The flu shot can give you the flu.
Fact or fiction?
Come on over.
Don't be on no island.
I'm holding!
It's time for another fact or fiction
and today we're talking about vaccines.
Hi, everyone. Hi.
My name is Michelle Yasharpour.
I am an allergist and immunologist.
I have been in practice for about eight years.
So the rules are I'm going to be reading off
a series of statements. If you think it's
a fact you're gonna go over to my right side,
the blue side.
If you think it's fiction, the left side,
the pink side.
I think that there are so many different
social media outlets that discuss
vaccines and unfortunately,
a lot of misinformation.
Vaccines are one of the things that have kept
us from seeing some really devastating diseases.
In the last couple of years we're, you know,
seeing a lot more measles, we're seeing a
lot more of these diseases that we haven't seen
in over a decade.
To create this
communication dialog about vaccinations is
really, really important because so many people
hold such hard opinions on it.
I always have a government conspiracy
type of attitude to vaccinations, but
my knowledge is actually very limited so…
I think this is gonna be a fun challenge.
Alright, is everyone ready?
Yeah! Let's do this.
Statement number one:
Fact or fiction?
So why do you think it's a fact?
I never thought about what is
the oldest medical tradition.
So I don't know if vaccines wouldn't be.
Anybody want to say why they
thought it was fiction?
Well, they used to use leeches
so that's pretty old.
And a hot rag to put on yourself to feel better.
This is a fact.
So I think, you know, cold rags and water...
they're not technically a medical treatment.
Vaccines are actually even older than antibiotics
and anesthesia.
What we've seen in the 7th century,
monks in India were using snake venom
and drinking it to protect themselves against
being bitten by snakes.
People in China inhaling smallpox particles in
order to prevent themselves from getting smallpox.
See, I almost walked across too because I
wanted to be a follower but you gotta stand
in your convictions.
The next statement:
Fact or fiction?
I've never gone to get any other vaccines since
I was a child, so I figured…
Becuse you got it, that you are protected for life?
Right.
This is actually fiction.
They lose their effectiveness after a certain number of years.
It was one of those things where, yeah, that makes sense,
vaccines work once and you're good for life.
But your body does grow, your body does change,
different things affect you.
The viruses are smart, they change.
A lot of time when the vaccines are being developed
they go to market without understanding
the full durability
and over time, we realize that, you know, it
has worn off and that we need to do a booster.
So our next statement:
Vaccines have only eradicated
one disease in humans.
Fact.
Fiction.
Eradicated means we haven't seen one case
of it in the entire world.
Polio, right, isn't that the only one?
Polio.
Definitely more than polio.
Polio, smallpox.
It's actually a fact.
Polio is not
the disease that's been eradicated.
There's a big difference between eradicated
and eliminated.
So eliminated means that a vaccine has basically
removed something from a certain region and
the only disease that's been eradicated is actually
the smallpox.
Well, I was thinking polio.
I stood on the right side, but technically I got it wrong.
So...
For a long time, we didn't see measles, mumps,
rubella, polio.
But we for sure can't say that they've been eradicated
because there was just five new measles cases
in L.A. in the last month.
Next statement:
Fact, fiction.
I want you to explain to me what shingles are.
So why do you guys think that that's not true?
Because I had chickenpox
and then later in life, I got shingles.
And that's embarrassing to tell everybody
but I know that it's not true.
It's actually fiction,
and part of it is because of what you said.
The vaccine for chickenpox does not protect
you against shingles completely.
There's actually two different types of vaccine
for shingles that you can get to protect against
the shingles itself.
Shingles is- and you were like,
"I don't know what shingles is."
Shingles is that virus that sits and sleeps
and hangs out in your nerves.
And in certain occasions, for example, if
you're super stressed out, haven't slept,
you know, you're just run down
it can get reactivated.
It can reduce the risk of it,
because if you have that live attenuated virus,
it's gonna be a smaller chance of getting shingles.
Next statement:
Come on over.
Don't be on no island.
I'm holding!
So to our lone ranger here,
do you want to tell us why you think it's not true?
I feel like whenever you get the flu shot,
they say you could get flu-like symptoms mildly,
but you don't get the flu from it.
Ok.
Because that's the whole point of a vaccine.
You don't get the actual thing, right?
I feel like I got really sick after a flu shot
once and I blamed it on the flu shot.
I don't know if that was the actual case.
So actually, this is fiction.
So if I had a dollar for every time somebody said
that "I'm not getting my flu shot this
year because every time I get my flu shot, I get sick,"
I'd be very rich.
I remembered them saying, you know, you might
feel a little bit uncomfortable, you might
have flu-like symptoms, but you're not
going to really get the flu.
And if you get it, it's because you already
were susceptible.
Getting any sort of vaccine is going to stimulate
your immune system.
So any time your immune system is stimulated,
you're going to get all of these different
weird side effects, you're going to feel a little
run down, you might have a low-grade
temperature.
It's just your immune system working to fight
against that vaccine so that it can build
immunity against the actual flu.
Scientists in a lab will sit and try
and predict what the flu is going to look like that year.
And then they basically formulate the different
proteins that they think it's going to be
in the flu virus.
So every year there's a new flu shot to try and
protect against that year's flu.
So you can't get the flu from proteins.
Alright. So the next statement:
Fact or fiction?
Why not?
Cancer could come at you in so many
different forms, like smoking, or you know you
can eat healthy and still develop
a breast cancer lump out of nowhere.
There's no vaccines for that.
Why'd you switch over?
Because he liked what I was saying.
Why do you think that that's true?
Because HPV, you can get cancer and you can
get a vaccine for that.
So in order for that to be true,
I thought you just needed one example.
We're speaking to this.
So basically, it's a fact.
And it's because there are vaccines...
I was over here the whole time.
So in particular, HPV is a very great example.
We vaccinate, you know, young adolescents
before they become sexually active to prevent
them from getting the HPV strain that can cause cancer.
And another example is actually hepatitis B.
So with the hepatitis B vaccine, we know
that chronic infection and chronic liver disease
predisposes somebody to getting cancer.
And so if you can prevent hepatitis B,
you can actually prevent liver cancer as well.
The next statement:
Fact or fiction?
I just feel like if there is a vaccine for it
why wouldn't you just do that rather than
like living through the disease itself?
I would rather not suffer so…
So this is a technicality question.
Just because something is more effective
doesn't mean necessarily that it's better.
It might sound great to be able
to get the natural disease and then
be protected for the rest of your life.
You're putting other people at risk and so that's
why preventing the disease itself with
a vaccine is better.
Preventing a disease and not having to live through it
and risking dying from it, we think
that that's better.
And when you have everybody vaccinated is that
you actually get to protect not just
you and not just your family,
but the concept of herd immunity.
When you get a bunch of kids sick
and they're walking around and you're taking them to,
you know, whatever market you're going.
There are a lot of people there that can't get vaccinated
either because they have an immunodeficiency.
Last question:
If you think they cause autism, stay here.
If you don't think that they cause autism, stay here.
So tell me why you guys think that that's true.
I have heard a lot of it being really high mercury
and so that's really bad for young, young children.
Well, there have been studies that I've even seen online.
I believe it was one study by a guy
who lost his medical license.
I don't think you can get autism post-birth.
I do feel like vaccines kind of have just
become like a scapegoat.
Like it's very easy to just be like, "Oh, it's the vaccine."
If your child was already going to have autism,
you would still blame it on the vaccination.
It seems like a false correlation to me.
So...fiction.
When studies are published we believe them
because they're supposed to be
evidence-based.
All of this started in 1997 when Andrew Wakefield
published an article claiming that this was true.
He actually lost his license and the article was retracted
because it was shown that a
lot of the data was falsified.
I used to be a behavioral therapist.
I worked with a lot of kids on the spectrum,
I worked with a lot of kids who have autism.
So I definitely did a lot of research.
If this is kind of like the one article
a lot of people are saying is,
"Oh, this is truth, we're basing everything on this,"
a bunch of other articles span off that to create
this other wave of thinking.
That's not good because he wasn't legit.
The problem is, once that notion is out there,
it's really hard to change people's ideas.
And just like you said, you know,
the time that we vaccinate is also the age where we
start noticing little signs that can indicate
that a child might have autism.
Any time things happen around
the same time, it's very easy to try and put the blame on
something because it's not easy
to digest that sort of diagnosis
and it's much easier to blame
something like a vaccine.
We actually have had studies recently that have
showed that autism developed in utero.
They've done specific studies looking at thimerasol,
and looking at the mercury levels in kids
that have autism, and kids that don't have autism,
and the levels were the same in both.
And so they can't say that the mercury is more likely
to cause autism or not.
Thank you all for being here.
That was great.
Any medication that you take,
any vaccine you take, of course, there's
gonna be a risk
of a side effect or there's gonna be a risk of a,
you know, local reaction.
Taking that small risk is worth it because
you're protecting yourself against something
much worse.
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