THERE IS NO VACCINE AGAINST STUPIDITY

JERRY WOLKOFF BLOG- IN LOVING MEMORY OF MY SON STEVEN NATHANIEL WOLKOFF, MY FATHER SAMUEL WOLKOFF, AND ALL THE OTHER VICTIMS OF INJUSTICE, EVIL IN THIS WORLD. They diminish your rights, then they diminish your existence, then they lie about it and say that you never existed and the problem is that people forget the suffering that lasts forever, never know the truth by whose hands, or how you were killed.

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 2015

THERE IS NO VACCINE AGAINST STUPIDITY

 

Have you noticed all the recent news about the measles vaccine and those who feel it should never be used on anyone because it's too dangerous?

The anti-vaccination movement is against using many different types of vaccinations and it is spreading across the US on the back of ideas about ‘all-natural’ lifestyles.

They’re right about one thing, there is nothing natural  about dying from measles.

I tend to believe in a "natural" life style buying organic fruits vegetables, whole wheat everything, trying to avoid "unhealthy" foods, always reading the ingredients labels of most things I buy to eat.

Although I can’t quantify, exactly, how much of the "natural/organic/healthy"designation benefits my health and how much is just marketing, I do it because I feel like it’s a more healthy way to live and, for some reason, that feels right.

Honestly, I don’t believe that armpit deodorant aluminium or a non organic banana is going to be the end of me.

Most importantly, unlike the potential repercussions of the current anti-vaccination movement, none of my opinions has ever caused a person with to pointlessly die of an entirely preventable disease.

Measles claims the distinction of being the world's most contagious disease. One infected person in a crowded room can spread the disease to nearly every other person present who hasn't been vaccinated.

Primarily a childhood viral illness spread through airborne droplets from nasal secretions, measles ranks among the top four childhood killers worldwide, especially among young, malnourished children with undeveloped or compromised immune systems.

In 2000, the United States declared that measles was eliminated from this country. However in 2008, 2011, 2013 and 2014, there were more reported measles cases compared with previous years.

According to the CDC- Measles can be dangerous , especially for babies and young children. From 2001-2013, 28% of children younger than 5 years old who had measles had to be treated in the hospital. For some children, measles can lead to:

• As many as one out of every 20 children with measles gets pneumonia, the most common cause of death from measles in young children.
• About one child out of every 1,000 who get measles will develop encephalitis (swelling of the brain) that can lead to convulsions and can leave the child deaf or mentally retarded.
• For every 1,000 children who get measles, one or two will die from it.
• Measles may cause pregnant women to give birth prematurely, or have a low-birth-weight babies.

Medical experts attribute this to:

• More measles cases than usual in some countries to which Americans often travel (such as England, France, Germany, India, the Philippines and Vietnam), and therefore more measles cases coming into the US, and
• more spreading of measles in U.S. communities with  unvaccinated people who believe that such vaccines are too dangerous to inject into human beings. 

The measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine is given in a series of shots. The first shot is usually given to a child who is 12 to 15 month old. The booster shots are then given between 4 and 6 years of age. At least 28 days (4 weeks) should pass between the first and second doses of this vaccine.

Adults born after 1956 should receive at least one MMR vaccination if they have never had the diseases or received an MMR vaccine during their lifetime

Babies under 12 months of age are not recommended to have a measles vaccination. This is because they usually have some antibodies to measles already in their system, passed on from their mother at the time of birth, which may give them some protection for the first few months. But this residual immunity also interferes with their response to the MMR vaccine, thereby making the vaccine not very effective for them.

Recent outbreaks of measles at day care centers show how vulnerable these innocent babies are to becoming infected by other people who have never been vaccinated.

There are also children who can't be vaccinated such as those who have cancer or are immunocompromised. Children who are truly allergic to a vaccine or part of a vaccine (i.e., anaphylaxis to egg). These children remain at risk.They cannot be protected, except by vaccinating people around them.

The measles outbreak that started at Disneyland in December is not slowing down. The total is up to at least 155 cases in 16 states. The latest state to join that list is New Jersey.

California had at least 35 of those cases, most of which were contracted in Disneyland in December, according to the Associated Press. 

In Arizona alone, health officials warned that 1,000 people could have been exposed.

Tom Frieden, CDC director, further admonished on Sunday that the country could see a "large outbreak" of measles. 

An analysis released by the Trust for America’s health on Wednesday noted thatfewer than 90 percent of babies between 19 to 35 months old have received the vaccination against measles, mumps and rubella.

Dr. James Cherry, a specialist in pediatric infectious diseases at the University of California, Los Angeles, told The New York Times that the recent outbreak was“100 percent connected” to parents declining to immunize their kids.
"It wouldn’t have happened otherwise, it wouldn’t have gone anywhere.There are some pretty dumb people out there."

Anti-vaxxers avoid immunizations for a number of reasons.
Some still believe there is a link between vaccines and autism, even though a now-discredited 1998 Lancet report by Andrew Wakefield , which suggested a link between vaccines and autism was later retracted.

Others have religious objections, while some simply want to avoid injecting "toxins" into their kids’ bodies, according to the Times.

As a nation we’re easily susceptible not to disease but to the fear of disease, and the media that both drives the hype and cynically criticizes it.

John Swartzburg, an emeritus professor at the Berkeley School of Public Health, calls the growing California outbreak a huge “red flag” for the country and noted that every measles patient has the potential to infect 12 to 18 unvaccinated people.

Now before anyone dismisses this as just being a problem for those who chose not to vaccinate their children or themselves, as Swartzburg says, measles can be devastating to those too young to be vaccinated (like, for example, the infants brought to Disneyland every single day). 

This is what’s leading people like Swartzburg to stop playing nice and it’s what’s led the media to finally listen and get on board. “A small but very vocal minority is perpetuating this myth of the danger from vaccines, and we have to stop accommodating them,” he says. 

Personally, I believe that it is good to be sceptical of massive,  government agencies and the way that they exploit people’s innate fears in order to funnel profits to pharmaceutical giants (and the diet industry, Wall Street, defense contractors, banks, and oil companies, etc.).

However, I have never been suspicious of the government’s involvement in educating citizens that they can easily prevent letting an infant baby go blind,develop seizures and mental degeneration, and die of measles-induced panencephalitis.

If anyone needed more evidence that opposing vaccination is an antiquated, bad idea, look no further than the fact that several ass hole politicians in the Republican Party have decided to further toxify the entire issue by politicizing all of this, for their own political gain.

These same politicians as ultimate talent scouts for other antiquated, bad ideas have recently come down on the anti-vaxxer side.

Recently, Kentucky GOP Senator Rand Paul said, vaguely, that he’d heard of “many tragic cases” of kids developing “profound mental disorders” after being vaccinated.

New Jersey GOP Governor Chris Christie argued that “parents need to have some measure of choice” because “not every vaccine is created equal”.

Neither politician offered any specifics about which “tragic cases” and which disproportionately dangerous vaccines they were referring to, but if citations mattered, we wouldn’t be having this conversation in the first place. (Great to hear you 2 conservatives are all about bodily autonomy now, though. I assume you’re going to apply that to women’s bodies, too? … Hello, Hello?)

I've noticed these 2 slime balls are also the same idiots who talked tough about Ebola, and yet are now talking soft on measles.

When Americans thought Ebola was going to burn its way across the contiguous 48 States leaving bled-out bodies in its wake, it was all anybody could talk about, especially the press. Any health professional could’ve told you that the chances of actually becoming infected with Ebola were on par with being struck by lightning while getting attacked by a shark on your way to pick up your lottery winnings, but that hardly mattered. 

Here's Senator Rand Paul from last October during the Ebola scare: "We've underplayed the risk of this. I hope we're going to only have very isolated incidents of this in the United States. But I also don't think it's that unreasonable to suspend commercial flights."He was ready to suspend commercial flights to West Africa to prevent the spread of Ebola.

Chris Christie, was then insisting that nurse Kaci Hickox be quarantined, even though she had no symptoms."The fact is, I'm not going to step away for a minute from protecting the people of my state and our region. But you can't take chances on this stuff."

Can't take chances with Ebola. Amen. Why? Because there's no effective vaccine.

But there is one for measles! Yet Governor Christie, while he says he vaccinates his own children, otherwise sounds indifferent. As for Senator Paul, he's saying the shot could be worse than the disease.

Well, it's true as many as ten people a year die after getting a measles shot although no research has established a direct link.

Does it make any sense that a politician who talks tough about Ebola would talk soft on measles, which is nine times as contagious?

When I was growing up in the 1950's there were more than half a million measles cases a year, and each year about a third of those patients got lung infections, and 450 died.

Do you really miss the old days, when there were no vaccines to worry about, life was simple, and, in too many cases, unnecessarily short . According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the average life expectancy at the beginning of the 20th century was 47.3 years.

A century later, that number had increased to 77.85 years, due largely to the development of vaccinations and other treatments for deadly diseases. Of course, vaccines only work if they're given.

Americans overwhelmingly support vaccination eight in 10 Americans believe that vaccines are safe for children, according to a new poll by the Pew Research Center.

The poll just released indicates that 83 percent of Americans  answered that vaccination for diseases such as measles, mumps and rebella are safe for healthy children. Nine percent thought vaccines were unsafe for children, while 7 percent did not know.

A clear majority of Americans agree on vaccination safety across the board, regardless of age or political preferences, as 89 percent of Republicans and 87 percent of Democrats trust the use of vaccines on children.

A new statistic is circulating in the anti-vaccination corner of the Internet. Two numbers, side by side: zero, the number of deaths caused by measles in the past decade, and 108, the number of deaths caused by measles vaccines in the past decade. To them, this means that Vaccines kill, measles doesn’t.

The first number, which comes from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), is correct. Due to advances in modern medicine, the mortality rate for measles in the United States is exceptionally low, on average, around 0.3 percent from 1987 to 2000, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). 

Not so for other countries, especially in the developing world: In 2000, measles was responsible for 22 percent of deaths of children under 5 in Ethiopia. So although measles remains a lethal disease elsewhere in the world, it is true that it hasn’t killed any Americans in the past decade.

But then there’s the second number: more than a hundred deaths as a direct result of having received a measles vaccine since 2004. This is the one that should strike you as off. And that’s because that figure comes not from the CDC but from the National Vaccine Information Center, a 501(c)3 nonprofit founded in 1982 for parents whose children suffered brain injury or death, they said as a result of having received vaccines.

The CDC also maintains a database of adverse events, which it shares with the Food and Drug Administration. It is legally mandated to do so. According to that database, there have been 69 deaths following receipt of measles vaccines since 2004. But neither of these numbers,108 or 69, tells the true story. 

This is because the protocol for reporting adverse reactions to vaccines, called the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, does not draw causal relationships between vaccines and adverse effects but merely correlations.

Either 108 or 69 people (depending on whom you ask) died sometime after having been vaccinated against measles since 2004, but not necessarily because they were vaccinated against measles. In some cases, their deaths were totally unrelated, or the patient had some undiagnosed congenital illness that meant he or she should never have been vaccinated in the first place. 

There’s one more way in which the anti-vaxxers misconstrue this statistic. While it’s true some people may have died as a result of the measles vaccine, many more would have died without them. 

According to the WHO, the measles vaccine prevented about 15.6 million deaths from 2000 to 2013. Childhood measles remains a leading cause of blindness in developing countries. In places like Haiti, Bangladesh and sub-Saharan Africa, the measles vaccine led to an overall mortality reduction of between 30 and 86 percent from 1970 onward, according to a paper published in The Journal of Infectious Diseases by Drs. Robert Perry and Neal Halsey.

Those promoting this 108 number appear to be uninterested in widely accepted facts, and most don’t seem to understand the difference between correlation and causation. Or they just don’t care.

Ironically, Santa Monica, California was named specifically in a recent Hollywood Reporter investigation into wealthy Southern California cities that have shockingly low vaccination rates. The report declared that some wealthy areas have vaccination rates lower than those in Sudan.

In other words, affluent Southern Californians, who have access to the best health care in the world, are allowing themselves to be as susceptible to disease as those living in the Third World.

In Sudan, it’s poverty that can kill you. Here, it’s just plain stupidity.