Monday, March 18, 2024

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Seriously. A Vaccine for the Common Cold?

girl blowing her nose

Children are supposed to catch colds, and lots of them. That’s how they build a healthy immune system. Yes colds are inconvenient, and yes they keep the family up at night, and yes a parent even has to stay home from work to adequately care for the child (and keep them from spreading it to others). Catching colds is necessary because it makes a child’s immune system stronger so it can fight severe infections and serious diseases like cancer, and prevent allergic disorders like asthma and eczema. So why would a university professor think it’s a good idea to develop a vaccine for children against the common cold? And is there such a thing as being over-vaccinated?

Dr. Martin Moore at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia believes this vaccine is such a great idea that he’s decided to leave academia and head up a private company to develop and market a cold vaccine. His talking points to the public are simple: Colds are inconvenient; Colds can kill immunocompromised people; Colds make parents have to miss work. All good reasons as to why we should never let children catch colds anymore, right?

But if catching colds and other routine childhood diseases allows the immune system to develop fully and therefore work more efficiently in adulthood when presented with more dangerous risks, could we be hurting ourselves by trying to prevent them altogether? Haven’t we seen the same problems recently with overuse of antibiotics? When it comes down to it, are we really too busy as parents to be “inconvenienced” by our children getting sick with a cold? Do we really want our kids to grow up germ-free and sterile with immune systems that don’t know how to fight off diseases? Is it worth subjecting our children to increased risk for allergic disorders and cancer for the added convenience of potentially skipping a cold? With more than 160 different strains of the common cold, the vaccine is unlikely to offer a guarantee anyway.

Even more concerning is that if this vaccine gets approved, people will start to fear the common cold because now it can be prevented, a pattern we’ve seen with the measles and chicken pox. The vaccine will become mandatory for health care workers first, then it will become mandatory for all children in daycare and school. And our whole society will in fact lose its natural herd immunity to what is now a harmless infection. However, Dr. Moore is right about one thing: if we prevent children from catching colds, building natural immunity, and growing up with a strong immune system, the common cold WILL end up becoming a deadly disease.


Note: The article was reprinted with permission. It was originally published by the Immunity Education Group—a community of medical and legal professionals, businesspersons, educators, journalists, and advocates who are passionate about immunity education and the right to informed consent.

12 Responses

  1. Stupidity at its finest. I’m sure this has nothing to do with health and everything to do with money. The chicken pox vaccine was developed for the same reason … not because it’s a deadly disease which threatened to wipe out humanity as some of the advertising would almost have you believe, but because employers were saying they lost productivity when mothers/parents had to stay home to care for their kids who had chicken pox. Always about that bottom line … sickens me.

  2. Yeah, routine childhood diseases, like measles, mumps, chickenpox… I can honestly say colds did NOTHING for my immune system, to speak of, but measles whipped it right into shape! Even mumps and chickenpox didn’t quite fill the bill. Prior to measles, I was a sickly kid; after that, I had perfect attendance records in school except a couple of years I missed days to take care of the other kids at home when parents were away or sick and unable to do so. I’ve been against vaccinating kids against those diseases since they started, for that very reason. Vaccinate against diseases that have high mortality rates like smallpox, ebola, typhus, typhpoid, and cholera!

  3. This is crazy. We need our immune systems to be strong and healthy. Vaccines contain either aluminum or mercury as adjuvants. The FDA even admits these are neurotoxins!

    For colds use 2 drops of oil of oregano (normally comes premixed with a carrier oil) under the tongue at the first sign of sore throat or cold. Oil of oregano is amazing. (But it is strong, tastes terrible and kind of burns a little.)

    But it is ANTI-VIRAL (colds are caused by viruses), anti-bacterial, anti-parasidic, anti-inflammatory, anti-fungal, antibiotic, anti-septic, antihistamine, anesthetic, antioxidant, anti-biofilm, anti-microbial and anti-biofilm! (Took away my neighbor’s migrane headache better than her prescription drug, which had given her rebound headaches. After being given penicillin for my gum inflammation–which took several days to even start to work–a week after I got home, my gums started to hurt again. This time I tried oil of oregano the first time, rubbing my guns with 2-3 drops. ON CONTACT the pain was gone!

  4. I wish the author would explain how catching a particular cold virus or a whole bunch of cold viruses benefits the innate immune system.

    The immune system can be divided into the innate and the adaptive immune system. According to this article, you can’t improve the innate immune system. And you don’t want to do that.

    https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/320721.php

    In fact, there are lots of drugs intended to dampen the innate immune system as many diseases are a result of too much innate immunity. Drugs like 6MP, Cyclosporin and Remicade are all intended to dampen parts of the immune system.

    The other part of the immune system is the adaptive immune system. That’s why you can’t catch measles twice. After a natural exposure, your body will be prepared the next time and destroy the virus so you can’t be infected. For those people who don’t want their children to risk death and serious damage, they can have their children vaccinated so that the first exposure does not cause all that risk of death and serious damage.

    So it appears the aticle is simply wrong. There is no benefit to the child of being exposed to multiple cold viruses.

    There may be benefits to children of being exposed to more dirt as that may lessen the chance of getting allergies. I just don’t think there is a similar benefit to getting a variety of cold viruses.

  5. Human papilloma viruses are followed by a number. Is there a similar numbering system for cold viruses? Has it been determined which cold viruses cause a majority of colds? If a vaccine is developed for the viruses that cause a majority of colds then will other cold viruses become more prevalent?

  6. Almost nobody here seems to understand at all how a vaccine works. A vaccine is literally MAKING YOUR IMMUNE SYSTEM STRONGER. It’s exposing you to whatever virus in a safe way so that your immune system can develop anti-bodies for it without having to go through the actual negative effects of the virus.

    @Patricia Please stop spreading this Facebook fearmongering lie. There is no alluminium in vaccines, and only trace amounts of Thimerosal, which is a safer formulation partly made of mercury, are used when large amounts are needed to be preserved and prevent any bacteria/fungus from forming. If you think a bit of thimerosal in your is nothing compared to having a bacteria or fungus injected directly into your veins because it couldn’t be sterilized fully.

    The Thimerosal is proven to leave your system very quickly and is no longer found to be in your body. And what you get out of it is immunity to some very deadly or potentially deadly diseases and keep yourself from spreading them to others who may be more fragile. Stop being a selfish uneducated person who wants to feel like they know some secret and know better than 99.9% of the world’s top scientists.

  7. I like how you mentioned that the common cold is an integral part of children’s sicknesses while growing up. It’s the body’s way of helping the young child help build up their immune system against other common childhood diseases like chicken pox and the measles. While I haven’t heard anything about a vaccine for the common cold–which is something that the entire world is still trying to search for–there may be a reason why the common cold is the one sickness that doesn’t have a proper vaccine yet, and that’s to help build up growing immune systems so that later in life, the same immune systems can be more resistant ton other diseases.

  8. I’m not even sure where to begin here. Let’s for a moment just ignore the debate at hand which is to vaccinate or not to vaccinate. Setting that hot topic aside there’s a lot wrong with this article. I’m not sure if you understand how the immune system works. For one healthy immune system doesn’t help you fight off cancer because cancer is your own bodies cells growing out of control. Also allergies can’t be prevented that way since allergies are essentially your immune system overreacting as it is. I could say more but I really just want to emphasize that not even those (which were your main arguments) are correct. It’s alarming that this looks like a real article and is even titled “enlightened” but not based on any fact whatsoever. You apparently didn’t do any research before writing this article and that is terrifying since there are many people who don’t know any better and will take this article as fact.

  9. Just going to chime in that the author of this article has a “strong opinion” not based on facts, but rather their belief system. Going through all the immune response of feeling miserable, does not make your immune system stronger. The fact is, that with or without symptoms (some peoples immune systems do not react to colds, by the way) everyone recovers in generally the same time, give or take a few days.

    As was said already, when you are vaccinated your immune system responds in the same way, just takes out a certain feature that is absolutely not needed for the body to create antibodies and protect itself, which are called “symptoms”. Your body produces the antibodies it needs to protect itself against said virus. You aren’t made “weaker” by doing the exact same thing nature does. The reason why we don’t get the virus we are vaccinated against when exposed to the real thing, is because out body already beat it and protected itself.

    This article is by someone who is obviously anti-vaccine and has no scientific base to their research, and someone who doesn’t even understand the basics of immunology. One more time, getting exposed to the virus in a vaccine or real life results in the same thing, antibodies and protection VIA your own body. The vaccine doesn’t protect you, it just starts the initial reaction your body does when it gets the real thing, with the same result, but the only difference is you are unlikely to “die” from it.

    Remember the spanish flu? How to killed all those people? Guess what, a vaccine would have prevented a majority of those deaths. Also, according to this author, a stronger immune system makes you stronger. Well it doesn’t, because let’s take the Spanish flu into equation again. The reason why it killed so many young, healthy people, more than the sickly people, is because their immune systems were strong to begin with and a strong immune system creates a more aggressive attack, causing more aggressive symptoms, such as fever, etc. That doesn’t really matter though because a strong immune system is based on many factors, and catching illnesses to boost strength naturally is a very small factor in a large pool of bigger fish.

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