Parents at centre of measles outbreak didn't vaccinate children | Hacker News Reader

Parents at centre of measles outbreak didn't vaccinate children

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22 pointsstygiansonic31 comments

Vietnam has largely refused to acknowledge their measles epidemic for over 5 years, and even official vaccination recommendations are weak (1 dose).

https://www.rfa.org/english/news/vietnam/measles-04232014175...

To use the verbiage from the article: there's a mountain of scientific evidence linking measles and increased mortality in infants, the very elderly and the immunocompromised, such as people undergoing chemotherapy, people with an organ transplant or people with AIDS. Why not argue like this when the topic of vaccination comes up?

Same with rubella. Who cares if some stupid parents' kid comes down with rubella? The problem is that the pregnant woman nearby whose vaccination didn't take might get it and deliver a child with severe neurological impairments!

For that argument to work, people need to change their focus from individual to social welfare.

The current political direction in pretty much all first world countries pushes in the exact opposite way. Hence the return of preventable disease.

That's the real question. Should we allow people a choice or establish dictatorship in important social issues? And who will decide what's worthy of consideration?

You’re right, a lot of the sentiment I hear is “what are you worried about if your kids are vaccinated?”. I’m not particularly worried about my kids.

There are going to be a bunch of teenagers getting diseases from the period where the misinformation was doing the rounds without the debunking being so prevalent.

The worst thing is that in the US the teenagers can't even sneak out to the physician without their parents noticing because health insurance is structured that way. That's part of the wider problem that teenagers in the US are far too supervised and confined.

Consider mumps: entirely preventable through a vaccine and 10 % chance of infertility if you are male and past puberty. You'd really like to hand out case photographs to the parents to show what testicular inflammation in adults looks like.

If the community decides a community law together, is that dictatorship? I feel like no.

Should the community have the right to decide what is put into my body? I'm pro-vaccination, but this line of reason leads to some pretty disturbing places.

Yes, absolutely. It should be allowed to determine what vaccinations are required to be a member of that community. Maybe one day you can get a vaccine without an injection, would that be less disturbing?

It only disturbs me if you aren't allowed to leave if you disagree.

Vaccines are good for humanity. Handwringing around body rights or religion or something don't make any impression at all on me.

Being allowed to leave makes a big difference. However, not voluntarily choosing to be part of that community also makes a difference. Also, most vaccinations occur at the behest of the guardian and not the individual (which is entirely appropriate). For example, say you (and your guardian) were born into a community (a religious state for example) that believed circumcision was required to be a citizen due to its effectiveness warding off disease. You believe it is ok for the state actor to force everybody to be circumcised so long as when the time comes, there is an option to leave the country?

The only way I see this as being reasonable is if there is a country that they can go to, and there is no cost incurred the process.

Your example is false equivalence - circumcision is harmful, vaccines are not.

It isn’t a false equivalence since they both violate body rights. You cannot say that all vaccines are not harmful because you cannot speak for future injections. Many people actually believe circumcision isn’t harmful, and the belief is what matters.

The WHO actually has a page specifically for dealing with adverse effects of vaccinations. http://vaccine-safety-training.org/immunization-error-relate...

Then you have cases like Thalidomide that were medical tragedies, although not vaccine related, we conducted with the best of medical intention.

The question is not are vaccines statistically beneficial (they are).

It is not, does medicine have a 100% hit rate at not causing adverse effects (it doesn’t and that is ok).

The question is, are you violating somebodies body rights by forcing them to undergo a potentially harmful procedure without their consent. Yes, you would be. This is why we don’t force this today.

I never argued for it to be forced - I argued that it would be necessary for inclusion in a community.

You defended "Should we allow people a choice or establish dictatorship in important social issues?" with the caveat "if a community decides" its not a dictatorship. That is implying, the community gets to decide violation of somebody's body rights else they must leave the community (regardless of whether or not they chose to be part of it, and if there was any cost to leaving.)

It’s funny that HN doesn’t agree with me, yet civil society does, since we do not have mandatory vaccinations that violate body rights, and we still manage to have herd immunity through education and other incentives.

The measles vaccine is pretty safe and vaccinating your kid is probably good for the individual (it's definitely good for the society).

There are more interesting cases where the vaccine is harmful or risky, like the smallpox vaccine. You can construct a scenario where the rational thing for any individual is to opt out of the vaccine if enough of his peers are vaccinated to reduce the risk of an epidemic, but the herd immunity is valuable enough that on the whole, vaccinating everyone improves public health.

In that case, should researchers play down the downsides of the vaccine? Should the state play them down? Should doctors recommend vaccination even if statistically speaking it is bad for the health of the individual?

Note I don't believe this is the situation with any diseases right now: the measles vaccine is safe enough that vaccination is good for the individual, smallpox vaccination would no longer be good for the herd. However, it's an important hypothetical.

The success story of vaccination means that people don't know the symptoms of these crippling diseases anymore. Even the hospital had trouble identifying the disease. Parents worry about vaccination shots because they don't know what it means to lose relatives to those diseases. The good news in this case was that the interviewed parent acknowledged his ignorance. He didn't try to spin it as if the children benefitted from his mistake.

We live very sheltered lifes but we can't know it. Tracking all that is being done to protect us is now beyond individual understanding. We have to trust the experts. And some people end up trusting sham experts.

> "We worried 10-12 years ago because there was a lot of debate around the MMR vaccine," said Bilodeau. "Doctors were coming out with research connecting the MMR vaccine with autism. So we were a little concerned."

No, there were no doctors (neither singular nor plural) coming out with research connecting the MMR vaccine with autism. Just one very misinformed celebrity.

Well there was, Andrew Wakefield with his fraudulent study, until he was struck off in the UK. So he moved to the US to carry on the lies.

And some more in the French speaking side of the internet, which they apparently belong to.

Few doctors yes, but this work has been a priority focus for alternative medicine actors such as homeopathic practitioners, whose propaganda is a if not the major cause of recent measles epidemics in Europe.

This story reminds me of this recent NPR interview with an anthropologist on vaccine hesitancy [0]. The upshot of the research is that "skepticism of vaccines [is] 'socially cultivated.'" Many of the people refusing vaccines are intelligent and well-educated, but they end up trusting bad information for a variety of reasons.

Hopefully this parent and others in his community are now receiving better information. It's not mentioned below, but when I heard this interview it was longer and made the point that vaccine hesitant parents need to be approached with respect; the more confrontational the approach, the more defensive people with anti-vaccine views will become.

[0]: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/02/13/6944497...

Charge them with inciting an entirely preventable epidemic.

Anti-vaxxers could be accurately considered to be retrospective Darwin Awards contestants.

Doing their best to remove those genes that they have already contributed to the human gene pool.

Presumably if there was an "outbreak" they weren't the only parents not to vaccinate their children. The article doesn't really elaborate on that.

The kids caught measles in Vietnam. They were the importing vector.

But an outbreak implies other children caught measles (the article suggests other children at their school) so they also weren't vaccinated presumably.

No. The vaccine is only 97% effective. If you’re vaccinated you can still contract the disease.

97% under ideal conditions (including 2 doses of quality vaccine). Per the article, the Vietnam health system usually only provides 1.

That would still prevent an "outbreak" if all the other kids were vaccinated.

Measles has a "90% secondary infection rate in susceptible domestic contacts". So, its likely that his brothers were infected as well. That leaves five others.

With the mentioned "97% vaccination success rate under ideal conditions", the fact that they were mixing around in school (and those they infected as well), it does not seem a stretch.

The HN title for this is one of those headlines that makes no sense: the opposite would be more of a news story.

The full headline, at least for me, is "Father at centre of measles outbreak didn't vaccinate children due to autism fears".

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