General Discussion
Showing Original Post only (View all)Yes, Virginia there ARE Two Sides to Vaccines [View all]
And neither of them is anti-vaxx.
One of the most important tasks of public health is disease prevention. So, the number one priority of public health officials around the world is to make sure that people have access to safe and effective vaccines and that they get these vaccines. When we have an outbreak of a deadly disease like measles in the US or polio in the Middle East, public health's number one, two and three top jobs are to promote those vaccines. Period.
Then, once the epidemic is under control and the disease is no longer a threat, public health must encourage researchers to develop newer, more effective vaccines for the many infectious diseases that plague us. Remember, not all vaccines are the best vaccines that will ever be developed for a certain disease. The old horse serum rabies vaccines made people sick. The old Hep B vaccines were culled from the blood of winos and drug addicts. The old measles vaccine did not prevent measles. The first rota-virus vaccines had to be pulled from the shelf. However, at the time they were marketed, the inferior quality vaccine was all that was available. So, yes, I took my Hep B vaccine culled from the blood of winos, despite being aware of the risks, because as a medical student I did not want to get Hep B and I did not feel like waiting a few years to see if something better came down the pipeline---I needed that immunity then.
To those who are not immune to measles, this is a scary bad disease. While we do not see it much anymore, in my three decades of medical practice, the sickest people with viral infections that I have seen have had measles. One young woman ended up in the ICU with measles pneumonia. A healthy young woman. So, you want your child or young adult son or daughter to end up in the ICU with measles pneumonia? BTW, if you are younger than me--i.e. in your forties, thirties or twenties---you might want to have a measles titer done to see if you are immune. The measles cases I see are always in adults who either never got vaccinated or got one dose of vaccine so many decades ago that they lost their immunity. Most (but not all) children that I see are fully immunized, it's their parents who are the walking time bombs. As far as I am concerned, we ought to be offering every adult under 50 or 60 a free dose of MMR right now (with a few exceptions such as those who are attempting pregnancy or immune compromised). If you are not a member of one of those special groups, you should join the immune herd to protect those who can not get the vaccine.
I have one word for anti--vaxxers: tetanus. All the herd immunity in the world will not save your child from lockjaw if he or she steps on a rusty nail.