Not Worth a Shot: Why Some Christians Refuse Vaccinations on Moral Grounds
“The use of fetal cell lines from the 1960s is another sticking point in the vaccine debate.” - Christianity Today
There shouldn’t even be a “vaccine debate.”
Does it make sense to view oneself as responsible for how a vaccine was derived but not view oneself as responsible for the spread of deadly diseases? … I can’t see it.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
There are a number of medical innovations whose roots ought to make us cringe; one thing for starters is that a lot of the best early work on hypothermia and said injuries was done in Nazi concentration camps. I think I can learn from that while mourning the atrocities committed, no?
Regarding fetal stem cells, it also strikes me that one could obtain a new line if one desired from fetal surgeries they’re doing now, or possibly even from amniocentesis. No murder required.
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
[Aaron Blumer]There shouldn’t even be a “vaccine debate.”
Does it make sense to view oneself as responsible for how a vaccine was derived but not view oneself as responsible for the spread of deadly diseases? … I can’t see it.
I agree, but let’s not act like an unvaccinated child is the equivalent of Typhoid Mary.
[pvawter]I agree, but let’s not act like an unvaccinated child is the equivalent of Typhoid Mary.
Tell that to the hundreds of kids getting measles around New York City because people aren’t willing to get their MMR. Measles has come back because we’re not vaccinating, and yes, it can be lethal. I also remember around Boulder that there were quite a few cases of whooping cough (pertussis) because people around there weren’t getting vaccinated.
As a result, Typhoid Mary is, in a manner of speaking, on the streets of Gotham again. It’s probably greatly because vaccination has been so successful that we forget how important a lot of these vaccines are. Put differently, ask someone my age or younger about polio, and then ask someone who’s 70 or up. You will likely get two very different answers, and Jonas Salk’s success has a lot to do with why.
Don’t get me wrong; there are more important and less important vaccines, corresponding with the lethality of the disease and how easy it is to prevent it. But that noted, let’s encourage people to remember their history and why, precisely, doctors started to recommend them.
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
One way to evaluate Measles vaccine is to compare the percentage of deaths to measles to the number of deaths and complications to measles vaccine. This is difficult to do, but the following quotes give a rough idea:
Historically, the CDC has reported measles death rates to be one in 10,000 cases.
https://www.nvic.org/vaccines-and-diseases/measles/measles-quick-facts…
Nearly two decades earlier, in 1981, a report of the National Childhood Encephalopathy Study was published in Britain that concluded:
“The risk of a serious neurological disorder within 14 days after measles vaccine in previously normal children irrespective of eventual clinical outcome is 1 in 87,000 immunizations.”27
However, a 2007 study conducted in Britain concluded “We can estimate the vaccine-attributable risk of serious neurologic disease after the first dose of MMR vaccine as 1 in 365,000 doses.28
Today, the majority of doctors and health officials reject the suggestion that MMR vaccine is associated with the development of autism in children.43 However, privately funded research continues to investigate the potential association between vaccines, including MMR vaccine, and the development of autism, inflammatory bowel disease and other kinds of brain and immune system dysfunction in previously healthy children.
https://www.nvic.org/vaccines-and-diseases/measles/measles-vaccine-inju…
There is, of course, much more information at each of these sites.
David R. Brumbelow
There’s an anti-vaxxer in our church
She has other issues too
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
[Bert Perry]As a result, Typhoid Mary is, in a manner of speaking, on the streets of Gotham again.
It is unhelpful and inaccurate to compare an unvaccinated person to Typhoid Mary. There is a world of difference between someone knowingly carrying a deadly disease and someone merely not contributing to herd immunity. It is characterizations like this that make any meaningful conversation with someone who is anti-vaccine virtually impossible.
There are both similarities and dissimilarities.
Both contribute to the spread of disease… one individually, the other as one of many, some of whom get sick and spread it.
The cases are not identical, no, but I don’t think anyone is saying that.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
Does the very fact that a person is unvaccinated contribute to the spread of disease? I think that would be a difficult assertion to demonstrate.
When we talk about the “responsibility” of an individual to society, should we include any and all things that carry a potential and uncertain risk as opposed to a known and actual risk? That’s where the conversation starts to get troublesome in my opinion.
Paul, look up “Typhoid Mary” and see what you find. She was a woman who was a carrier of typhoid, one who carried the virus but did not get sick. Because she wasn’t sick, she persisted in her vocation as a cook despite public health officials telling her she was spreading a deadly disease—somewhere between three and fifty people died as a result, and somewhere between 50 and who knows how many people got sick.
The same dynamics are at work with anti-vaxxers these days. The relevant principle is “herd immunity”, and it works on the notion that if you don’t get the disease (either openly or as a carrier), you also are far less likely to pass it on to others. Remember the old geometric series you learned back in junior high or high school math, where a^n goes to infinity if a>1, but zero if a < 1? That’s the principle. If the average person exposed exposes one or more people to the disease, you have an epidemic. If the average person exposes less than one, it fizzles out.
So like it or not, those who refuse vaccinations are indeed running the risk of exposing their neighbors to those diseases, just.like.Typhoid.Mary.
Side note; I believe that if the CDC and others made the case of herd immunity more emphatically, a LOT of the opposition to vaccines would disappear. People are looking at “will it make me immune?”, but that’s really far less important than “will it make me less likely to pass this disease to someone else?”
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
Typhoid Mary changed her name and moved constantly to avoid facing authorities because she knew she was carrying a deadly disease. Her story of more akin to an HIV infectee having sex with various people knowing he will likely infect them. It’s just not the same as otherwise healthy people who are not inoculated against a disease many of them do not and will not ever have.
And the consistent refrain she gave was that she didn’t believe she was causing a problem. Just.Like.Today’s.Vaccine.Deniers. It’s also worth noting that you can transmit diseases like measles without knowing you’ve got it. Just.Like.Typhoid.Mary. She also changed her name a sum total of…once.
And regarding your comparison to HIV, thankfully typhoid is not (sans AZT/cocktail) consistently lethal like AIDS. So the case of measles in Gotham is a lot closer to Typhoid Mary’s case than vaccine deniers would like to admit.
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
Just so I understand you, Bert. You’re saying that unvaccinated people in the US are like those who knowingly carry and spread disease to others. And this applies to all of them, whether they actually carry disease or not, because they may carry a contagion at some point. If the above is an accurate characterization of your view, then I assume you would be in favor of either forced vaccination or quarantine for all those who refuse the vaccine. That was how Mary spent the last decades of her life, btw.
I’m sure that argument wins a lot of vaccine skeptics to your position.
One of the major contributors to anti-vaxxers is the almost complete inability to get any numbers at all regarding actual (not fictional) deaths from vaccination. Try even googling for them. Of course, it’s recognized that nearly all adverse events, rare as they are, are a result of allergic reaction or severe immunodeficiency, but when someone asks the odds, and gets the answer that “vaccines are safe” rather than getting a number like 1/10,000,000 (I just made that up) can have an issue with vaccine, people start to not believe what they are being told.
Since the consequences of some of these diseases, like measles or polio, is fairly high, it’s pretty easy to make the decision to take the risk even without numbers. For something like chicken-pox, which no one of my generation was vaccinated for and most eventually got, it’s a harder call when you’re getting “feel good” answers from the doctors. I’ll admit I went back and forth about getting the chicken-pox vaccine for my kids, before eventually having them vaccinated. (As discussed in a previous thread, my kids ended up getting all that were available, except HPV.) When you think you are being fed a line, it’s easy to listen to alternative sources of information, even if they are more likely to be wrong.
The same thing happened when my wife got breast cancer (a fairly rare and aggressive type, or so we were told). We kept asking for her prognosis or odds. Unlike what you hear from others with cancer, where they got answers of “its possibly curable” to “you have a couple months to live,” the doctors refused to ever give my wife or I any numbers. At all. Ever. All they would say is “let’s be positive.” I can assure you that such non-answers have completely the opposite effect of what’s intended. I never did get them to tell me whether the odds were just really bad, or they didn’t know them. What it did do, was make me realize that I would listen to what they said, but then my wife and I were going to make the call on treatment, taking advantage of their knowledge, but never completely believing anything they said. I’m not sure that that’s the goal they were shooting for.
Doctors need to be completely honest with people. They should say that vaccine complications are rare (or even extremely rare), but can happen, and they need to be prepared to give whatever numbers are available, rather than trying to snow the patient’s parents. And they need to contrast that with what can happen if people do get polio or measles, and show the numbers there too.
Along similar lines, have you ever noticed what happens in an airport when there’s a delay and all personnel refuse to give *any* information as to what is causing it it vs. just saying the pilot was late, or there was an equipment malfunction, or whatever? People get much more infuriated when staff are trying to pacify them vs. just being straight up with them. I know it’s true for me, and it’s fairly easy to see in the passengers around me. I hate getting no info, and I fume and think the airline is terrible, but believe me, I’m perfectly happy to patiently wait knowing the plane needs to be repaired or replaced, since I’m going to be riding in it.
If you want people to believe vaccines are safe, give hard numbers. That may not convince everyone, but it will convince a lot more than just saying “vaccines are safe.” Not doing so makes people think the doctors are hiding something, even if they are not.
Dave Barnhart
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