Hep B Vax...thought this was interesting. Read the whole Article.

[LimeSlice]

In Australia, as I understand it, no vaccinations used for infants contain thimerosal. So that is not a problem for us here.

So the question is: what is the greater risk: the risk of an adverse reaction to the vaccine, or the risks associated with not being protected from the disease.

One thing I'd like to know - maybe someone has found the information about this:

Answer: Hepatitis B is a rare, mainly blood-transmitted disease. In 1996, only 54 cases of the disease were reported to the CDC in the 0-1 age group. There were 3.9 million births that year, so the observed incidence of hepatitis B in the 0-1 age group was just 0.001%. In the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), there were 1,080 total reports of adverse reactions from Hepatitis B vaccine in 1996 in the 0-1 age group, with 47 deaths reported. Total VAERS Hepatitis B reports for the 0-1 age group outnumber reported cases of the disease 20 to 1.

As I understand the article, this survey was done 5 years after the vaccination of newborns for this disease was started. So it's not surprising that there is a low rate of cases of the disease among children 0-1. If there was a high rate, the vaccine wouldn't be working. So what is the author's point about this? What he writes actually suggests that the vaccination program is working very well.

The statistic we need, that he doesn't state, is how many infections were reported in the years before the vaccine program started? The closest information to that I can find (from vaccineinformation.org) is that 16,000 children under 10 were infected yearly in the USA before the vaccine program started. I don't know how many of those were under 1, and the article doesn't state its references, so not sure where that data is coming from.

It really bugs me how on the one side, we know that adverse reactions may not be getting reported very well, and on the other side, the anti-vaccination information is littered with misinformation in the form of bad statistics that claim to support conclusions that they actually don't support (the quoted paragraph above is an example of this, there are many others). No wonder there is such confusion over this stuff!

I think you have misunderstood...The answer to your question is actually in the paragraph you are quoting.

The reason he is quoting the statistics from AFTER the vax was introduced is to make a frame of reference to the statistics involving the ration of adverse reaction:HB infection.

The point he is making that having adverse reactions at a 20 times the number of infected child is an outrageous statistic!
The more telling fact though is this:
54 cases of HB in 0-1 age group vs 47 deaths from the VACCINE

So almost as many children DIED from the vaccine as actually suffered the illness it is supposed to prevent.



Within the frame of reference he is talking about (the suitablility and adequacy of the testing and safety of implementation among he newborn (0-1) populace, this is an astoundingly high risk.

The number of births in that year was 3,900,000 (3.9mil), 47 deaths from the vaccine - supposing all newborns had their MANDATORY vaccines, make it 0.0012% of those inoculations ending in death - the same as the rate of HB infection.
So as many children are DYING from the vaccine as are contracting the disease after vaccination

To me, that number is too high. Especially when considering the fact you yourself recognised that not all adverse reactions are reported, and taking into consideration many ME's reluctance to make reference to the Vaccine in death reports (as in this articular case), it makes me wonder how high that number really is.

WRT to thimerosal in Australia, all flu shots have it, as does the new Swin Flu vax, which they are pushing on pregnant women, the elderly and small children. So yes, it is a problem here too.
In fact, there is a law suit underway in the US at the moment to stop the use of the 3 new SF vaccines as they are untested and unsafe, and in fact broke FDC regulations to get on the market.


BTT, making reference to how many children 0-1 were infected with HB before vaccinations started, whilst there is no figure given this paragraph is highly indicative:

The Hepatitis B vaccine was effectively mandated in 1991 for universal immunization of newborn babies by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) -- an adjunct of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Paradoxically, the CDC's own Fact Sheet on the Hepatitis B disease does not include newborn babies as a risk group for that disease. That Fact Sheet lists the risk groups as injection drug users, homosexual men, sexually active heterosexuals, infants/children of immigrants from disease-endemic areas, low socio-economic level, sexual/household contacts of infected persons, infants born to infected mothers, health care workers and hemodialysis patients NOT NEWBORN BABIES.

The notion of handing out a vaccine to a newborn infant that does not meet your own standards of an "at risk" group is careless to say the least, especially when the effects of the additives of that injection are KNOWN to cause serious side affects, inluding death at the same rate of infection. (which effectively nullifies the process. One could give the vaccine to NBs of HB positive women, and babies exposed from BIRTH to a high risk group and infected persons with a better result in terms of infant death and reaction, if one was following the CDCs own guidelines - there is simply no NEED to give it to other NBs at all)


The basic premise of the article and more to the point his testimony, is that the vaccine is not safe ENOUGH to be given.
If you look at other countries that do NOT give out HB vaccine to all its NBs, you will not see a soaring childhood infection rate at all. You also wont see 1000+ babies suffering adverse reactions.


KAWAZUKI - there is evidence that suggests, and indeed infectious disease specialits agree, that there is a cyclical infection rate of Whooping Cough. That regardless off vaccinations there is a WC "outbreak" somewhere every 3-5 years.
If you look at countries such as Sweeden and Germany, places where routine WC vax was stopped in 1978 and 1982 respectively, WC infection rates are still declining, just as they were already doing before WC vax was developed. The rates of infection in those countries is no higher than it is here either.

[tenar]

Limeslice, I haven't explained this very well, have I. I'll try to explain it better.

Let's assume that the figures quoted in the article are correct, that is that about 54 cases of the disease occurred in 0-1 age group, and that there were 47 deaths caused by the vaccine in the same year. Now, that is 47 deaths too many, obviously. But that is not the point at all. The most important figure in that paragraph is that the disease rate is so incredibly low.

I found elsewhere that there were 16000 infections yearly of Hep B in children under 10, in the US, in the years leading up to the vaccination program. Let us be conservative, and assume that only 10% of those were of children 0-1. Actually, the figure is probably far higher than 10%, because it seems probable that many of the infections of young infants are via their mothers, so acquired at or soon after birth. It also seems probable that since the older one is the more likely one is to be able to fight off a Hep B infection, that also would make the rate of infections in 0-1 year olds disproportionately high. But let's ignore those factors and assume that it's just evenly spread over each age in the 0-10 category.

So that would be 1600 infections in the age group 0-1, before the vaccination campaign. Of those, we know that 95% of them will not clear the infection themselves, and will go on to develop ongoing hepatitis (not sure what the terminology for that is). That's 1520 people. Of those, 40% will die of cirrhosis or hepatocellular carcinoma (whatever that is). So that's 608 deaths from each year's infections, pre-vaccination.

Now that the vaccination is done, the US is seeing around 47 deaths, plus 54 cases of Hep in infants. From those 54 cases you'd get, on average, 54*0.95*0.4 = 20.5 deaths, so a total of 68 deaths (rounding up).

So the vaccination campaign actually has reduced those deaths from Hep B by about 90%. Even though it's not a perfect vaccination, and has too-high a death rate. That means that each baby vaccinated has 1/10th of the risk that it once did of death due to Hep B.

That's an excellent result. Even though it can clearly be improved, and I'm sure that they are working on that.

This is my point exactly, that much of the anti-vaccination literature uses statistics badly. I don't think I've read an anti-vaccination article yet that didn't bug me (and I've read a lot of them, actually, because I'm interested) because somewhere in it was at least one (often many) statement that actually meant the opposite of what it was suggested to mean. There is also good, useful information in the literature, but a lot of it is fear-mongering based on meaningless statistics, and that annoys me because it means that loving parents are making choices based on wrong information.

I can spot this stuff because I have a background in mathematics. Many people would not understand it at all - it is often pretty obscure. I need to learn to be better at explaining it, though Doing my best to make it clearer here.

Hope that helps.