Maybe they didn’t have that drug when I was twenty, because that was some incredible pain
I’m just getting over a bout of shingles, and it is fucking awful. Like having a blistered sunburn over a pulled muscle over arthritis - every layer of your body hurts like a bitch where you have the rash. I still have the post-herpetic neuropathy, which means several times a day, out of nowhere, I get to enjoy the sensation of having a sharpened knitting needle pierce my torso. FUN! I understand that the current shingles vax isn’t terribly effective as vaccines go, and I’m too young to get it anyway (they don’t give it to anyone under 50, generally). But I can fully confirm that reducing your chances of getting this by any amount at all is WORTH IT if you can get it.
And on the topic of herd immunity and vaccinating, two issues related to my shingles. First, my 6-year-old, who has been vaccinated, did come down with a very mild rash that may well be an attenuated form of chicken pox that he got from my shingles. Because the vaccine doesn’t prevent the disease in 100% of exposure; his case was very mild due to having been vaccinated, but he still could potentially have transmitted it. Second, before I knew my rash was shingles, I was in contact with a friend’s baby who is too young for the vaccine. It appears that I wasn’t contagious at that point and he hasn’t gotten sick. However - these incidents illustrate the two reasons we need herd immunity: people in whom the vaccine is not fully effective, and those who can’t get the vaccine for various reasons.
5 Likes
well that counts me out for another year and half at least…
I’ve read that a more effective shingles vax is in development. That might tip over into giving it to younger people. The problem is, few people under 50 get shingles (lucky me, I’m 41), and the vax is only about 50% effective. So it doesn’t prevent enough cases to justify giving it out to a large group of younger people. It does a good job of preventing the post-herpetic neuralgia, though, which I can absolutely confirm is a great benefit.
2 Likes
According to wikipedia it was discovered in the 1970’s. However, it may be under-prescribed. I know when my mother got it for shingles, they weren’t certain it was shingles yet… and a lot of doctors don’t like to give you meds if they don’t know what it is. However, she asked if anything bad could happen if she took it even if she didn’t have shingles, and the doctor said no, so she did. As I mentioned earlier, what it basically does is stop the virus from replicating catching it early is imperative. So if you wait until the doc is sure you have shingles… it may be too late.
1 Like
That’s what Mussolini said.
1 Like
Treated drinking water increases the risk of bladder cancer by a small but measurable amount. That doesn’t mean we should go back to untreated water and have people dying of cholera, and babies or other vulnerable humans getting life-threatening dysentery. I could post a video here of someone dying of bladder cancer, and it would be awful, and that person in no way deserves it. But that doesn’t mean that it’s better to have untreated water.
2 Likes
I think you’re thinking of the anti-viral, not the vaccine. The anti-viral medication is a course that must be taken within 72 hours of developing symptoms. I got famciclovir, and there are a couple others as well. It lessens the outbreak, especially if taken early.
Big Pharma does a lot of questionable things in its quest for money. It’s hard to believe that despite their awful behaviour in every other sector of medicine, their approach to vaccines is uniquely unsullied by the profit motive. I’m sure Pfeizer’s CEO was sincere in his gripe, but that hasn’t motivated him or any other company to nationalize that aspect of their business.
The repeat customers in this case are children: a fresh batch of whom are created and brought to market every year. Since education is compulsory and the school nurse administers the shots, these drugs are cheap to administer. Which is what some of these parents want to mess up. From a purely business perspective, a smear campaign that isolates and defames people who want to change the model, makes much more sense than actually changing the way in which the drugs are administered. Branding them all “Anti-Vaxxer” is a genius move, from that perspective.
1 Like
Yes, that’s what I’m talking about. I mentioned it earlier because it drastically decreases the bad of shingles and other viruses like it. I’ve known a lot of people who don’t seem to know about it, and it makes a huge difference so i felt it was work mentioning.
Definitely. I got it but was probably close to the end of the effectiveness period. I thought of shingles as something the elderly got, and it wasn’t even on my radar. So it took a couple of days to see a doc.
I’ll know when it shows up. I’ll know every other day for a month.
Th UK and Canadian parents who are keeping their kids away from the vaccines might have single payer, but I’ll bet they’re listening to quacks in the US, that doesn’t. I think if the US were to enact single payer, the support for quackery would go down, and less of this nonsense would cross the border. It’s almost a mirror image of herd immunity, call it “herd ignorance”.
1 Like
The American Solution to this Problem:
“My company won’t hire people who aren’t vaccinated. The marketplace has spoken. Work is not a Democracy. Suck it!”
Suddenly, a great deal of people who were concerned about creeping government overreach are on board 100%.
4 Likes
From my time spent lurking on sites where anti vaxxers run rampant, this doesn’t work. Some work places already require you to be vaccinated (working in hospitals, some schools, etc) and the anti vaxxers basically whine about how they’re being “discriminated against”.
ETA: I do agree with this approach though. Let them whine! They need to be put back in their place to protect the rest of us.
You should follow the money. The anti-vax conspiracy was a fluoride/grey-alien class bit of public misinformation until Andrew Wakefield was handsomely paid to produce a fraudulent paper that invented data to link MMR with autism for a lawsuit (while he was trying to market an alternate vaccine he claimed didn’t have these fictional problems). After that paper was produced it was picked up on by the natural health quacks to sell books, vitamins, and other useless health product quackery and eventually went mainstream. The anti-vaccine industry is not without its own profit motive and poor ethics.
It’s sad because there are a lot of legitimate criticisms of Big Pharma well worth popularizing, but instead a big lie created by a corrupt doctor which has literally no basis in fact and which actually harms public health is the one that’s gone viral (
).
The claims of profits from Big Pharma are obviously false, and if you were to look at the data you’d see it immediately. Reality trumps the willful ignorance of the conspiracy theory there given the numbers, and esp. given the fact that Big Pharma would make a vast amount more capital by not producing vaccines.
The claims of links to autism/other health issues have literally no scrap of reliable data to back them up and are backed by stupid lies like mumbling about mercury that’s not actually present in vaccines or other fear-mongering.
There’s literally no single aspect of the anti-vax conspiracy theory that’s not trivially demonstrable as willful ignorance, and annoyingly, the anti-vax mass stupidity actually takes away attention from and delegitimizes legitimate grievances with a for profit health industry. By spreading this ignorance, you are part of the problem.
8 Likes
Except that it doesn’t happen. We have comprehensive single-payer healthcare, people do visit their doctors more freely here, and we still have the same problem. And it does tend to be those who can afford your health system (or, in our country, those who would be able to afford healthcare if they were in the US), who are presumably better-educated (ha!), who form the nucleus of the movement.
That’s not to say that single-user isn’t bonum in se. It is. The average lifespan up here is about 2-3 years greater than in the USA, which is significant between countries where people on average are living well past their 60s. There are admittedly other factors at work, but a single-user system tends to allocate greater resources in preventative measures than a free market system - there’s more bang for the buck there, while there is greater profit to be had in curative and (a fortiori) palliative measures, which colours the focus of the different systems. For that reason alone, it would be worthwhile to reform your system.
But the style of insurance (and access to physicians) is demonstrably irrelevant to the problem at hand - we have the same problem in Canada; the UK has the same problem; and I don’t doubt that the problem exists in Europe.
Well, no, we’ve had homegrown quackery for quite some time. Andrew Wakefield, who started the ball rolling with his faked study of the link between MMR vaccines and autism, is British. Believing woo is not unique to your country; neither are quacks.
That being the case, maybe demonisation - demonisation with real teeth - is the answer here. The quantifiable risks to society of breaking herd immunity far outweigh the quantifiable risks associated with vaccination programmes, and it takes a truly willful ignorance to think otherwise. If reason doesn’t work (and that’s also demonstrable), come down with the hammer.
If that seems too draconian, perhaps consider radical reforms to an educational system that teaches people how to become professionals, but fails to teach critical thinking.
7 Likes
What do you do if the Boss is an anti-vaxxer? It does tend to be the well-to-do who form the nucleus of the movement.
1 Like
If you phrase that correctly (as an internal side effect, something like “made the kid extra smart”) and report it to the right place, it will become a listed side effect on the package insert. And there’s the problem with user-reported side effects.
10 Likes
We do the same thing we did to all the bosses that didn’t subject their employees to indiscriminate and context-free drug testing during the 1980s. 
