In what world is having a kid who is autistic worse than HAVING A KID WHO IS FUCKING DEAD AND LIKELY TO KILL OTHERS WITH THEIR DISEASES.
Just the fundamentals of anti-vaxxers doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense.
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This really needs to be understood. Vaccines make little money, for anybody. Manufacturers don’t run huge lines for these things, and it is a pretty regular problem for us to have a temporary shortage of a vaccine because of a problem in manufacturing, and to go months without certain vaccines. Most vaccines are only made by one or two manufacturers, and each only generally runs one line, so a problem there kills availability. Why would this be, unless they are just simply not making enough money to make it worth running more. Not generally a big Pharma fan myself, but on this one, they really are doing God’s work.
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Indeed. A great overview of the some of the industry’s flaws, particularly in hard-wiring in publication bias (not the results you expected? Ditch the study) as part of their business model are in Ben Goldacre’s “Bad Science” and “Bad Pharma”. Goldacre is a senior researcher at the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine at Oxford, so comes to this issue with a bias towards truth and good research practices. He’s also a strong critic of woo-woo, pseudoscience and faith-based “medicine”.
But yeah, the evidence about vaccines is about as good as epidemiology gets.
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Oooh, a puzzle. Let’s see… climate change deniers are a sub-set of transphobes, and anti-vaxxers overlap with both categories? That sounds about right…
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Did you accidentally post in the wrong thread?
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The flu vaccine is not /wonky</>. There are many strains of the flu virus and each year the powers-that-be use the best available information, often/usually based on data from south of the equator where the flu season is directly opposite to north of the equator, to “bet” on the most likely flu strain to be dominant that year. Sometimes, they are not as “lucky” as other years.
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It annoys me that the responses towards the anti-vaxxers are missing out on several key things, and are thus dismissed by the anti-vaxx community.
Always listen to the other side, identify the shreds of truth in their arguments, and work on that. Otherwise, that shred of truth you do not address is like a fortress one side refuses to attack in a war; as long as it offers a safe haven, there is where the other side will rally and regroup, no matter what you do.
In this case, yes, they do have facts. Vaccines can cause some injuries, even deaths. Yes, we do have a National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. Yes, it pays out claims. Yes, it protects vaccine manufacturers from liability. All those things are facts, not fake news.
And yes, the number of actual deaths and injuries is amazingly low contrasted with the losses to diseases in the days before vaccinations. I’ve seen the stones in the cemeteries, a century old and older, indicating a lot of very short lifespans. The vast majority of people greatly benefit from vaccines. A few experience tragedy. It’s a fairly normal thing with technological advances, and we can say the same about flight, nuclear power, high rise construction, and automobiles.
But one should not mock or dismiss those who have experienced tragedy. It does nothing to win over the other side. Those few children who do have extreme reactions- those parents who do file claims with vaccine injury compensation program- are real people, and their experiences, though rare, are not always “fake news”, any more than a story of an air crash is fake news because the other 50,000 flights that day landed safely.
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It feels a little wonky to me. Everyone talks about getting a flu shot so you won’t get the flu. No one says, “Get a flu shot to reduce your chances of contracting the flu by 20-40%.”
Is there a percentage efficacy where you would no longer get the flu shot?
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I do. A 20-40% chance of preventing a miserable week, or worse, for free is better than a kick in the head.
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You understand that very few things in life offer 100% results, right?
When you take an ibuprofen, it’s not a 100% chance of a cured headache, and when you put on socks it’s not a 100% chance of dry feet all day.
Flu shots significantly lower the chances of the flu spreading as widely, and the flu shortens the lives of a lot of older people and other people. So, isn’t that great in the end? To have less deaths, not more?
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It isn’t that the flu vaccine is wonky. There isn’t a single flu vaccine. Each year there are a bunch of strains of flu and based on early monitoring they select strains to go into production as the vaccine of the year. The closer they get to the strains that spread widely the more effective it is in any given year.
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You can point out that getting injured to the point where the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program pays a claim is literally a one in a million event.
To put that in context, flip a fair coin 20 times. If they all end up heads, that’s about a one-in-a-million event. Most people, if that happened, would question whether the coin was fair.
So an analogy is the morning commute to work. You’ve got several choices on which way to get to work in the morning. You try to figure out which one will have the least traffic. Sometimes you guess right and your commute is smooth sailing. Other times you guess wrong and you end up stuck in a makeshift parking lot for an hour.
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Joke my middle schooler brought me:
Q. How are anti-vaxxer kids and self-referential dark humor alike?
A. They never get old!
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Wonky or not after the last flu I caught I try to get the vaccine every time. My odds are better with it than without it, and that’s what actually matters. Sounds like getting the vaccine out each year is a logistical nightmare too.
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This is a long read, but if you wish to understand the “vaccine courts” it is worth a look. In essence, in this system, you do not have to prove the vaccine caused harm, you do not even have to prove it is more than likely the vaccine caused harm. Only that it is reasonable to think it is possible the vaccine caused harm. Even with that low standard, it is, as has been pointed out, a one-in-a-million chance that there will be monies paid out. The whole reason for the existence of this system is that with the very low profitabiity of vaccines, manufacturers would be chased out of business by having to defend all the antivaxxer suits that would be brought. Even if you win, a court battle is expensive.
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Man, no kidding. I’ve been reading about it all morning. They’ve distributed 168 million doses so far this year. Most of those are egg-based. Does that mean 168 million eggs? That would be 1 in every 500 eggs produced annually in the US. Or can they get multiple doses from one egg? How many extra eggs do they have to buy to account for breakage, spoilage, etc.? Who supplies the eggs?
Also, I learned that they use ferrets as a critical part of the process in determining which strains to include in the vaccine. Sucks to be a flu ferret.
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Do you drink alcohol?
They … ferret out the right flu strains?
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When Sheryl Sandberg appeared on Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and they were discussing her Russian ancestry, part of me hoped for one of those reveals where they show the guest is related to someone famous (or infamous). If Gates had given her a folder containing Putin’s picture, the conspiracy theorists in my family would’ve been thrilled.
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