"The safety of thimerosal is entirely possible to evaluate. It was in a bunch of childhood vaccines; it now is not. Has there been any demonstrable difference?"
If you don't believe that proper clinical trials are important to evaluate safety then there's not much more I can say. Epidemiological studies are rife with problems and the data can be manipulated to claim almost anything you want.
"Not necessarily. Could just not be worth the fight with the anti-vaxxers spreading bullshit about it. See also: Subway ditching azodicarbonamide because some blogger started a scaremongering movement around it."
Good point, but mercury is one of the most toxic substances known to man, does not break down, and is scientifically proven to bio-accumulate in mammalian tissues and never leave. It was also injected directly into the body, bypassing all the normal biological defenses a compound must go through before entering tissues. Furthermore, people can chose to not eat Subway without consequence. If vaccines had thimerosal in them again, it would be unavoidable without major life changes and being forcibly removed from large swaths of civil society. A consequence so severe necessitates a more proof than just saying you think mercury is safe in small doses with zero supporting concrete evidence.
Thimerosal was removed around 2001, well before the anti-vaxxer movement had enough influence to matter.
Your feelings and weak suppositions about thimerosal in vaccines are not science, and rather just indicate that you want to believe what you want to believe without presenting any concrete evidence.
There's no evidence it caused harm. For example, quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiomersal#Toxicology - "the World Health Organization has concluded that there is no evidence of toxicity from thiomersal in vaccines and no reason on safety grounds to change to more expensive single-dose administration"
> They stopped putting it into American vaccines about then
Because American worry warts were induced into a false panic by a fraud pushing a false connection between vaccinations and autism, leading to a specific belief that the mercury in thiomersal was the main factor.
The US authorities believed the precautionary response of removing thiomersal would increase public confidence in the vaccination system, even without solid evidence that it caused a problem. (The evidence by comparing autism in the US with a country that didn't use thiomersal was that thiomersal did not have a contributing effect.)
The US can do this because it has the money that a poorer country does not.
However, this precautionary removal caused people like you to believe the authorities were hiding a connection.
See https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4826a3.htm for the stated reason. (" There is a significant safety margin incorporated into all the acceptable mercury exposure limits. Furthermore, there are no data or evidence of any harm caused by the level of exposure that some children may have encountered in following the existing immunization schedule. Infants and children who have received thimerosal-containing vaccines do not need to be tested for mercury exposure.")
> when they got a dozen simultaneous vaccinations each preserved with the stuff
However, the CDC link points out "Some but not all of the vaccines recommended routinely for children in the United States contain thimerosal". https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/thimerosal/index.... says MMR, Varicella, IPV, and pneumococcal conjugate vaccines have never contained thimerosal, which are 3 of the 11.
Posting this now before finishing the article to be an early poster. (see edit below for my comments after finishing the article)
The article refers to missteps and errors doctors have made concerning vaccinations. One misstep/error that is concerning to me is the use of thimerosal as a preservative/adjuvant.
Around 1999, the FDA began to pressure manufacturers to remove thimerosal from all childhood vaccines due to safety concerns. The following link is a great summary why that presents pro/con perspectives. Thimerosal is no longer used in childhood vaccines, and has been largely replaced by aluminum-based adjuvants. https://www.fda.gov/vaccines-blood-biologics/vaccines/thimer...
In 2004, FDA official William Egan stated that no clinical trial had been done to evaluate the safety of thimerosal, a preservative/adjuvant that was commonly used in vaccinations. Except for a poorly run 1930 study. See the following link for the testimony. It's from an anti-vax youtube channel, but the testimony is real and uncut.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBRwOohhHuA
A few years ago, after about 15 years of studying biochemistry and personal experimentation (including obtaining an environmental engineering degree), I identified the root cause of my crippling illness that took away my ability to walk. Chronic mercury toxicity. Thimerosal contains mercury. Maybe I got the mercury somewhere else, but I have no other known exposures. Never ate much fish, and my symptoms started long before I ever ate any.
I have reversed the course of my illness using a medication that specifically binds to mercury and facilitates easier excretion from the body. I've been using this therapy for 3 years now with consistent improvement. If it was a placebo effect it would not produce consistent results for such a long period of time.
For those curious, the medication I'm using is emeramide. It is currently going through the FDA approval process for the treatment of mercury toxicity, and looks like it will be approved within 10 years.
Edit:
After finishing the article I'd like to address two points:
(1) I see that the author discussed the FDA's removal of thimerosal. They point out how experts "talked out of both sides of their mouths", claiming thimerosal was safe, but insisted it be removed as expeditiously as possible. Toxicity is very very complex science. During my 4 years as an environmental engineer I noticed a huge amount of politicking around toxicity issues because it's so hard to prove if some compound is safe or not. My interpretation of the expert's behavior regarding thimerosal is that they became so uncomfortable with the unproven safety profile of the compound that they pushed for it's removal, while simultaneously saying it was fine in order to cover their asses. It's career suicide to admit you supported the use of a compound all the while insisting it was safe, only to flip-flop and say it was dangerous all along. So the experts do the right thing, banning the compound, while covering their asses. I saw this phenomenon over and over while working in pollution remediation.
(2) The author spends considerable time discrediting Wakefield's MMR study. MMR never contained thimerosal, so discussion of that study with respect to thimerosal's safety is not applicable. Also, Wakefield's study was ONE study, and it's so strange how the pro-vax movement keeps talking about how terrible it was like it is still relevant. There have been hundreds if not thousands of other studies much more worthy of discussion. The healthcare industry has published numerous fraudulent studies from all sorts of perspectives. It's not a phenomenon only associated with people who question vaccine safety. See Merck's fraudulent study demonstrating Vioxx's safety. They just removed 3 participants so the numbers looked good.
> Data reviewed did not demonstrate convincing evidence of toxicity from doses of thimerosal used in vaccines. In case reports of accidental high-dose exposures in humans to thimerosal or ethyl mercury toxicity was demonstrated only at exposures that were 100 or 1000 times that found in vaccines.
May I suggest a couple of links to some in depth analysis of these studies by scientists in a form the layman can understand? Links about researchers stealing money from their university do not add to your cause as it has no bearing on whether or not a particular immunizations are more dangerous than the disease they prevent.
And to address your concerns re Thimerosal. Apart from the fact the general scientific consensus is it isn't dangerous it was removed from almost all vaccines around 2001. For more information: http://www.fda.gov/BiologicsBloodVaccines/Vaccines/Questions...
first they say that vaccines contain mercury which they do not they contain thimerosal (sodium ethylmercurithiosalicylate) that is not mercury. Further in the body it is metabolized to ethylmercury which is still not mercury. It still has a whole ethy group. There are entire compounds that by slight deviation can mean the difference between fatal and essential.
While ethylmercury has some links to not being that great for you, the fact that the article is so grossly negligent to call a compound mercury (because everyone knows it is bad stuff) tends to hint that their is either a political agenda or that are looking to scare up a story.
Further, thimerosal was removed from all children vaccines in the 90's so even if there was a link, there is no valid reason today to not vaccinate you child.
Personally, (if it where mercury) I would much rather expose my child to even a small dose of mercury to prevent a return to the infant mortality rates of a century ago.
Can you imagine a time when it was unusual for a family to not loose a child. Ponder that for a moment, then weight it against the risks. Up until vaccination technology, a family would almost assuredly loose a child in their lifetime.
My grandmother lost her older sister at 10 years old to a vaccinatable disease. That was the reality back then The math says it all, something changed infant mortality rates and medical science has testable reproducible results that say they where responsible for that change, until the witch doctors can provide reproducible results, I am sticking with the guys that are using science.
Basically the first paper states, from what I can understand, "Some people are born with a genetic defect in their cells, specifically in the mitochondria part of the cell. When these people are injected with Thimerosal, they get autism. Others don't." My proposed solution: Check to see if the kid has this genetic defect, and if so, don't inject them with mercury, inject them with the mercury free vaccine and they will be fine.
I'm not anti-vaccine at all, just anti-mercury in the vaccine. Also they did not remove Thimerosal from vaccines. In fact, the swine flu shot had Thimersal and if you remember, children and pregnant women were encourage to take it first. This caused a 700% increase in miscarriages. http://hubpages.com/hub/thirmerosal_in_vaccines
"Regarding the question of vaccines and autism, for ethical reasons we cannot do a double-blind, randomized, control trial of vaccines with and without thimerosal. However, we can do the next best thing, and, indeed, we now have several good studies since 1999 that do just that. Some of these studies are epidemiological; some are ecological. What allows us to use them to reject the hypothesis that mercury in vaccines is an etiological agent that is either associated with or causes autism is a very simple but powerful prediction that the hypothesis makes. Quite simply, if the hypothesis is true and thimerosal-containing vaccines (TCVs) cause autism (or are even merely a significant contributing factor), we would expect that the removal of thimerosal from vaccines would lead to a rapid decrease in autism incidence and prevalence within 2-5 years.
"There have now been several studies that examined this very hypothesis in countries that removed thimerosal from their vaccines before the U.S. did. For example Hviid et al3 reported that autism prevalence in Denmark increased from 1991 to 1996 despite the removal of thimerosal from vaccines, while Madsen et al4 looked at the time period from 1971 to 2000 and concluded that autism diagnoses continued to increase after thimerosal was removed from vaccines. Neither study supported a causal link between TCVs and autism, and they were a prominent part of the dataset that was used by the Institute of Medicine to conclude in 2004 that there was no good evidence to support a link between TCVs and autism. A more recent study by Eric Fombonne5 in Montreal examined 27,749 children born from 1987 to 1998 attending 55 different schools. Cumulative thimerosal exposure by age 2 years was calculated for the 1987-1998 birth cohorts. This exposure ranged from 100-125 µg from 1987 to 1991, 200-225 µg from 1992 to 1995, and then none after 1996, which was when thimerosal was completely removed from vaccines in Canada. The result was that autism, ASD, and pervasive developmental disorder diagnoses continued to increase in all periods, demonstrating no relationship between TCVs and autism or ASDs. Even more recently, a large study6 failed to support a relationship between thimerosal and adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes, a result that led one of the investigators in the study, Sallie Bernard, a proponent of the thimerosal hypothesis, to disavow the study in a case of sour grapes, because it did not show what she had hoped that it would show."
>Yes, those metals at the concentrations in vaccines can cause minor side effects, though there is no evidence of serious side effects.
How about this to ensure safety: demonstrate that they are safe at say 100 times the amount used in vaccines. Has this been done? No, is what I understand. ( if you do find a study to that effect please put it here or email me).If that can be demonstrated then we can be reasonably sure that 1/100 the massive dose will be relatively harmless.
The way it is normally put : that is no evidence of serious side effects is disingenuous. It's the other way round, it has to be demonstrated that it has no serious side effects.
Even if it has been debunked, the fact that thimerosal is banned in california, and being phased out just legitimizes the fear. Then California temporarily unbans it for the H1N1 vaccine. How does that make arguments towards its safety sound? It merely makes it seem as if the dangers of H1N1 for this case outweighs the suggested risk of thimerosal.
The Facts: The Eli Lilly Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS) for Thimerosal acknowledges that exposure to Thimerosal in utero and in children can cause “mild to severe mental retardation and mild to severe gross motor impairment.”
Ok, so where is the actual data sheet? You've got a link to it to bavck up this claim, right? Err, No? The rest of it isn't much better.
I actually met my first and only anti-vaxer a few months ago. She quite clearly didn't have a clue about chemistry and wanted to make out this big pharma conspiracy (I used to work in medical trialling so I knew more about the crap that goes on than she ever would). I basically called her a crank.
Seems there is no reasoning with these people because it's not about reason or truth.
> Is there any scientific literature on potential dangers of these standard vaccines? Maybe newer findings?
> I’m asking because this is such a polarizing topic that science-trusting people could totally have developed a blind spot by now.
There are massive publicly-accessible databases of reported possible adverse reactions to vaccines. You can easily download a spreadsheet listing every reported instance of someone developing a runny nose or rash after receiving a vaccine last year in the US. It is very reasonable to assume that the reporting rate for more serious reactions is plenty high enough for any real patterns to be quite noticeable from analyzing that data, at least for the vaccines that are given to large portions of the public. There is no blind spot when it comes to safety of the vaccines that have been recommended for the general public; this is well monitored and the safety of something like the MMR vaccine is supported by a mountain of data. Anyone questioning the long-established safety of common vaccines needs to provide up-front an analysis of VAERS data and a very good explanation for why they think that data is inaccurate.
> Am I correct in saying your grievance is a lack of evidence that they're helpful?
Part of the second picture that the user has highlighted basically says that said vaccine contains a mercury derivative and that it has not been tested for "carcinogenic or mutagenic potential, or for impairment of fertility". So I would say that this is also part of his issue.
> they don't believe it posed any additional health risks
> So likely nothing to worry about at scale
> About 500,000 people have received shots from the three suspended Moderna batches
Why are you so confidently advocating for a "safe until proven unsafe" mentality here? The health impacts from this contamination are completely unknown, and could impact a lot of people, and their children, etc.
EDIT: down vote all you want, armchair reasoning does not prove that this contamination is safe - cite some relevant scientific literature to support your claims
That was their point: they were showing how ridiculous your first comment is, saying the same thing you are saying in your second comment. There is no elemental mercury in vaccines (this is probably the most debunked antivax argument).
The hypothesis that Thimerosal is toxic to humans has been largely disproven.
The source of this silly idea that vaccines are bad came when Andrew Wakefield published a study claiming the MMR vaccine caused autism. Alas, at the time he didn't disclose that he had a competing vaccine that he was unable to sell because the MMR vaccine was so effective.
However, people latched on to his study and now he were are 20 years latter with this faulty idea that vaccines are hurting people.
Any insights on why it has been banned from childhood vaccines since 2001? (see. https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/thimerosal/index....)
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