And The Dumb Marches On
I want you to meet Texas State Representative Bill Zedler, who lives in a small area between Dallas and Fort Worth.
Zedler has introduce legislative to make it easier for parents to opt-out of getting their kids vaccinated.
He explained the scientific reasoning behind his efforts.
“They want to say people are dying of measles,” he added. “Yeah, in Third World countries they’re dying of measles. Today, with antibiotics and that kind of stuff, they’re not dying in America.”
Oh Holy Crap. If this guy, God forbid, should come down with cancer, let’s pump him full of antibiotics and send him home.
You know what bother me? Not one other Republican stood up and said, “Shuddup, you damn fool.” All the sheep just turned around and started following the guy talking.
Thanks to Brian C for the heads up.
If you are born before 1957 and you don’t know if you’ve had measles the doctor tests for it – that’s how serious this is. I hate for innocent children to suffer because of this idiocy!
1Measles is caused by the Rubeola virus. ANTIBIOTICS DON’T WORK AGAINST VIRUSES.
Sheesh.
What the heck does that mean, “They want to say people are dying of measles”? Who wants to say that? Either people are dying of measles (which they are) or they are not; it doesn’t matter what “they” want to say.
2Would say Zedler is just another snocilbupeR practicing medicine without a license, but I’m old enough to vaguely remember Bill Frist ~2005 was a doctor. Back to the drawing board for a theory as to why these guys are so obstinately proud of saying st00pid things.
Yeah kids hospitalized for measles an easily avoidable situation with vaccination. No doubt this screaming genius also has some st00pid ideas on how to cut the health care budget, too.
3Anyone who has followed my comments on this blog should know that I have no truck with Republicans.
But if you check he is right: in the U.S. in the last decade there have been zero deaths due to measles.
Further, there have been many deaths that have been attributed to measles vaccines. And many thousands of visits to the ER due to vaccine reactions.
The sheep in the room are not the people who question vaccine use.
What will happen here is that I will be called an anti-vaxxer (I am not) and many other names based on the statements above. Also anti-science. But science is about what you can measure with numbers and the actual numbers do not support the policy of forced vaccination.
It is hopeless to get anyone on an Internet forum to discuss this rationally because it is nearly impossible to get people who think they have science on “their side” that they actually do not so if you are really serious about it then look at the numbers and not the rhetoric.
4So this fool has no knowledge of 1) measles and 2) antibiotics. So I will explain it simply 2) does not treat 1). It is just that basic. God only knows other basic science he has wrong. I suspect it might involve the climate. He probably thinks high levels of CO2 won’t hurt you. I would be glad to show him how it can kill you dead in a closed space and will not take that long.
5The virus which causes measles can also cause births defects, premature delivery or death when a pregnant woman who is not immune is exposed to someone with the measles or chicken pox. Although healthy children may not die from these viral infections, the developing fetus is at high risk of death.
6250,000 children die each year worldwide from measles. It’s not harmless. Go to any old cemetery in this country and look at the tiny graves from 100 or so years ago.
7@Alan. Better check again. There was one in 2015-the first recorded death in a decade. Measles kills about 1 in 1000, so if there were only a couple of dozen cases a year, statistically there wouldn’t be many deaths. Since measles cases are on the upswing because of deluded idots against vaccination, there will be more in the future.
8Alan, do you think maybe the reason there have been zero deaths in the last decade d/t measles is BECAUSE of the high vaccination rates in the US?
9the silver lining is that if the offspring of people stupid enough to believe him, their gene pool will dwindle in just a generation or two.
10What Mike said.
@ Alan, while you’re being scientific, you are of course considering the health of infants too young to be immunized and people (e.g. immune-compromised) who can’t be immunized for health reasons, who rely on the herd immunity achieved through high vaccination rates, aren’t you?
The previous global target date for measles and rubella elimination worldwide was 2015 (it’s now 2020, but …), but outbreaks among the unvaccinated, which are actually getting bigger, put the kibosh on that. Antivaxxers are killing people, both children and adults, all over the world, when these dangerous diseases could be as completely eliminated as smallpox is, or as polio is getting to be. Nobody is vaccinated against eliminated diseases, so nobody would have an adverse reaction.
Although there are 1-2 deaths per 500 measles cases, the rate of hospitalization is 1 in 4, according to CDC (https://www.cdc.gov/measles/downloads/measlesdataandstatsslideset.pdf). Rates of serious adverse effects to vaccines are very much lower (see WHO info sheets on adverse effects).
The scientists are at CDC and WHO. All I can say is that I had measles, including fever so high I was delirious and almost hospitalized, and I wouldn’t wish it on anybody, of any age.
11Here’s y’all’s health PSA for the day *:
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/index.htm
The link shows and links to the various vaccine schedules for different groups, young, old, travelers, health providers. At the bottom are links to more info about it all.
.
Alan @ #4,
(politely) You’re just flat out wrong about ‘US last ten year zero measles deaths’.
Besides, the current and recent historical low absolute death numbers are due solely to near 100% vaccination rates preventing higher mortalities from measles.
Measles, once contracted, is a very dangerous disease, with a rather high mortality rate (IIRC, ~2-3 deaths per 1000 cases), far higher than any actual ‘complications’ rates.
Not too good odds, IMO, when playing with death.
I had measles when a kid, as did most kids, the vaccine became available in 1963; none of my kids since had it, all born from 1968 on. At ~2/1000 odds, even I ( ;] )would have a pretty small risk of losing a child to measles, but those are still unacceptable odds.
I had some cousins with polio too, I remember getting the first round of general public polio vaccinations around 1955 as about a second/third grader, very few contracted polio in the US after that. It had been a very scary disease, even scaring us kids, until then.
You want to help bring back those kinds of diseases? Go find another goddamned planet.
https://vaxopedia.org/2018/04/15/when-was-the-last-measles-death-in-the-united-states/
https://www.cdc.gov/measles/downloads/measlesdataandstatsslideset.pdf
“n the United States, from 1987 to 2000, the most commonly reported complications associated with measles infection were pneumonia (6%), otitis media (7%), and diarrhea (8%) (8). For every 1,000 reported measles cases in the United States, approximately one case of encephalitis and two to three deaths resulted (9–11). The risk for death from measles or its complications is greater for infants, young children, and adults than for older children and adolescents.”
.
* (although I’d like to choke the livin’ shit outta the CDC webpage designers, 70-80% of many of the page’s screenspace is eaten up with utterly useless pictures and a large ‘social media link’ bar; possibly why their pages are slow to load, their servers are wasting bytes and time on useless visual fluff… all of which makes it slow and difficult to find shit there now)
12MMR is more than measles. I have a deaf sister due to rubella brought to a girl scout meeting by an unsuspecting 10 year old girl, infecting my mom.
13I’m old. I’m old enough to remember when my bright, talkative eight-year-old cousin got the measles back in the 1950s. I also remember that she spent the rest of her life brain damaged in a wheelchair. Anti-vaxxers are the product of growing up in a country where vaccinations were the norm, and they never saw the alternative.
14I was afflicted with measles when I was 10 y.o.; I spent almost a month in the dark (to avoid going blind), feverish, and covered in horrible itchy spots.
Anti-vaxxers are stupid. Too bad their children and the children of others are going to have to suffer and die.
15Let us not forget the daughter of Gene Tierney and Oleg Cassini. Tierney was pregnant when somebody with German measles (an adult) just had to meet her at some public function. She gave birth to a severely disabled child–caused by exposure to measles–who was eventually institutionalized.
16BarbinDC & maryelle: German measles (rubella) is responsible for birth defects, not measles. (Dunno if measles also causes them, but the birth defects are the worst part of rubella.)
As for Alan, vaccinations are a victim of their own success. All of us older folks remember just how bad polio and measles and chickenpox and … were. Then they went away, and the societal memories went, too. Talk to your elders: how many aunts and uncles and great-aunts and great-uncles never made it to adulthood thanks to diphtheria, polio, measles, &c? Do they remember the pools closing every summer after the first polio case? Quarantine flags?
17To all my friends here.
I appreciate the responses here but as I said there is no point in trying to argue this complex topic in a space like this. And I am not an anti-vaxxer.
What I am saying is that the topic is NOT as cut-and-dried as so many of you seem to think it is. I could pick apart your numbers but it would be futile. Let me explain by example:
Consider the following:
As of November 30, 2018, there have been more than 93,179 reports of measles vaccine reactions, hospitalizations, injuries and deaths following measles vaccinations made to the federal Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS), including 459 related deaths, 6,936 hospitalizations, and 1,748 related disabilities. Over 50% of those adverse events occurred in children three years old and under.
OK somebody here refuted me by saying oh no there haven’t been zero deaths in the last 10 years there have been some. Like 11. So for sake of argument let’s say that’s accurate. From the VARES data base we have killed over 220 kids by giving them measles vaccine. If there was a toy out there (or maybe a snack product) that killed that many kids (and an equivalent number of older people) what would your reaction be?
So why are you all insisting the worse odds are the path to take?
But I know from experience you just won’t consider those numbers in any of your thought process or arguments. You will just tune it out because you all know it MUST be wrong. The CDC and your doctor told you so. And something about herd immunity.
Oh right. That. You might be surprised to learn that herd immunity is damaged by use of vaccines, not supported by it. I am not going to bother explaining that here because if you really want to know you will google it up and find out why. Odds are you won’t. Because the disinformation circulating is that strong.
OK, forget science for a second and get back to politics. Did you know that drug companies are shielded from liability related to vaccines? And the special court set up to hear such cases, after denying more than 90% of claims has still managed to pay out $4B of taxpayer dollars to people with vaccine injuries? Why is that? Because vaccines are so safe and nobody should even raise the slightest question?
There is much much more but I will sign off with that I agree that Zedler is dumb and I suspect that he has come to his contrary position not by any true process of skeptical science but by partisanship. And I agree that’s dumb.
18Any time anyone does the garbled-gush talk thing, you know they are 1. Wrong, and 2. Stupid. Dead give-away.
19Anybody here remember polio? Anybody remember the babies whose mothers had rubella during pregnancy?
Anybody know anybody with a compromised immune system including those with cancer who developed shingles??
Or people who have died from pneumonia? Flu?
Anybody remember having mumps measles rubella and chickenpox?
20I do. It was miserable. I had friends hospitalized with measles.
And you are right.
Disinformation is very strong.
But for those of us who suffered with the diseases, that knew people crippled by polio and died of pneumonia. Who saw severely handicapped kids born after exposure to rubella. For those of us who raised kids that had chicken pox.
We remember.
Just want to acknowledge Alan’s courage to wade into this swamp. It’s not without risk as this episode in our local news last month shows.
21https://www.precisionvaccinations.com/vaccination-side-effects-linked-improper-storage-and-handling-vaccines
Sadly this sort of thing is fodder for skeptics and shows that there needs to be constant effort to improve safety and efficacy. We had our child vaccinated, he’s now a healthy 28 year old. I got the polio vaccine on a sugar cube (1962?) but we have a close friend our age who’s parents wouldn’t consent and is crippled from polio. OTOH, I don’t get an annual flu shot. I didn’t get last years flu, why should I let them give it to me this year? That said, if I worked in health care, with children or elderly I might make a different choice.
For all of you at risk for shingles because you had the chicken pox as children, there’s a shortage of vaccine available. Unfortunately the media isn’t covering this and the CDC under this maladministration isn’t talking. That vaccine was recalled.
22Thank you, Jane & PKM, for the important info about the shingles vaccine being recalled. My doc gave me a script for it last summer, but none of the local pharmacies have had it in stock. It would have been nice to know why.
23