I use Mary Chapin Carpenter’s maxim:

The stars might lie, but the numbers never do.

In the USA, measles vaccination was introduced in 1963, when that country had around 450,000 cases of measles per year. By 1968, when vaccination coverage reached about 60%, that number had fallen to <10,000.

Did hygiene undergo some astounding revolution from 1963–1968?

No.

In the year 2000, measles was declared eliminated from the USA. There were sporadic cases, traced to reintroduction by travellers from other countries, but American measles were No Longer A Thing. On average, there were fewer than 100 cases per year.

And then…

In 2014, there was a measles outbreak in Ohio. Of the 389 people affected, 340 had not been vaccinated: 89%.

In 2015, an outbreak traced to Disneyland afflicted 147 people, of whom 48% were definitely unvaccinated and a further 38% did not know their vaccination status.

In 2019, 1,282 people in the USA contracted measles, of whom 128 ended up in hospital and 61 had complications such as encephalitis or pneumonia.

Did hygiene in the USA undergo some catastrophic failure from 2000–2014?

No.

So what has changed?

In 1998, that lying son of a bitch, deservedly-ex-Doctor Andrew Wakefield, published a fraudulent study with one goal: that of boosting sales of his own single measles vaccine plus ‘test kits’ for a condition he’d made up called ‘autistic coloenteritis.’

People were fooled.

People started to refuse to vaccinate their kids.

And now people are getting seriously ill.

Once more with feeling, Ms. Carpenter.

I don’t. Or rather I didn’t when I was still practicing. I wasn’t about to change their minds and I didn’t care to argue with their junk science. I’d been there and done that and all it produced was a splitting headache. It simply wasn’t worth the time or energy only to fail to make a dent in what they “knew” to be “true”. If they truly wanted to return to a time of polio, smallpox, diptheria, varicella, influenza, hepatitis, tetanus, rubella, pertussis…I think that’s a long enough list for now…then who was I stop them? I treated them as well as I could, wished them well and sent them on their way with my heartfelt wishes that they would live a long and healthy life.

My only problem with anti-vaxxers had nothing to with their beliefs. My problem was that they had a choice, but their kids didn’t.

The first thing I would say is that the Black Plague — by which I mean the complex of three diseases caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis — certainly has not disappeared.

The Black Death is a term which refers to one specific epidemic which lasted from 1346 to roughly 1353 and is notorious for being particularly deadly and well-documented. However, it certainly was neither the first, nor the last, of its kind. The Plague of Justinian in the 6th century, which killed roughly a quarter of the population of the Byzantine Empire and the Middle East, was almost certainly Yersinia pestis. And following the mid-fourteenth-century wave, the plague would return every ten to twenty years in Europe, right through the seventeenth century, after which time it became less common. Today, the disease is still around, and is in fact endemic in certain parts of the world, including the Congo, Madagascar and Peru. It is not exactly unheard of in the United States either; we get about 7 cases of it per year. In fact, with much of public health in the US being dismantled, and what’s remaining having been taken over by anti-science cranks, I expect the plague to become endemic here too.

The second thing that I would say is that I haaaaaaaate the way “popular” science simplifies everything to the point of transforming statements that have a grain of truth to them into borderline misinformation. No, modern people are not immune to the plague. There is no “long-term immunity” to the disease among the population, as one of the answers to this question asserted.

The reality is much more complicated.

The series of plague pandemics that swept through Eurasia and North Africa beginning in the 14th century and subsiding in the 18th did lead to the surviving human population being slightly — slightly — more genetically robust against the pathogen, and slightly more likely to survive when infected. But the plague is still EXTREMELY deadly, and no, you are not immune to it.

In its mildest, bubonic, form, the plague has a mortality rate of 50%-60% without treatment; with prompt and aggressive antibiotic treatment, it’s 10%-15%, which I hope you realize is still HUGE. Respiratory plague has a mortality rate of nearly 100% without treatment, and around 50% with treatment. Septicemic plague has a mortality rate of approximately 90% with or without treatment. (Septicemic plague is basically ebola, practically speaking, just from a different germ.) All three forms are caused by the same bacterium, so if you contract it from someone with, say, the bubonic form, you can develop one of the other two, deadlier, forms, depending on the mode of the infection and what our girlfriend Yersinia decides to do once inside your body.

The bubonic plague is contracted through bites of infected fleas, with flea-carrying rodents (usually, but not always, rats) being the vehicle by which the fleas access human hosts. Pneumonic and septicemic forms are transmissible human-to-human, and in the case of the former, contagion is spread via coughing and sneezing.

So, bottom line: the plague is still around, it is still extremely contagious and it is still extremely deadly.

Genetics isn’t magic, by the way. Genes “multitask”, and even “positive” mutations almost invariably have trade-offs. The same genetic variant that made humans (slightly) more resistant to the plague, also made us more susceptible to autoimmune diseases.

Oh, and another reason later plague outbreaks killed fewer people than the Black Death was that there were just fewer people to kill. The 1346–1353 outbreak killed at least a third of the European population, and latest research suggests it was actually closer to half. Density dropped like a rock, even in cities (hell, especially in cities), and the population took almost 400 years to recover.

The third thing I would say is that public health policy is a lot more than vaccination, and public health policies are ABSOLUTELY the reason why the severity of plague pandemics declined after the 1340’s-1350’s and why they no longer happen today (for now).

Most anti-vaxxers, after all, are not only against vaccines, they are against ALL policies calculated to prevent the spread of disease. They are against clean water, against mass testing, against lockdowns, against social distancing, against public information about disease and against safety regulations being imposed on private business.

But long before antibiotics and vaccines, medieval and early modern governments were stepping in to dampen the effects of plague pandemics. In fact, I would trace the beginnings of what American conservatives bemoan as Big Gubmint to the Black Death and its aftermath. Lockdowns, quarantines and social distancing were invented back on the 14th century. Note, Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron is a collection of stories that a group of people tell each other to pass the time while isolating themselves in a castellated country villa during the Black Death.

I love this show, by the way.

If you know facts about the plague — like I do, because I am a former medievalist — you’d be amazed how many public policies we have today are clearly calculated to prevent the plague from becoming endemic again. That’s what all those deraticization programs are about, where government workers spray train tracks and various dumpsters with rat poison, while you grumble about what a waste of your tax money it is. (Yes, I know, rats chew through electrical wiring, but also the plague.) That’s what all those “insane” local laws are about that subject property owners to fines for failure to keep their lawns trimmed and clear away garbage; no, it’s not about appearance — at least not as the first priority. This is the rationale behind all those regulations imposed on grocery stores, warehouses and restaurants, and all the laws about garbage disposal.

The human race learned the hard way, through unspeakable tragedy, that rats = plague. You gotta keep rats away, and make it a matter of government policy. Leave it up to rugged individualists, and you’ll have people dropping in the streets in a month. (And back in an era when you couldn’t really keep rats away, a way to somewhat reduce the death toll was to act as soon as someone found a dead rat in their kitchen. Which was to put the authorities on high alert and in the case of people of means, start packing their trunks for an extended stay in the country.)

The fourth thing I would say … Is it the fourth thing? Anyway, I don’t even know where to begin with this.

An anti-vaxxer who says a thing like this implies, I suppose, that the way to deal with an epidemic of a disease like the plague is the way that he imagines people dealt with it in the 14th century, which is to suck it up and do nothing. Because the alternative — a death toll of considerably less than 30–50% of the population and no societal breakdown — is … worse? I mean. I can’t even.

(By the way, before I forget to mention: yes, there is a vaccine for Yersinia pestis. It is not generally available to the public, and the only people who take the jab are those who work with this organism in a lab or those who travel to areas where the plague is endemic. For now, other public health measures have been sufficient to prevent plague outbreaks.)

I have noticed that anti-vaxxers, and modern right-wingers in general, suffer from massive survivorship bias. Which is to say, they advocate policies that are expected to cause mass suffering or death in the belief that they will not be affected. During the COVID-19 pandemic, anti-vaxxers were routinely surprised when they, or people close to them, developed severe coronavirus. Today, people who cheered Trump and Musk on in hacking away at the federal government are shocked when they or people close to them lose their jobs or their financial backing.

So I guess the fourth thing I would say to this anti-vaxxer is that he is not special. A disease outbreak which kills 50% of the population (let’s say) gives him a statistical 50% chance of dying and is likely to kill at least half his family. A pathogen does not care how “brave” or nonchalant someone is. It does not care about people’s politics, their wealth, their religion or their workout routine. Anti-vaxxers and their kids make excellent hosts for bacteria and viruses. (Fungi, too.)

I can’t believe I have to say this, but living through an epidemic that kills between one third and half the population, even if you yourself survive, is almost unimaginably horrific. I really don’t understand how someone can be cavalier about a thing like this.

Apart from just being surrounded by mass death and losing one’s immediate family members — because let’s be realistic, the chances of an entire family surviving in an outbreak this deadly are nil — there are knock-on effects that exacerbate an already apocalyptic disaster.

Half the population dying means half the people who produce the food — grow it, butcher it, package it, deliver it to you — also die. During the Black Death, crops rotted in the fields, cows and goats went unmilked, animals died. The price of whatever food was available shot through the roof — every day. This triggered a famine that lasted years.

This famine didn’t just affect the poor, whom anti-vaxxers, of course, don’t care about. Letters survive that the Queen of Sweden and Norway, Blanche of Namur, wrote to her husband, King Magnus Eriksson, who spent most of the Black Death away on this or that crusade. The letters describe bleak conditions at the royal palace, with the Queen and her surviving courtiers literally starving because there was literally no food. Everyone who had been making food died, so survivors were now dying of starvation. With even the queen herself and the most privileged nobles of the kingdom also starving. They were also freezing to death, by the way, because all the people who had been supplying firewood for the winter likewise either died or ran away. With most of the palace guards dead or sick, too, it was dangerous to venture outside, so even people who could, ostensibly, go out and chop some wood for the fire, balked at the idea of doing so. This is what royalty had to go through during the Black Death. What do you think the lives were of the hoi-polloi?

The starvation triggered by the plague outbreak in turn triggered outbreaks of other diseases, like tuberculosis, smallpox and dysentery, because when people don’t get enough calories into their bodies, this weakens their immune systems.

Half the population dying means that almost all the people who care for the sick quickly die too. Remember how I mentioned that the bubonic plague has a 10–15% mortality rate with prompt and aggressive treatment? Setting aside the fact that this is still a colossal mortality rate — I have to keep repeating that because anti-vaxxers don’t understand numbers — you don’t get that prompt and aggressive treatment if there are no hospital beds available, and if all the doctors and nurses are dead, and if half the people who produce the medicine are also dead, and if half the law enforcement is dead, which means armed gangs are going to seize whatever medicine remains. Sounds like fun? May you die in interesting times.

In short, I don’t know how anyone can see letting something like this happen as the preferred alternative to using modern medicine and pubic health to … not letting something like this happen.

For a fascinating first-hand account of the Black Death, I suggest Buonaiuti’s Cronaca Fiorentina. Not that I expect an anti-vaxxer to read a whole book not written by a MAGA ghost writer, but instead by a 14th-century dude who’s never even appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast.

The hypothetical in the question is an excellent illustration of how misinformation works. The question included a claim that was short, clear and wrong. To refute it, I had to write a freakin’ thesis. Which most people who are prone to being anti-vaxxers will dismiss for being too damned long.

So I guess the fifth thing I would say to this anti-vaxxer is that, like or not, reality is very complicated. Any solution that’s simple and short, is almost certainly wrong. Any statement about a huge section of history that’s simple and short, is guaranteed to be completely wrong.

UPDATED TO ADD: Predictably, anti-vaxxers became upset with me, especially over my claim that they oppose non-vaccine-related public health measures. They claim that they had a reason to do so with COVID-19, because its 1% death rate is negligible and does not justify lockdowns, business closures and the like.

This, again, demonstrates how some people simply don’t bother to think about what numbers really mean.

For one thing, the fact that COVID has a 1% death rate doesn’t mean that only 1% of people who become infected develop a serious illness. But it is, in fact, what anti-vaxxers assume it means. It’s a good illustration of this infuriating phenomenon where people project their wishful thinking onto statistics.

In fact, approximately 10% of COVID infections lead to a serious enough illness that it requires hospitalization. Of these ,90% ultimately survive, but again, unlike in movies, surviving whatever put you in the hospital doesn’t mean you walk out with no long-term disabilities.

As long as well are talking about lockdowns, however, I want to touch upon just one aspect of how a disease with a “negligible” death rate like COVID can wreak complete havoc if allowed to spread unchecked.

Do you know how many per-capita hospital beds the US has? That’s okay, I did the Googling for you. As of the latest survey, from 2022, it’s 2.35 beds per 1000 people. Please note, before I go on, that when people talk about “hospital beds”, we aren’t talking about furniture. “Hospital beds” is shorthand for a hospital’s carrying capacity. It’s space, yes, but also equipment, medication and staffing. A specialized hospital cot with buttons isn’t going to do you much good if there aren’t enough doctors and nurses to treat you, and if there isn’t a respirator to help you breathe while you’re in respiratory failure.

So with that said, let’s do some quick back-of-the-envelope calculations here.

2.35 hospital beds per 1000 people. (Let’s set aside regional variations and the fact that most of the 2.35 beds aren’t intensive care beds.) At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, in its hotspots, about 10% of the population was infected at any one time. So, 100 infections per 1000 people. Of these, 10% require hospitalization. So 10 people. You have 2.35 hospital beds, and 10 people who need hospital beds. And that’s just for COVID. See the problem here?

Sure, the government can increase the number of beds, but that involves lowering the quality of care (by reducing staff, or pressing dentists into service as respiratory therapists, that kind of thing), and given that health care providers have higher-than-average rates of infection themselves, and the inevitable shortage of equipment, it could never expand 2.35 beds to 10 beds, or anywhere near it.

The obvious answer to avoiding the collapse of the healthcare system and mass deaths that will follow (from COVID and other things), is aggressively lowering the rate of transmission — and that involves temporarily shutting down non-essential routes of transmission, such as dine-in restaurants, bars, pools, concerts and so on.

I am not saying public health measures enacted in response to a pandemic should never be challenged. There were COVID-19 policies with which I strongly disagreed, such as limiting food retail hours and closing down urban parks. But any criticism of a public health policy has to be done from a position that’s informed, intelligent and not fueled by stupid politics.

Certainly not with personal insults and disparaging comments, which betray lack of evidence.

Certainly not by chickening out of a rational, evidence-based discussion; like one of the other respondents below, after I cited an automated reporting study that found medical history events objectively consistent with vaccine injury within 30 days following 1 in 39.4 vaccinations that were administered in response to his unsupported answer that consists of nothing but accusations he’s unwilling to rationally defend. https://healthit.ahrq.gov/sites/default/files/docs/publication/r18hs017045-lazarus-final-report-2011.pdf

Here’s the most convincing way, albeit hardly the easiest; and one which anti-vaxxers have been fairly begging to have done: Conduct a thorough and transparent (except for patient anonymity in public records) accounting of the medical and vaccination (if any) histories of all people who consent to determine the effects of vaccination; including the health status of people before and after vaccinations, as well as the comparative overall health of vaccinated and unvaccinated people.

The analysis would need to account for all outcomes. For example, if a disease or vaccine causes mental impairment, then it could affect such seemingly unrelated matters as accidents, and eventually suicides and violent crime, especially as the subjects reach their teens.

That would end the argument - at least among sensible people.

As for whether you would “win” - well, that would remain to be seen.

As for spewing insults and refusing to engage in rational discussion; those approaches are forfeiting the argument.

But if the CDC and vaccine manufacturers were really confident such as study as I and millions of others are calling for would prove their claims of the great overall benefit of so many vaccines, would they not have already done such a study to shut up anti-vaxxers?

Hmmm…

Thank you, my friend, for asking me to reply to your question.

I am going to assume you have provided with this family member all the factual data, with which they might change their viewpoint on the Covid-19…or any other vaccine.

Having done all you can do, and said all you can say, and the family member is stubbornly intransigent and obstinate…steadfastly refusing to even discuss the matter…rationally or logically…this would be the perfect time to simply remain silent.

When the family member brings up the subject in future discussions, don’t even speak a word on the subject, but try to steer the conversation towards more pleasant topics, like, “How about those Mets, huh?”…or “Do you think we’re going to have an early Winter, this year?”

It takes two people to have an argument. If you refuse to “rise to the bait”, and engage in yet another heated argument…which no one is ever going to win…you keep your blood pressure in check…the antacids in the medicine cabinet…and peace in the family.

Look, this family member is twenty-nine (29) times more likely to be hospitalized…than a vaccinated person…and eleven (11) times more likely to die…if they become infected. (Data provided by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.)

Try to keep peace in the family…as this family member might very well be living the last few weeks of their life…if they become infected.

I hope you have a peaceful evening, my friend.

They likely will not.

First of all, antivaxxers tend to genuinely believe that vaccines aren’t effective and are dangerous. They would likely read the note and counter “what will you say when your child confronts you with the vaccine injuries they suffered?”

Of course, there’s extraordinarily clear evidence that vaccines are in fact very safe, and extremely effective against disease (measles for instance, is all but wiped out in countries that have introduced the vaccine, with new cases occurring only when people catch it abroad).

But that’s the thing - anti-vaxxers, like most conspiracy theorists, react differently to evidence that most people would. Specifically, when antivaxxers encounter evidence that runs counter to their beliefs, their beliefs are strengthened rather than weakened. Repeat: When you show an anti-vaxxer studies showing, say, that vaccines do not cause autism, they react by becoming more convinced that vaccine do cause autism.

Like arguments involving evidence, there’s research showing that ‘emotional’ arguments of this sort have a similar backfire effect

This of course requires a lot of resources, but unfortunately, the only other thing successful in pursuading antivaxxers seems to be children getting sick and/or dying from preventable diseases. For example, a 1998 paper on anti-vaccine movements through history

You see the incidence of pertussis dropping dramatically after the vaccine is introduced around 1950. Sometime in the 1970, the anti-vaccine movement starts picking up, and vaccine uptake rates plummet, however, and doesn’t increase again until the disease incidence starts growing.

Depressingly, this pattern has been observed in many places - vaccine is introduce, disease incidence plummets, anti-vaccine movements grow because the disease no longer appears dangerous, leading to less vaccination, leading to more disease.

Footnotes

There is a certain amount of truth that, but it is still basically a logical fallacy. A lot of the increases in human health during the 20th century did occur as a result of better hygiene and safer food rather than vaccines per se. However, that is not to say that vaccines made no contribution whatsoever. If you look at the the leading cause of death in 1920 compared to today, several of them are simply no longer an issue due to vaccines. Tuberculosis was the third largest killer - gone. Pneumonia and influenza was the second largest killer - now virtually gone. Various other killers like measles and smallpox - virtually gone. All down to vaccines.

Are you sure that this ‘relative’ actually believes that vaccines do not work. That is very rare. Almost all reasonable resistance to mass vaccination is not based on the the assumption that they do not work, but rather that there are risks involved, long term issues that are not clearly understood, and exaggerated risk of actually having the disease and gaining natural immunity as opposed to the less reliable vaccine immunity.

If you want to convince the vaccine hesitant, look at their sources of information, and do it thoroughly. Prepare yourself for many hours of ‘research’ . A good place to start is Del Bigtree. He has accumulated a vast amount of information. One you are versed in exactly what vaccine skeptics actually know, then you can look for information to ‘debunk’ it. It is not easy to find, there are very few in depth criticisms of people like Dr. Suzanne Humphries, Dr. Bob Sears, Dr. Theresa Deisher - generally they are just labeled as quacks, without actually tackling all the points that they are making. There are some quite deep criticisms, but as yet, I have not found a real one on one debate.

If you want to convince people that are hesitant to accept all the vaccines, then you just need to find someone willing to publicly debate Andrew Wakefield or Suzanne Humphries, or one of many other highly educated vaccine skeptics.

Most "antivaxxers" were once VERY PRO-VACCINE. The majority of us believed blindly in our physicians, parents, and "authorities". We trusted the "science". And then, we or our loved ones suffered a horrific vaccine injury. Damage, death, and lifelong impairment after injection isn't a rare thing. Many people (such as myself) experience anaphylaxis, subsequent asthma & "allergies', autoimmune challenges diseases, etc. I know others who suffered seizures, GBS, neurological swelling, etc.

Then there's the FACT that VACCINES CAUSE DISEASE. There's VdPv and VdMv (Vaccine-derived Polio virus and Vaccine-derived measles virus). As well as "breakthroug" casesc(Vaccine-derived) covid. Vaccines are like a very profitable snake eating it's own tail. Cause more outbreaks & dis-eases mean they get to sell more snake-oil!

Almost all objections to the covid vaccines are some form of the list I am providing below and all of them have been widely discussed and literally torn to shreds.

• "They were developed in just one year instead of the usual 10-15" - First of all, it should be pointed out that work on these vaccines already started at the time of MERS and SARS. In addition, the reasons why it normally takes 10-15 years are many and varied and have nothing to do with efficacy or safety: it usually takes a long time to find enough volunteers and especially to accumulate enough infections to have statistically relevant data; the various steps are done in sequence to keep costs down; and to get authorisation you have to queue and wait your turn. For the anti-covid vaccines, on the other hand, finding volunteers and having enough infections in the middle of the pandemic was very easy; no expense was spared and phases were carried out in parallel; absolute priority was given to authorisations, making them jump the queue.
• "mRNA technology is new' - The first studies on this technology date back to the 1990′s and RNA pharmacology has been a reality in the fight against cancer for about ten years. At any rate, there are also non-mRNA vaccines such as J&J.
• "They are genetic serums" - Simply untrue. The vaccine induces the cells of the vaccinated person to produce a piece of the virus (the famous spike protein) to which the immune system reacts by "learning" how to neutralise it, exactly as it happens with the real infection, but with the slight difference that there is no replication: when the mRNA runs out (a few hours at most) so does the protein, and so does the simulated infection. They work exactly like any other vaccine, i.e. by inducing an immune response. The fable that they “change your DNA”, as some claim, is simply nonsense: mRNA cannot change DNA, end of story. I repeat that there are also "conventional" vaccines by the way.
• "They cause side effects" - just like any other drug: I invite you, for example, to read the informative sheet of ibuprofen, section “side effects”. With billions of vaccinations worldwide and over 200 million confirmed infections, we now have incontrovertible data showing that the side effects of covid are a thousand times more serious and dangerous in terms of both incidence and severity. Refusing the vaccine for fear of the very rare side effects is like swimming across the proverbial raging river for fear that the comfortable bridge built over it might collapse. It should also be noted that any reaction one might have to the vaccine, which is ultimately a fragment of the virus in modest quantities, would be multiplied a thousandfold in the event of infection with the full-blown, replicating, actual virus. The only alternative is not to become infected, which is almost impossible with the delta variant and a large proportion of the population unvaccinated.
• "Long-term effects are unknown" - There are no cases of vaccines having long-term effects in the whole of history. In fact, there are no cases of long-term side effects in sporadically administered drugs (with very specific exceptions as noted in Pierre Dalcourt’s comment below). Long-term effects can occur in drugs that are taken regularly over a long period due to accumulation phenomena that are difficult to identify in trials. Imagining that some form of “time bomb” could occur whereby the vaccine does nothing to you in the weeks after you took it but it makes a penis grow on your forehead a year later goes against everything we know about biology.
• "They don't protect 100%" - Like any vaccine in history. Smallpox and polio vaccines were not 100% effective but that didn't stop them from ensuring complete eradication of these diseases through mass vaccination. The covid vaccines protect against the disease and above all reduce the risk of ending up in the ICU or in the morgue by more than 99%.
• "Vaccinated people are as contagious as unvaccinated people" - Incorrect. The maximum viral load found in vaccinated people may be equal to that found in unvaccinated people, but a vaccinated person, in addition to being less likely to be infected at all, also has on average a lower viral load and for a shorter period of time.
• "Vaccines cause variants" - False. Variants are a random product of virus replication: the more opportunities the virus has to replicate, the more variants can be created. As a result, variants are more likely to emerge where the virus can replicate out of control, i.e. among the unvaccinated.
• "I have done my research" - Reading a couple of popular articles on the internet or clicking on the first result that comes up on google does not mean “doing research” at all. Research is done by collecting all the data, making complex statistical analyses, and comparing the results with other researchers according to a well-established process known as peer-review (great examples of such actual research carried out by trained professionals can be found in the references section). It is work that requires a high degree of specialisation, absolute dedication, and access to resources. Believing that you can do “your own research” better than professionals is as ridiculous as claiming to be able to win the US open with zero physical training, a wooden racket, two tennis lessons, and zero matches played under your belt.
• “Plenty of doctors are against these vaccines” - Citation or it never happened. Do these doctors make such claims within the rigorous scientific environment of a peer-reviewed paper or conference talk or do they just casually express vague concerns? No-vaxers invariably fail to provide upon request any evidence for these alleged anti-vaccines doctors and indeed the only known fact is that their percentage among physicians is zero point something. Any given human group contains morons, mentally ill members, or people that just shouldn’t be there. Why should we listen to such a small fraction who doesn’t publish a line about these alleged doubts and ignore the remaining 99.9…%?
• "Nobody knows what they put in it" - Apart from the fact that it is very well known what “they put in it”, but even knowing that, what difference does it make? I wonder if those who make this objection know at a molecular level what is in each of their meals, or are they blindly trusting that what they buy at the supermarket is not poisoning them. For example, if you read the chemical analysis of a normal banana, you will see that the argument “who knows what they put in it” is a laughable one. And don’t get me started with total nonsense like 5G chips or dead foetuses.
• "Vaccinating is a personal choice" - "Personal" my arse. The choice not to vaccinate has numerous consequences for society: it leads to avoidable hospitalisations that cost money and take up beds needed to treat other diseases; it puts staff and health facilities under stress; it puts at risk those who cannot vaccinate for medical reasons (allergic, children, ...); it promotes the proliferation of variants as described above, variants that could also prove dangerous for vaccinated people or children; it postpones the end of the pandemic and the return to normality, exposing us instead to the risk of further closures.

All these pseudo-arguments have already been similarly debunked thousands of times and yet vaccine detractors insist on repeating them unchanged. One has to be seriously misinformed not to have gotten the message at this point.

Or in bad faith.

References:

COVID-19 vaccine: How was it developed so fast?

The tangled history of mRNA vaccines

Balancing benefits and potential risks of vaccination: the precautionary principle and the law of unintended consequences

Covid Shots’ Benefits Outweigh Side-Effect Risk, CDC Report Says

Safety of COVID-19 vaccines - European Medicines Agency

Three things to know about the long-term side effects of COVID vaccines

Side effects, myths & questions on vaccination | Swiss Federal Office of Pubblic Health

Vaccinated who get breakthrough infections less contagious

Vaccines Will Not Produce Worse Variants

AMA survey shows over 96% of doctors fully vaccinated against COVID-19

What is the Full List of the COVID-19 Vaccine Ingredients?

Bioactive compounds in banana fruits and their health benefits

Measuring the impact of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation on vaccination intent in the UK and USA - Nature Human Behaviour

Notice that these are from prestigious scientific journals (e.g. Science and Nature), public independent agencies, universities press offices, and similar authoritative sources, not the various and all equally bonkers tin-foil-hat conspirationist sites anti-vaxxers get their “information” from.

1 We ALL want safer, more effective and cheaper vaccines.

2 I also want world peace, end to hunger and climate change

3 There is no such thing as something which is completely safe. For example you can die if you drink too much fresh clean drinking water.

4 The industry wants safer vaccines after all they would sell more!

5 Usually in life the ‘stronger more effective product’ tends to be less safe and require special precautions. Eg cleaning materials. To some degree this applies to vaccines. There are the homeopathic vaccines which appear to have zero effect apart from lightening your pocket book but they have very little side effects. Vaccines need to trigger some immune response to get the protection. An immune response can include soreness fever malaise. A very small number of people are so allergic to eggs or antibiotics essential to the production of the vaccine they would react and therefore should not take them. This is rare.

5 The big question is what is safer the vaccine or the disease. We are at the end of the time when people routinely took vaccines and diseases such as measles, whooping cough and polio had been virtually eradicated. The anti-vaxers grew up in a world where they were relatively safe because most others took the vaccines. Now that is changing. Herd immunity has dropped dramatically and we are seeing outbreaks, serious illness and DEATHs.

6 Quite often life requires us to make a difficult, usually unwelcome choice. We should make that choice based on evidence not emotion and conspiracy theory.

Step 1: Find out why they are “anti-vaxx”. Not everyone holds similar beliefs, or the same beliefs for the same reasons.

Step 2: Find out why your “pro-vaxx” arguments don’t convince them. Once again, asking about being convincing means a personalized rather than generalized address.

Step 3: Fix your arguments or get more convincing ones. Maybe you or others don’t currently have any convincing arguments.

There are no shortcuts through those three steps. If you want a convincing argument, you need to build one. In order to build one, you need to understand what drives particular beliefs and how your own beliefs can be made to appear superior. Perhaps there is no way to do this in some cases.

Practically speaking, you could just make shit up and lie and fabricate evidences or simply a hold a gun to someone’s head. But, convincing arguments are not necessarily good, scientific, or constructive arguments. This is important in part because you would not someone else to consider a convincing argument a good enough argument.

Not only can that put you in danger, it also fails to address the reasons for disagreeing in the first place, and likewise neglects to facilitate an environment where critical assessment and evidence-based theories are preferred and where mutual discourse is provided for.

If someone has a different value system, worldview, or position in life, it may be that no honest means can lead to a convincing argument. There is no reason to expect others to believe what you believe, regardless of your reasons, experiences, or arguments. And somewhere out there, your philosophical opposites are asking amongst themselves the very same question.

There are no antivaxers. ‘AntiVaxx’ is a ‘harmful’ dehumanizing political term. The only person who needs to be privy to your vaccinations is your physician…it’s really no one else’s beeswax!

The government always brings in harmful measures by demonizing those who oppose them. So, if you chose to breathe fresh air, like we have done for eons, they label your ‘antimask’. And if you chose to not get a jab, for a disease with 99.9% survival, they call you ‘antivaxx.’. The current movement against the experimental Covid vaccines is spurred by multiple reasons. The vaccines were forced, administered with no Informed Consent, & they are causing millions of injuries and deaths. If you choose to use a derogatory term like ‘antivaxer’ it’s now time for introspection, because history teaches us the horrors of denying people their humanity.

Are you saying you would like us all dead? In an argument on masks, I remember being told “Its better to give people fewer choices.” The original antivaxxers were mostly a small group of people who had children that were injured by childhood immunizations. But that all changed with Covid. The experimental Covid vaccine caused the Antivaxx numbers to increase exponentially. People were disgusted at the misinformation, the draconian mandates, & the silencing of medical personnel in relation to the experimental Covid vaccine. Add to this the millions of post vaccine injuries & deaths. Many started doing their own research which led to the questioning of all vaccines.

There will always be different opinions. If you wish to support your ‘cause’ use facts, figures & data. Shutting people down simply means your argument lacks strength!

No. An anti-vaxxer is somebody who hates vaccines and believes they cause harm. An anti-vaxxer is someone who refuses to accept (or allow their children to accept) a vaccine.

I'm a (relatively moderate) libertarian, so it may come as a surprise to you that I support mandatory enforcement of vaccinations…

Why?

Because, the decision to not vaccinate yourself or your children does not merely put you and your children in harm's way; it also puts other people in harm's way. A handful of people are legitimately allergic to vaccinations. Herd immunity is the term we give to the idea that, if the vast majority of people are vaccinated or otherwise immune, deadly diseases will not spread to those who are unvaccinated and are not immune.

Basically, diseases spread from person to person. If most people are immune, the chances of somebody who is not immune coming into contact with another individual who is simultaneously not immune and carrying that disease are incredibly small.

However, the larger the anti-vaxxer movement grows, the greater the risk for those who have legitimate allergic reactions when exposed to vaccines.

Every individual has the right to life, liberty, and property, but when your right to liberty begins to actively infringe on the right of another individual to their life, a line must be drawn.

I’m fully vaccinated. I will beg forgiveness as I break from paragraph form to individual premise form

I went in for a pre-op appointment for Lasik surgery. I was handed a four page list of possible complications. Further they had this note at the end that it should not be considered an inclusive list and something about long term effects being unknown.

We have all heard the commercials that start with “if you took ___________ you may be entitled to compensation.”

We can listen to any commercial for medications and hear a list of possible side effects yet there seems to be no such list in regards to the vaccine.

When I got the vaccine, and the second dose of the “single dose” product, the pharmacist asked me to sit there for 15 minutes where they could see me to monitor for obvious concerns. They ask everyone the same thing. I

had a severe reaction to the first dose which took me over six months to recover my cardio from.

We all knew, or should have known going in, that our understanding of the science was evolving and it was an RNA based virus. Future boosters, and likely a yearly booster, were a real possibility due to mutation. Somehow this was NOT well communicated.

My own point: If vaccination REPLACES social distancing and other measures in peoples mind it is not useful as it has shown to not be 100% effective (no vaccination is)

Now I am vaccinated. My wife and I decided to have our children vaccinated even though we avoid most of the risk by homeschooling and avoid crowds 95%+ of the time compared to pre-pandemic making few exceptions. We went from “normal” vacations to a camper and camping to avoid crowds that way. I think we have taken the pandemic more seriously than the majority of people,

All that said I do not think that those who chose to not get the vaccination are making a decision that is indefensible. The science does evolve on things like this and it is not a fault of the science. It is a fault of the communication abilities of our elected leaders who seem to insist that science must be all or nothing and hinder their abilities to properly apply it as that all or nothing approach damages credibility.

EDIT: For the record I was not going to get vaccinated. My wife and kids stayed home at that point the vast majority of the time and I handled anything outside of the house. I was at risk because I was an essential employee but being in very good health (I was running 20 miles+ per week) I was taking my chances. That and we had had COVID (I think) early in 2019 before it was a thing. For the record my reaction to the vaccine was much rougher than my reaction to that brush with COVID - my wife had the exact opposite experience and had SEVERE issues with what we presume was COVID. Somewhere last year, in a discussion on Quora, someone offered the premise that vaccination decreased your viral load and, at the time, science indicated that viral load was a primary factor in being contagious. I checked that claim against scholarly articles from sources I could trust. Well there was something I could do that would decrease my chance of bringing it home. I got vaccinated. For those doubting that your reasonable tone and arguments can be effective I will offer as proof that the point that made me look further and ultimately get vaccinated was made in a discussion on Quora.

Let me tell you my story on how I became an anti-vaxxer (sort of). For 15 years I’ve been working in the area of statistics - I trust in math completely for my arguments. My wife is an arts major and is more into the emotional types of arguments. So, when the topic of children came up the issue of vaccines naturally emerged and she took the anti-vax stance. I never really thought about the topic prior to that. So I set out to change her mind with statistics, rationality and logic - how I would go about trying to prove anything. But instead I had my mind changed.

The matter can be resolved by answering one simple question: “What is more probable: getting serious negative health results from getting a disease vs getting serious negative health results from side effects from the vaccination from the said disease”. Answering this question should be pretty simple and any doctor SHOULD be able to do that. But for some reason that info is seldom provided to the would-be parents. So I had to go look. The answer will depend on your individual circumstances, but let’s break this down in principle.

Firstly, to get negative health results from a disease one needs to catch it. So we need to take a look at the prevalence of the disease in your area - that’s easily googlable. Secondly, you need to take a look at transmission modes and risk factors for each disease/vaccine. Quite obviously, even in the same area an IV drug user and a bourgeois household member would have totally different risk profiles when it comes to contracting diseases. Then one needs to take a look at the availability/quality of med services: the availability of med services in New Jersey is not the same as in South African Republic. That’s pretty key.

Let’s illustrate the point with Hep B, that children are vaccinated against at birth. Hep B from the POV of epidemiology is pretty much exactly the same as HIV - it can only be contracted through direct contact with infected blood and intensive contact with bodily fluids of an infective person. Basically you get it from IV drug use and (a lot of) unprotected sex with risk-group partners. For children there is some small probability that it may be contracted via breastfeeding from their infected mother. Realistically one would not be able to contract it at all unless they are in a very specific risk group and then maybe in their teens. And these risks can be easily mitigated. So why are children being vaccinated at birth? Same logic can be applied to all of the vaccines - like how does like a 2mo child even contract tetanus under normal circumstances? Ergo, there is no rational reason to vaccinate against these diseases to begin with - a waste of time and money.

Then we need to take a look at medical care availability. Pretty much all of the bacterial-type infections on the immunisation schedule (Birth-18 Years Immunization Schedule) can be very easily treated if there are modern medical services available (basically if you are not in Central Africa or India). And the probabilities of severe long lasting harm to health aren’t that high in the first place. Viral infections are a bit tougher to deal with, but good strategies typically exist both for treatment and prevention. And really, basic modern sanitation like washing hands, staying away from risky areas/people and having clean water prevents most of them under normal circumstances. For most of the stuff on the vaccination table we are talking literally 1/1000000 chances of contracting the disease under normal circumstances. For some it really is 0 outside of India and Central Africa. And if you do then the chances of something bad happening to you are 1/1000 given the availability of healthcare.

Now to the fun part - side effects of vaccines. When you are injected with the vaccine you get 100% risk of being subjected to its side effects - compared the the low stat probability of catching the disease and then suffering from the adverse effects. So we are not talking about the risk of contracting the vaccine but rather go directly to side effect probabilities. I’d refer you to the official WHO stats - WHO vaccine reaction rates information sheets. I won’t recite the stats here, but for some vaccines the probability of severe adverse side effects is exceptionally high. How do you like 10%-25% probability of acute arthritis in reaction to the Rubella vaccine?

I am not advocating for anything here. But I would urge everyone to study the topic and make their own decisions based on evidence and facts - in relation to each individual vaccine! For me I think that 1–2 vaccines may be worth the while for my kid given the risk profiles. The rest - hell no!

As for the debate, the problem being that both sides of the argument are appealing to emotions rather than hard facts and logic. This may be somewhat forgivable for the anti-vaxxers because they operate in an environment where objective facts are not readily available, but not really forgivable for the pro-vax crowd for pushing “science” via emotional arguments rather than with objective facts.

Particularly damaging is the “conspiracy theories” red herring - you can’t just dismiss legitimate concerns as if they are just a “conspiracy theory”. And do it through emotional arguments and not fact-based ones. Particularly given the history of the Big Pharma of hiding stuff, lying, paying to doctors and corrupt “scientific magazines” and actively engaging in lobbying. Plus the history of US gov-t injecting people including pregnant women with radioactive materials and biological warfare agents to see what happens - American citizens and without their knowledge (so did UK, btw). And bad things did happen. So why should people just trust the government and corporations and their propaganda? Especially given the fact that nobody is providing objective info and the government is insisting that people in mid Vermont be vaccinated as if they are living in Central Africa Republic.

So firstly, we need to establish how you define an ‘anti-vaxxer’. The term is thrown around too often. Hopefully I can explain how vague the term is with some examples below.

Am I an anti-vaxxer IF…

1. I believe that vaccines do not work and think that their sole reason for being injected into everyone is for de-population.
2. I have had all of my vaccinations apart from the annual flu shot. I believe this is not necessary, and that the chances from an adverse reaction is higher than my chance of dying from flu.
3. I vaccinate my children, but on a ‘slowed down’ schedule. I will wait until they are at least 6 months old, and I wait at least 2 weeks between each shot, because I believe that too many shots too young at once can overload the immune system and increases the likelihood of an adverse reaction.
4. I believe vaccines can cause autism, but still get all of my shots to protect me from dangerous diseases.
5. I have looked at the chance of getting a disease and compared this to the chance of getting an adverse reaction from the vaccine. Due to what I found, I have been vaccinated against 5 diseases, but not the other 11 that are offered in my country
6. I do not vaccinate due to religious beliefs.
7. I will not vaccinate my child until they have not been tested for all of the illnesses that may make my child more susceptible to an adverse reaction.
8. I am fully vaccinated, as are my children, but I am not up to date with my boosters.
9. I have vaccinated my child against everything but Hep B, HPV and flu. The adverse reactions for these vaccines are too high for me to consider getting it, and the success is highly debated. I remain up to date with every other vaccine.
10. I believe vaccines are beneficial, so I encourage people to vaccinate. I do not want to roll the dice with my own child, so I will not vaccinate them and rely on herd immunity to protect them.
11. I follow the Swedish vaccination schedule. They only get 12 vaccines in year 1 rather than the 26 the US offers.
12. I will not vaccinate during pregnancy, as no vaccines have been properly tested in pregnancy. I will vaccinate my child when they are born.
13. I used to stay up to date with vaccines, then had a severe adverse reaction, so no longer get them.

Now this list definitely doesn’t outline every line of thinking when it comes to vaccines, but it does hopefully demonstrate how it is not just a ‘pro’ or ‘anti’ situation.

Now we have that out of the way, I will go into some reasons that people might use as a reason not to vaccinate.

Disease history.

Whenever I hear a figure about how many lives vaccines have saved, it is always how much deaths from a disease has reduced since the vaccine was available. But this figure is useless unless you compare it to what the reduction in deaths was like before the vaccine was available - otherwise, how do you know it was the vaccine that reduced the deaths? Here’s an example.

So lets say that in 1900, 10,000 people died from ‘Disease A’, and 20,000 from ‘Disease B’.

In 1950 2,000 people died from ‘Disease A’, and 5,000 from Disease B.

In 1951 we release a vaccine for Disease A.

In 2000, 500 people die from Disease A and 1,000 from Disease B.

Is it fair to say that the vaccine has reduced deaths from disease A by 75%?

Now take a look at the graph below:

We see that the deaths from diseases were decreasing well before vaccines, so maybe vaccines haven’t saved as many lives as we are led to believe..

We never hear about how disease has been significantly lowered by less cramped living conditions, sewage systems, pest control, good hygiene, better diets… Why don’t we hear about it? All we hear is fear campaigns to get people off to get their flu shots because we’re running out of supplies.

Vaccine Damage Court

I’ll touch on vaccine damage court briefly. Whilst it's not really a reason not to vaccinate, it is an argument that is used against vaccines. It is notoriously hard to reach a settlement with the vaccine damage courts, and there are many problems with it.

• It usually takes a many years to go through. Many parents have to wait 8 - 10 years before reaching any settlement
• Lawyers are not paid until the court has settled
• In the UK, you cannot claim more than £120,000. Think about it - if you are left +60% disabled, the cost of this on your life can be millions. There are estimates that being disabled can cost people an extra £550 - £1000 a month. It obviously varies a lot. lets take the £550 a month figure. That £120k will last you 18 years of extra costs… and that's the low estimate..
• In the UK, you cannot claim anything if your child dies before the age of 2.
• The Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund in the U.S. has paid out over $3 billion dollars to vaccine injured or vaccine killed children. No, the vaccine manufacturers do not pay for it, that's tax money.

Vaccine Damage Payment

Flu Shot

I initially wanted to avoid talking about specific vaccines as we’d be here forever, but I will touch on the flu shot, as it is an interesting one, and is a reason many people start to doubt some vaccines.

First off, the multi-dose flu shot is one of the few vaccines to still contain large amounts of mercury - I am sure I will cover mercury later..

Then there is the huge overestimation that the CDC gives regarding flu deaths. In December of 2005, the British Medical Journal (online) published a report by Peter Doshi, which spelled out the delusion.

Here is a quote from Doshi’s report:

“[According to CDC statistics], ‘influenza and pneumonia’ took 62,034 lives in 2001—61,777 of which were attributable to pneumonia and 257 to flu, and in only 18 cases was the flu virus positively identified.”

This is obviously far lower than the parroted 36,000 figure. However, Doshi is only reporting numbers of flu deaths estimated by the CDC in those years. As he showed from the year 2001, the CDC actually finds the flu virus in a tiny proportion of people who are estimated to have died from the flu.

Basically by twisting the figures like this, the CDC is creating hype and promotion for the flu vaccine.

Then there is the issue of effectiveness, which reports vary between around 3% and 48%. The thing with flu is that the strains are different every year, so we have to guess, which gives it wildly varying effectiveness every year.

There were many schools here in the UK that closed for weeks following the flu shots (they are generally administered annually in schools here). Unfortunately I can’t source this, as it was only an observation - seeing schools closing due to high level of sickness, and noting that this was just after flu jabs (with a quick check of the school calendar on their website), which were live and therefore shed.

Corruption

There are many, many stories of corruption in the pharmaceutical business (just as there are in any other business). There are records of pharmaceutical companies being fined for bribing doctors to overprescribe medications - example of one case below

GlaxoSmithKline fined $3bn after bribing doctors to increase drugs sales

There are many reports of CDC officials ‘cooking’ results to make vaccine data look better than it was. If you want to know more about this look up SPIDER and CDC Whistle-blowers.

I should also mention Poul Thorsen here. He authored or co-authored 21 of the 24 studies that the CDC claim show no link between vaccines and autism. He now tops the federal most wanted list for 22 counts of wire fraud and money laundering, facing 260 years in jail.

So the history of the pharmaceutical industry rightly creates some distrust for people.

Exaggerated danger of ‘Vaccine-preventable diseases’

Measles is a good example here. It follows a similar history to chicken-pox in terms of the publics reaction to it. People were encouraged to get measles early to train your immune system, and to help achieve herd immunity. Check out this video below, demonstrating nicely how measles was looked at in the 1950’s before the marketing of the vaccine.

Now, measles strikes fear into the hearts of those that hear it. It is vaccine pushing in the media that has fuelled this fear.

In reality, in developed countries, no one dies from measles. Even the ‘epidemic’ that is spreading across Europe currently has infected 2–4000 people. 17 have died - all immunocompromised or had co-morbidities. this leads me nicely onto….

The Blame Game

Every time someone dies from a ‘vaccine-preventable’ disease, it hits the news everywhere and of course, anti-vaxxers are to blame. Someone dies from a vaccine? you won’t hear about it. it gets reported to VAERS (maybe) and that's it.

Lets take, for example, as it is very current, the current measles outbreak in Europe. Here is the typical scare-mongering mainstream media article:

Deadly measles outbreak spreads in Europe as vaccinations fall

Now, the article says 2,000 people have been infected (I have seen it reported elsewhere as 4000) but, 2000 or 4000, if only 17 people have died, that's less than 1%. We do know that the 17 people who dies were immunocompromised or had co-morbidities - http://ecdc.europa.eu/en/publications/Publications/27-02-2017-RRA-Measles-Romania,%20European%20Union%20countries.pdf.

Then we have the case of France, where you have to have up to date MMR to get into school. they get around 23,000 people every year infected with measles. Read about it in the news? no, because with 95% vaccination rates, there is no one to blame.

Also, there are parts in London that have 80% vaccination rates for MMR. are there big outbreaks? No.

And another one.. if the measles outbreaks are happening because of a lack of vaccinated people, then where are the rubella outbreaks? Its the same shot..

A much more likely scenario? The ‘anti-vaccination’ crowd has been growing in Romania, and pharmaceutical companies have tried twice now for mandatory vaccination, and failed twice, so they must try scare people into it.

Natural Immunity/Herd Immunity

‘The more vaccines we use, ironically, the more vaccines we need, because what happens is we lose the natural immunity. For instance, with measles, people would develop long term immunity for up to 75 years. There's studies that were done in the Faroe Islands that showed that once somebody had measles, they stayed immune for 75 years. It's a long time to stay immune. With the vaccine, the kind of immunity that's provoked is not the same as when you develop a natural disease, and it doesn't last as long. If you vaccinate a little girl for measles, she may stay immune to measles for 20 to 30 years, but when she goes to have her first baby, she's not going to be passing her immunity onto that baby the same and as well as she would have had she had the natural disease, because vaccines don't impart the mucosal immunity, so her breast milk won't be as full of protection as it would have been. This is proven in science medical literature as well. I've written about it and it's in conventional medical literature that vaccinated women do not impart the same degree of benefit to their infants as women who have had the natural disease. In addition to that, both her child and she will not maintain long term immunity because we don't have measles around circulating anymore, because part of the herd immunity that was happening, where the term herd immunity was coined had to do with measles, and it had to do with the percentage of people who had had measles and were immune to it. It had to do with the circulation, the ongoing circulation of that virus in the community, which was actually beneficial to adults, because they were re-exposed over and over. The same with whooping cough, the same with chicken pox. Look at chickenpox today. Chicken pox, most people know chicken pox is a pretty benign entity. Now we're vaccinating for chicken pox and hey, the vaccine's working. We're not seeing as much chicken pox, so that seems like a good thing. However, what we're seeing more of now is shingles, because those of us adults who need to be exposed to ongoing chicken pox through children aren't, so we're not getting those natural boosters and so what happens is our immunity level starts to drop, and the virus can come out our spinal cord and give us shingles, which is basically it's a very painful pustules in a specific area on the skin..’

Dr Suzanne Humphries.

Other ways of protecting and treating disease

There are other ways of protecting children that carry less risk.

Exclusive Breastfeeding is the best way to boost a child's immune system. Breastfeeding passes the mothers antibodies onto the child to protect them. Breastmilk also changes significantly when the child is ill to help protect them.

Consuming probiotics is a great way to protect you from bacterial disease. About 80% of you immune system is in your gut. Probiotics allow your gut bacteria to thrive. It helps undo some of the damage that is done by antibiotics - doctors in some countries routinely prescribed alongside antibiotics. Fermented foods contain isoflavones that actually have benefited and documented effectiveness in polio prevention.

Vitamins are great. Vitamin D is great at helping to protect you from infectious disease. Vitamin C is great for fighting it. High dose vitamin C has been shown in many studies to be incredibly effective for fighting pertussis. Vitamin A has shown to significantly decrease measles complications.

Manuka Honey has a unique ability to help the immune system, and is incredible for fighting colds and flu.

The best way to protect yourself against illness is to eat well. Having a healthy diet that is not full of preservatives, refined sugars and unhealthy fats allows your immune system to perform at its best.

Lack of testing in vaccinations

This is a big area. Firstly, there are no randomized double blind placebo controlled studies carried out for vaccines. This is a testing process that is carried out on literally every other drug on the market, but for some reason it is not done for vaccines, and the vaccine manufacturers refuse to do it. There have been cases where a vaccine is tested against an aluminium adjuvant ‘placebo’. This is not a placebo. A placebo is a saline solution. Taking one of the dangerous ingredients in a vaccine, and testing just that compared to the complete vaccine is not a placebo controlled study. It is cheating.

Secondly, there’s the vaccine schedule. something that is growing very quickly (it has tripled since vaccine manufacturers were protected from liability). It has never been tested for safety at all. So, after some relaxed testing, we have decided that it is safe to inject one of these vaccines. So we just add this to the schedule without seeing if it is safe alongside the other ones??

There are also what are known as ‘Black Triangle’ Vaccines. (there is a small black triangle after the name). These vaccines have not completed testing and therefore people who have these vaccines should be closely monitored. A lot of doctors do not even know this and do not warn parents.

Ingredients

Vaccines contain many questionable ingredients. They used to contain Mercury. Mercury has been removed from most vaccines (it is still in some) due to safety concerns. It was replaced with Aluminium. Another toxic heavy metal. Here’s some figures regarding the Aluminium in vaccines:

The following are examples of weight with their corresponding maximum levels of aluminum, per the FDA:

8 pound, healthy baby: 18.16 mcg of aluminium

15 pound, healthy baby: 34.05 mcg of aluminium

30 pound, healthy toddler: 68.1 mcg of aluminium

50 pound, healthy child: 113 mcg of aluminium

150 pound adult: 340.5 mcg of aluminium

350 pound adult: 794.5 mcg of aluminium

So how much aluminium is in the vaccines that are routinely given to children?

Hib (PedVaxHib brand only) – 225 mcg per shot

Hepatitis B – 250 mcg

DTaP – depending on the manufacturer, ranges from 170 to 625 mcg

Pneumococcus – 125 mcg

Hepatitis A – 250 mcg

HPV – 225 mcg

Pentacel (DTaP, HIB and Polio combo vaccine) – 330 mcg

Pediarix (DTaP, Hep B and Polio combo vaccine) – 850 mcg

The HEP-B shot alone is almost 14 TIMES THE AMOUNT OF ALUMINUM THAT IS FDA-APPROVED. The MMR? The dTap? All have similar amounts.

Then we can move onto other ingredients, for example formaldehyde. Some people say ‘you know, there’s formaldehyde in pears’. Well let me explain to you how ingesting and injecting are very different. We have clever bodies that can help us keep the poisons we ingest out of our blood. You know we can drink as much snake venom as you like as you’ll be absolutely fine. Inject it? Don’t think I need to explain why you shouldn’t inject snake venom.

I won’t go into every ingredient, but you can find the list of ingredients on the CDC website. Here is an interesting article:

Mom Says She Is Giving Child Same Ingredients in Vaccines, Other Moms Threaten CPS

Treating is better than preventing

Many people who do not vaccinate will research how to treat illnesses. We have come a long way in the last 50 years with regards to knowing how to treat these diseases. This comes with increased medical knowledge, and better technology.

There is also the belief that treating is better for the immune system than preventing, as it create a much longer and more effective immunity to the illness and actually strengthens the immune system, and is therefore better for achieving herd immunity. We can touch here briefly on herd immunity too. Whether herd immunity is possible with vaccines is debatable. It relies on a vaccinated individual actually achieving immunity. It relies on everyone being able to get vaccinated. And it relies on vaccines giving life long immunity. It relies on vaccinated individuals not spreading the diseases. Vaccines have varying degrees of effectiveness, not everyone can get vaccinated, and when vaccines do give immunity it is not for very long, and in many cases vaccinated individuals can still spread the disease.

Doctors speaking out against vaccination

There are hundreds of doctors who have spoken out about vaccines. They are all called idiots. There are so many examples of credible scientists turning their backs on vaccination and are automatically considered ‘quacks’. Nobel Prize winners, Neurosurgeons, successful Obstetricians, successful Chiropractors, PhDs in Neurology, PhDs in Biology, PhDs in Immunology – these are all people who are currently speaking out against the practice of vaccination and are categorically, no questions asked, considered ‘quacks’. That raises a red flag for a lot of people.

Then you look at the Andrew Wakefield mess. Despite what people may lead you to believe, the Anti-Vaccine movement did not start with Andrew Wakefield. In fact I will give this it’s own section…

Andrew Wakefield

So Wakefield gets a lot of attention in vaccination questions. People seem to think that he started the whole ‘anti-vaccine’ thing. In reality arguments against vaccines have been around as long as vaccines have. Maybe it was around the Wakefield time that the media started using the term ‘anti-vaccine’? Anyway, let me tell you a bit about Wakefield..

Dr. Wakefield was part of a team of 13 doctors and scientists who did what he describes accurately as a humble case series in the late 1990's to look at children who had autism and severe gastrointestinal problems. What he found was that the gastrointestinal disease seemed to be a result of vaccine injury. There seem to be some link between this gastrointestinal disease and autism and the MMR vaccine in particular. He hypothesized that it was the measles component of the vaccine. It was a very humble case series. Families had come to him. He has started doing measles research. The article could not be more scientific. It says this is just a case series. This is just a hypothesis. We think this deserves further study.

What was different, though, is after the study was published, Dr. Wakefield and others did decide to do a press conference. That did get a lot of attention in the UK. In fact, in the UK, that led to parents being fearful about giving their children the MMR, for good reason. Parents were then starting to selectively vaccinate with the M and the M and the R separately. Then the government in its wisdom decided to make the separate MMRs unavailable. Then families had to either go to France or not vaccinate. In the UK, unlike the US, they have a federal exemption right. They can just say no. A lot of families did. In fact, whether related or not, there then became a more prevalent rate of measles and certainly Dr. Wakefield was the sacrificial lamb for that issue.

Autism

I really don’t know how I am going to keep this section short.. I think I will lean on the side of this section being too brief rather than go into too much detail. There are hundreds of papers that demonstrate a link between vaccines and autism. Every single vaccine insert list that brain swelling and spinal swelling as side effects and this swelling can cause brain damage, which is Autism. There have been many cases in Vaccine Injury Court where the court has paid out legally declaring that the vaccine in question caused autism. Then you have the recent (2014) CDC Whistle-blower who has testified that he was forced to withhold data proving the vaccine-autism link. (this is gone into more detail in the documentary ‘Vaxxed’ - a documentary about corruption in the CDC.) Then you have the videos of children regressing into autism post vaccination - they can walk and talk first, then after vaccination they lose the ability to do either (This is something that was never documented prior to vaccines.)

Here's an interesting page:

I’d Rather Have a Child With Autism Than a Dead One: The Latest Science.

Distrust of Many Doctors

Many arguments against ‘anti-vaxxers’ accuse them on not having PhD’s and therefore do not know what they are talking about. Or that if you don’t get vaccines, then you should not be allowed to go to the doctor for anything. I think this is mad. You do not need a PhD to oppose vaccination (although there are plenty of people with PhD’s opposing vaccination).

Many doctors actually know very little about vaccines. From speaking to doctors I know this myself. Doctors are taught the vaccine schedule, they are given a brief description of herd immunity, and are told how great vaccines are and how everyone should get them. The only time any real discussion is had, is when discussing methods of how to get parents to vaccinate their children. This is a pretty poor amount of knowledge for something that is considered to be the best thing to happen to humans ever..

Most people who oppose vaccines strongly will have done much more research on the subject than many doctors administering them.

Then there is the other issue of doctors having financial motivation to vaccines. Doctors are paid for hitting vaccination targets (getting a certain percentage of their patients vaccinated). This creates a bit of a conflict of interest.

VAERS - Vaccine Adverse Effect Reporting System

VAERS is where people can report adverse reactions to vaccines. Unfortunately adverse reactions to VAERS are significantly under reported due to lack of advertisement. A lot of doctors are not even aware of its existence, so cannot even tell parents how to report it if their child does have a bad reaction to a vaccine.

Although under-reported, it does still paint a picture for the safety of vaccines:

• How many children have died from the Heb B Vaccine? it was 856 deaths (aged 0 - 17). 816 of those deaths were children under 3 years. (As of June 13 2015)
• Serious injuries and deaths reported to VAERS from DTaP? (As of June 13 2015)
• 20,704 emergency room visits
• 7,151 serious adverse events
• 5,605 hospitalisations
• 770 patients disabled
• 978 life threatening
• 827 deaths.
• From Tdap (As of June 13 2015)?
• 8,359 emergency room visits
• 1,577 serious adverse events
• 1,290 hospitalisations
• 255 patients disabled
• 289 life threatening
• 51 deaths.
• Gardasil (As of September 14 2014)?
• 11,660 emergency room visits
• 4,329 serious adverse events
• 3,157 hospitalisations
• 1022 patients disabled
• 590 life threatening
• 158 deaths
• Gardasil (as of June 13 2015)?
• 12,178 emergency room visits
• 4558 serious adverse events
• 3352 hospitalisations
• 1124 patients disabled
• 621 life threatening
• 208 deaths
• Flu vaccine deaths? 1,224 deaths reported
• H1N1 Monovalent - 85 (no longer used)
• FluX H1N1 - 50 (No longer used)
• Fluvarix Quadravalent - 12
• Flumist Seasonal and Quad - 29
• Fluzone Trivalent - 1068

This is only a few vaccines, but it’s enough to make the point I think. When someone tells you that vaccine reactions are just a bruise around the injection area and a slight fever, it isn’t the whole picture.

Comparing countries with different vaccine schedules

Looking at just the vaccines given in the first year of life:

Finland - 15

Sweden - 12

Denmark - 12

Norway - 12

Switzerland - 17

US - 25–26

It is worth noting that none of the Scandinavian countries vaccinate against Hep B, unless the mother tests positive for it. In the US and UK, pregnant women are screened for STDs anyway, but are children are given the Hep B vaccine anyway.

It is also worth noting that the US has the highest infant mortality rate in developed countries, despite having the largest vaccine schedule, and having the most amount of money spent on healthcare. You can look at this further on a state by state basis, and there is a high correlation between high vaccination rates and high infant mortality rates.

Unvaccinated healthier than vaccinated.

Unfortunately there are no real studies comparing vaccinated against unvaccinated, but there are many surveys comparing them. In almost every survey it is found that children who are vaccinated have much higher chance of getting infections, suggesting that their immune system is weaker. See link below:

http://www.efi-online.de/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/VaccineFreeChildrenHealthier.pdf

This is one of them. I have seen many more surveys telling the same story.

Unfortunately these are only surveys so are instantly ignored by anyone who advocates vaccines as being inaccurate.

There is also the interesting story of the Hopewood Children (although an old example - 1942 I think). This is too long a story to go into in detail, but it was essentially a small group of 85 children (who’s mothers were unable to care for them) who were raised in a place called ‘Hopewood House’. they were unvaccinated, and raised under a Natural Heath philosophy. Doctors were astounded how healthy they were in all aspects. They almost never got ill (just a few cases of very mild chicken pox). Even their dental health was astounding (in a country with an average of 9.5 decaying teeth in each child, they had 0.5. It is an inspiring example of raising children naturally, without drugs or vaccines. I encourage you to look into the story more.

Babies do not produce antibodies until they are 3 to 6 months

Babies are given vaccines to produce anti bodies when they do not even produce antibodies. This makes no sense. It is speculated that the real reason for these early jabs is ‘parent training’. Babies get the antibodies they need from their mothers breast milk. If the mother has previously contracted measles, the mother will pass the measles antibodies onto the child through breastmilk. If the mother has been vaccinated for measles, the immunity is not passed onto the baby through breastmilk.

Outbreaks of disease in fully vaccinated communities

There are still outbreaks of diseases in fully vaccinated communities.

Outbreaks in Highly Vaccinated Populations: Implications for Studies of Vaccine Performance

Investigation of a measles outbreak in a fully vaccinated school population including serum studies before and after revaccination.

Pertussis Infection in Fully Vaccinated Children in Day-Care Centers, Israel

What was that about vaccine derived herd immunity?

Biased Media

It is worrying how blatantly biased the media is towards vaccines. Every time someone dies from a ‘vaccine-preventable disease’ it is all across the media. When someone dies from a vaccine, there is nothing to be seen anywhere.

Every now and then, there are articles that appear on media questioning vaccines. they are usually very quickly removed. I saw one recently - it was a positive review of the ‘Vaxxed’ film on the Washington Post. It was up for about 2 hours before it was taken down, and replaced very quickly with a negative one..

Then we look at the recent CDC whistle-blower. No one reported anything. There was one mainstream media site (can’t recall which one) that posted a story about it. It was up for about an hour, before it was removed.

It is estimated around 70% of mainstream media finance comes from pharmaceutical companies. You can understand why they don’t want to piss them off.

Vaccine Shedding

Those who are vaccinated with live viruses can shed and pass the disease they were vaccinated for to others. This was the big problem with the flu vaccine in the UK, and it the reason many schools were closed for weeks after it was administered.

Comparison of virus shedding after lived attenuated and pentavalent reassortant rotavirus vaccine.

Studies Show Measles Vaccine Spreads Virus | The Healthy Home Economist

Duration of virus shedding after trivalent intranasal live attenuated influenza vaccination in adults.

Investigation of a measles outbreak in a fully vaccinated school population including serum studies before and after revaccination.

Videos

There are loads of videos of babies and toddlers having seizures after vaccines. Videos of toddlers walking and talking before vaccines, and being unable to do either post-vaccination. They are not pleasant to watch.

It tends to be a bit harder hitting when you see it on video rather than just seeing it as a figure on paper, so this is definitely a reason that some people may not vaccinate for.

Quora Answers

I'm gonna chuck this one in here at the end real quick. Almost every single vaccine question on quora gets about 20 pro-vaccine answers, and 1 or 2 anti-vaccine answers. The difference between these is, almost all of the 20 pro answers and basically the same thing. ‘Anti-vaxxers are idiots, want children to die, haven’t done their research, think they’re smarter than doctors. Anti-Science, the research is there.. It’s all Wakefields fault, blah blah blah.’ its the same crap every time without actually giving a real answer. It shows a lack of research. The 1 or 2 ‘anti’ answers are generally better thought out, sourced, giving decent reasons every time. Some people would rather follow the intelligent than follow the crowd..

Similarly, I have had many debates with people on Facebook. It normally feels like me against the world, but I have had people send me personal messages saying that they were surprised at the other side of the argument, and that I have encouraged them to do more research. The problem is, these guys don’t want to post on the facebook post, because they do not want that ‘anti-vax’ label.

_________

I’m not sure when to stop with this… I think that will do for now. To be honest, it only scratches the surface of reasons not to vaccinate - there is much more to say about all of these areas, and more areas to go into - I tried to keep it brief.. I'm sure many others could add a significant amount of information to the list.

Every disease is different. Every vaccine is different. Every country is different. Making a decision to vaccinate is not an all or none decision. Look at the vaccines one by one and decide whether each of them is worth it. There should be no taking shortcuts where the health of yourself and your child is concerned, and do not give in the bullying, particularly the ‘hurting the herd’ crap. Personally I wouldn’t let anyone persuade me to set my child on fire on the off chance it may keep others warm..

There is no good argument. Anti-vaxxers are ridiculous. They are ignorant, deluded. I have seen the effects of for instance - Polio. A work colleague of mine (years ago) contracted polio, spent a year in an iron lung unable to even breathe for herself. She survived as the virus burnt itself out, she was left with a limp as many victims were if they survived.

iron lung polio - Google Search

These diseases caused many deaths before vaccines were discovered. People used to cough themselves to death, slowly spitting up blood as TB destroyed their lungs. I have no patience with anti-vaxxers. Selfishly they put others at risk as there are certain people who cannot be vaccinated for genuine medical reasons.

Easy. Mind your own business. Live by the old adage: “Live and Let Live”. Practice the notion of “to each his own”. Realize not everyone agrees with you and that you’re not necessarily correct. Realize that people crave freedom, not security and authoritarian rule. Realize that you have no right and no authority to govern anyone else, determine what’s best for anyone else, or to force your ideology upon anyone else. Finally, realize that you do NOT have the whole picture, and probably not even the correct picture at all, and that those with whom you disagree may actually know something that you do not.

They’re afraid — and I actually have some empathy there. When my son was very young he had all the routine vaccinations, and I suffered very few qualms. He was so tiny and vulnerable to disease, and the whole process was so businesslike and the doctor so sure of him/herself. At every Well Baby Check the needle would come out, the injections given, and that would be that.

It got a little harder, though, as he got older. By then it was mostly a matter of booster shots, and I actually had to take some initiative to see that they happened. The thought that he might be that 1 in a million kid who had a severe, even fatal reaction, to a booster surfaced from time to time, and my involvement in the process — the instigator, really — would haunt me to my grave. I must admit too that the thought that could rely on other kids’ immunity to avoid measles and mumps flickered through my mind from time to time — something I’m definitely not proud of. (And for anyone who wonders, he did get every last booster. I wasn’t about to let my irrational fears get in the way of his health and safety, and of being a responsible parent).

The funny thing is that I had no such qualms — not even a flicker — when the Covid vax was introduced. By then my husband had lost some family members and friends in Europe to the disease, and I had seen Covid tear through his Essential Industry workplace more than once. Suddenly that 1 in a million chance of something going seriously wrong from the vax seemed like nothing compared to all the Covid-related devastation around us.