Vaccine “safety” and the swine flu vaccine

I find it tragically unsurprising how even with more than 800 confirmed cases of something as rare as teenage narcolepsy staring them in the face, the vaccine providers are still staunchly holding to their usual position of “no causal link”:

Emelie is one of around 800 children in Sweden and elsewhere in Europe who developed narcolepsy, an incurable sleep disorder, after being immunised with the Pandemrix H1N1 swine flu vaccine made by British drug maker GlaxoSmithKline in 2009.

Finland, Norway, Ireland and France have seen spikes in narcolepsy cases, too, and people familiar with the results of a soon-to-be-published study in Britain have told Reuters it will show a similar pattern in children there.

Their fate, coping with an illness that all but destroys normal life, is developing into what the health official who coordinated Sweden’s vaccination campaign calls a “medical tragedy” that will demand rising scientific and medical attention.

Europe’s drugs regulator has ruled Pandemrix should no longer be used in people aged under 20. The chief medical officer at GSK’s vaccines division, Norman Begg, says his firm views the issue extremely seriously and is “absolutely committed to getting to the bottom of this”, but adds there is not yet enough data or evidence to suggest a causal link.

Perhaps, as supposed to be the case with the increase in autism, what we’re seeing here is nothing more than a sudden increase in the parental awareness of narcolepsy…. What one always has to keep in mind when hearing the pro-vaccine parrots squawking “no causal link, no causal link” is that the standard they use for a causal link would eliminate the link between “being shot in the head” and “death” in the vast majority of lethal shootings.

In most cases, unless someone keels over dead after receiving a vaccination while still in the doctor’s office, the vaccine propagandists will claim that there is no link between the administration of the vaccine and the resultant harm that has been suffered by the individual receiving it.  Of course, having personally witnessed an individual collapse unconsciousness within two seconds of receiving a vaccine and hearing the doctor exclaim “oh, no”, I tend to have a considerably more skeptical outlook concerning the purported safety of vaccines and the vaccine schedule than the average individual.

The undeniable fact of the matter is that vaccines are not entirely safe, nor as they as safe as the vaccine advocates claim they are.  The precise degree to which they are unsafe is completely unknown, by either side, because no real and replicable scientific experiments have been performed concerning the current U.S. vaccine schedule.

Furthermore, we also know for an absolute fact that the vaccine manufacturers cherry-pick their statistical studies purporting to demonstrate the safety of the products they are selling.  The only rational position one can take concerning the safety of vaccines is a cautiously skeptical one, particularly in light of the legal immunity granted to those who manufacture, sell, and administer them.

To be clear, I am not against all vaccines.  I even received a tetanus shot when my kneecap was torn open on the soccer field a few years ago.  But it is also perfectly clear to me that not all vaccines are equally safe, or equally necessary.