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RE: Do These US Gov (CDC) Figures Show The Risk of Harm From Measles Vaccines Exceed The Risk of Measles Itself?
I don't know if the numbers are right but I think the fundamental problem is that if everyone stopped getting the measles vaccination, EVERYONE (or close to it) would get the measles sooner or later. That would mean 1 in 1,000 dying of measles as opposed to 1 in 1 million dying (or severe reaction) to vaccine. If I follow your numbers...
If you look at the incidence of measles over the last 150 years, you will see that it was nosediving close to zero before the measles vaccine was introduced (having been pretty high earlier, before sanitation was improved). The measles vaccine's introduction does not look statistically significant to me. However, you will see that the graphs provided in support of the measles vaccines by governments always cut off the earlier years that show how measles cases plummeted prior to the vaccine's introduction.
Measles is a highly contagious airborne disease. It spreads easily through coughs and sneezes like the flu or the common cold. I'm not sure that better sanitation can do all that much to prevent its spread. As late as 1980 2.6 million people died from the Measles, most of whom were under the age of 5. 9 out of 10 people who are not immune and share a living space with someone who has it will catch it. How does better sanitation help that?
Approximately 11.7 million doses of measles vaccine were distributed in 1967–1968, and the estimated number of cases of measles fell from 900 000 to 250 000. Statistically, that's pretty significant and I doubt sanitation changed much in that year. It's a virtual certainty that ceasing vaccination would lead to hundreds of thousands or millions more cases worldwide and there would be a not insignificant number of deaths associated with those, particularly among the very young.
It's true that better sanitation and better living conditions led to decreased mortality due to the measles (along with the use of antibiotics but that has its own problems), however this didn't have much to do with a decrease in the incidence of measles. Before the vaccine was introduced, it was expected you would contract it sooner or later.
you will find it is quite (very) difficult to source data on measles death rates globally prior to the last few decades - not apparently because the data is not available. last time i looked into this i was able to find a swedish university that did publish this data, but it was commented by others at the time that this was the only source they could find from any government affiliated site that published it. i have just looked again and was unable to find even that site this time.
so here is the kind of graph i am referring to anyway:
this was produced by independent researchers - though i am not clear at present where they sourced the data. this data, though, is the exact form that i am referring to and is the only form i have ever seen for this type of data.
while it may be true that cases of measles fell after the vaccine introduction period, my point is that the drop was not a large one when compared to what had been happening before the vaccine was introduced.
That chart is death due to measles, not actual cases of measles. And yes, as I stipulated, that did drop significantly before the vaccine was in wide use. While sanitation and living conditions probably played a role in the reduction of deaths, so did the use of antibiotics. The fact remains that without a vaccine, most people will contract the measles and there will be many thousands, particularly among the very young, who die as a result. There's also a risk (I would say probability) that antibiotic resistant strains will develop, negating some of the improvements in death rate that occurred in the years leading up to the vaccine. The fact remains that there is a much higher risk of death, particularly for young children, in a world where most people contract the measles than in one where everyone is vaccinated. And again, deaths dropped by more than 50% the year the vaccine was first used in large quantities.
Remember, that chart is deaths per 100,000 and without a vaccine MOST people would contract measles at some point in their life. At even 1 death per 100,000 (and I'm sure the number is higher than that in a world where most people get the measles) that means more than 1,300 people would die each year (based on how many births there are each year).
The reason the vaccine looks statistically insignificant on that chart is that there used to be such a huge number of deaths. Because of the scale of that chart, you can't even see the drop from 900,000 to 250,000 that occurred 1967-1968. You're right in that the drop in deaths due to the vaccine is not as large as what came before but the vaccine still saves hundreds of thousands of lives. Just because it's not many millions doesn't mean it isn't important.
In 1989-1991 there was a resurgence of measles in the U.S., particularly California, that was due primarily to a low rate of immunization. A a result there were 16,400 cases of measles along with 75 deaths. Most of the measles cases were in those under 5 and most deaths were in babies under 12 months. Without widespread vaccination this scenario becomes much worse.
I typically use death rates from measles and you mentioned death rate from measles previously - so the graph is relevant and in context here.
I think perhaps this is not such a straightforward claim. The data we have from history shows a continuing drop in issues/death from the disease without vaccines and so it is not so simple to identify the effect of the vaccine from the continuing drop alone. We also have the issue that scarlet fever never had a vaccine developed for it and yet the number of infections dropped to essentially zero anyway:
https://healthimpactnews.com/2013/an-honest-look-at-the-historical-evidence-that-vaccines-eliminated-diseases/
The situation would be clearer if honest studies were carried out between vaccinated and unvaccinated people, but so far - as I understand - this has been prevented by claims that such a study would be 'unethical' because 'we know vaccines work and to be unvaccinated is dangerous'. This position is countered by various unfunded studies that were made along the way by Doctors examining their own data that showed that vaccinated children were significantly less healthy overall than unvaccinated.
I understand the logic that alleges that measles incidence is reduced by vaccines and thus more cases would mean more death without vaccines - I just think that given the data presented (and the understandings present about immunity and vaccines in general), we should absolutely be open to alternatives to vaccines and definitely shouldn't be trying to force people to be vaccinated using government pressure, peer pressure or financial pressure.
In you first reply to me you said "If you look at the incidence of measles over the last 150 years, you will see that it was nosediving close to zero before the measles vaccine was introduced" leading me to believe you were talking about cases of measles, not deaths, hence my reply.
Regardless, I think my claims are substantiated based on the known numbers. Measles deaths did decline significantly before the vaccine was introduced but seem to have been fairly steady in the decade or more before the vaccine. Once the vaccine was introduced, deaths from measles was more than cut in half almost immediately. Unlike Scarlet Fever, Measles never substantially disappeared, at least not before the vaccine. If you take the numbers you quoted at face value, particularly the 1/1000 deaths from people who contract measles and make the reasonable assumption that most people will contract the measles without a vaccine (as they did before the vaccine was introduced) then the deaths become significant enough to make the vaccine worthwhile.
Scarlet Fever is a different beast. Actual incidences of Scarlet fever decreased for uncertain reasons unlike with the Measles where the death rate declined but the incidence of the disease didn't. And with Scarlet Fever there is some concern that it may be making a comeback as cases spiked in the UK and parts of Asia in 2017.
And to clarify, I don't support forced vaccination. I just think it's generally a bad idea not to be vaccinated.
Yes, I know I used the word 'incidence' initially, however, ultimately I am kind of interchanging the idea of incidence with death rate to some extent - which is ok with me since the graphs are so close as far as I know (historically) and I have no way to know how accurate the graphs are anyway, so I am only looking at them roughly.
The level of cases of measles in the decade prior to the introduction of vaccination does appear to be relatively stable and did appear to drop to close to zero following vaccinations. I am not saying that vaccinations cannot achieve anything at all, however, the situation is far from being as straightforward as saying that 'vaccinations are good'.
Firstly, if we look at the data published on every major government website regarding vaccines and measles, we see that they ALWAYS try to only show the data after vaccines were introduced and literally never show the earlier data. I feel certain that this is to over-inflate the appearance of the value of vaccinations. This is the same as the way that media companies often use this tactic of altering the y axis on graphs or just removing earlier data to give an impression of something being more substantial than it is. This is important because the media propaganda often tries to essentially claim that anyone questioning vaccinations are heretics and cites the hysteria whipped up partially as a result of their doctored data. As far as I am concerned there is absolutely a biased perspective on vaccines in the general mind at present. (Although I can show a long list of professional Doctors and vaccine researchers (even vaccine inventors) who state that vaccines in general are far more dangerous than the mainstream/gov is making clear).
Given that the US government's own top people have stated that cases of vaccine injury are under-reported by as much as 9 in 10 to the VAERS database (e.g. only 10% of cases are reported) - this means that the figure of severe reaction to vaccine is not 1 in a million, but is probably actually much lower than even 1 in 100,000. In a population of 300 million, that means that roughly there are going to be 3000 cases of severe reactions to vaccines in the US each year (probably more). If 13% die in that situation, then that's somewhere in the region of 390 deaths per year from vaccines in the US.
Currently, then, the likely number of deaths from the vaccines starts to make the number of deaths from measles, for example, look quite small in comparison. I appreciate that somewhere in all of this, is the claim that millions of lives are saved by the vaccine - however, this inevitably means that some people literally openly say (and I have heard them many times) "I don't care if people die from the vaccines, it's better than people dying from the disease".
Call me 'old fashioned' or just logical.. But if an alleged 'healing method' actually kills people and potentially even more than the disease was killing before it was introduced - or at least potentially close to that.. Then I have to question it. When we now consider that the average child has more vaccines before their 6 months than most adults over the age of 30 have had in their entire lives - we, in my opinion, have a seriously fucked up situation.
In my opinion, not only are vaccines being over-hyped, but they are being relied on by a hedonistic society that wants to deny it's own responsibility to heal itself through self empowerment and making better choices, in favour of just paying someone else to inject them.
I could go on for a long time on this, but I will just point you to 'Wim Hof' - in case you haven't heard of him. He is in the record books for being submerged under ice the longest (by far) and literally swims under polar icebergs in his underwear! I mention him because he has also forced textbooks to be rewritten by proving in lab conditions that he can manually increase the effectiveness of his immune system by changing his brain patterns. He was able to not get sick after being deliberately injected with bacteria under lab conditions. He also trained numerous other people who were also tested and who also did this. Given that this is the case, we must ask - "why isn't this big world news? why aren't we actively training people and researching heavily so that we don't put people at risk from vaccine injury?".
The "incidence" of measles did not drop as much as death rate (or at all as far as I am aware) so using them interchangeably is not accurate. I believe you are projecting some negative motive on the statistics where there is none. The reason graphs are shown the way they are is 1) there are no official government statistics before a certain date. The graph you show contain statistics gathered in other ways. 2) The graph you show doesn't show how much the vaccine helps and is therefore pretty irrelevant when you are trying to show that the vaccine saves hundreds of thousands to millions of lives a year (which it does). Even if deaths due to vaccines were as high as 1 in 100,000 (and I have my doubts about that number - it's obviously a worst case scenario number with a lot of guessing behind it oriented to make vaccination look bad), you are still 10 times more likely to die of the measles in a world without the vaccine than you are to die of the vaccine in a world where everybody gets vaccinated. Also, you seem to be grouping the measles vaccine in with all vaccines. Each vaccine should be evaluated based on its own merits.
Of course there is no absolutely 100% safe vaccine. Nothing in the world is 100% safe. People die of anaphylactic shock using tampons. Some people die because of their seatbelt or airbags too but that doesn't mean we're better off without them. I was vaccinated, my kids were vaccinated, everyone I ever knew as a kid and everyone my kids know have been vaccinated. None have died or been severely injured as a result. Now I don't know anyone who has died of Measles either but I bet my Mom does.
One further point that I briefly mentioned before. Much of the reduction in death rate due to the measles (and other diseases) was due not just to improved sanitation and living conditions but to the widespread use of antibiotics. It's not necessarily the disease itself that kills you, but the secondary complications and infections that it can cause. Many people who are opposed to vaccines are also opposed to that (you can speak for yourself of course). But without the use of antibiotics, the improvement of death rate would be far less. Plus, if we go back to not vaccinating and using antibiotics as necessary there is a high chance you will at some point start to see antibiotic resistant strains of these diseases.
As to 'Wim Hof', no I am not familiar with him but an example of one is hardly convincing evidence no matter how spectacular the results. I have my doubts that a significant portion of the world population can become disease free by changing their brain patterns.