Chossidmom's thread about childhood vaccines

amother

↑ Scarlet ↓

Wed, Feb 28 2024, 3:47 pm

amother Aquamarine wrote:

Gotcha. It sounds like this presumes that the first generation vaccines were in fact tested against proper placebo trials?

Right! And my understanding is that most of them WERE (I can’t think of one that wasn’t but I don’t wanna claim “every” if I’m not positive). See my studies linked above. So like with the COV vax, it was against placebo until the burden of evidence that it WAS effective became so great that the ethical weight shifted from “vs placebo in case vax is harmful” to “no placebo bc placebo causes more harm than the benefit that vax could provide.”

Like everything it’s a risk benefit calculation.

amother

Amethyst ↓

Wed, Feb 28 2024, 3:58 pm

@Scarlet (I didn't read the whole thread and can't find the post I want to quote.)

I'm curious what you think of this.

I believe most doctors are good people who want to help their patients be healthy.

Here's the challenge. Medical school is extremely competitive. Once accepted, a student has to work very hard to maintain their grades in order to graduate.

That seems like it would make it very hard for someone who thinks out of the box, who's willing to challenge the status quo, or who has doubts on conventional wisdom to even graduate. Schooling takes all their energy, it doesn't leave much room to reflect, critically and contemplate whether the ideas being taught are true.

So whether they started that way or not, to graduate medical school, you have to work really hard to memorize and respond in the way medicine is being practiced.

It's telling to me that two of the big vaccine critical doctors admit to following mainstream medicine for years or decades before they stopped to think on their own.

amother

↑ Blush ↓

Wed, Feb 28 2024, 4:01 pm

amother Scarlet wrote:

So there is no long term placebo safety trials!!!!
How can one be so sure that “placebo causes more harm than the benefit that vax could provide“??

amother

↑ Blush ↓

Wed, Feb 28 2024, 4:05 pm

amother Scarlet wrote:

No they were not.
These documents have all the links. Especially the 3rd one.

https://icandecide.org/vaccine-safety-debate/

amother

↑ Blush ↓

Wed, Feb 28 2024, 4:09 pm

amother Scarlet wrote:

polio

varicella

[url=https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(23)00598-9/fulltext#]measles mumps rubella[/url]

Interested to see how you will move the goalposts next, now that your claims have been shown false.

Why do you think I’ll move the goalpost? Honestly it’s not easy to be going against the narrative. I’d love to be proven wrong.

amother

↑ Aquamarine ↓

Wed, Feb 28 2024, 4:36 pm

amother Scarlet wrote:

With respect to the covid vaccine, what's long term? My recollection was that the actual vaccine was given within a few months to the control group. There's no way that could have been enough time for all possible side effects to appear. Especially for a new technology whose potential side effects were as yet unknown and would potentially take time to appear. And if possible adverse effects were beginning to appear, destroying the control group would have made those effects difficult to spot and prove.

Also, it's one thing to say that a different formulation of, say, the polio vaccine has been on the market for several decades and therefore we have an ethical responsibility, vs the covid vaccine which had no predecessor.

Wouldn't it be nice if, today, we could compare, say rates of new cancer diagnoses to vaxed vs unvaxed across age groups? Using that as an example since this seems to be the latest unsolve-able debate regarding the covid vaccine.

amother

↑ Amethyst ↓

Wed, Feb 28 2024, 4:42 pm

amother Blush wrote:

Why do you think I’ll move the goalpost? Honestly it’s not easy to be going against the narrative. I’d love to be proven wrong.

I totally agree. I would love to be proven wrong. So much easier to go with mainstream medicine and have to fight against it. But I have to protect my kids.

Maybe most people who get vaccines are not injured. But if it's your kid, that's the only one who matters.

Sometimes I wish I could unsee everything I've seen. It's definitely easier to go along with everything - until it's you or your kid who's harmed by it.

amother

↑ Oak ↓

Wed, Feb 28 2024, 4:43 pm

amother Aquamarine wrote:

With respect to the covid vaccine, what's long term? My recollection was that the actual vaccine was given within a few months. There's no way that could have been enough time. Especially for a new technology whose potential side effects were as yet unknown and would potentially take time to appear.

Wouldn't it be nice if, today, we could compare, say rates of new cancer diagnoses to vaxed vs unvaxed across age groups? Using that as an example since this seems to be the latest unsolve-able debate regarding the covid vaccine.

New technology? Covid vaccine is not a new technology. mRNA has been around since the 1960s.

amother

↑ Aquamarine ↓

Wed, Feb 28 2024, 4:45 pm

amother Oak wrote:

New technology? Covid vaccine is not a new technology. mRNA has been around since the 1960s.

When was the technology used in humans prior to covid?

amother

↑ Oak ↓

Wed, Feb 28 2024, 5:03 pm

amother Aquamarine wrote:

When was the technology used in humans prior to covid?

For a prostate cancer vaccine, for MERS, flu, Zika virus vaccines, other cancers.
I think the cancer vaccines were primarily used by each patient for their specific cancer.

amother

↑ Aquamarine ↓

Wed, Feb 28 2024, 5:16 pm

amother Oak wrote:

For a prostate cancer vaccine, for MERS, flu, Zika virus vaccines, other cancers.
I think the cancer vaccines were primarily used by each patient for their specific cancer.

No, they were not in use prior to covid. Please provide links and I will retract.

Regardless, even if arguably they were used for some cancers, it doesn't change the fact that mRNAs were not used at a mass level to treat a virus such that safety, as based upon prior placebo-controlled studies, had been well established.

amother

↑ Scarlet ↓

Wed, Feb 28 2024, 6:44 pm

amother Amethyst wrote:

I would see it the opposite, as someone who also went a competitive route (PhD). In my experience, people who got accepted to my school/department (1% acceptance rate to my program), then somehow passed comprehensive exams, dissertation, landed a competitive postdoc, performed well in the postdoc, then landed our competitive job and continue to perform well in this job...are MILES more open-minded than other people I meet. In fact, challenging the conventional wisdom is precisely what helps people excel in science. Otherwise you would just be processing and reprocessing the same findings over and over.

Similarly, med school and residency etc weeds out people who would otherwise do poorly. Sure, success involves a degree of memorization, but it also involves clinical rotations which require you to creatively and flexibly gather information from a lot of sources (and use a bit of intuition and experience) to figure out a diagnosis and treatment. It's not as easy as following a textbook or running a standard battery of tests then giving a gold standard treatment. That does work sometimes! Like sure, if someone has high blood pressure, you toss a blood pressure med at them. But other times, you really have to think hard sometimes to get to the right diagnosis. Like for me, I have an autoimmune disease. Aside from the years it took for my doctor to find the right diagnosis, I then would be on a med that worked for a while, then it would stop working, and my doctor would have to think about what to try next.

My husband works in primary care so he's the exact person who is encouraging patients to get vaccines. That part, sure, is straightforward. But I have watched this man read the clinical trial data for himself. He's not just going "oh well uptodate said so."

Gently, as a BT, I can say that the secular world would also say that religious/frum people are more likely to be close-minded, uneducated, and just accept whatever we are told, too. We probably shouldn't resort to such generalizations.

Re: the ICAN letters

I didn't go through every single thing because it's a lot of info, but I did try to glean the most important bits.

One thing that stood out to me is that it seems people don't understand why the idea of solicited adverse effects is important. I think people who don't have a background in science or stats think that if anything could conceivably be linked to the vax 10 years down the line then it might be. Like if your kid gets vaxxed then later gets cancer, it COULD be from the vaccine.

But similarly, if your kid ate ice cream last year, maybe overindulgence in ice cream caused cancer.

That sounds a bit silly though, right?

We can predict what kinds of things are likely to be caused by vaccines, and in what time period, because we understand the chemicals at work and the ways they interact with humans and the ways things might go wrong. Vaccine injuries do exist and are well-documented. nobody is trying to pretend there are never side effects or other negative events that clearly link to vaccines.

Just that the autism your kid got at age 2 (a very normal age for signs of autism to emerge) is about as likely to be linked to the vaccines as it is to be linked to microplastics in your diet. (I'd argue the second explanation is way MORE likely, honestly.) Or to a medicine you took while pregnant. Or to genetics. All they can say is that they HAVE studied this, they have actually done this legwork, and autism does not relate to vaccines.

I know that's not the only vaccine injury people are worried about, but it's a common one so I'm using it as an example.

The point that I'm trying to make that I worry is going to be hard to explain is that a lot of the reasons we predict certain effects have to do with a detailed and expert understanding both of the drug at hand and of the human body. Those things only come with a medical or biological/biochemical etc education. You can't just throw out a random symptom and be like well it couuuuuld be vaccine.

That said, the FDA evaluates those too! All these things that there is no theoretical reason to think they are vax-related still get studied.

People take this stuff VERY seriously. Nobody wants dead or ill babies. I'm continually baffled and dismayed that people think we do.

In general, too, I think people don't quite grok statistics very well without studying it. The way these data get analyzed involves a lot of complicated mathematical modeling to account for the roles of random chance, of individual random variance (and non-random variance), group/demographic variables, etc etc etc, and then the kinds of models that compare the "universe in which this effect is likely to be related to vax" to the "universe in which the effect is likely unrelated" and use math to determine the probability that we are in one universe or another.

I guess you could say that anything over 0% probability we are in the "unrelated" universe is too high, but in that case there is nothing I will say that will convince you otherwise, because we think about the world in very different ways. I think it's tempting to want a hard easy black and white solution but, speaking as someone who does a lot of statistics, it's REALLY difficult to get someone to understand that we can actually have pretty strong confidence that a thing is true...but that the reason we know it is something that isn't as simple as pointing at the grass and going "green."

But I also think sometimes there are just people who wouldn't believe a vax was safe even if they shadowed it from start to finish and observed every step of the process because "who knows, They could have changed the vial label to trick me!" and to those people, I also won't ever convince them, because again we just do not think about the world the same way at all.

amother

↑ Amethyst ↓

Wed, Feb 28 2024, 7:40 pm

amother Scarlet wrote:

Hi all, just got home from picking up my kid + got dinner on. Will try to go through and answer questions. Will also ask my husband for clarification on anything that regards medicine/doctor stuff.

I know that everyone here is coming at it in good faith. I am too. I think that it is easy to get a bit frustrated having these conversations bc everyone cares deeply about the outcome, as we are all mothers. Professionally, it can also be frustrating for me because it feels like I always see people devalue or distrust people like me and my husband who only care about improving the world and helping people.

I hope that we can all give each other the benefit of a doubt. And please know that on the vax side, the vast majority of people involved in vaccine production and roll-out (including clinical trial leaders and doctors) really do care about the people who will be receiving the vaccine...which usually includes themselves and their own children.

All right. Anyway. I'll try to touch on the main things people brought up.

I would see it the opposite, as someone who also went a competitive route (PhD). In my experience, people who got accepted to my school/department (1% acceptance rate to my program), then somehow passed comprehensive exams, dissertation, landed a competitive postdoc, performed well in the postdoc, then landed our competitive job and continue to perform well in this job...are MILES more open-minded than other people I meet. In fact, Otherwise you would just be processing and reprocessing the same findings over and over.

Similarly, med school and residency etc weeds out people who would otherwise do poorly. Sure, success involves a degree of memorization, but it also involves clinical rotations which require you to creatively and flexibly gather information from a lot of sources (and use a bit of intuition and experience) to figure out a diagnosis and treatment. It's not as easy as following a textbook or running a standard battery of tests then giving a gold standard treatment. That does work sometimes! Like sure, if someone has high blood pressure, you toss a blood pressure med at them. But other times, you really have to think hard sometimes to get to the right diagnosis. Like for me, I have an autoimmune disease. Aside from the years it took for my doctor to find the right diagnosis, I then would be on a med that worked for a while, then it would stop working, and my doctor would have to think about what to try next.

My husband works in primary care so he's the exact person who is encouraging patients to get vaccines. That part, sure, is straightforward. But I have watched this man read the clinical trial data for himself. He's not just going "oh well uptodate said so."

Gently, as a BT, I can say that the secular world would also say that religious/frum people are more likely to be close-minded, uneducated, and just accept whatever we are told, too. We probably shouldn't resort to such generalizations.

Re: the ICAN letters

I didn't go through every single thing because it's a lot of info, but I did try to glean the most important bits.

One thing that stood out to me is that it seems people don't understand why the idea of solicited adverse effects is important. I think people who don't have a background in science or stats think that if anything could conceivably be linked to the vax 10 years down the line then it might be. Like if your kid gets vaxxed then later gets cancer, it COULD be from the vaccine.

But similarly, if your kid ate ice cream last year, maybe overindulgence in ice cream caused cancer.

That sounds a bit silly though, right?

We can predict what kinds of things are likely to be caused by vaccines, and in what time period, because we understand the chemicals at work and the ways they interact with humans and the ways things might go wrong. Vaccine injuries do exist and are well-documented. nobody is trying to pretend there are never side effects or other negative events that clearly link to vaccines.

Just that the autism your kid got at age 2 (a very normal age for signs of autism to emerge) is about as likely to be linked to the vaccines as it is to be linked to microplastics in your diet. (I'd argue the second explanation is way MORE likely, honestly.) Or to a medicine you took while pregnant. Or to genetics. All they can say is that they HAVE studied this, they have actually done this legwork, and autism does not relate to vaccines.

I know that's not the only vaccine injury people are worried about, but it's a common one so I'm using it as an example.

The point that I'm trying to make that I worry is going to be hard to explain is that a lot of the reasons we predict certain effects have to do with a detailed and expert understanding both of the drug at hand and of the human body. Those things only come with a medical or biological/biochemical etc education. You can't just throw out a random symptom and be like well it couuuuuld be vaccine.

That said, the FDA evaluates those too! All these things that there is no theoretical reason to think they are vax-related still get studied.

People take this stuff VERY seriously. Nobody wants dead or ill babies. I'm continually baffled and dismayed that people think we do.

In general, too, I think people don't quite grok statistics very well without studying it. The way these data get analyzed involves a lot of complicated mathematical modeling to account for the roles of random chance, of individual random variance (and non-random variance), group/demographic variables, etc etc etc, and then the kinds of models that compare the "universe in which this effect is likely to be related to vax" to the "universe in which the effect is likely unrelated" and use math to determine the probability that we are in one universe or another.

I guess you could say that anything over 0% probability we are in the "unrelated" universe is too high, but in that case there is nothing I will say that will convince you otherwise, because we think about the world in very different ways. I think it's tempting to want a hard easy black and white solution but, speaking as someone who does a lot of statistics, it's REALLY difficult to get someone to understand that we can actually have pretty strong confidence that a thing is true...but that the reason we know it is something that isn't as simple as pointing at the grass and going "green."

But I also think sometimes there are just people who wouldn't believe a vax was safe even if they shadowed it from start to finish and observed every step of the process because "who knows, They could have changed the vial label to trick me!" and to those people, I also won't ever convince them, because again we just do not think about the world the same way at all.

"Challenging the conventional wisdom is precisely what helps people excel in science."

I have two masters degrees. I had a 3.9 GPA in both. And I'll freely admit that I got it by doing the work the professors wanted. Accepting their version even if it was kind of niggling at me that maybe it wasn't correct. I wrote my papers according to their theories, and saved my doubts to discuss privately with my classmates.

When I tried to go with the interpretations I preferred over the professor's pet theories, I didn't get good grades.

Granted, I wasn't in the health sciences. Are the Health sciences so different?

Is a medical student who questions? The safety of vaccines going to get his professor to write a good recommendation? Is someone who see things big picture over details going to get good grades? If an intern evaluating a child for ADHD suggests a natural diet over medication, will that win his supervisor's approval?

↑ lakewood mom ↓

Wed, Feb 28 2024, 8:51 pm

amother Scarlet wrote:

Read the study about the varicella trial. Both groups were given the MMR vaccine first. One was given the varicella after, and one a placebo. But both groups had the MMR vaccine!!! That obscures any adverse reactions to a vaccine. How about one group vaccinated and one group NOT vaccinated?

↑ lakewood mom ↓

Wed, Feb 28 2024, 8:53 pm

amother Scarlet wrote:

I just mean there isn't a conspiracy. People might be acting greedily but there isn't an organized group of them. One of my academic colleagues might be greedy and p-hack his data to get published in a good journal. But when I look at 99% of my colleagues, they are motivated by the idea of justice and good in the world. That's why we accept $74k/year salaries despite having PhDs. We care about doing good, not making money.

No offense, but you aren’t part of the big fish that we’re referring to. Unless you work for the CDC and are conducting safety trials on vaccines…

amother

↑ Steelblue ↓

Wed, Feb 28 2024, 8:59 pm

amother Scarlet wrote:

Hi all, just got home from picking up my kid + got dinner on. Will try to go through and answer questions. Will also ask my husband for clarification on anything that regards medicine/doctor stuff.

I know that everyone here is coming at it in good faith. I am too. I think that it is easy to get a bit frustrated having these conversations bc everyone cares deeply about the outcome, as we are all mothers. Professionally, it can also be frustrating for me because it feels like I always see people devalue or distrust people like me and my husband who only care about improving the world and helping people.

I hope that we can all give each other the benefit of a doubt. And please know that on the vax side, the vast majority of people involved in vaccine production and roll-out (including clinical trial leaders and doctors) really do care about the people who will be receiving the vaccine...which usually includes themselves and their own children.

All right. Anyway. I'll try to touch on the main things people brought up.

I would see it the opposite, as someone who also went a competitive route (PhD). In my experience, people who got accepted to my school/department (1% acceptance rate to my program), then somehow passed comprehensive exams, dissertation, landed a competitive postdoc, performed well in the postdoc, then landed our competitive job and continue to perform well in this job...are MILES more open-minded than other people I meet. In fact, challenging the conventional wisdom is precisely what helps people excel in science. Otherwise you would just be processing and reprocessing the same findings over and over.

Similarly, med school and residency etc weeds out people who would otherwise do poorly. Sure, success involves a degree of memorization, but it also involves clinical rotations which require you to creatively and flexibly gather information from a lot of sources (and use a bit of intuition and experience) to figure out a diagnosis and treatment. It's not as easy as following a textbook or running a standard battery of tests then giving a gold standard treatment. That does work sometimes! Like sure, if someone has high blood pressure, you toss a blood pressure med at them. But other times, you really have to think hard sometimes to get to the right diagnosis. Like for me, I have an autoimmune disease. Aside from the years it took for my doctor to find the right diagnosis, I then would be on a med that worked for a while, then it would stop working, and my doctor would have to think about what to try next.

My husband works in primary care so he's the exact person who is encouraging patients to get vaccines. That part, sure, is straightforward. But I have watched this man read the clinical trial data for himself. He's not just going "oh well uptodate said so."

Gently, as a BT, I can say that the secular world would also say that religious/frum people are more likely to be close-minded, uneducated, and just accept whatever we are told, too. We probably shouldn't resort to such generalizations.

Re: the ICAN letters

I didn't go through every single thing because it's a lot of info, but I did try to glean the most important bits.

One thing that stood out to me is that it seems people don't understand why the idea of solicited adverse effects is important. I think people who don't have a background in science or stats think that if anything could conceivably be linked to the vax 10 years down the line then it might be. Like if your kid gets vaxxed then later gets cancer, it COULD be from the vaccine.

But similarly, if your kid ate ice cream last year, maybe overindulgence in ice cream caused cancer.

That sounds a bit silly though, right?

We can predict what kinds of things are likely to be caused by vaccines, and in what time period, because we understand the chemicals at work and the ways they interact with humans and the ways things might go wrong. Vaccine injuries do exist and are well-documented. nobody is trying to pretend there are never side effects or other negative events that clearly link to vaccines.

Just that the autism your kid got at age 2 (a very normal age for signs of autism to emerge) is about as likely to be linked to the vaccines as it is to be linked to microplastics in your diet. (I'd argue the second explanation is way MORE likely, honestly.) Or to a medicine you took while pregnant. Or to genetics. All they can say is that they HAVE studied this, they have actually done this legwork, and autism does not relate to vaccines.

I know that's not the only vaccine injury people are worried about, but it's a common one so I'm using it as an example.

The point that I'm trying to make that I worry is going to be hard to explain is that a lot of the reasons we predict certain effects have to do with a detailed and expert understanding both of the drug at hand and of the human body. Those things only come with a medical or biological/biochemical etc education. You can't just throw out a random symptom and be like well it couuuuuld be vaccine.

That said, the FDA evaluates those too! All these things that there is no theoretical reason to think they are vax-related still get studied.

People take this stuff VERY seriously. Nobody wants dead or ill babies. I'm continually baffled and dismayed that people think we do.

In general, too, I think people don't quite grok statistics very well without studying it. The way these data get analyzed involves a lot of complicated mathematical modeling to account for the roles of random chance, of individual random variance (and non-random variance), group/demographic variables, etc etc etc, and then the kinds of models that compare the "universe in which this effect is likely to be related to vax" to the "universe in which the effect is likely unrelated" and use math to determine the probability that we are in one universe or another.

I guess you could say that anything over 0% probability we are in the "unrelated" universe is too high, but in that case there is nothing I will say that will convince you otherwise, because we think about the world in very different ways. I think it's tempting to want a hard easy black and white solution but, speaking as someone who does a lot of statistics, it's REALLY difficult to get someone to understand that we can actually have pretty strong confidence that a thing is true...but that the reason we know it is something that isn't as simple as pointing at the grass and going "green."

But I also think sometimes there are just people who wouldn't believe a vax was safe even if they shadowed it from start to finish and observed every step of the process because "who knows, They could have changed the vial label to trick me!" and to those people, I also won't ever convince them, because again we just do not think about the world the same way at all.

It’s great to invent a new product or drug that will help people. It’s good for a doctor to offer the product to the patients in order to help if he or she believes in it. It’s not ok to force everybody to use it no matter what. If you knew ice cream affected your child poorly and caused problems, whether an allergic reaction, a behavioral problem or whatever it may be, but in order to do anything or go to any program, your child had to eat a bowl of ice cream every morning, how would you feel about it? Forcing people to give their children a product that for whatever reason they feel is dangerous for the child is cruel. It’s important that people be able to opt out if need be. And of course, the parent will be upset if there is an adverse reaction and blame the vaccine.

↑ lakewood mom ↓

Wed, Feb 28 2024, 8:59 pm

amother Aquamarine wrote:

Gotcha. It sounds like this presumes that the first generation vaccines were in fact tested against proper placebo trials?

Let’s make something clear. Besides for testing the antigens in each vaccine- there are toxic and terrible ingredients in the vaccine itself. The original vaccines were tested against another vaccine minus the antigens. This doesn’t give a REAL honest judgement if the vaccine is safe or not. They were tested for efficacy. And if you are putting an old vaccine against a new one… again, for efficacy. Because both groups can have adverse reactions to the vaccines but it will be obscured because they’re both given vaccines.
Give one group a vaccine and another a saline placebo. I don’t believe that was ever done!

↑ lakewood mom ↓

Wed, Feb 28 2024, 9:02 pm

amother Scarlet wrote:

You are incorrect. They don’t give saline due to “ethical reasons”. It’s such garbage.
Since 1986, they are protected and have multiplied the amounts of vaccines given to children. It’s very sad.

↑ lakewood mom ↓

Wed, Feb 28 2024, 9:14 pm

[quote="amother Scarlet"]polio

varicella

[url=https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(23)00598-9/fulltext#]measles mumps rubella[/url]

Interested to see how you will move the goalposts next, now that your claims have been shown false.[/quote
Your polio link isn’t the original study…

amother

↑ Aquamarine ↓

Wed, Feb 28 2024, 9:21 pm

lakewood mom wrote:

Well that was my question. Were the first generation, original vaccines tested against an inert placebo? I don't have time to parse through the ICAN letters and look up each vaccine he lists to see if it is first generation or not.