That’s what you are missing. He is not the Lord of his little fiefdom. It is NOT his risk to take.
But basketball!
His choices were clear, and they were a LOT better than they have been in the past. “Get vaccinated, or stay home”
“But basketball!! I’ll…i’ll sue!”
Pacifists were still drafted when the draft was a thing. When your country calls, it rarely says please.
It is an excellent analogy. To stop a fire, you starve it of fuel. To stop an outbreak, you starve it of vulnerable people. Either by vaccinating them, or by removing them from the “hot zone.” Pretty elementary epidemiology.
Well why don’t you consult epidemiologists about what does and does not make sense here, rather than rely on whatever you imagine to be logical here
Not fair, I was typing on my phone and you got to say epidemiology first 
The layers of stupid are breathtaking.
The UK’s NHS policy not to vaccinate against varicella may or may not be the best way to go (and obviously most people on this thread strongly disagree with it) but they definitely took shingles into account. There’s good evidence that widespread vaccination of the population actually increases the odds of older folks contracting shingles, because they’re no longer getting periodically exposed to grubby little infected kids that serve to boost their own immunity:
(For the record, while shingles rates have definitely been going up in recent years it’s still not 100% clear how much of that increase is due to the reduced exposure older folks are having to infected people. The link is strong enough for the NHS to take it seriously though.)
Maybe he does…but if he does, he sure hides it well.
According to immunize.org, this isn’t a big problem:
Can the varicella vaccine virus be transmitted (caught) from a person who was vaccinated?
Yes; however, transmission of the varicella vaccine virus is extremely rare. It has only been documented in healthy people on a few occasions out of millions of doses of vaccine distributed. All these cases resulted in mild disease without complications.
If you want to put actual numbers on this, there are around 5 documented cases out of about 55 million doses of the vaccine administered, so it’s not really something to worry about.
What a worthless little hunk of waste. Let’s find a way to give him several other diseases, so he’ll be too sick to leave home and will be unable to infect babies and other people who REALLY can’t be vaccinated. And if he survives, may he get shingles. Really bad shingles.
One can be vaccinated against shingles even if one has had shingles before. You should probably talk to your doctor to see whether that makes sense in your case.
But there is now a shingles vaccine (actually two) that should take care of that argument. That and the fact that vaccinated kids won’t get shingles in their later years.
Yes, but it’s only approved for people over 60. I’m guessing that some of the comments on this thread were from people who got shingles at an age younger than that.
I still don’t buy it as an argument against vaccination. Universal vaccination would eventually wipe out shingles.
Thank you, I wish it did. Now that I’ve had it, I can’t get the vaccine. I personally recommend anyone who has had chickenpox to get the shingles vaccine.
https://www.ninds.nih.gov/Disorders/All-Disorders/Shingles-Information-Page While shingles is the herpes zoster virus, it is the later neurological form of the varicella zoster virus, which is chickenpox. Please consult an actual medical source, not wikipedia.
That is the “conservative” answer that I hear so often about government-run social programs: “The church should be doing that!”
Never mind that churches aren’t filling those needs (nor did they, historically), nor really can they in the ways required, even if everyone was part of a church, which increasingly isn’t true anyways. But I guess that’s one way of driving people back to churches, making it the only way to get anything like a social service…
You realize you have not contradicted me, correct?
Shingrix has only been tested in people 50 years or older. It is recommended for people over 60, because that is when most people do get shingles and it seems to have fewer side effects at that age.
You could probably get Shingrix if you’re under 50 (the packaging explicitly recommends against getting it when pregnant, and that is a condition few over-50s will find themselves in) but shingles in under-50s is comparatively rare, which likely explains why it hasn’t really been tested.
Recently saw a 35ish year old guy come pretty close to dying in front of me from the Flu. He might well have died afterwards, he went to the ICU and didn’t do well. Healthy patient, no health problems. It was very frightening.
Before that I had zero patience for any discussion about vaccines and their efficacy, and afterwards I continued to have zero patients about it, with a bit of losing my shit when the subject comes up.
So boring, so stupid.
The ratio of time talked about vaccines (which are actual miracles) to climate change (which has a very very high chance of killing all of us) is truly depressing.
