Pretty sure one of the base way vaccines function is that most people are supposed to get most vaccines.
So that people who can’t, like @navarro , don’t die of polio.
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Also so vulnerable people like the elderly, who Maher is supposedly expressing concern for with his “flu vaccines cause Alzheimer’s” nonsense, don’t die of the flu.
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My 93 year old grandfather very nearly got KO’d by a combination of the flu and a bowel obstruction this year. If he hadn’t have gotten this years “ineffective” flu shot his flu would have been worse and he would have died.
The flu aint nothing.
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I started avoiding SA when I noticed their chummy relationship with Michael Shermer, a right-wing hack who only stopped denying global warming for political reasons, when he thought he’d be the last “environmental skeptic” standing. He might be regretting it now, but switching sides twice would be a little too obvious. If this is the company they keep, I don’t trust their motives.
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Tens of thousands of deaths annually in the US alone. And that’s only because we’ve been astoundingly lucky for the last couple of generations; the 1918 flu pandemic wiped out an estimated 3-5% of the planet’s population.
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Shermer is gross. His, and other’s like him’s, continued control/association with the Skeptic Society/Skeptic Magazines and the broader Skeptic movement is hugely controversial over on that end. He’s been publicly accused of rape, and repeatedly accused of “misconduct” often at skeptic conferences.
Guy’s trash.
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Travel vaccinations. Hep A and Hep B vaccinations are not recommended for most people as an example. I used to believe that vaccinations had no side effects but going to a travel vacc clinic with the attitude of ‘gimme all you got’, I was repeatedly told I shouldn’t bother with most vaccinations because the cost benefit was such that it wasn’t worth the risks. If there were no risks then why wouldn’t everyone get Hep vaccinations?
The common thread is false equivalence.
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As one example, the rabies vaccine works very well to protect people who’ve been exposed to the virus (which is an extremely dangerous disease) but has a high rate of side effects, thus is not recommended for the general population unless there’s reason to believe you’ve been exposed.
Yellow Fever and Japanese encephalitis are examples of diseases that are rare in most countries so the CDC does not recommend vaccinating against them unless you plan to travel to areas where the specific disease-carrying mosquitoes are more common. Similarly, the vaccine for tick-borne encephalitis is recommended only for travelers at high risk, as that vaccine is not especially well studied, and is not currently licenced for use in the United States.
The cholera vaccine offers relatively short-lived protection and would be pointless to give in areas with clean water supplies and no active outbreaks.
the expense for those either uninsured or carrying insurance with high co-pays can be around $300-500 for the full set. otherwise the main side effects are similar to those for the flu shot.
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i see your point. i was actually thinking in terms of what are considered the standard, legally required vaccinations for children to be able to attend school and not really thinking about travel vaccinations.
even though i would not recommend everyone get the typhoid or rabies vaccination as a routine in the states i wouldn’t hesitate to get the typhoid vaccine if i were going to the back country of cambodia and i would absolutely get the rabies vaccine if i were going to thailand to collect cave bats for study. i don’t really regard that as an anti-vax position so much as one of recognizing context.
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Here’s a related thought: different advanced, western countries with similar populations and disease risks have come up with slightly different recommended vaccine schedules. If someone lives in country “A” and then carefully compares the childhood health and mortality rates in their country with those of their peer counties, finding that country “B” has statistically healthier kids, would it be “anti-vax” or “anti-science” to prefer to follow country B’s schedule instead?
It takes a lot more than a grain of salt for me to swallow bigotry. It’d take quite a bit more than a silo’s worth.
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the biggest differences seem to be that the chicken pox (varicella) vaccine is not used in every country in europe where it is in the states. and many european countries use the rotavirus vaccine which is not used here. you can look around at variations among countries here if you like-- http://www.mvec.vic.edu.au/immunisation-references/vaccine-schedule-by-country/
there really doesn’t seem to be as much variation as you might think especially when you notice that many vaccines in europe are given in multi-disease formulation even more complicated than the ones used here.
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News flash: around 60% of Americans think 45 is actually intelligent, and about the same proportion consider him ‘strong’.
WTFFFFFFF
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Yes, at this point in time only 5 out of the 28 EU countries currently recommend universal varicella vaccination, with 17 of them explicitly recommending vaccination for susceptible teenagers* or risk groups only. And it’s not like they just haven’t been looking into it. The public health experts in many countries seem to be reluctant to give up the strong, naturally-acquired immunity that most people develop as children in favor of a weaker vaccine-acquired immunity that could potentially result in a future “epidemiological shift,” in which more people may catch the disease as vulnerable adults when their immunity wears off.
I personally don’t know which approach is better but my point isn’t really about the specifics of this one vaccine. It’s to show that it’s possible for reasonable people (or countries) to look carefully at the exact same available data and reach different conclusions in their risk/benefit analysis.
*Teenagers because this is a disease that’s actually riskier to get when you get into adulthood, so the idea is that if you haven’t acquired natural immunity by the time you;re in your late teens, then the vaccine definitely becomes the safer way to go. To quote the report I linked above: “WHO advocates recommendation of the vaccine in any country to individual adolescents and adults without a history of varicella, in particular to those at increased risk of contracting or spreading the infection. This entails no risk of an epidemiological shift, as childhood exposure to VZV remains unaffected.”
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and there’s so little variation because we did precisely those sorts of comparisons through the 70s and 80s. With the exact aim of settling on the best schedule for a broad section of the world.
And still do them. It’s a pretty normal part of epidemiology and public health studies.
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keep in mind that because the u.s. has chosen to treat health services overall as a luxury good rather than a basic human right which many european countries do has guaranteed that the overall health of the populace, children included, is quite likely to be worse in the states. this makes it a grapefruits to pummelos comparison if not an apples to oranges one in terms of determining the utility of vaccinations in isolation from the rest of the health system.
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