ANTIVAX 4.5

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• We start with antivax claim #3: The very first vaccine was a disaster. Vaccine safety and effectiveness is a created myth, strongly embedded in Americans’ psyche and reinforced by the health care system.The history of small pox vaccines demonstrates that the first vaccine resulted in an increase in the disease and created additional serious health consequences including syphilis and deaths. Physician groups met repeatedly to discuss the “vaccine problem” and concluded that as long as vaccines remained profitable, they would be impossible to eliminate, in spite of the evidence against them. Nothing has changed since this time. The polio vaccine was another one linked to serious health consequences, including cancer and AIDS. Statistics were manipulated to try and prove this vaccine’s effectiveness. With each new vaccine has come new health damage and created illness. See Small Pox Vaccine: Origins of Vaccine Madness.
• “strongly embedded in Americans’ psyche” 
• Ah duh, Americans aren’t the only people who vaccinate, dummy. 
• Did the introduction of the smallpox vaccine result in an increase in the disease? 
• Hard to get worldwide figures. 
• But found this one from Boston. 
• The smallpox vaccine was first used in Boston in 1800. 
• Before then, hundreds or thousands of people per hundred thousand died whenever there was a smallpox outbreak. 
• For over a year, from the spring of 1721 until winter 1722, a smallpox epidemic afflicted the city.
• Started when a British ship arrived in Boston Harbor from the West Indies, carrying the disease.
• Out of a population of 11,000, over 6000 cases were reported with 850 dying from the disease.
• They started using the inoculation method mentioned earlier, brought back to England from Turkey. 
• Cotton Mather a New England Puritan minister is thought to have introduced it to the American colony. 
• He’s best known for his involvement in the Salem witch trials
• He first learned about inoculation from his West African slave Onesimus, writing, “he told me that he had undergone the operation which had given something of the smallpox and would forever preserve him from it, adding that was often used in West Africa.’’
• Anyway, after the actual vaccine was used in Boston in 1800, the disease pretty much disappeared. 
• So much for it causing an INCREASE. 
• The only quotes I’ve found that suggest an increase in smallpox in England after vaccinations, all come from books written by the same guy. 
• Trung Nguyen
• I took a quote from one antivax article. “Smallpox attained its maximum mortality after vaccination was introduced.”
• And every book that I can find that quotes that are written by the same guy – with other co-authors. 
• Same with another quote “Vaccination was made compulsory by an Act of Parliament in the year 1853; again in 1867; and still more stringent in 1871. Since 1853, we have had three epidemics of small-pox, each being more severe than the one preceding.”
• At least FIVE identical books, written by Trung Nguyen and different coauthors. 
• Who, btw, are all dead antivaxers from the late 19th and early 20th century. 
• I found references to them in a 1967 edition of the Bulletin of the History of Medicine:
• In the 1850s, opposition to vaccination arose, largely from the irregular physicians, the advocates of unorthodox medical theories.
• For example, Dr.  Joel Shew, adherent of the Vincent Priessnitz water cure, Dr.  Russell T.  Trall, founder of the New York Hygeio-Therapeutic College, and Dr.  C. C. Schiefferdecker, the owner and manager of a Philadelphia hydropathic infirmary, were the leading anti-vaccinationists of the 1850s.
• Calling vaccination “the greatest crime that has been committed in this last century, ” Schiefferdecker set out to prove scientifically that the Jennerian method was mere “nonsense before reason.”
• Using the scientific method, he called upon the world’s most highly respected authority, the Bible, to prove the inadequacy of vaccination.
• Another guy that Nguyen uses is William Tebb, a British radical liberal in the late 1800s. 
• Vegetarian, abolitionist, a pacifist and anti-imperialist.
• Sounds like a cool guy
• But a major anti-vaxxer 
• he opposed vaccination on the grounds of personal liberty. 
• So let’s talk about personal liberty 
• When you live in a society, you agree to certain things. 
• There is no such thing as complete liberty in a society. 
• You live in a society because you want to take advantage of the benefits of living with a large group of people. 
• Otherwise you would be living like a hermit, out in the middle of nowhere, where nobody is going to give a flying fuck if you vaccinate your kids or not. 
• But if you choose to live in a society, then there are certain things you can’t do. 
• You can’t murder. 
• You can’t rape. 
• Even if you’re a Catholic Priest. 
• You can’t drive over the speed limit. 
• You can’t drive while intoxicated. 
• You can’t steal things. 
• Regardless of what your religion says about those things. 
• Regardless of whether or not you agree with them. 
• And the nature of a society is that the majority get to determine the laws. 
• At least in theory. 
• While, hopefully, protecting the basic human rights of the minority. 
• but here’s the thing
• If you’re in the minority, you should have the right to choose how you live – UNLESS, in doing so, you are infringing upon the rights of others. 
• So if you’re in a minority by believing your god wants you to rape little children in your church, that’s not okay. 
• We don’t protect that right. 
• And the same is true of vaccinations. 
• If you don’t get your children vaccinated, you are putting the health and lives of others at risk. 
• And you don’t have the right to put others at risk. 
• I don’t care what your personal beliefs are. 
• We draw the line at your personal beliefs infringing on the basic human rights of others. 
• That said, in most countries, vaccinations are NOT mandated. 
• Because we believe that we have high enough levels for herd immunity to be effective. 
• Let’s talk about herd immunity for a minute. 
• Because antivaxers like to say it doesn’t work. 
• What is it? 
• It’s about maths. 
• The idea is that, when you have a contagious disease, you can disrupt chains of infection if enough people in the herd have immunity. 
• Basically, it’s less likely to spread. 
• The term was first used in a 1923 paper looking at vaccination of mice. 
• It found that even vaccinated mice could be susceptible to the disease if they were surrounded by enough unvaccinated mice. 
• The immunity of the HERD, not just the individual, was important. 
• For very infectious diseases, like measles, they say you need to have 95% of the population vaccinated to have herd immunity. 
• With other diseases, like diphtheria, the rate needed for herd immunity can be lower and still be effective. 
• And yes, it takes into account that fact that vaccinations don’t work 100% of the time on 100% of the people. 

• Anyway back to the 1800s.
• Smallpox vaccinations did start to decline after the 1840s, but not really because of the arguments of the antivaxers
• The widespread use of vaccination in the early years of the nineteenth century had rendered the population immune to smallpox, and as the memory of the disease slowly receded into the past, vaccination fell into disuse.
• People just decided they didn’t need to be vaccinated, since smallpox had disappeared from view
• keep in mind that we didn’t much acceptance of the germ theory of disease until the late 19th century
• So this point gets a FIVE for bullshit 

• 4.Vaccines are highly profitable for pharmaceutical companies and the health care industry. Strong financial incentives exist to continue this practice, not effectiveness. You cannot trust brochures on vaccines provided by pharmaceutical companies because they are corporations with a profit motive. Their objective is NOT to protect health but to sell vaccines.

• On the surface this one makes some sense. 
• Yes, pharma companies make money from selling vaccines. 
• But they also sell lots of other products. 
• Do antivaxxers take ANY pharmaceutical products? 
• Panadol? Ibuprofen? Asprin? Statins for lowering cholesterol. 
• According to market research firm Technavio, The global human vaccine market is predicted to reach a size of more than USD 47.5 billion by 2022.
• But vaccines are less than 2% of the overall pharma market. 
• Still big. 
• Also more complicated to develop, because new strains come out all the time. 
• But you only need to make Viagra once. 
• So R&D is higher and cuts into the profit margins. 
• You know who else makes money out of selling things? 
• EVERYBODY. 
• Herbal medicine manufacturers make profits out of selling their products, so I guess you can’t believe anything they say either. 
• Homeopathic medicines – if you can call them that – too. 
• It’s not enough to say ” You cannot trust brochures on vaccines provided by pharmaceutical companies because they are corporations with a profit motive.”
• Because that’s the entire world. 
• Outside of Communist countries, I guess. 
• Here’s the other problem with this argument. 
• How much do pharma companies sell a dose of the MMR vaccine for? 
• According to the CDC, the private sector cost is $75.04 per dose
• But the CDC cost is about $21. 
• Now if you don’t have the vaccine, and you catch measles, chances are you end up in hospital for between 2 – 10 days.
• How much do you think your pharma bill is going to be?
• According to the CDC, in the US, your hospital bill in total will be between $4,032- $46,060
• How much of that is pharmaceuticals? 
• Probably around 30-40%. 
• So if you catch measles, the pharma industry will make $1000 – $20,000 out of you. 
• But if you get a vaccination, they only make $20 – $70. 
• Or double that if you get the recommended two doses. 
• How many people would get measles? 
• In the decade before 1963 when a vaccine became available, nearly all children got measles by the time they were 15 years of age.
• It is estimated 3 to 4 million people in the United States were infected each year.
• Also each year, among reported cases, an estimated 400 to 500 people died, 48,000 were hospitalized, and 1,000 suffered encephalitis (swelling of the brain) from measles.
• US POP in 1963 was 189m. 
• Today it’s 330m. 
• 60% bigger today. 
• So let’s say if there were no measles vaccine today about 5.5 million Americans would catch it each year. 
• 77,000 would end up in hospital. 
• Each visit would cost $10,000 in pharma. 
• That’s $800m in measles treatments alone. 
• in the 2012-13 school year there were about 4.2 million kindergarteners. 
• So let’s assume that’s how many kids are roughly born each year. 
• And each kid gets two doses of the MMR over two years. 
• 4200000 x 50 per dose x 2 doses = $420m per generation, spread over two years. 
• So about half of what the industry would probably make if there was no vaccine. 
• Doesn’t make good business sense. 
• They would make more money by not making vaccines. 
• Come to think of it – if Big Pharma would make more money by NOT selling vaccines, maybe it’s the antivaxers that are secretly working for Big Pharma to convince the world NOT to get vaccinated, so Big Pharma can make more money? 
• Makes perfect sense by the antivaxer logic. 
• Now – multiply that by all of the OTHER vaccines they also sell. 
• And the cost of treating those if people actually caught the diseases. 
• BTW – the entire reason governments push vaccines hard is BECAUSE of the cost-benefit analysis. 
• It costs the economy far more money if people get sick. 
• People get sick, we have to cover their healthcare costs, they aren’t productive, aren’t pushing the economy forwards, aren’t paying taxes, aren’t buying iPhones. 
• It’s the same reason governments have cracked down on cigarettes. 
• It’s about the cost to society. 
• For example – In the USA, it was estimated that the introduction of the meningococcal vaccine saved US$551 million in direct costs and $920 million in indirect costs, including costs associated with permanent disability and premature death.
• Another example is the benefits of polio vaccination.
• In the first six years after introduction of the vaccine, it was calculated that more than 150,000 cases of paralytic polio and 12,500 deaths were prevented worldwide.
• This represented a saving of more than US$30 billion annually in 1999 dollars.
• So yes – it’s about money. 
• But not really about big pharma profits. 
• It’s about reducing direct and indirect health care costs across the community. 
• Also – in a world with no vaccines of any kind, lots of people would die. 
• If you’re dead, do you know how much money pharma companies make out of you? 
• They want you to live to a ripe old age. 
• Get old, get sick, buy drugs. 
• But a ton of ibuprofen over those years too. 
• And prozac and viagra. 
• So this argument makes no sense when you think about it for a few minutes. 
• Gets another big FIVE.