Making an Exception
Dec. 9th, 2014 03:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
akirluA number of my friends over on Facebook get pretty militant posting criticisms of the anti-vaccination crowd, and rightly so. There is zero scientific support for the fear that autism is caused by childhood vaccinations. None. The original study that started the panic was a methodological mess, so thoroughly bogus that The Lancet published not just a retraction but also an apology. Conversely, diseases like polio, small pox, whooping cough, influenza, rubella, these can cripple or kill people and are totally preventable with vaccinations. If you refuse to get your kids vaccinated based on totally irrational fears when the means are available you are not just a bad parent, you're a bad citizen, you're contributing to a public health risk and putting other people in danger. Shame on you.
So with respect to the overwhelming majority of anti-vaccine hysteria, I'm totally there with those who denigrate and debunk it.
But. I have an exception. My one divergence is on the subject of anthrax vaccine. Specifically, the quick-acting anthrax vaccines used on military personnel being deployed in Operation DesertSword Storm, in the first Gulf War. Those vaccines depended on two potentially toxic adjuvant components to help them mobilize the recipients' immune systems more quickly: aluminum hydroxide and squalene, One or both of those adjuvants may be the root cause of the galaxy of symptoms we call Gulf War Syndrome.
One of the clues that the immunizations were implicated was the fact that American soldiers who got the shots but never made it to the combat theater contracted Gulf War syndrome. Another is that French and British troops who participated in the Gulf, but did not get those inoculations, never developed GWS symptoms.
A dear friend of ours was mobilized for the Gulf War and given the standard troop vaccinations before being deployed. He collapsed on the tarmac while standing in formation after getting his injections, and was never sent over to the Gulf. He did develop a subset of the Gulf War Syndrome neurological and psychological symptoms, anyway. Jeff suffered a declining spiral of pain, depression, chronic fatigue, and insomnia, and eventually lost his ability to hold a job, and so also lost his house, all starting after that one inoculation and subsequent collapse. He's since died of a fatal interaction between the drugs he was on to relieve some of his GWS symptoms. Jeff was a warm, outgoing, bright, funny, loving, boundlessly fun guy, and he's gone now. Very probably because of that one vaccination. And so I take an exception.
This, of course, is just a personal anecdote. But there's been subsequent research which also support concern about these ingredients in those vaccines: here and here.
So with respect to the overwhelming majority of anti-vaccine hysteria, I'm totally there with those who denigrate and debunk it.
But. I have an exception. My one divergence is on the subject of anthrax vaccine. Specifically, the quick-acting anthrax vaccines used on military personnel being deployed in Operation Desert
One of the clues that the immunizations were implicated was the fact that American soldiers who got the shots but never made it to the combat theater contracted Gulf War syndrome. Another is that French and British troops who participated in the Gulf, but did not get those inoculations, never developed GWS symptoms.
A dear friend of ours was mobilized for the Gulf War and given the standard troop vaccinations before being deployed. He collapsed on the tarmac while standing in formation after getting his injections, and was never sent over to the Gulf. He did develop a subset of the Gulf War Syndrome neurological and psychological symptoms, anyway. Jeff suffered a declining spiral of pain, depression, chronic fatigue, and insomnia, and eventually lost his ability to hold a job, and so also lost his house, all starting after that one inoculation and subsequent collapse. He's since died of a fatal interaction between the drugs he was on to relieve some of his GWS symptoms. Jeff was a warm, outgoing, bright, funny, loving, boundlessly fun guy, and he's gone now. Very probably because of that one vaccination. And so I take an exception.
This, of course, is just a personal anecdote. But there's been subsequent research which also support concern about these ingredients in those vaccines: here and here.
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