Kimmo

joe, i think you were pretty unequivocal regarding your support for the hpv vaccine, and jayb, vaccines in general: Dr. Harper helped design and carry out the Phase II and Phase III safety and effectiveness studies to get Gardasil approved, and authored many of the published, scholarly papers about it. She has been a paid speaker and consultant to Merck. It's highly unusual for a researcher to publicly criticize a medicine or vaccine she helped get approved. excerpts from an interview with her: Yes, (merck's) marketing campaign was designed to incite the greatest fear possible in parents, so that there would be uptake of the vaccine. If parents and girls were told the benefits and harms of Pap screening and HPV vaccines as described above, an informed and valued decision would have been able to be made. Many may have chosen to continue with a lifetime of Pap screening and forgo the vaccines, with the unknowns of duration of efficacy and safety unable to be answered for many more years." Dr. Scott Ratner and his wife, who's also a physician, expressed similar concerns as Dr. Harper in an interview with CBS News last year. One of their teenage daughters became severely ill after her first dose of Gardasil. Dr. Ratner says she'd have been better off getting cervical cancer than the vaccination. "My daughter went from a varsity lacrosse player at Choate to a chronically ill, steroid-dependent patient with autoimmune myofasciitis. I've had to ask myself why I let my eldest of three daughters get an unproven vaccine against a few strains of a nonlethal virus that can be dealt with in more effective ways." Merck also says it's looking into cases of ALS, commonly known as Lou Gehrig's Disease, reported after vaccination. ALS is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that attacks motor neurons in the brain and spinal cord. Merck and the CDC say there is currently no evidence that Gardasil caused ALS in the cases reported. Merck is also monitoring the number of deaths reported after Gardasil: at least 32. Merck and CDC says it's unclear whether the deaths were related to the vaccine, and that just because patients died after the shots doesn't mean the shots were necessarily to blame. "Parents and women must know that deaths occurred. Not all deaths that have been reported were represented in Dr. Slade's work, one-third of the death reports were unavailable to the CDC, leaving the parents of the deceased teenagers in despair that the CDC is ignoring the very rare but real occurrences that need not have happened if parents were given information stating that there are real, but small risks of death surrounding the administration of Gardasil." link and link would you say, joe, that the deaths mentioned were simply an unavoidable part of our response to an infectious disease?

more or less!

So, which vaccine will save more lives? Bayesian statistics. Do the math, report back. interesting stats on those most affected by cervical cancer and what increases risks, in the following link. really no surprises.... -hispanic/latino highest risk. -african american second. -smoking doubles the incidence rate. -number of sexual partners; can't get it without unprotected (generally) sex. i would guess that other factors weight the stats: general health, alcohol use, diet, etc. so here we have an illness that affects 1 in approximately 1,500 women, and this is WITHOUT accommodating for the above factors. yet the merck/cdc phalanx pushes this vaccine as a response to an "epidemic of preventable deaths". (obviously, without unprotected sex, one's risk goes to +-0.) link and no, gspotter, your point isn't lost. the vaccines will save lives. it's just that there are other just as effective ways to do it, without paying pharma $400 every 4 years. now if one doesn't want to take responsibility for one's health and health decisions, sure go for it. $400 every few years isn't a huge fee to allay one's concerns (no matter how small the risk might be).

Okay. Sounds like the best we can do is wave across the chasm. If you read the IOM report - I'd be curious to know which particulars/specifics you don't accept/disagree with. i doubt it's as deep a chasm as one might surmise. there's a lot of nuance to (most) things in this life; rarely are they black and white. but i'll wave a friendly wave regardless. i'll take a look at your links....

what are you rambling about? put the 1950's national geographic down and come back, joe. come back to 2012. Dude, if you can't figure out the essential, unyielding truth in that statement and acknowledge it you are completely adrift in any discussion about infectious disease in general and vaccines in particular. Completely adrift and lost, babbling without the slightest grounding in reality. joe says: "Actions in the face of infections". we share about as much in common with the animals you listed above in this regard as we do with their anatomy. maybe you have fins and wings and a really small brain, sure, but in the "face of infections", humanoids have a massive response repertoire, whilst the animals you listed? well, it's pretty much let "nature" run its course.

what are you rambling about? put the 1950's national geographic down and come back, joe. come back to 2012. come back to the world of reflective humans, the ones capable of making informed decisions based on facts and actual events, joe, the ones capable of making vaccines in the face of deadly illnesses, joe, and then actually making them safer as our thinking evolves. yeah that's right joe, SAFER. did you know we've made our vaccines safer? far out, man, don't gotta be like them birds and fish forever. is that right, joe? always? i admire your talents of prognostication. ACCEPT THE STATUS QUO! brilliant. let's do this with politics also. and in our personal lives. and we'll teach our children this lesson too: SOME THINGS ARE UNAVOIDABLE, SO PLEASE DON'T EVEN TRY. ACCEPT WHAT YOU ARE TOLD.

I agree that most "anti-vaccine/anti-science" types are, by definition, "irrational." even "pro-science/pro-vaccine" types sometimes fall into that category.

it laughs and rolls around, all at the same time!

i know, a strange uncommon position. at this point in amerigo, a vaccination is not for the safety of the individual per se, but for the safety of cdc's vaccination regime (and its implications).

sure, i got your point, but we disagree on the particulars that make up your metaphor (we disagree on vaccine risk assessments and how they are arrived at). and, as stated before, i think the individual risk currently is near zero from the vaccinatable illnesses (that vaccines have no doubt helped eradicate), but it is the potential collective risk that undervaccination might lead to that causes me concern.

hey bob, check this out, it's pretty cool (cooler after a bong toke):

this is definitely an improvement over the idaho compound accent, but i'm afraid you might have missed checking some outlets.

depends on numerous variables and not so variables. check on these, report back.

what was the actual trouble you had with my asperger's analysis of the situation? i thought it to be quite robust in methodology and result. my BF is around 10%, i quit smoking years ago, and i even stopped alcohol. now if i could somehow get over this interwebs thing.... but seriously, not really sure what you think the elephant in the room is that i'm avoiding? thanks for links. looking forward to reading.

some context on the hpv vaccine: The Human Papilloma Virus occurs as more than 100 subtypes, only four of which are associated with cervical cancer. When Merck created the first HPV vaccine, Gardasil, in 2006, the company engaged in an aggressive marketing and lobbying campaign to get governments to mandate vaccination of all girls ages 11 and older. Merck was in a hurry to establish Gardasil’s market dominance because it knew its competitor, GlaxoSmithKline, was not far behind with an HPV vaccine of its own. Interestingly, this first high-pressure marketing campaign was launched before there was widespread experience with the vaccine to assess safety, and the attempt to ramrod HPV vaccination into the menu of government-mandated vaccines was met with substantial resistance. she goes on to say: Proponents of mandatory vaccination will point to studies showing HPV to be the most prevalent sexually transmitted disease with nearly 45% of women ages 20 to 24 being infected. However, this includes all of the various subtypes. When looking at the subtypes that are considered high risk for cervical cancer and covered by the HPV vaccine (subtypes 16 and 18), the prevalence rate drops to 2.3%.] furthermore (bear with me): Adding to the scandal of the promotion of these vaccines is the fact that at least 30% of all cases of cervical cancer are associated with HPV types that are not covered by vaccines. Therefore, getting the vaccine does not lessen the need to get regular pap smears.The Center for Disease Control (CDC) states that getting these regular pap smears alone will prevent most cases of cervical cancer because precancerous changes can be detected and successfully treated before they develop into actual cervical cancer. and, thank god, finally: What does this series of three shots costing $400 provide? It does not save women any money or time with regards to preventive care because they still need the same cervical cancer surveillance as those who are not vaccinated. And it does not change your ability to fight HPV subtypes not covered by the vaccine. All it does is prevent the need for treatment of precancerous lesions in that small percentage of women who contract subtypes 16 or 18 and do not clear the infection on their own. she goes on to say that the vaccine is quite safe, and either path taken, in her eyes, is a reasonable one. pretty balanced and informative take, imo. i suppose a concern might be that girls will think they are protected, therefore skipping out on regular pap smears? conjecture.... link

meaning, that isn't a good argument against it. there are much better ones.

some did, some didn't. a heck of a lot more didn't than did.

from joe's link: Diagnoses have increased tenfold, although a careful assessment suggests that the true increase in incidences is less than half that. don't confuse diagnosis with actual incidence.

that's a mighty fine, um, idaho accent you got there, but care to run the numbers?

hi oly, i agree, but then you kinda did by saying you're not an "anti-vaccine person". very few are "anti-vaccine" per se. of course there's a fringe that vocally and hysterically decries everything about vaccines: gov plot, big pharma conspiracy, aliens, etc etc., but don't automatically assume that anyone who questions any aspect of vaccines as they are currently promulgated by the cdc, nih, offit, etc. falls either into the above group, or is "anti-vaccine".

oh and i think the article mis-stated the rise in autism: hasn't it gone from a 1 in 10,000 diagnosis rate 50 years ago to a in in 88 rate now? much greater than a ten-fold increase....

interesting article. a few little misgivings: At least a subset of autism — perhaps one-third, and very likely more — looks like a type of inflammatory disease. And it begins in the womb. doesn't completely jibe with: What does stopping the insanity entail? Fix the maternal dysregulation, and you’ve most likely prevented autism. nitpicking, sure, but interesting article. now if a similar study would include a vax vs non-vax component. it'd be pretty easy to find 'em, since we all know about those crazies who aren't vaccinating.

#5 i think absolutely plays a role. but the only role? how many of the other correlatives can create symptoms that fall within the autism spectrum?

and jayb, for more reasons, read this beast of a thread.

what sort of intelligence are we talking about? the ability to decipher a set of inter-related variables and their interactions and predict the optimal outcome? if we are to use this game theory model, there would be only one "intelligent" course of action for an american living an exclusively domestic life today: no vaccinations. when one computes the odds of contracting ANY of the illnesses we currently vaccinate for, then further computes the odds of having ANY serious side effects, and contrasts these with both the known and the possible side effects of vaccinations, the "intelligent" course of action is quite obvious. (this model assumes current disease prevalence in the US.) any change in the variables above would potentially affect the optimal strategy of course. ayn rand endorsed this approach, therefore you will too. btw it was the pnas.org post that i found really interesting.