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  • From: Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Ignore the anti-vaccination mindset
  • Date: Wed, 25 Mar 2015 16:35:02 -0700

> On Mar 24, 2015, at 9:25 PM, Linda Shewan <linda_shewan@yahoo.com.au> wrote:
>
> We in the permaculture world know that taking care of the whole is
> essential. Injecting a chemical to make a plant 'immune' to a pest or
> disease is simply not the way permaculture looks at the world... so why
> would a permaculture practitioner believe that in human disease we are
> somehow outside the rest of the ecosystem?

As a former immunologist (who is agnostic on the vaccine debate, but a
supporter of good data collection), I would point out some errors here.
Vaccines are not “chemicals.” The active ingredient is disabled cells from
the disease organism; that part of them is made from life itself, so the
active component is as natural as any living thing.

Second, plants do not have immune systems. But animals do. Injecting an
animal with an antigen absolutely, provably can render that animal immune to
a disease. Vaccination is a biological control, and the same processs occurs
constantly in nature when an animal gets a disease and then becomes more
immune to it. I had measles. I am immune to it now.

The “deaths from vaccines” data come from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting
System (VAERS) and does not measure confirmed vaccine-related deaths, but
simply reports a death that occurred at some time after the person received a
vaccine. So the number of VAERS deaths will be higher than the number of
confirmed deaths caused by a vaccine. For example, there are roughly 100
VAERS deaths from measles vaccines reported per year, but most of those fall
apart on follow-up (look at the VAERS website).

Measles deaths in the US from 1900 to 1950 averaged between 350-750 per year
(plus all the brain damage from the disease). After the vaccine, deaths
dropped to 2 per year. Even if the 100/yr vaccine deaths is accurate—and we
know it is much lower—that’s better than 350-750.

Of course vaccines have side effects in a percentage of those using them. So
does eating any food (enjoy your wheat and dairy!) or taking any medicine,
herbal or otherwise.

I am not arguing for vaccines here. I am arguing for looking at all the data,
especially at data that refutes your hypothesis (which is one of the true
joys of science: having a colleague come up with a zinger that utterly
demolishes your idea, so you come back with a much stronger hypothesis).

The problem with self-educating is that we tend to gather only information
that supports our position, and ignore (or nowadays, fail to search for) info
that refutes it. Data that refute a position are far more important than data
that support it. This is particularly a problem in highly educated people who
have not been taught how to think critically, and there are many of them.
They are great at data collection and confirmation bias, and terrible at data
analysis. Of course it’s the educated who don’t vaccinate: they read all the
scary stuff.

The main problem with not getting vaccinated, regardless of how you feel
about the safety of vaccination, is that those who do not get vaccinated
become the sole carriers of diseases that would otherwise become extinct or
extremely rare, like measles in the US (the deaths are all in the
unvaccinated). Vaccine avoiders put others at risk, and make other people
sick. So avoiding vaccines is a social problem, and not so much a health
issue.

Toby
http://patternliteracy.com


>





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