A Response to Vaccine Religion

I recently came across this photo from a pediatrician’s group office and it’s been niggling at the back of my mind for the past several days so I thought it might be useful to take it point by point and respond to the belief statements with actual evidence since (as is typical) there is not a shred of science cited on this statement.

First of all, I’ve never read anything that reads more like a religious creed than this other than an actual religious creed. It gives second hand embarrassment and major cringe. It starts out with a number of belief statements, a whole section in the middle of propaganda and misinformation, and rounds out the end with a heavy dose of fear mongering. I will not mince words. It’s a festering turd, but let’s start wading through, I can promise it will be worth it.

Let’s be clear. Unless you address specific scientific evidence, broad belief statements are not a part of an honest discussion of science. Simply making belief statements without citing anything is extremely telling, in my opinion. Especially the line “we firmly believe…” over and over.

“Saying “I believe in science” and then not actually being willing to follow the scientific method and allow for scientific debate or changing your mind as more evidence comes out is so hilariously obtuse. And it’s become the rallying cry of so many of these people who don’t realize they’re talking about ideology, not science.” -Caroline Dooner

The first two belief statements combined are basically a parroting of the oft repeated slogan, “vaccines are safe and effective”. This statement alone is incredibly unscientific because it is too broad and oversimplified.

Let’s define these terms according to the way they seem to be understood by those who repeat this claim: by “safe” I think most doctors would say that although every product has side effects and risks, compared to the infections they prevent, vaccines do so much more good than harm that whatever small risk is inherent in them is worth it.

The problem is, none of the vaccines on the childhood schedule have been properly safety tested so there is no evidence on which to base this belief. To evaluate safety, one must have a control group. To have a proper control group that you can actually measure safety with, that group must receive something inert, usually a sugar pill or a saline placebo. That simply does not occur in clinical trials for vaccines. You can read my thoughts on the safety testing here, but if you don’t have time for that, here’s a photo of the vaccine placebo pyramid for you to study:

For a simple example of how this works, when the pneumonia vaccine was first licensed for babies (first given at 2 months) it was measured for safety against an experimental meningitis vaccine that never actually made it to market. [1] One assumes that’s because it was even more dangerous or faulty than the pneumonia vaccine, but regardless. Giving the control group an “investigational” product with which to measure safety is beyond unethical. When they moved from 7 strains of pneumonia to 13, the new prevnar vaccine was measured against the old because its safety had been thoroughly established apparently.

If there isn’t an older version to measure against, they sometimes take all of the components of the vaccine minus the antigen (virus, bacteria, etc) and use that concoction to measure against in the control group which is what they did with the rotavirus vaccine. [2] Because…why? Well, you tell me. I actually can’t come up with a reason that sounds plausible other than hiding reactions and purposefully obfuscating safety signals. But I’ve been at this for long enough to develop a healthy cynicism and view these trials with a gimlet eye, so I may be missing something.

Sometimes, like with the hepatitis vaccines given on the first day of life, they were measured for safety for 4 days [3] and 5 days [4] and they skip a control group entirely. How that measures safety in any quantifiable way, no one can say, but here we are.

So proper safety testing is not done during clinical trials and once the vaccine is on the schedule, it conveniently becomes “unethical” to have a placebo group because withholding these miraculous products from a group of children would be consigning them to death and destruction, obviously. So in a cycle where the proper studies are never done, we enter a state I like to call “Settled Science” and this is how that is accomplished.

The entire schedule has never been evaluated for safety, nor do we check to see what happens when a new vaccine is added and then given at the same time as other vaccines.

We have death rates from the infections vaccines target. We have some of the injury rates. What we don’t have is any sort of safety profile for vaccines. We simply cannot make a risk benefit analysis based on this evidence and declare vaccines broadly “safe”. To do so, one must be willfully ignorant or in the grips of a religious belief system that gives one assurance through repetition instead of actual evidence.

Efficacy is another conversation altogether and most vaccines do “work”. But let’s actually define that. The only way we measure vaccine efficacy is through the production of antibodies, and by that measure, they do seem to be effective for most people. Primary vaccine failure does occur, however. Which means 2-10% of healthy people do not mount antibodies to vaccines at all. [5] Then there’s the whole conversation about secondary vaccine failure which is how long they actually last. Some only last 2 years, [6] while others may last as long as 10 [7], but the evidence is pretty weak. I will say the live vaccines seem to last longer but 20 years would be a stretch.

So yes, effective. But that statement requires a lot more detail than just a broad, sweeping generalization. It does people a disservice. Each vaccine is different and each person is different.

The third “firmly believe” statement is one I’m not going to try and refute. They can go right ahead and keep believing that everyone should follow CDC recommendations. A lot of us don’t trust the CDC blindly anymore, but to each their own. To that I simply say, “no thanks.”

The fourth statement is a firm belief that vaccines do not cause autism. I’m not going to dive deep into this because I’ve already covered that topic here but I highly encourage anyone to look into the evidence cited by the CDC that vaccines (plural) do not cause autism. Find the “mountain of evidence” cited on their website here.

To sum up the evidence available to back up this claim; we’ve studied the MMR (let’s not talk about how epidemiological studies have a hard time proving causation or the fact that within those studies we have accusation of fraud and whistleblowers etc), we’ve studied thimerosal (one ingredient out of hundreds contained in vaccines) and we have one antigen study (which no one is even concerned about). So since we’ve studied the MMR and one of the ingredients that’s in some vaccines, that equals an unequivocal statement on the CDC website claiming “Vaccines Do Not Cause Autism”. Okay wait. All vaccines? All of them don’t because you’ve studied one of them? Is that how we’re doing science now?

If you want to read about the lawsuit where the CDC provided ALL of the evidence they relied upon to make that statement, this is such a fun read.

The glowing report in the fifth statement is simply contrary to all evidence and even common sense. How does one look around and assume that vaccines create health? They’re not even meant to do that. Unless health means the absence of the symptoms of the 16 infections we vaccinate against? This is where I suffer another wave of second hand embarrassment for these people. They’ve gone beyond the science here. They’re dabbling in a fairy tale that’s completely disconnected from reality. Vaccines target certain diseases. They do not make people healthy. They’re not loaded down with essential minerals and vitamins, y’all. We weren’t born with a deficiency that is somehow filled with vaccines. Although maybe these doctors have wondered so far afield in their imaginations that they believe this? It does seem that way. Oh I do cringe for them.

I’m just going to list 4 points to refute the belief that vaccines are the salvation of the human race from all disease, bringing us nothing but glowing, robust, vibrant healthiness.

When we look at all cause mortality, we find that measuring from 1900 to 1977, vaccines had less than a 1% impact on saving lives. Sanitation is the real hero and that’s simply the truth. Vaccines, along with surgeries and antibiotics, have very little impact on actually saving lives, contrary to the popular slogans repeated over and over. [8]
The DPT vaccine, hailed as the hero for eliminating diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus here in the US (we’ve since switched to the DTaP but that didn’t occur until 1992) has been found to kill 5 to 10 times more children than it saves from those infections in Guinea Bissau, Africa. [9] Maybe this is why no one wants to do vaccinated versus unvaccinated studies?
We’re not actually that healthy. I mean, look around, doc. Do you really think children are healthier now that they’re injected 72 times versus our parents who only got 11? If vaccines actually made us healthier, children in the US would actually be…healthier. It really is that simple. If you want some stats, start here.
There’s a trade off that no one is talking about but is being quietly documented in the literature. There’s something that happens when we deny God’s design and think we can do one better. We may accomplish some things people think are worthy but messing with nature comes at a cost. So does playing God. It’s a trade off that I personally am very uncomfortable with.

Not to beat a dead horse but I want to finish up this section with a few visual tools that may help make this even more clear.

When the CDC and other vaccine promoters talk about lives saved, they only measure by disease rates/deaths. They do not look at all cause mortality. It’s true that they may save lives from the infection they’re targeting. That is not the whole picture though. If your vaccine makes children more susceptible to dying from other causes at 5 or 10 times the rates they would have been dying from the infections you’re preventing, you’re not actually saving lives. You’re taking them. The DPT vaccine is being given to children all over the third world. And the WHO is still claiming to save millions of lives with it. This is the case with more than DPT. Polio also fits this category. Paralysis rates are actually worse and more deadly than when polio was endemic in most of the world but all we can talk about is polio.

But I digress.

To enhance the success of vaccines, there are all kinds of ways to make them appear more effective than they are. You can count rates from decades before the vaccine was introduced and compare with rates today. Because in this case, correlation actually does equal causation. But when they show you graphs of vaccine efficacy, they always start the graph a minute and a half before the vaccine was introduced. Like this:

But what happens when you zoom out?

“When the tide is receding from the beach it is easy to have the illusion that one can empty the ocean by removing water with a pail.” -R. Dubos

Moving on to the sixth statement: blaming the return of “once eradicated” infections on antivaxxers is a dirty trick only pharma could get away with. They literally blame the failure of their product on the people who didn’t get it. It’s kind of genius, actually. As a marketing gimmick, at least. Truly a shame that it works so well.

There’s so many directions we could go with this argument. Herd immunity history, our ability to place full confidence in the bubble of protection provided by our vaccine when traveling to a country with endemic infections we don’t want to catch, but here in the US where childhood vaccine uptake is 95% or more as a whole, we look askance at our neighbors, expecting them to pull smallpox out of their back pocket or something. It defies all logic, but let’s do a few examples anyway. Specifics are important here. Which diseases are coming back? Are they truly coming from antivaxxers?

Measles is always a big one. First of all it’s important that it more or less follows a five year cycle instead of annual surges. It’s always been like this. Yes, the vaccine did decrease cases, but does that follow that the unvaccinated are bringing it back? Did you happen to know that 5% of the MMR-vaccinated get a “measles like rash”? [10] Did you know the vaccine sheds? What about genotyping and testing outbreaks for vaccine strain measles? Did you know that in the infamous Disney outbreak of 2015, of the 194 measles cases, 73 were identified as vaccine strain? [11]

Let me just insert here that I do think measles is coming back. But it’s not because of the unvaccinated. It’s because the vaccine does not confer lifelong immunity like catching it naturally did. Most adults are completely “unvaccinated” even though they don’t know it, unless they’ve gotten boosted in adulthood. Which makes a larger and larger portion of the population vulnerable, especially as the older generation starts dying that had lifelong immunity from catching it. Herd immunity is in our review mirror when it comes to measles and we will never achieve it with the artificial immunity the vaccine offers.

What about polio? Well that’s a long story that I won’t get into right now, but genotyping plays a big role in this conversation and they actually do keep track of the types causing the outbreaks with polio. The outbreaks of polio in the world right now are 99% vaccine strain. [12] The random case in New York recently? Vaccine strain. [13]

Those two seem to be the big ones people complain about, but let’s be clear. It is disingenuous, ignorant, and annoying that antivaxxers become the scapegoat in this conversation when no one wants to talk about how live vaccines shed and inactivated vaccines don’t stop transmission and can actually make you a silent carrier. [14] If you care about stopping the spread of disease, vaccines are simply not the way.

The rest is just them denying that they’re trying to scare you while they tell you your child may become ill, disabled, and die, and assuring you they don’t want to pressure anyone, but if you don’t comply with their recommendations they might be kicking you out of their office. I’m sure insurance payouts for percentage of patients vaccinated has nothing to do with this at all.

I haven’t mentioned this, but the Covid vaccine is on the CDC recommended childhood schedule now starting at 6 months. I feel like that gives the statements above a whole new perspective and makes all of it even more disturbing.

To wrap up, it saddens me to see this religious belief in doctors who should be doing their due diligence and at the very least, following the Nuremberg Code to not coerce their patients and give them informed consent instead of a list of belief statements and bullying tactics. But when the evidence to support your beliefs is so inadequate, I guess this is the path many feel they must choose.

Informed Health

A Response to Vaccine Religion

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