Same reason. Younger kids haven't had the time to build up their immunities. My one year old daughter getting a gever can be more life threatening than my 7 year old having the same issue. Applies for the elderly too, their immune system is slowing down due to age.
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Also close. It's because their immune systems are much less effective. Not because of naivete, but because of ineffectiveness. You are exactly right, that's why the very old and the very young can be septic without fevers, why they die from infections at rates much higher than those in the middle.
But that begs the question -- why try to stimulate immunity against a (mostly) adult disease at a point when the immune system is really incapable of mounting much of a response? (which is why it takes 3 serial attempts to get much immunity from the whole process...)
The answer is that the medical community has a bias, a standard perspective which states that immunizations in general have very little capacity to create harm. So they figure, why not?
That's the headspace that the proponents of early immunization come from.
So -- do the proteins in hepatitis B vaccines cross the blood brain barrier, or do adjuvants in the hep vaccine cross the blood brain barrier?
Vaccines are made from attenuated viruses, this renders them inert (harmless to humans) but still allows the immune system to develop against it.
Yes it is possible for many things to cross the BBB. Again though, if there was a wide spread issue, we would know due to the amounts of people that are vaccinated. Around 4 million kids are born in the us, 99% of them are vacinated. Even .5% having an issue would be around 200k per year, every year. In five year, over 1 million would be affected. We would know. You can't hide that much.
Ahhhhh -- So I see that you don't understand how the immune system works, which is where some of our crossed wires are coming from.
It's true that vaccines are "inert" viruses in the sense that they are damaged and therefore incapable of replicating. But that is a far cry from "harmless." That over simplification is the root cause of much of the disagreement between pro and anti vaccine advocates.
The immune system doesn't have any magic that it uses to differentiate dangerous things from non-dangerous things. It's not that smart. It simply spends its early years learning self proteins from foreign proteins, and it does this by shape. It is completely incapable of telling whether or not a protein is "infectious" or not. All it knows is "self" and "non-self", "invader" versus "local."
Take food allergies -- the peanut protein isn't "dangerous', it can't "replicate", but try telling someone who is about to die from an overwhelming immune reaction to that protein, (called anaphylaxis, essentially unknown before vaccinations were started, by the way...) that it isn't dangerous. Obviously that's not true, so vaccine advocates who equate "inert" to "harmless" have missed the boat somewhere, right?
The purpose of injection foreign proteins into the bloodstream (which is effectively what an IM shot is) is to stimulate an immune response against those foreign protein parts. So you see -- the immune system is supposed to react to the foreign proteins, to mount an inflammatory response and try to destroy those foreign proteins, and it is completely irrelevant to the question whether the foreign proteins are capable of replicating or not.
The immune system sometimes doesn't mount a strong enough response, so immune system irritants (adjuvents) are added -- often things like squalene, or aluminum.
Problem is -- those immune system irritants don't stay in the muscle any more than the foreign proteins do. They float into the bloodstream, and some of them cross the blood brain barrier, especially in the very young, whose blood brain barriers are not watertight yet and still a little leaky. And once found by the immune system in the brain, they set up an inflammatory reaction there. Or in nerves, or gut, or wherever they are found. That's where encephalitis after vaccination comes from -- not an infection, but rather an immune reaction -- the very thing you are trying to stimulate. You just got too much and in an unfortunate location.
So the question is -- what are the long term consequences of an irritated immune system, or nerves irritated by an immune reaction to foreign proteins? Not today, tomorrow, or next week, but months to years later?
Answer? We have no idea. Most of what goes on in medicine is actually an unknown. What are the causes of rampant food allergies (hyper-stimulated immune system) these days? We don't have a clue. Clearly a new thing, but no idea where it comes from. How about ADHD? No clue. Autism? No clue. Depression? No clue. Anxiety? No clue. Panic attacks? No clue. Asthma/atopy? No clue.
So you see -- sometimes the pat answer, the dogma, doesn't really shed any light. It makes us feel better, but for some of us, that is inadequate. So we think about physiology, and are willing to think outside of what the "experts" tell us. After all -- it wasn't too long ago that they told us that smoking was good for our lungs, that mercury injections were the cure for syphilis, and that there were few diseases that a good bloodletting wouldn't cure.
Enjoyed the discussion!
What an interesting discussion! Thank you very much for your comments @gwiss and @john1981
I agree with the smoking and blood letting analogy. You write and articulate yourself very well @gwiss
Upvoted and followed!
Cheers! =)