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Comment by gregwebs | Hacker News Reader

You might wonder how polio gets reintroduced into Israel or anywhere else. The polio vaccines we currently use are imperfect.

The oral vaccine is a weakened form but it mutates in the neighborhood of one in a million cases to become effectively wild polio and some years this accounts for most of the poliomyelitis cases.

On the other hand, the fully inactivated injected vaccine is non-sterilizing: it prevents poliomyelitis but still allows for gut infection. This eradicates the disease but not the virus. This is why they previously found the polio virus in sewage samples even though there were no poliomyelitis cases.

Most anger at the un-vaccinated (due to the assumption that they are causing the spread) seems mis-placed since those vaccinated by the injected form (that's probably you commenting on Hacker News!) will spread the polio virus as well.

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This is also somewhat complicated because, as the article notes, sewage monitoring in Israel picks up polio virus with some degree of frequency, despite there being no recorded cases - there's definitely shedding going on, and it's sort of an odd case due to a number of demographic and geopolitical factors.

This is not necessarily something that can be attributed to the vaccine. Will be curious to see what the results are if they try to trace it back.

> despite there being no recorded cases - there's definitely shedding going on

> This is not necessarily something that can be attributed to the vaccine.

Some stats about polio that people seem unaware of:

* Around 72% of infections are completely asymptomatic.

* Around 25% of infections result in flu-like symptoms.

* That remaining 3% is where the serious symptoms are, with paralysis occurring in only about 0.5% of infections despite being what polio is known for.

* Searching for the death rate of polio almost always results in finding "5 to 10 percent" - but that's of paralytic polio, not polio infections in general, so if you want polio infections in general, that's 5% of 0.5%, or around 0.025 - 0.05 percent.

https://www.cdc.gov/polio/what-is-polio/index.htm

To put that in perspective, to date, Covid-19 has killed 957k Americans. This works out to be 0.3 percent if everyone had it (which they didn't).

This number is lower than that due to the "with vs from" distinction. The data is really messy though so we can't be sure how much lower.

This "with vs from" distinction is almost entirely meaningless. Unless the person had Covid19 and got shot or drowned in the sea, Covid19 is part of what killed them. When you have multiple diseases, they all contribute to your death.

Otherwise, if we only try to look for the disease that directly caused your final moment, we get absurd conclusions - such as, "no one has ever died of AIDS", since AIDS only destroys your immune system, it doesn't kill you.

Not to mention, Covid19 is not only a pulmonary disease, it is a blood disease, and as such it has hard to measure and predict effects everywhere in your body.

A recent italian Istituto Superiore di Sanità study showed that a great majority of people dead with covid died from it or it have been a serious concurrent cause.

https://amp24.ilsole24ore.com/pagina/AEbOPLHB

And your point is? That Polio is just a non-serious disease?

Look at the two lines from the parent comment that I quoted.

Polio keeps being found in sewage in many countries without active cases.

The countries that need the sewage monitoring the most, are the ones least likley to have it, so it's probably even worse than it seems.

That's exactly what is expected from a non-sterilizing vaccine. The polio virus will still circulate in the gut of the vaccinated and be visible in sewage, etc even though there are no poliomyelitis cases.

Ugh, your post is a terrible mix of true and false, and you keep confusing IPV and OPV.

I don't like that it's flagged, since there are elements in there that are true, but you wrote them in such a confusing way (in particular confusing IPV and OPV), that maybe you deserve to be flagged.

Does polio not have animal reservoirs?

No. If it could be eliminated from humans, it would be gone. Like smallpox.

The oral polio vaccine is a live vaccine and occasionally reverts to an actually infectious strain. This isn’t a major concern in countries where people are widely vaccinated but would be an issue if we considered it eliminated and stopped vaccinating segments of the population. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine

After some years without cases and if the country has a high vaccination rate, then the recommendation is to switch to use only the injectable vaccine. More details in the section https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine#Schedule

No. It and measles are currently our two best targets for genuine eradication.

recently it has found a way to spread to dogs, in Chad I believe.

Sorry, misremembered it, it was the Guineea worm.

This bears some correction. As the article reports, the strain that caused infection was traced from Malawi/Pakistan, where there is still endemic polio because of long-lasting vaccine hesitancy.

Some interesting history on Pakistan there that has do with unforeseen consequences and why the ends never really do justify the means.

The CIA gained some intel that Bin Laden was residing in Pakistan, and in the precise vicinity, but they wanted to be certain. They way they did this was by recruiting a local doctor [1] and splashing around a ton of money to start a fake vaccine campaign. It's unclear if they bothered using real vaccines or not, but the entire point of the program was a CIA DNA collection program. The CIA was bulk harvesting Pakistani DNA and cross referencing it against DNA from Bin Laden's sister

Once it was confirmed that Bin Laden had children in the area, the program was scrapped, we invaded, he was killed, and everybody was left out to to dry. The doctor was imprisoned, charged with treason, and has since been in solitary with claims of torture for going on a decade now [2]. Local aid workers (who had no idea what they were involved in) were hunted down and killed, some districts banned vaccination drives, and Pakistanis have been extremely critical of any sort of vaccination effort since.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakil_Afridi

[2] - https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/ten-years-what-became...

I don't have the emotional resevoir to find the hard numbers, but it is estimated that hundreds of doctors and aid workers have been killed because of this specific CIA action. And it turns it, from the article below, it was to possibly confirm that the compound had Bin Laden, not to actually find him.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2011/07/the-cia-s-fake-vacc...

destroying trust has consequences.

Thank you very much for the information.

I have a running troll with friends who are unvaccinated, it goes like this.

""" The elites know the second coming of Jesus is near, the idea they had is to kill Jesus before he is born.

Jesus can only be born from his last remaining bloodline, somewhere in the world are the last descendants of Jesus.

They need to find his parents and serialise them.

To do this they created a tracer virus that has no symptoms but is detectable to test bio security measures for when the real virus is released.

When you get PCR tested they take two swabs, one for the bio security test and one to get your DNA to see if you have Jesus's blood flowing within you.

If you have the holy blood it will render you sterile, your DNA is also tested so they can visit you and follow up on your family, those too young to get tested.

Jesus will raise again at the start of WWIII they need to kill him before he is born.

That is why the lipid nano particles concentrate in the ovaries, to sterilise Mary.

They did the same with Bin Laden who has Muhammad bloods in him. """

I have been adding to the troll story overtime when new bits of information surface, they find it quite believable.

I have also tried the inverse story, where its actually godly people trying to find the descendants of Jesus to save them from what's coming. So you need to take the vaccine to protect you from what's coming.

But this inverse story doesn't work at all. Conformation bias is strong.

If you want to use my troll story please quote me. It's original and took me awhile to come up with it.

If this is how you treat your friends, then you dont deserve to have any. If one of those people ends up killing themselves, then you should understand that you may have had a hand in that.

Why would someone who thinks they might have holy blood end their life.

If anything my story gives them conviction, the only person who would be upset is a religious vaccinated person, better repent now dear reader.

Whatever makes you feel better. The main point is, no-one threats their friends like this. Your original comment didn't state that your friends believed that they had holy blood, but if they did, do you think its a good idea to have fun with their beliefs for your own amusement (and some stangers on the internet for imaginary internet points)? If world war 3 breaks out, you're probably gonna need some friends.

If these lies that you tell to your friends prevents them from getting vaccinated, then what?

I have a feeling and also some hope, that your story is just that, a long winded BS story to make yourself sound intelligent, because otherwise, you are just a sociopath.

What upsets you so much about the story, can I ask.

Is their a certain section that sounds out to you?

In my country its very common to tell yarns or tall tails, to try make them believable as possible, trying to make sense of a hard situation.

They say what if X

I say what if Y

They say no that wouldn't happen because of Z

I say factoring in Z how about YY

Its not like anyone actually believes the story, but the goal is to make it believable - almost possible. Something that you consider in the back of your mind.

For example, their was a news report of a military airplane doing circles north of my city leaving contrails.

I said well what if they are testing the release of a airborne bacteria like they did in San Francisco.

My friend said that would only be possible if the wind direction was blowing south

We checked the wind, it was blowing south.

Now we have a story, with just enough credible information to make a highly unlikely situation possible.

That is what a movie is, a story where you suspended disbelief just enough to be entertained. We are doing that but verbally, its a exchange and it is actually quite fun to see what outrageous stories you have spin to be half believable.

That was a terrible idea and certainly contributed, but there's more to it than that: https://firstdraftnews.org/long-form-article/first-draft-cas...

There's a rich history of anti-vaccine conspiracy theories worldwide: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6318131/

Conspiracy theories, not conspiracies.

Thanks, miswrote that.

The article doesn't say that this has been traced from anywhere. It just says the Malawi outbreak was traced from Pakistan.

Part of the problem is that the weakened form is used because it doesn't require refrigeration.

So, the fully inactivated vaccine is the "better" of the two, but, because it requires refrigeration, is harder to deal with in the areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan where vaccination is most needed.

Does Israel even use the oral vaccine? As far as I know all countries that have the basic infrastructure that is needed for the injection one, use that one.

For many years, Israel used both - injection, followed by oral a few years later. At some point, it stopped with the oral - but e.g. in 2013 following some increased sewage levels detected, Israel had a population wide oral vaccine drive[0]

I'm not quite sure what the schedule is right now, but the heavy handed essentially mandated covid vaccination is reported (so far unofficially, official data not yet released) to have caused a non trivial drop in standard vaccine uptake.

Last time Israel had a vaccine mandate was for a short while in the early 50s; Since then, there were no mandate or general requirements e.g. in schools. Uptake was still very high, at over 95% or so until the MMR vaccine scare, which only dented it lightly. Officially and technically, Irsael did not have a covid vaccine mandate - but practically, it did for many people, much like it did in France until a few days ago.

[0] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1922746117

> Most anger at the un-vaccinated (due to the assumption that they are causing the spread) seems mis-placed since those vaccinated by the injected form (that's probably you commenting on Hacker News!) will spread the polio virus as well.

Seriously. In what population does polio spread, the unnvacinnated or the vaccinated? In what population are you exposed to it?

> In what population does polio spread, the unnvacinnated or the vaccinated? In what population are you exposed to it?

This is all so weird. An explanation of how I understand it:

Polio definitely spreads in the unvaccinated.

If you've given the IPV vaccine, you can later be infected and spread polio (with a little less likelihood), but won't become sick.

If you're given the OPV vaccine, you eventually will have sterilizing immunity, and won't spread it, once immunity develops a small time after vaccination. But the OPV vaccine itself very rarely causes polio outbreaks.

So the recommendations are complicated. If you're in a part of the world without polio spread, you should be given the IPV vaccine.

If you're in a part of the world with endemic polio and a good health system, you should be given the IPV vaccine and then the OPV vaccine a few months later.

If you're in a part of the world with endemic polio and a lacking health system, the best bet is just giving you the OPV vaccine.

> If you've given the IPV vaccine, you can later be infected and spread polio (with a little less likelihood), but won't become sick.

> If you're given the OPV vaccine, you eventually will have sterilizing immunity, and won't spread it, once immunity develops a small time after vaccination. But the OPV vaccine itself very rarely causes polio outbreaks.

What if we have IPV first then OPV as a booster, would that give sterilizing immunity with less risk?

> > If you're in a part of the world with endemic polio and a good health system, you should be given the IPV vaccine and then the OPV vaccine a few months later.

Weren't there vaccine derived polio cases from the OPV in Pakistan?

Perhaps -- the parent explicitly points out that this is a possibility.

Apparently some old P2 vaccine was kept around after it was supposed to be disposed of nationwide and inadvertently administered.

> The polio vaccines we currently use are imperfect

Is that due to tradeoffs (cost, health risk, etc.) with other types of vaccines, or do we simply not know how to make them?q

They are non-sterilizing ; that is, they protect the vaccinee from getting the disease, but not from getting (and shedding) the virus.

We have sterilizing oral ones. They have safety issues, both personal and population level ones.

The essentially perfect way is to give everyone the non-sterilizing one as early as possible in life, and the sterilizing one at a later stage. The non-sterilizing one protects against the safety issues in the sterilizing one.

Yes but the vaccinated would have no one to make sick around them if there isn’t anyone unvaccinated around them. Doesn’t matter as much if we all have the virus, as long as it doesn’t develop as a sickness.

Is this where mRNA vaccines can be useful?

The COVID vaccines suffer from a similar issue. By design they are non-sterilizing because they don't develop immunity in the nasal mucous. It's always been the case that with a large enough exposure the COVID vaccinated would still get infected in the nose and transmit the virus to others.

This is disinformation. If you get the vaccine you won't get COVID. It's that simple.

There already are effective polio vaccines.

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