Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Explanation of shots
Someone-Diary of an Angry Mom- more articulate than I has posted an explanation of the flu shot/shots in general. Go read it. This one applies to adults, not just kids.
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2 comments:
I have a few issues with this blog. First, she says flu vaccines are ineffective, and then points to two seasons where they didn't work that well. Two data points does not make a trend by any standard at all.
Second, she's knocking down a bunch of straw men in the rest of the post. Whether people who refuse a vaccine should be quarantined/lose their jobs/lose custody of their kids is an entirely separate issue from vaccine effectiveness. People who say that kind of stuff are on such an extreme end of the spectrum (and very rare, to boot), so really she's losing focus on the actual argument.
Finally, I think she misunderstands why people say that unvaccinated people can be a danger to the vaccinated population. The way it works is that if you have a majority of people vaccinated, the virus is effectively dead to humans, although it can still survive in other hosts depending on the virus. The few people who aren't vaccinated are kept safe by the fact that there's almost no one to spread the virus to them in the first place. When the group of people refusing vaccines for whatever reason starts to grow, it becomes easier for the virus to reappear in humans. The chance of one person having a weakened immune system that an otherwise dormant virus can infect will increase, which makes it possible to spread to other unvaccinated people. When a virus finds enough hosts to spread around, it naturally mutates and forms new strains that THEN can infect people who were vaccinated against a different strain of the same virus. This is why in the UK and australia, measles and mumps are reappearing in the population at large; the number of people refusing the vaccine have increased dramatically. Viruses don't just die because humans can't be infected by them. THIS is why it's important to have the overwhelming majority of the population vaccinated.
I'd have to look up stats on genral flu shot effectiveness to give a better answer.....too busy right now to do that. The comments people make about those who choose not to vaccinate ix related to the post (and I don't think those people are all that rare. People get very worked up about an issue like this and strong feelings cause normally docile people to make "extreme" remarks and mean them.) I believe her point was that people make these comments without truly understanding the situation themselves.
I don't think the majority of people who are afraid that an unvaccinated child will infect their vaccinated child DO understand what you just explained! Just like all our antibacterial products are causing new tougher strains of bacteria to emerge, is it not possible for viruses that we are vaccinated against to do the same as well?
I am not necesarily anti-vaccination-I think that vaccines should be made safer, with less dangerous substances in them and with individual and family history routinely taken into consideration. Not to mention the fact that we gve so many shots to such tiny people with immature immune systems. The number of shots we receive has gone up drastically, it's not like even when you were born Claire. It's much more black and white before you have kids. Don't forget that many of the people who chose not to vaccinate have seen or know of someone who was harmed by a vaccination. It depends which you are more afraid of, the disease or the vaccination, and if you know someone harmed by either, your views will be skewed accordingly.
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