that is all, and yet their jump from correlation to causation becomes fact.

We can look around us and know how many fewer people are being stricken by polio, by measles, by diphtheria.

Knowing that childhood vaccinations protect not just your children but also persons who cannot protect themselves from serious diseases, what are reasons not to accept vaccination? I would say (a) the knowledge that some certain vaccine was prepared by immoral means, means that cannot be justified by any amount of benefit (b) the knowledge that a certain vaccine is novel in some respect that could have unknown consequences and the risk of the disease being prevented not deemed serious enough to warrant the unknown consequences and (c ) evidence that a particular patient is unusually sensitive to the side-effects of vaccination.
 
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blackforest said:
BTW, I’m not arguing that vaccines cause autism, just that it’s not as cut and dry that research = non-bias.
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What is the mechanism by which you believe this could be happening?

If you say that it is raining because you just washed your car, why would it be the default to have to disprove that by doing a study that connects precipitation patterns to the incidence of car wash? Even if I did, you could say, “well, my car has a special effect on the environment.”

Now, of course that is an extreme analogy, but my point is that the standard for disproving a causal link has become unrealistically high in light of the positive causal link between immunization and the prevention of deaths and serious disability.

If some pharmaceutical does some certain kind of damage, there needs to be a mechanism by which that happens and there needs to be a reason it happens some vanishingly small proportion of the time. Unlike the effects of thalidamide, we aren’t seeing an unusual malady suffered in unusual proportions and only by people who were given a particular vaccine.

The number of environmental or genetic factors that could cause autism are many, but the epidemilogy does not support the idea that vaccinations are even a precipitating risk factor, let alone a direct cause. Yes, we want to error on the side of safety, but in this case both courses of action are meant to prevent harm. The difference is that one prevents a known harm that puts a large population at risk for both death and disability on an easily measurable scale due to an established mechanism of harm whereas the other sets out to prevent a serious harm but without a causal link that has an epidemilogical or physiological basis.

Of course, if we were to allow our medical records to be pooled as they are in other countries, the work of doing the epidemiology would be a lot easier. Oh, well. Such is the price of freedom. You can’t have everything.
 
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blackforest said:
I’m not arguing that vaccines cause autism. I never argued that.
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Sorry. My point was not that you were arguing that vaccines cause autism. My point was that you were only attributing the possibility of bias to research. You did not attribute the possibility of bias to having heard lots of anecdotal “evidence” that was supported by a correlation that is suggested in spite of the absence of either epidemiological evidence or a proposed physiological mechanism.

In other words, some people (not you) refuse to accept that epidemilogy isn’t tainted by bias, but they (not you) give a great deal of weight to “our child had a vaccination, we noticed shortly thereafter that our child doesn’t act like other children, and we think his atypical neurological development was caused by the vaccination.” Then the stories go around and the impression is given that this is common when analysis of a high number of cases can show that it is not–that is, they can show that this bad outcome is not more prevalent in children who got the vaccine when they are compared to children who didn’t! The anecdotal story is given weight it does not deserve in spite of the obvious problem that it is one piece of data that only shows a correlation. Why? Because the story arouses fear of a bad outcome in a time while fear of the outcome of getting a disabling or deadly disease has grown weak because of the early success of the immunization program!

If it is bad science to be too quick to accept research as unbaised, it is even worse science to accept anecdotal evidence as unbiased when it claims to have found a causal link that is not supported by epidemilogical evidence. Nothing is going to make someone biased like watching their child suffer and having a belief that they “know” what caused it. Fear is not evidence, though. Anger is not evidence. Suspicion is not evidence.

Don’t even get me started on how slow people are to accept that Dr. Wakefield falsified his data in order to get a payoff from a legal firm that wanted to sue the pharmaceutical companies. He did untold damage.
 
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You are mixing up correlation and causation. If you happen to stub your toe everytime Born in the USA comes on the radio, surely you wouldn’t think Bruce Springsteen causes your toe stubbing.

Vaccines are typically administered around the time that symptoms of autism can start being recognized. Often times certain conditions on the spectrum take awhile after that to be recognized.

Vaccines should be mandatory. Because I work with immunocompromised students every day. Students who for one reason or another /cannot/ be vacccinated. They depend on herd immunity to keep themselves safe from things that we immunized people take for granted.

Those kids lives aren’t worth soothing the concerns of parents who can’t be bothered to properly educate themselves on the subject.

Notice people typically don’t complain about vaccines for tetnus, or flu, or rabies, or the battery of shots people get to join the military or go abroad. At least, not complained about for autism.
 
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Watch the Frontline documentary I discussed. That is where I learned that.
 
Gab123 said:
So yes, anyone who raises concerns is labeled a quack, snake oil salesman, conspiracy theorist and ignoramus. We see this method used in court cases, where the integrity of people become the target for elimination through slander, and the facts are credibility of the evidence…
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No, no, all the shades of no.

That is not how people get branded snake oil salesman. You continue to read what you want to read and hear what you want to hear. People get branded as that when they harp on bunk science and categorical untruths or continue to repeat the same things over and over that have been disproven time and time and time again.

When they spread less than facts they earn the title.
 
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Then I misspoke - and it was Denmark. My error. I had Norway in my head.

My apologies. Go on and rip me up for it (I’m smiling and shrugging - that’s not mean in the least).
 
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blackforest said:
in to defend pnewton from correction. 😉
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From my point of view, I had to correct your correction. I am okay with what I posted morally, by the way. You said I need to give people the benefit of the doubt, when if you had read my post, you would have seen that I say I do give a position the benefit of the doubt, and it was sorting through positions, information, and misinformation that I was referring to, not people. I have never doubted the love that people have for their children. Ever. No shock there.
 
Me either - I have no issues when people make a rational decision through research and careful consideration.

But to dismiss on the general belief that vaccines are terrible isn’t that.
 
blackforest said:
But then, you must have a little of that in you, too, the way you stepped in to defend pnewton from correction. 😉
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I can’t say I’ve ever been called an SJW.

I didn’t defend pnewton “from correction” so much as back him up. One can say “kookiness” without it being directed at someone else. He didn’t call you a kook. Her own piles of thought, though, he can label what he wants - as can all of us.

Edited. 🙂
 
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Gab123 said:
So yes, anyone who raises concerns is labeled a quack, snake oil salesman, conspiracy theorist and ignoramus.
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That is not true. Raising concerns is never a problem. I only take issue when concerns are presented as science, not the speculation that it is. The CDC did take the concern over the autism link seriously enough to discontinue the use of thimerasol, as a precautionary measure, even though the evidence was shaky. There were other alternatives, so they were used. I also take issue when the complaints turn to some area I know to be unscientific, like the introduction of “chemicals” into the body, criticism of preventative medicine, or the whole idea of homeopathic medicine by dilution.
 
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