The rabies vaccine has gone a long way from the 6 dose goat brain cultured vaccine to the new (as of 3 decades ago or more) chicken embryo cultured ones.
As for crowd diseases being benign and immunity, I'd suggest looking at either whooping cough or polio for counter examples. Or German measles (rubella) - which, if a pregnant woman contracts it, is mild for her, but can and will cause severe retardation in her child. Do update your research on pertussis though, the vaccine given these days is, in general, acellular. Less long lasting than the whole cell one so needs booster shots, but much less likely to provoke reactions. On 04/02/19, 1:50 AM, "silklist on behalf of Heather Madrone" <silklist-bounces+suresh=hserus....@lists.hserus.net on behalf of heat...@madrone.com> wrote: Kiran K Karthikeyan wrote on 2/3/19 2:44 AM February 3, 2019: > This leads me to the point I'm trying to make - the reason to accept > science and its findings, warts and all, is simply because we are human and > the scientific method is the best method of enquiry we have at our > disposal. This obviously doesn't mean blind acceptance, but it does mean we > ask for a preponderance of evidence which peer review (sometimes) supplies. > The system is not perfect but that is a problem with actors in it who are > unfortunately human. Add to this the last para of Heather's response on > whether we can ever truly know something. > > [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Significant_figures > [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_and_precision It's also the reason to question science and its findings, warts and all. It's the scientific method all the way down. Checking past work and assumptions is part of it. "Measure three times and cut once" is from carpentry, not science, but it's a valid practice when making any irreversible change. New evidence comes in all the time. It's worth taking a breath to ask whether we are on course. This gets muddier when you have interested actors (and we always do) on both sides of the scientific equation. There are always people who try to force-map available data to get the conclusions they want, and it can be very difficult to tell when they're doing so. Pharmaceutical companies have a long history of massaging, suppressing, and manufacturing results so they can bring drugs profitably to market. I did my vaccine research after my daughter had a life-threatening reaction to the whole-cell pertussis vaccine. I discovered that vaccines are not a monolithic issue. The tetanus vaccine, for example, is a safe and effective preventative of a horrible disease that lies in wait in the soil everywhere around us. It's usually quite long-lasting as well. WWII soldiers who were vaccinated against tetanus exhibited immunity over 50 years later. The crowd disease vaccines, on the other hand, share the distinction of being much less effective at conferring immunity, shorter-lived, and with more side effects. Many of the crowd diseases are largely benign in healthy children and confer lifelong immunity. The diseases are bad news for pregnant women and people with immune disorders, but it's not clear that vaccinating healthy children against these diseases is our best public health option. Some public health officials agree that it might be better policy to vaccinate against many diseases at puberty and again in early adulthood, but they can't enforce vaccination of teens and adults. Young children are a captive audience, though, so they are repeatedly vaccinated against the crowd diseases, which don't pose a particular threat to their health, and also against hepatitis B and HPV, which they are extremely unlikely to contract. Meanwhile the adults who should be vaccinated against those diseases mostly aren't. We don't yet have longterm data on the effects of our current aggressive vaccine policy. How do repeated doses of a wide variety of vaccines affect the health of individuals over 50, 75, 100 years? How long do the vaccines confer immunity? What percentage of the population remains susceptible to the disease after aggressive vaccination as opposed to after natural immunity to the endemic disease? About 15 years ago, we discovered a bat colony inside our chimney as well as a bat bite on my shoulder. The rabies vaccine is not particularly safe. It requires 6 doses that cause flu-like symptoms over the course of a month. Rabies was then invariably fatal. The whole family received all six doses of the rabies vaccine, and we were grateful for it, flu-like symptoms and all. When I was a child, doctors ordered up x-rays for every minor mishap and handed out antibiotics like candy. "Better safe than sorry," they'd say, completely unaware of the effects of overindulgence in those particular kinds of medical technology. So let's see, what is the experiment and what is the control? In adopting a new medical technology, should we err on the side of over- or under-prescribing it? How much data do we need before we decide that a technology is safe and effective? How long do we need to follow patients to determine whether there are deleterious side effects? These aren't easy questions to answer. It's not unscientific to want new medical technologies to prove themselves before submitting one's self and one's children as experimental animals. We do our research and make the best choices we can, knowing that Mother Nature always bats last. --hmm