Catholic Teaching and Immunization Policy

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I worked with Division TEACCH at UNC-CH when I came back from Saudi Arabia back in 2003. I’m familiar with those folks you’re talking about. The founder of TEACCH, Dr. Eric Schopler, worked with Dr. Rimland eons ago.

 
blackforest said:
There’s nothing wrong with making money, provided it’s done ethically. Medicine is its own animal, however. I would like to see everything in medicine socialized; I don’t believe that human suffering should come with a profit motive attached to it. But that’s another day, another thread.
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You’re not going to get any argument from me about conspiracy theories or conflicts of interest. I’ve seen them–everywhere. However, I also realize there are some people who are honest and ethical–the medical director and operations director at my old company were examples. I wish I could say the same about myself, but it’s a slippery slope–you’re ordered to do something wrong, you realize it’s not going to hurt anyone, it’s just breaking a regulation, so you do it. Then you’re ordered to do something else wrong…and it escalates. Pretty soon you’re putting people’s lives in danger. I quit. But no one else did.

My old boss literally rubbed his hands together at the news of any outbreak in Africa or Asia–he got a % of the sales as part of his salary. Disease outbreak = money in his pocket. Any charitable organization or missionary who came to us to buy vaccines (and their were many) paid top dollar. Literally. No one paid more. And the profit margin? Get your head around this one: we sold vaccines to UNICEF and PAHO for thousandths of a cent per dose–and we made a profit. Retail price for a hospital, ministry of health, etc.? $12.95 for a 10-dose vial. So $1.29 a dose. I’ll let you figure out the profit on that.

And I’m sure you’ve heard of the shortages of various antibiotics, etc. There’s not much profit margin, so no one wants to make them. So they don’t. Why make something that will net you 0.1% profit when you can make something else that will make you 1,000% profit? If you’re a privately owned company, you make the 1,000% profit product every time.

Also, there were several vaccines that could have been improved in various ways–we all knew it. But the corporation refused to invest in the improvements.
 
A deacon I respect once told me that we can judge actions but not people. A lot of this stuff is obviously wrong, but I don’t know if I’d be thick-skinned and principled enough to face it at work every day. You must have been in a lot of prayer.

I appreciate your candor. When I express my concerns about profit, I get dismissed with, “Vaccines don’t make a lot of money.” But they’re actually a brilliant business model.

Think about it. You get them funded. You’re shielded from liability if there’s a product defect. Darn near everybody has to take the product, as opposed to the more targeted model of treatments and cures that are only for those with the affliction. In fact, the more poorly the product performs, the higher the “herd immunity threshold,” i.e. the more the people who getting guilt-mongered, scared, and coerced into using it at more and more doses.

I’m curious about something. Frequently I hear in the news about horrible vaccine reactions in under-privileged countries. Examples: 3 children die after vaccination in Nawabshah


https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017...-15-children-south-sudan-170602132556122.html

Why is this? Are inferior products shipped to these vaccination campaigns? Are less competent people deployed, explaining administration errors?

Are these events to be dismissed as “conspiracy theories?” Is every case of questioning someone’s intentions and actions a “conspiracy theory?” (Those last questions were rhetorical and not directed at you).

In any case, it seems hardly fair to don halos and proclaim, “Vaccines save lives!” when they’re clearly taking lives, as well.

I will never bring myself to oppose a medical or scientific innovation that saves lives. That’s why could never be a true anti-vaccinationist. I just see the other side of the coin and believe in doing everything possible to mitigate the corruption and conflicts of interest. Vaccines mandates accomplish precisely the opposite.
 
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blackforest said:
Why is this? Are inferior products shipped to these vaccination campaigns?
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We tested a new rabies vaccine in Pakistan. Why? Because they let us–we couldn’t do it in a Western country because we needed to do a controlled study: new vaccine vs. old vaccine. Clearly the people who got the old vaccine weren’t as safe (assuming the new vaccine was better). The reasoning was that if we didn’t do it, they wouldn’t have gotten any vaccine at all. Some logic to that.

Inferior products…well, I know that if we gave vaccines away, we gave away the oldest vaccines in stock (not out of date, but getting there).

One thing you have to bear in mind is that vaccines have to be administered correctly: some have to be kept at a certain temperature, and can only be at higher temperatures for a maximum period of time. We shipped a lot of products in dry ice, and the S&H costs were often as great as the cost of the vaccine itself. But we occasionally got complaints that the dry ice had all evaporated by the time the customer got the vaccine (Africa’s hot…). That wasn’t our fault–we calculated the amount of dry ice needed during shipping. But often there were customs delays or the purchaser wouldn’t pick it up on time. You can’t pack something in dry ice for an indefinite period of time–you’d end up sending a container full of dry ice for 10s of thousands of dollars.

Beyond that, you have to wonder if the vaccines were given properly–new needles each time, sterile conditions, etc. Clearly the S. Sudan story is about this problem. The Syrian story–clearly if it had been the vaccine itself, other babies in other parts of the world would have died too if they got the same vaccine. Something was different in Syria. Did they adulterate it–add some other substances to stretch it out? Who knows.

Another issue is that although vaccines are tested at several steps in production, they are biological agents. As I said, it’s not chemistry, where 100% of the time you get the same result. Things happen that you can’t control and might not even know about. We had a case where a trivalent vaccine (good against 3 different strains of disease) failed to protect against one of the strains. We had been selling this product for decades with no problem. When we heard about the problem, we tested it on our employees (including me!). The customer was right–one part of the vaccine wasn’t working. What do you think we did? 1) Recalled the vaccine already shipped and sent free replacements 2) Sent customers a warning about the ineffectiveness against one strain of the disease 3) Kept quiet and hoped the customers got lucky. If you guessed #3, you win.

It’s all about incentives, which is a management problem. If it’s a private company, what incentives would overcome the built-in need to maximize profits? (See SW Airlines and the exploding engine…it was “too expensive” to check them all, so…) Also creating numerical goals and standards leads management to measure what can be measured easily. But some things that can be measured easily (costs, profit, …) aren’t necessarily the right things to measure.
 
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There’s ample reason to be suspicious of both manufacturers and of policy makers based on recent history of bad behavior. Take for example the MMR fiasco in the early 1990’s with the mengingitis causing Urabe strain of Mumps virus. Here’s a damning article about Britain and how it ignored the safety of its children until too many died. The language the government used sounds very familiar.

 
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PetraG said:
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.
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Needless to say, vaccines and modern medicine has been a blessing to humanity; the problem is when blessings are corrupted and become an industry driven by money and ideology, then something good becomes very untrustworthy. Medicine and medical science has been used in the name of reproductive health and population growth, through abortion and eugenics. Most people seem to be clueless about the history of modern eugenics in this country, which sponsored and spread the movement worlwide through organizations like the Rockefeller Foundation and UNESCO, with plenty of evidence that the scienctific objectives never went away but we’re simply re-packaged and buried under the guise of disease and population-control. What do you expect them to do? Confess that it’s all true? Far too sophisticated for that.
 
Whitney said:
So even to attend a catholic preschool you must be up to date on vaccines without exception including the hepatitis B vaccine.

I do wonder what these (and all) schools think is happening in kindergarten? 💉
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This may surprise you, but on a worldwide basis most people with chronic Hepatitis B were infected at birth or during early childhood. Approximately 25%–50% of children infected between the ages of 1 and 5 years will develop chronic hepatitis; the risk goes down when the person is infected when they get older.

Children with hepatitis B usually don’t have symptoms, so they may easily pass the disease to others without anyone knowing they were infected in the first place. Non-sexual transmission of HBV in homes occurs primarily from child to child, and young kids are at highest risk of infection. Children who get the HepB vaccine also reduce the risk of getting the disease from moms or family members who may not know they are infected.

Anyway, that’s what they think could be happening in kindergarten, in a nutshell…
 
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Here’s an article about the new champion of vaccine safety in the U.S. Congress, Congressman Bill Posey and his attempts to get the CDC to state for the record whether any studies had ever been done comparing the rates of Autism in UNVACCINATED children to the rates of Autism in VACCINATED children. I’ve seen the video on this. They answered “No.” But only after extensive questioning.

 
Gab123 said:
Needless to say, vaccines and modern medicine has been a blessing to humanity; the problem is when blessings are corrupted and become an industry driven by money and ideology, then something good becomes very untrustworthy. Medicine and medical science has been used in the name of reproductive health and population growth, through abortion and eugenics. Most people seem to be clueless about the history of modern eugenics in this country, which sponsored and spread the movement worlwide through organizations like the Rockefeller Foundation and UNESCO, with plenty of evidence that the scienctific objectives never went away but we’re simply re-packaged and buried under the guise of disease and population-control. What do you expect them to do? Confess that it’s all true? Far too sophisticated for that.
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How did you work a fear of eugenics in to whether or not to get immunized? That’s like deciding whether or not to have anesthesia when they work on your teeth based on the prevalence of euthanasia. I do not see any connection.
It isn’t as if they have labeled vials for immunizations that go to the “desirables” or the “undesirables.”
I have news for you, too: It would be very difficult, if not impossible, to conceal a secret program for smuggling…well, what is it exactly that you think they are smuggling into the vaccines? How do you think they could do that and not have anyone find out and tell what they’re doing? Do you think the work of the pharmaceutical industry is carried out by unquestioning drones, or do you think scientists belong to a secret society that demands loyalty and…well, what do you think happens to the big mouths who find out about these programs? Besides…where would the profit be in what you’re suggesting? It would be extremely expensive. What is the pay-off? Who is paying them, for what aim, and where is the money coming from?
I guess I know enough scientists to know that they tend to be rather free with what they know. It takes cloistering them away in something like the Mannhattan Project to keep secrets. They can keep mum about secret recipes, but a worldwide conspiracy stretching over decades to smuggle secret ingredients into vaccines being given to the children of their relatives and their friends? I don’t think so.
Does your water come from a well, too? Ever heard of a company named TLC Beatrice International? Look that one up. If you believe in conspiracies and people secretly out to get you even though there would be no profit in it, the existence of that food giant will keep you up at night.
 
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If he’s giving CDC money to gather up records, more power to him. The problem, of course, is that a lot of unvaccinated children are “off the grid” of Western medicine generally. I would be more concerned that there would a lot of confounding variables that might actually make going without vaccinations look worse than it is…
 
PetraG said:
This may surprise you, but on a worldwide basis most people with chronic Hepatitis B were infected at birth or during early childhood.
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“A worldwide basis” is not a fair metric for developed nations. Here in the U.S., women with prenatal care are routinely screened for Hep B. It’s great that the vaccine is available to the newborns of mothers who test positive. But the vast majority of us who tested negative are pressured to keep our children “up-to-date” on this vaccine, including the newborn dose.

@Pup7 was correct in stating that childhood Hep B vaccination is done routinely with the goal of “eliminating” the virus completely. But it is not done to stop an immediate, widespread, casually communicable public health threat of a childhood disease.
 
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blackforest said:
“A worldwide basis” is not a fair metric for developed nations. Here in the U.S., women with prenatal care are routinely screened for Hep B. It’s great that the vaccine is available to the newborns of mothers who test positive. But the vast majority of us who tested negative are pressured to keep our children “up-to-date” on this vaccine, including the newborn dose.

@Pup7 was correct in stating that childhood Hep B vaccination is done routinely with the goal of “eliminating” the virus completely. But it is not done to stop an immediate, widespread, casually communicable public health threat of a childhood disease.
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It takes one person in one of the families to have contact with someone from a foreign country for a daycare or kindergarten to become a petri dish of HepB, and no one the wiser because children infected with HepB so often don’t show any symptoms.

When you combine the high rate of chronic infection among young children who contract the disease and the high likelihood that a child with HepB will not be identified because he or she will not develop any symptoms, I think it becomes very obvious why a daycare, preschool or school would want to require universal vaccination. They don’t want to be that one place that was responsible for a lot of failing livers because they required that people bringing children into their care took reasonable measures to keep all of the children safe.

Those who don’t want to do that have a simple option: they can set up their own vaccination-free daycare and schools. The freedom exists to do that, if they want to do it.
 
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Erikaspirit16 said:
We tested a new rabies vaccine in Pakistan. Why? Because they let us–we couldn’t do it in a Western country because we needed to do a controlled study: new vaccine vs. old vaccine. Clearly the people who got the old vaccine weren’t as safe (assuming the new vaccine was better). The reasoning was that if we didn’t do it, they wouldn’t have gotten any vaccine at all. Some logic to that.
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Were the trial participants given informed consent and appropriately compensate? Far too many medical studies are moved to under-privileged populations, far from those “pesky” hindrances like IRBs and human rights concerns.
Erikaspirit16 said:
Another issue is that although vaccines are tested at several steps in production, they are biological agents. As I said, it’s not chemistry, where 100% of the time you get the same result. Things happen that you can’t control and might not even know about. We had a case where a trivalent vaccine (good against 3 different strains of disease) failed to protect against one of the strains. We had been selling this product for decades with no problem. When we heard about the problem, we tested it on our employees (including me!). The customer was right–one part of the vaccine wasn’t working. What do you think we did? 1) Recalled the vaccine already shipped and sent free replacements 2) Sent customers a warning about the ineffectiveness against one strain of the disease 3) Kept quiet and hoped the customers got lucky. If you guessed #3, you win.
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All of these are fair considerations. The more mitigated they are, the better, because locals will stop trusting the vaccination missions. Did this happen in Taliban territory when CIA agents posed as health care professionals administering vaccines?
Erikaspirit16 said:
It’s all about incentives, which is a management problem. If it’s a private company, what incentives would overcome the built-in need to maximize profits? (See SW Airlines and the exploding engine…it was “too expensive” to check them all, so…) Also creating numerical goals and standards leads management to measure what can be measured easily. But some things that can be measured easily (costs, profit, …) aren’t necessarily the right things to measure.
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I agree. I think instead of demonizing “anti-vaxxers,” (not you personally- but the media and public), more energy should be spent reforming the corrupt parties that create them.
 
blackforest said:
I agree. I think instead of demonizing “anti-vaxxers,” (not you personally- but the media and public), more energy should be spent reforming the corrupt parties that create them.
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That horse is out of the barn, though, isn’t it? What would it take to convince that they can trust immunization programs? Vaccines produced by either the government or a for-profit corporation?

Truly–what would it take to satisfy your condition?
 
PetraG said:
It takes one person in one of the families to have contact with someone from a foreign country for a daycare or kindergarten to become a petri dish of HepB, and no one the wiser because children infected with HepB so often don’t show any symptoms.
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This sounds like fear-mongering, i.e. trying to frighten people into vaccine compliance based on something with little to no quantifiable chance of happening. You are aware that Hep B is not casually communicable, right? And you are aware that Hep B+ children are allowed into schools while unvaccinated Hep B - kids aren’t?
PetraG said:
Those who don’t want to do that have a simple option: they can set up their own vaccination-free daycare and schools. The freedom exists to do that, if they want to do it.
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This is inaccurate and incorrect. Schools and daycares that are accredited or seeking accreditation are required to comply with state laws on immunizations.
PetraG said:
When you combine the high rate of chronic infection among young children who contract the disease and the high likelihood that a child with HepB will not be identified because he or she will not develop any symptoms, I think it becomes very obvious why a daycare, preschool or school would want to require universal vaccination. They don’t want to be that one place that was responsible for a lot of failing livers because they required that people bringing children into their care took reasonable measures to keep all of the children safe.
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Ah! The “childhood safety” argument! It can be used to defend even the most preposterous absurdities. The world is full of risks and trade-offs. It is impossible to build our lives around every single one of them, and I haven’t seen a solid case presented to build our lives around the risk of childhood Hep B transmission in a classroom setting.

Here’s a wonderful piece on how irrational we are with, “But . . .but, it’s for the CHILDREN!” How to Overcome Fear Based Parenting | Let Grow
 
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Those studies HAVE been done. I posted numerous links to them in an above post.

And one is straight from the CDC.

Congressmen aren’t always the most savvy people in the world. Who was the genius who said women being raped can will themselves to not become pregnant? :roll_eyes:
 
blackforest said:
The “childhood safety” argument! It can be used to defend even the most preposterous absurdities.
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So what’s your other recommendation for backing vaccines?

As I said, go look up what pertussis looks like in a young baby. And it’s not as rare as you’d think.
 
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