How the Anti-Vaxxers Are Winning

The New York Times ^ | 02/08/2017 | Peter J. Hotezfeb

[Future Snake Eater]

As for the current rejection of vaccination, a lot of it sounds more like conspiracy theory than science to me.

My wife's looked into it quite a bit. The number of vaccines they push on little kids now is huge compared to when my wife and I were kids. There are also questions as to the delivery and preservative methods of the vaccines and what effect those could have on kids who have allergies.

My second daughter had some terrible, terrible problems immediately after getting a round of vaccinations--problems that persist to one degree or another six years later. We don't know for 100% sure if it was related, but, like with Global Warming^TM, we aren't even allowed to ask the question.

[Pelham]

Actually penicillin wasn’t in use until 1942, parallel with WWII.

And while it is true that the absence of sterile technique killed injured soldiers in the Civil War, that doesn’t address the cholera and typhoid and diptheria that brought mass death to CW encampments where soldiers weren’t injured. These diseases killed as many as battle did. We vaccinate against those now, something not available in 1860.

The greatest killer of American GIs in the first world war wasn’t battle, it was the Spanish Flu of 1918 that swept through the ranks. That flu was a hybrid human/animal flu which are the most lethal.

[Pelham]

The vax could be the issue, but correlation isn’t always causation and individual biochemistry is so complex it’s hard to know. I came down a serious disease at the age of 10 that I still have to deal with every few years. Little was known about it other than that 30% of kids who get it have allergies. Now it’s known to be the result of a nearly invisible defect in the kidney. Before that it would have been easy to believe it was caused by a vaccine. There’s a lot about disease that we just don’t know, maybe including vaccines.