For me i wasn’t even itchy! If you can stay cool (my parents always had A/C and loved to keep the temp pretty low) it seems to help with the itchiness. A lot. So i basically had two weeks of no school and feeling fine. Discovering all the really awful implications of chicken pox was mind blowing for me years later.
ETA: The reason I think it was the coolness was that towards the end of my chicken pox days we ended up in a hotel for a few days (I was past being contagious, we weren’t spreading disease around), but the A/C was broken. I remember discovering how itchy the spots could be and basically lathering myself in aveeno lotion to calm down the itch.
No worries. I’m admittedly a bit bloody-minded about this, but it was right during my childhood that we wiped out polio (@anon73430903, Ian Dury being a half-generation ahead of me, unfortunately for him). The TB vaccine dates from the '20s, and TB was eradicated long before I was born, but we’re seeing occurrences of both again, and that’s bloody stupid.
I guess the question here that goes begging, is what should happen here. I know it feels SO GOOD to have the answer, to know you are correct and your opposition is wrong. That unlike the problems of middle east terrorism, global warming, gun culture in America, antibiotic resistance, police abuse of power… this is one issue with no nuance to it, no alternative view.
Perhaps if you stick your thumbs in your ears, wiggle your fingers, sing, “Nyah-nuh-nyah,nyah nyah yah!”, maybe that will overcome their unreasonable fears, and they’ll be shamed into compliance.
If this country had comprehensive single payer health care, vaccine compliance would go up. But that’s just a suggestion that we might change something. There might be other ideas that would also change things. But the status quo is, You are right, and people who disagree with you are wrong, so let’s just end the conversation right there, shall we?
I don’t know how much that would affect it. Most vaccines, being generally required for schools, are available at free clinics. My daughter got all hers on time even when we had no health insurance, and I didn’t pay a cent. I did pay half of the HPV cost, because that one is optional and my insurance at the time didn’t cover all of it.
Furthermore, a lot of the opt-out people seem to be well-off living in expensive neighborhoods. They’re deliberately making that choice, not having it happen because they don’t have the money or time to get the vaccines done.
Also we got pockets of anti-vaxers and diseases coming back in countries with “free” healthcare: UK & Canada, we’ve got frakking measles and mumps. So its not a cost thing… its a “belief” thing.
Maybe. Maybe not. We have antivaxxers up here, despite comprehensive single-payer healthcare. The impetus for refusing vaccines seems to be an irrational weighing of the risks, which, unfortunately, is a very human thing - humans are notoriously bad at assessing risk (or the War on Terror wouldn’t be a thing).
If you can figure a way around that particular irrationality, I’m all ears.
Vaccines are used in countries with universal healthcare, and barely drive any revenue for pharma companies. While marginally profitable, they’re nowhere near as profitable as anything else pharma. companies do. Most mid-range drugs owned by one corp will bring in 10x the profits individually than all vaccines bring in combined.
When I got it, it was just at the start of a school vacation, and then I got over it just in time to go back to school. I suppose I should be glad I didn’t have to make up for missed schoolwork, but…
This show taught me so much. I’m not sure I completely buy into everything they’ve said, but their vaccine episode is definitely great, and most of their stuff is definitely really good for getting you to think about things.
People who are against any form of gun control make the same argument: whatever measure being suggested is unlikely to be effective. There’s a hidden assumdption there that the current situation is not bad enough for the public good to be served by trying something that may not work.
My point wasn’t so much that single payer health care is a magic bullet that will turn everyone into a rational player of the game, rather, suggesting something be done to actually help people, seems more controversial than simply demonizing them and excluding them.
It’s the kind of thing people like Ted Cruz miss, when he talks about policing muslim communities to prevent them from becomimg radicalized.
In this case, the root cause of the problem (measles and whooping cough) is made out to be parents acting in ignorance and fear. that’s a plausible premise, I can get behind that premise. But to come out of the gate by calling such people anti-vaxxer, is unlikely to make anyone want to change their minds. It’s kind of like beginning a conversation about Muslim terrorists by calling them sand niggers. You aren’t really serious about making the problem go away when you demonize the people you blame for that problem.
It’s not the monetary barrier to vaccination that I think a single payer health care system would erase. It’s actually addressing the problems if ignorance and fear that cause parents to gamble so poorly. If it were cheap and easy to get preventative check-ups, more parents would bring their kids to a doctor instead of just keeping them home. Every contact with a genuine medical professional, means one less opportunity for a cut rate crystal healer quack to bend that parents ear with a seemingly safer, “natural” remedy. When taking your kid to a doctor becomes an expensive luxury that only the already well educated can afford, Parents, and sick people who one day will become parents, are going to look somewhere else for help.
I enjoy listening to Tim Minchin rant about people like Storm, but I have no illusions that people like storm are going to be any less foolish after listening to that kind of self righteous gloating. And this post suffers from the same kind of problem. It’s complaining about a real social ill, while simultaneously making it harder for anyone to actually do anything constructive towards improving things.
If you’re going to put the blame for measles and whooping cough squarely on the shoulders of certain ill informed parents (and outliers like Mayim Bialik) then you’re letting the health insurance racket off the hook. And I think they bear some responsibility as well.
Its immoral to pose a risk to society at large to feed one’s selfish need for control. Libertarian arguments of this stripe are generally sociopathic bullshit. It gives people the impression that they have a right to harm others as a matter of course.
Per-dose, vaccines have a very low profit margin. But mass produced, and mass-injected, that profit margin gets multiplied enormously. It’s those scaredy-cat parents who want to pace out the injections and reduce the shelf life of the product, that mess up the system, and make it much less cost effective and profitable. Vaccines don’t have to be a cash cow like viagra, in order to skew big pharma’s thinking.
All vaccines produced by all Pharma corporations produce less profit than a single mid range drug (not a major moneymaker like Viagra) produced by a Pharma corporation. A few years ago Pfeizer’s CEO (pretty sure it was Pfeizer) said he wished he could drop vaccines since they’re so low profit compared to other products, but didn’t think the blowback was worth it. In general Pharma corps see them as a social responsibility much more than a profit center. As mangochin just mentioned, as vaccines are preventative medicine, from a Pharma perspective they would benefit far more financially from not preventing the diseases but treating them.
