You clearly did not understand what I posted. I stated that I supported vaccine use for certain diseases, but that there are unaddressed questions about long-term safety. You fail to address the issue of whether it is feasible to expect all world populations to be able to be vaccinated, or whether treatment options are a more realistic goal for hard-to-vaccinate populations, which incidentally consist almost entirely of poor and uneducated people in third-world countries. I happen to believe they have a right to live, and that disease control options should not be optimized only for wealthy developed countries. I disagree with your premise that vaccination is by definition superior to treatment. How exactly do you propose prophylactic vaccination programs for viruses that have no effective vaccines because they mutate rapidly? How do you propose to handle diseases that suddenly become epidemic, and there has been no research on vaccines because of their sudden emergence? Do you think that those people who were vaccinated for measles but got the virus anyway don't deserve to benefit from a research focus on treatment rather than the prevention that failed them? Do you think that vaccine research, approval, and manufacturing can be done so rapidly that epidemics can be controlled easily? If so, you night consider this year's severe flu epidemic, and the failure to develop an Ebola vaccine in the months since that outbreak. Would not effective treatment for these patients be superior to a vaccine that does not exist?
I do not think that the 2/3 of measles victims who WERE vaccinated would agree that the vaccine was effective. I never stated that thousands should die so that one should live -- because you made up that statistic and the claim that I said it, which I most certainly did not. There are serious questions about efficacy and safety of certain vaccines, and you cannot condemn a parent who witnessed their child having a seizure after receiving a vaccine for refusing to have the child vaccinated again for anything but the most dire illnesses. I do not consider chicken pox or measles to be worth risking a child's life for.
It is impossible to discuss this rationally with someone who claims that I wrote things I did not write, expresses hatred for all people who refuse vaccinations, and refuses to accept that there may be valid questions about something that they so clearly hold sacred. This is the NNVC board, not the vaccination board, and I suggest that if you wish to discuss the merits of vaccinations for all people no matter what their individual circumstances might be, that this is not the board to do so.
