Gawdzilla wrote:I got vaccinated against polio. I didn't ask for it, I had no choice. Good thing, too.
Seth, are you an anti-vaccer?
Polio is a highly-contagious disease that has devastating effects on the victims. Like smallpox, typhoid and a small number of other pathogens, it's a public health risk because it's easily spread and has immediate devastating public health consequences. But there was a lot of resistance to polio vaccinations as well, with good reason.
A major concern about the oral polio vaccine (OPV) is its known ability to revert to a form that can achieve neurological infection and cause paralysis.[37] Clinical disease, including paralysis, caused by vaccine-derived poliovirus (VDPV) is indistinguishable from that caused by wild polioviruses.[38] This is believed to be a rare event, but outbreaks of vaccine-associated paralytic poliomyelitis (VAPP) have been reported, and tend to occur in areas of low coverage by OPV, presumably because the OPV is itself protective against the related outbreak strain.[39][40]
Doses of oral polio vaccine are added to sugar cubes for use in a 1967 vaccination campaign in Bonn, Germany
As the incidence of wild polio diminishes, nations transition from use of the oral vaccine back to the injected vaccine because the direct risk of iatrogenic polio (VAPP) due to OPV outweighs the indirect benefit of immunization via subclinical transmission of OPV. When IPV is used, reversion is not possible but there remains a small risk of clinical infection upon exposure to reverted OPV or wild polio virus. Following the widespread use of polio vaccines in the mid-1950s, the incidence of poliomyelitis declined rapidly in many industrialized countries. The use of OPV was discontinued in the United States in 2000 and in 2004 in the UK, but it continues to be used around the globe.[16][29]
The rate of vaccine-associated paralytic poliomyelitis (VAPP) varies by region but is generally about 1 case per 750,000 vaccine recipients.[41] VAPP is more likely to occur in adults than in children. In immunodeficient children, the risk of VAPP is almost 7,000 times higher, particularly for persons with B-lymphocyte disorders (e.g., agammaglobulinemia and hypogammaglobulinemia), which reduce the synthesis of protective antibodies.[38] The World Health Organization considers the benefits of vaccination to far outweigh the risk of vaccine derived polio. Outbreaks of vaccine derived polio have been stopped by multiple rounds of high-quality vaccination, in order to immunize the entire population.[42]
Outbreaks of VAPP occurred independently in Belarus (1965–66), Canada (1966–68), Egypt (1983–1993), Hispaniola (2000–2001), Philippines (2001), Madagascar (2001–2002),[43] and in Haiti (2002), where political strife and poverty have interfered with vaccination efforts.[44] In 2006 an outbreak of vaccine-derived poliovirus occurred in China.[45] Cases have been reported from Cambodia (2005–2006), Myanmar (2006–2007), Iran (1995, 2005–2007), Syria, Kuwait and Egypt.[46] Since 2005, The World Health Organization has been tracking vaccine-caused polio in northern Nigeria caused by a mutation in live oral polio vaccines.[47]
Public health vaccination programs are very controversial precisely because they balance the rights of the individual to be free of government interference in their health care and the potential for injury from the vaccine against the overall public health benefits in fighting a dangerous disease. Unfortunately, in such situations, the effects on the individual who is placed at risk by a vaccination program are discounted by authorities who are looking only at statistics in the overall sense, and who wish to achieve widespread positive results regardless of a small number of deaths or injuries.
This makes sense where the disease is devastating and immediate, and is highly contagious, like polio or smallpox. It makes much less sense, and is much less ethical when the association between the disease vector (HPV) and the disease it's supposed to prevent (cervical cancer) is neither absolutely known, there is a substantial time span between infection with the HPV and the onset of cancer, and the vaccine is not 100 percent effective (it appears to be only about 70 percent effective).
The number and type of adverse reactions reported by young girls taking the vaccine that may lead to life-long medical problems are not to be discounted either, since the chance of getting cervical cancer is very small in the first place (fewer than 10,000 cases were reported in 2008 in the US). Subjecting millions of young girls to vaccinations that may lead to permanent, life-long pain and disability, not to mention potential generational effects on their children, makes the vaccine all the less necessary as a public health mandate.
There is a time and place for mandatory vaccinations, but HPV and cervical cancer is not it. Smallpox, cholera, polio, measles, rubella and other highly-contagious childhood illnesses likely qualify, particularly where the disease is highly fatal and highly contagious. Cervical cancer simply is not a large enough or contagious risk to the general population to justifiably trigger a vaccination mandate.
Strong marketing advocating vaccination, certainly, but only when the advertising and advocacy FULLY discloses the known and potential risks, including life-long pain and debility, posed by the vaccine and along with a genuine disclosure of the ACTUAL RISK of getting cervical cancer even if one DOES get the HP virus, which is actually quite small. Only with informed consent is it ethical to give the vaccine to a child who cannot properly evaluate the risks for herself as an adult.
"Seth is Grandmaster Zen Troll who trains his victims to troll themselves every time they think of him" Robert_S
"All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke
"Those who support denying anyone the right to keep and bear arms for personal defense are fully complicit in every crime that might have been prevented had the victim been effectively armed." Seth
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