Infectious disease doesn't care why you're unvaccinated

I know the Internet can seem overwhelming at times.

Here you go: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=cia+fake+vaccination+osama

For a start "Good data" is data from independent sources, not merely clinical trial data provided by manufacturers. The need to collect "Good Data" doesn't stop after the clinical trial ends because there are many opportunities to screw up between the end of clinical trials and mass vaccination.

>what's the effective benefit?

It closes the loop. Researchers and manufacturers get data with which to improve their products. Patients get more confidence in the products they are administered. Increased confidence means more vaccinated people, and better herd immunity.

>Which was an outbreak mostly among those who have not been vaccinated.

It was also mostly fear mongering, and there were a fraction of those who contracted Pertussis who were vaccinated. Ped's shouldn't be surprised if this sort of thing biases the opinions of worried parents. I think baby's cough happened after the first or second of the series. Can't remember exactly, doesn't really matter. Baby is doing fine.

>Why do you think it's 'near miraculous' any more than having potable fresh water come out of your tap?

Because manufacturing and distributing pharmaceuticals is more complicated than digging a hole, pumping water through sand filters and adding Chlorine, a task that is routinely accomplished by people without even a high school education.

> A clean water supply has probably saved more lives than all the vaccinations ever done in the US.

Yes, I know, isn't it great? But vaccines often get the credit.

>We bathe in drinking water!

The significance of this isn't lost on me. I have visited developing countries, and lived in China, where tap water is usually not considered safe to drink.

>My argument is that your demands on the quality of the information you expect - personalized tests after every vaccination, for example - is not possible. It's expensive, even if feasible, and the major benefit seems to be that it makes people like you more confident.

It probably is too expensive to achieve 100% testing, that's a high bar. Continuous sampling? I think it not too big a challenge or too expensive. I'd bet that some people would even pay extra for it if they had too.

>the major benefit seems to be that it makes people like you more confident.

Do you want herd immunity or don't you? It's not as though I am the last doubter.

>But that data will also have vague and uncertain parts. It won't be a simple statement of "the last vaccine did not provide enough immunization" but "the number of antibodies is 10% lower than the recommended level. This may increase the risk that your child will be infected in the future by between 1% and 15% compared to full immunization. Enough other children have been immunized so the overall probability is very low, unless . Should you wish a booster shot, please contact your physician."

We need some meeting place between the raw data in .csv vs "Just Take, All The Vaccines" Maybe I'd trust Nate Silver to tell me, if he showed me some pretty charts. It needs to be understandable by a lay-person.

>You complained about "waving more CDC pamphlets at us"

Well, obviously, they aren't effective on everyone. Why would more of them be more effective?

>For that matter, there are failure rates, just not at the level where you're looking. People get the wrong shots, last year "160,000 doses of the Novartis vaccine, Agrippal, [were] recalled after 'particles' were found in the vials", and this year Merck recalled "1 lot [27,000 vials] of Recombivax HB hepatitis B vaccine (adult formulation, 10 μg/mL) because some of the vials may be cracked."

No, that's exactly the sort of thing that worries me. And no amount of historical safety data can prevent a mishap like those you mentioned from occurring.

>Why does any of this require you have "unreserved faith in the manufacturers of vaccines, and the government", any more than you have faith in the builders of your car, the maintainers of the traffic lights, or the pilots and builders of the plane you fly?

Cars are not a great example, I can choose not to buy a crappy car because they performed poorly in crash tests. Planes are a little better, and you know what? I don't really want to ride in a 787 until they fix those batteries, and I can choose not to fly Northwest because of their maintenance problems (well before they went under). But in general, I am mostly unimpressed with the FAA. But, I have very small latitude WRT my choices of vaccines. A gov't agency purposefully crashes example cars to prove their safety, it is unethical to try the same thing with people. But neither the FDA nor the CDC appear to take much interest in providing better oversight. I expect more. Sorry if you think it is too expensive or not worth it. I don't agree.

I know a pregnant woman trying to get information about which vaccines to administrate to her future baby. She either get as answer "do them all as there's absolutely no risk' or 'vaccines are bad'. So it's not an organised group publishing position papers as you asked. But she has a very hard time to get explanations of the implications of not administrating a vaccine against usually benign affections.

Also, I just found this article mentioning that the cdc used children as guinea pigs for a new vaccine. Of course i am not sure it is true but it makes me suspicious and distrustful. How could i believe them blindly as some commenters seem to do if they do such covert operations?

> She either get as answer 'do them all as there's absolutely no risk' or 'vaccines are bad'."

She's supposed to receive a handout from the CDC describing the known risks. That required by law, I believe. These handouts say, over and over, that there's always a risk, that there are common mild side-effects (redness or soreness where the shot was injected, for example), and that the severe side effects are extremely rare, as in larger than 1:1,000,000. It's hard even to know if some of the side effects are due to the vaccine or not.

The handout she gets is supposed to tell her where to report severe side effects, and tell her about the fund that's set up to pay money to those who have severe side effects.

But the side-effects are so rare that it falls into the background noise. It's hard to even think about odds this low, which is the reasoning behind the "micromort"; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort . A risk of 1:1,000,000 is about the same as traveling 6 minutes by canoe, or 250 miles by car.

This is so low that most people say "no risk" rather than enumerate all the low-probability ways you could die.

> the cdc used children as guinea pigs for a new vaccine

I don't know how the paper defines "guinea pig." The answer is both 'yes' and 'no', depending on how you want to interpret it. If "guinea pig" means "children used as a subject for a medical test", then the answer is certainly "yes."

There's a point between "we think this is a possible vaccine" and "this vaccine is effective." At some point you need to inoculate children and see if the vaccine works. In this respect, those children are indeed guinea pigs.

But if by "guinea pig" you mean there's no knowledge of what the risks are, or even that the test is going on, then there's a long story.

Earlier in our history we would test physically and mentally disabled children in institutions (see Koprowski's work on the polio vaccine), or people in jails (see Southam's experiments with HeLa cells), or simply not tell them what was going on (see the Tuskegee syphilis experiment).

This is unethical, though it took a long time to establish and require those ethical standards. Human testing requires oversight by an institutional review board, and informed consent from the test subjects.

There's all sort of problems related to what "informed" means. Obviously, children cannot grant informed consent, so their parents are used as proxies to make the decision. Even then, it's hard to know if the parents have all the information they need to make a decision.

It gets even worse with overseas testing. There have been many attempts at coming up with a malaria vaccine. One such is RTS,S (or Mosquirix). You can read about the ethics behind the test http://www.nejm.org/doi/suppl/10.1056/NEJMoa1208394/suppl_fi... . There are several pages detailing what they did to maintain good ethics:

- follow international and local standards for testing

- get independent local doctors to provide oversight

- have community meetings, and meetings with local leaders

- discuss the goals and methods with the parents, including the use of an impartial witness for illiterate parents

and more. For example, we know that bed nets are effective at reducing malaria, so all of the children who volunteered for the trial - even if they weren't accepted - got insecticide treated bednets.

So yes, those 6537 infants are guinea pigs. We don't know of a better way to find out if a candidate vaccine works.

The factors are not the same in the two comparisons.

It's people who develop these vaccines. These people have friends and family, with children. These children will be vaccinated. Why would they want to place these children at too high of a risk?

If your thesis is true, then you would expect that the children or grandchildren of pharmaceutical researchers are less likely to be inoculated. Do you think that's the case? Do you have any evidence for that?

(Personal anecdote: I once met a woman who worked at Glaxo-Wellcome, back before they became GSK. Once the chicken pox vaccine was available, she immediately got her daughter inoculated.)

There are many public health organizations besides the CDC. There's the WHO, and the public health organizations of different countries. The EU, for example, also has a very extensive set of requirements and oversight. So you can also look towards the UK, or Australia, to see what they think. (I picked English speaking countries to make it easier on you.)

There are significant differences between the CDC and NSA: 1) the NSA is institutionally secretive, while public health research is not, 2) the NSA staff are less likely to have an adverse effect by the NSA accessing their private data than the public at large, and 3) other espionage organizations, who are in the position of finding out what the NSA does, are also secretive and not likely to publish that information to the public.

I assume you considered these differences as part of your critical analysis. Why did you think they aren't significant?