Immunizations....what has happened

Hi. My name is Paul Offit. I am talking to you today from the Vaccination Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

Today is December 21, 2012, a day that according to the Mayan calendar should mark the end of the world as we know it. Speaking of ancient beliefs that aren't founded on good science, I thought it would be of interest to talk about a paper that appeared in the journal Pediatrics [1] this week, about thimerosal in vaccines.

Many of you might wonder why we are still talking about this. Hasn't this issue been resolved? Yes, it has, but it has come up again because of an effort by antivaccine groups that have lobbied the World Health Organization and other global health groups to try and get thimerosal out of vaccines given to infants and young children in the developing world -- something that would be disastrous.

In the late 1990s, as children began to receive more and more vaccines in the United States, they also received more and more thimerosal, an ethyl mercury-containing preservative in vaccines. Concern was expressed at the time that this may put children at risk. Mercury at high doses can cause harm, but the question was whether mercury in the form of ethyl mercury, given at much lower doses, could cause harm. This caused a great deal of concern in the late 1990s. As a consequence, there was a real effort to get thimerosal out of vaccines given to infants and very young children.

Since that time we have learned, in a series of 7 studies, that children who received thimerosal-containing vaccines compared with children who received the same vaccines without thimerosal are not at greater risk for neurodevelopmental problems, including autism or even subtle signs of mercury toxicity. In the late 1990s, a handful of children died of hepatitis B because the health centers in which they were born were so scared of thimerosal, which had been given a "scarlet letter," that they abandoned their hepatitis immunization program -- even for children who were born to mothers who had hepatitis B.

At the time, this action was considered a precaution: Let's get thimerosal out of vaccines until we learn more about thimerosal. Children died as a result; therefore, we didn't follow a precautionary principle that argues to do something to avoid harm, but in fact we caused harm. This new article is putting forward the idea that we should not make the same mistake, because now we know that the level of thimerosal in vaccines doesn't cause harm. If it is decided by the World Health Organization or other global health agencies to remove thimerosal from vaccines, it would mean using single-dose vials instead of multidose vials, which makes vaccines much more expensive for countries that already can't afford them.

If we were to do this, instead of a handful of children dying, hundreds or thousands of children will die. This paper is saying, "Mea culpa; let's not make the same mistake again." Thank you very much for your attention and happy holidays.

//Unless we are willing to kill off 3/4 of the population, and all go and live on farms, that's not going to change.//

Except that so many human diseases originate in herd animals...

vaccination was up to 100% effective in reducing the risk of HPV16/18-related high-grade cervical, vulvar, and vaginal lesions and of HPV6/11-related genital warts.

High-coverage HPV vaccination programs among adolescents and young women may result in a rapid reduction of genital warts, cervical cytological abnormalities, and diagnostic and therapeutic procedures. In the longer term, substantial reductions in the rates of cervical, vulvar, and vaginal cancers may follow.

Ultimately, there's really only two choices when malthusian pressure red lines: fight it out in natural selection terms or manage the reproduction (fairly in some way in the eyes of the community; via "impotence," haha, no, sterilization after replacement)

2012 ends with fewest wild polio cases ever: The year ended with the fewest children paralyzed by wild polio virus, in the fewest places, in history. Two hundred and eighteen wild polio cases have been reported so far for 2012 – a greater than 60% reduction from 2011. Over the year, through the tireless dedication of the on-the-ground heroes of polio eradication, more than 2 billion doses of vaccine were distributed to 429 million children around the world.

Hi. My name is Paul Offit. I am talking to you today from the Vaccination Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. I would like to talk about a report from the Institute of Medicine (IOM), published on January 16, 2013, looking at the safety of vaccines and the vaccine schedule. The IOM tried to answer the questions, "Is this vaccine schedule, as recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Academy of Pediatrics, reasonable? Has it been well tested? Is it safe?"

The advantage of the IOM is that they are part of the National Academies, which don't receive funding from pharmaceutical companies or the federal government. This panel, for the most part, is made up of individuals who have never done research specifically in vaccines. They haven't done clinical studies on vaccines, reviewed biological license applications, or participated on data and safety monitoring boards for vaccine research. This is a group that has expertise in other areas of medicine, and they brought that expertise to looking at the safety of vaccines.

Information from IndustryThey looked at voluminous amounts of data, including data from so-called "concomitant use studies," in which investigators aim to prove that a vaccine, when it is added to the schedule, doesn't interfere with the safety or immunogenicity profiles of existing vaccines, and vice-versa. Hundreds of such studies have been conducted, and anyone who looks at these data closely will come to the same conclusions that the IOM came to, which is that the vaccine schedule is well-tested and safe.

Hopefully, for some patients in your practice, this review by a group of independent investigators will be convincing. I suspect that some patients, no matter what the data show, will still choose not to get vaccines. This is unfortunate because then we simply have to keep our fingers crossed and hope that children don't suffer as a result of that choice, whereas we wouldn't have to keep our fingers crossed and depend on luck if people simply got vaccines. I hope the IOM study will help.

Thank you for your attention.

And as far as immunizations and the prolific use of antibiotics,, weve created these newer strains of ever developing and morphing bacterias. Have we not?

Howrah District, India (CNN) -- Rukhsar Khatoon is too young to fully grasp the significance of her life: that she is a last in a country of 1.2 billion people.
She has become the greatest symbol of India's valiant -- and successful -- effort to rid itself of a crippling and potentially deadly disease. Rukhsar, 4, is the final documented case of polio in India.

Her parents, Abdul Shah, 32, and Shobejan Begum, 30, blame themselves for their child's suffering. They had their other children vaccinated, but not Rukhsar. She was a sickly child, in and out of hospital with liver infections and diarrhea. They thought it safer not to subject her to more medication.

Rukhsar's father Abdul Shah blames himself and says he thought she would never walk again.

It wasn't until little Rukhsar's right foot swelled and twisted in early 2011 that her parents took her to a hospital in nearby Beleghata for tests. She was just 18 months old when doctors confirmed the worst: Rukhsar had polio.

Polio is caused by a virus that attacks the brain and spinal cord cells that move joints and muscles. About one-third of those who contract polio in India are left paralyzed -- as was Rukhsar.

"There were three keys to our success," Kapur says. "Immunize, immunize and immunize."

When The Carter Center began leading the international campaign to eradicate Guinea worm disease in 1986, there were an estimated 3.5 million cases in 21 countries in Africa and Asia. Today, that number has been reduced by more than 99.99 percent, with the vast majority of cases remaining in South Sudan.

In 2014, 126 cases of Guinea worm disease were reported worldwide.

Only in America can one be considered a caring parent if you don't spank yer kid yet you
refuse them a smallpox or polio vaccine. Do we have lead water pipes?

The disease killed an estimated 400,000 Europeans annually during the closing years of the 18th century (including five reigning monarchs),[10] and was responsible for a third of all blindness.[6][11] Of all those infected, 20–60 percent — and over 80 percent of infected children — died from the disease.[12] Smallpox was responsible for an estimated 300–500 million deaths during the 20th century.[13][14][15] As recently as 1967, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that 15 million people contracted the disease and that two million died in that year.[5]

Like I said it has gotten much better. When my son was born in 2001 the pamphlets they gave out said things like "slight risk of serious complications like seizure, deafness, death". And I asked the Doctor what does "slight risk" mean statistically? Like 1 in a million, 1 in 10,000? And they said, "we don't know". Really? This industry makes billions of dollars and they can't fund studies and communicate the actual risks and produce literature to compare that to the risk of getting the disease or what would happen to the chance of getting the disease over time if people don't vaccinate?

About 700 people have died since 2000 from vaccines. Of course MANY more would have died from disease. But anything I'm going to do to my children with the risk of death must be well explained.

It's not my job to figure this stuff out and communicate it.

In the past three decades, the United States has made across-the-board progress in improving the rates of mortality among children (from birth to age 19). For example, the child and teen mortality rate has improved by 43%, dropping from 46 deaths per 100,000 children and teens in 1990 to 26 per 100,000 (representing 10,800 fewer deaths) in 2011.