In the blame game that we seem to constantly play I ask you, “Who do you think is to blame if I choose not to wash my clothes? Can I blame my neighbors or maybe my daughter or how about my cat?” That’s a good one! 😀
No. The only one responsible is ME!
“What if I CHOOSE not to have my children vaccinated against a disease that has been mostly eradicated? Can I blame the pediatrician? Maybe the person who gave my child the disease? Who is to blame? I know…my ex-mother-in-law…” 😀
I don’t like playing blame games but we really need to become responsible and wisen up to things that are happening around us. I cannot fathom what people will choose to believe or not believe. Maybe it’s the nature of the internet—I don’t believe that. We have the responsibility to learn what is correct. This is not brain surgery or nuclear fusion (or other complex facet of science).
wikimedia – By Uwe Hermann (http://hermann-uwe.de/photoblog/sugar) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons
It’s one thing to guard against the unknown—holding a constant vigil—but it is another to choose not to protect against what is known. I have a problem with this. There are many who cannot be vaccinated because of medical reasons—basically either suppressed immune systems or those that are developing. Some are allergic to what is in the vaccine but there have been changes in this area. Who would risk someone else’s life because they are too righteous—think too highly of their own life? Should we not think of others, too? To believe that it is better to get a disease than to be vaccinated–I can understand this point a view in a way but what happens when you don’t develop an immunity to a disease? This is part of history–civilizations have been all but eliminated because people didn’t have immunity.
Here is where the anti-vaccine followers received fuel for their fires. A doctor/researcher had a hand in fraudulent data linking autism to the vaccine known as MMR. Problem 1: His results that he claimed could never be repeated—not in any form or even close—but that did not stop this doctor/researcher. As the blaming community became a bigger thing, parents wanted to crucify someone and he was only happy to help. It was later discovered there were selfish and nefarious reasons behind his quest but unlike many studies that are filed away and forgotten, this guy’s work still has an effect because people have used this information to start more fires and yet his work has been removed and his credentials revoked. It is synonymous to repeating a lie often enough that people believe the lie.
The parents who are not getting their children vaccinated are not the ones who are poor or do not know better…many of them are very affluent and choose this lifestyle. You can’t just point fingers at a certain group and say they are the conservative ones or liberals or are republicans or democrats. I had someone tell me yesterday that it was all those “organic people”…(shakes head) One of the biggest problems is that people believe anything they hear or read whether it is in an email or on a news channel or on facebook or other social media. They choose to not question the validity because they believe it has to be true. It is like a cancer that is affecting everything it touches. And, it even affects members of the health community, too. Some doctors tell their patients to not vaccinate their kids. (shakes head again)
Given everything I know, I would rather risk autism (if there were such a link found and there has not been) than to risk my child having the disease or giving it to someone who is in risk that cannot vaccinate. I made that decision a long time ago and have made other risky decisions but I did the best I could for everyone and not just my child.
Have a great day and use that noodle upstairs! 🙂
We have been given brains to use and we have been given all different talents. We should trust in the talents others have received from the Creator and take care of our bodies. Vaccinations are a way to protect ourselves which we should make use of.
My thoughts exactly. Thanks for stopping by! 🙂
You go girl! I agree with you 100%. God bless. 🙂 Dave
🙂 Thanks, Dave. I don’t know what I would do without you in my cheering section 🙂 . Have a great week!
Your unnamed quack was Andrew Wakefield, who began as a surgeon in England. He began by claiming a link between the measles virus and Crohn’s disease. His infamous paper in the Lancet was from 1998, and it fraudulently claimed a direct link between the MMR vaccine and both autism and Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). Most (if not all) of his raw data was faked, and he performed child abuse in the form of invasive procedures on autistic children without their parents’ permission – things like colonoscopies and lumbar punctures. Wakefield’s project resulted in life-threatening complications for one of the children. The children were recruited by equally unscrupulous lawyers who had filed a lawsuit against the MMR manufacturers. They paid Wakefield over 400,000 pounds under the table for his “exposé” of the Truth about MMR vaccines.
It was immediately dismissed as fraudulent by most of the medical establishment, but it took another five years and the work of a tenacious reporter to prove the fraud and rampant ethical violations. His medical license in the U.K. was yanked, but the Lancet didn’t retract his article until 2010, after his co-authors retracted their part in the study when they realized they were duped.
He did what any other defrocked practitioner would and moved to Texas, Land of the Free/Land of the Stupid, to continue his “studies” with a series of fellow quacks. Along the way, he picked up cult of thousands of dim bulbs like Jenny McCarthy, whose son is autistic, undoubtedly caused by MMR vaccination. (Her case has a silver lining, though. The autism has converted her son into an “Indigo Child”, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigo_children.)
A few years before Wakefield’s article, anonymous others had decided that a mercury-based preservative, Thiomersal, which added in extremely small quantities (normally no more than 25 micrograms) to some vaccines was causing autism. Supposedly this was what was causing autism, based on the toxicity of methyl mercury. Thiomersal connects ethyl mercury (far less toxic than methyl mercury) to a thiophenol to prevent bacterial and fungal contamination, especially in globulins and multidose vaccine vials. If you use Merthiolate to prevent infection from a cut, that’s the same antibiotic as Thiomersal, but in much more massive doses.
A whole new industry has grown up around preventing autism on the assumption that it must be caused by mercury. It was hijacked from legitimate heavy-metal poisoning treatments for use against autism. Called chelation therapy, its use for autism is covered by Quackwatch, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quackwatch.
In 1999, CDC and American Academy of Pediatrics asked vaccine manufacturers to stop using Thiomersal in vaccines as quickly as possible. The only vaccines that still use 25 micrograms of Thiomersal are some DT, TT, influenza, and multidose meningococcal vaccines. Four others contain trace amounts of Thiomersal (less than 300 picograms). By far, most vaccines (including MMR) contain no mercury. The result? Cases of autism continue to increase (because of improved diagnosis) and third-world countries can no longer afford to vaccinate their population (how lucky they are) because the inexpensive multidose vaccine vials are no longer available.
The anti-vax lobby is so strong now that at least two (and probably more) presidential candidates (Mike Huckabee and Chris Christy) support anti-vax parents – because it’s the “right thing to do”. Not surprisingly, there are hundreds of anti-vax Mds. Look up “anti-vax dr” on Google.
By the way, I’m one of those people with an extremely low white-cell count when I’m on chemotherapy, so I’m prejudiced.
As usual thank you for your informative comment but I think you omitted Ms McCarthy’s invaluable credentials 😀 (joking for anyone who doesn’t know). People will listen to her more than real doctors and scientists.
I would add that there is some interesting info on the Wakefield fiasco (I wasn’t going to mention him as he doesn’t deserve anymore acclaim 😉 ) in some of the British journals but there are also people who believe he was telling the truth and was forced to quiet his true findings linking autism to the vaccine. They want his research to be “unretracted” … like that will happen. Never mind all the children who exhibit signs of autism before receiving the questioned vaccinations.
While we are mentioning names you might want to throw out cardiologist Wolfson from Arizona–maybe it’s the heat that attracts the crazies. People will follow those that promise them what they want to hear. We should all be concerned about this because this isn’t a linear concept. The effects are far-reaching.
Take care and do your best to stay away from sick people. 🙂