Steve Chalmers
Jul 27, 2017 · 2 min read

Let’s pick on vaccines. We vaccinated our now adult children, and will recommend that they do the same as they become parents. I had diseases now vaccinated against as a child, and knew and worked with polio survivors. My parents had schoolmates who did not survive diseases which vaccines controlled so long ago most people in the US do not grasp those risks.

When I was a child, my sister had a minor adverse reaction to a routine vaccine (her upper arm, around the injection site, swelled like a balloon). Our excellent pediatrician said OK, this sometimes happens, the swelling will go down and she’ll be fine, and in the future we need to use this other (more expensive) vaccine formulation for her. This matter of fact, professional response, both of the individual physician and of the system, is what I expect. Vaccines carry risks: dealing with these requires matter of fact honesty and transparency.

A couple of decades ago, an intuitive decision was made to change the formulation of vaccines, to contain less antigen and more adjuvant. I trusted the judgment of the physician/scientists leading the vaccine establishment.

Anecdotes emerged of a significantly greater number of a new kind of adverse vaccine reactions. However, what happened then totally destroyed my confidence in the vaccine establishment: (1) PR from the vaccine establishment denied there was a problem; (2) PR from the vaccine establishment used converse arguments and equated absence of evidence with evidence of absence, which means this PR was being written by non scientists for ignorant people to consume — and was not honest; (3) rather than investigating and gathering facts, perhaps to establish the existence of a susceptible sub population for which the adjuvant heavy formulation was inappropriate, the vaccine establishment simply circled the wagons; (4) for all that Wakefield is likely a bad actor, putting his head on a pole and showing it all over the world made it clear that it was unacceptable for scientists anywhere to research or publish on vaccine risks. This means science is no longer doing science, it’s doing politics and marketing. This means that just as a for profit pharmaceutical company can politically influence the standard of practice in a particular area of medicine to in essence force physicians to prescribe a particular medicine in response to certain indications (or on a particular ladder) as a condition of keeping their medical license, it means a for profit vaccine manufacturer can suppress independent research, and publication of that research, into risks of a particular vaccine.

I vote no confidence, and throw everyone in charge out.

    Steve Chalmers

    Written by

    Student of complex systems; prematurely retired from a career in tech focused on the boundaries between server, storage, and network in the data center.

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