Spate of polio outbreaks worldwide puts scientists on alert
nature.com
nature.com
The oral vaccine in use in a lot of the world contains a weakened version of the virus, and allows your body to fight it off without any negative effects. This is usually a 3 or 4 course vaccine.
This specifically engineered weakened virus has been shown to mutate and infect other partially or non vaccinated individuals, including causing paralysis, and is the one now popping up in more developed / inoculated areas - but again, in unvaccinated individuals.
Note - from what I have read, you can still get and spread polio even if you are vaccinated (much like Covid), but it’s an incredibly low chance - and furthermore, your risk of serious disease / paralysis / death is even lower (so we know the vaccines work). The oral vaccine (weakened virus) efficacy is much higher than the injected (inactive virus) vaccine too, and boosters are offered for those who had the vaccines as children and are now adults.
There is also another oral vaccine, with a weakened virus, that has been engineered to prevent certain mutations that cause it to spread (if I read some articles correctly), but is not currently approved for use in the US / UK.
Polio was one of the first few horrible diseases almost eradicated by vaccines. Whatever your stance on getting vaccinated, do understand that Polio has a 1 in 200 chance of resulting in severe symptoms and paralysis, and there is no treatment for it - only prevention via inoculation. It is not like Covid where mostly the older, more immunocompromised suffer - it will ravage children and healthy adults too.
Science skepticism has always been a thing; its only in recent years though that internet has allowed the rapid spread of disinformation. Glossy content created for misinforming Americans inspires copycats in other countries. It’s really depressing.
America's Anti-Vax movement is religiously sure of itself. They aren't on the fence. They're not weighing the pros and cons. They're convinced that they know the secret capital-T Truth, and that spreading their gospel saves lives. COVID brought it mainstream, but if you look back at the "Anti-vax Moms groups" long before COVID, there was still no hesitancy. Their minds were also made up.
This is the activist wing of the movement. Many more Americans are genuinely, in many cases reasonably, hesitant.
The vaccine-hesitant group is much larger than the anti-vaxx group, and the anti-vaxx group wields a very disproportionate influence on the undecided, vaccine-hesitant group, than actual real expert groups do. We know this.
I think we actually know the answers to these questions but we're too frightened to tackle the problem head-on.
(biochemist, no conflict of interest)
Why? Are you saying they're too stupid to weigh up the facts?
The amount of factual evidence is enormous, and it's a trivial exercise to evaluate it accurately.
Edit: Actually, it’s not just HN. It’s quite unfortunate.
My original comment was based on anecdotal data tho. None of the people I know that refused the Covid vaccine (initially) had any issues taking other vaccines. One friend for example who was a vocal critic of Covid vaccines, didn’t have any issues vaccinating his child this year against other things.
Basically they wanted a vaccine with a “track record” was my conclusion.
When you lump these type of people with people who think the vaccines are from the deep state or stuff like that, you can’t create good and effective policies IMO.
The origin of the term "vaccine hesitancy" is actually scholarly research on the subject, not the media.
It may be depressing, but it's not helpful to associate it with "science skepticism".
The vaccine "hesitant" you refer to are not skeptical of science. They freely use the language and processes of science as their argument. You or I may think they misuse the language, make unconvincing assumptions, etc, but there's nothing to it that's skeptical of science.
Where vaccine hesitancy is rooted in science skepticism, you see the hesitant relying on alternative means of knowing why vaccines aren't right for them. You can think of the classic faith healing communities l̶i̶k̶e̶ ̶C̶h̶r̶i̶s̶t̶i̶a̶n̶ ̶S̶c̶i̶e̶n̶t̶i̶s̶t̶s̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶J̶e̶h̶o̶v̶a̶h̶'̶s̶ ̶W̶i̶t̶n̶e̶s̶s̶e̶s̶ as an example of that.
The contagious skepticism that you're talking about is of institutions and authority. They don't trust Fauci or the CDC or the WHO or Pfizer or whomever to to communicate honestly, objectively, and in their own interests. They believe that these institutions can not be trusted to communicate scientific knowledge free of political bias.
And when you look at it that way, of course America is the exporter of that. While responsible for founding some impressive modern institutions, the founding myth of the nation is all about skepticism of institution and authority. The country is constitutionally designed to live in perpetual tension with itself, and that's what's getting exported now.
Let's also not lose sight of the fake vaccine operation run by the CIA in Pakistan to catch Bin Laden. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/11/cia-fake-vacci...
You can say that's a good and admirable thing, but it also takes a revolutionary tension between people and government and structures into the national identity.
Words are different than the things they refer to. Using "sciency" words doesn't neccesarily mean people are following the scientific method just like how soverign citizens aren't actually lawyers.
What matters is the meaning of the words, not what they superficially sound like.
* to be clear, im not saying that all antivaccine people are neccesarily anti-science, just that the superficial form of the words they use is irrelavent.
If it helps to situate it in a different truth system: Heresy may be wrong according to the prevailing doctrine or theologically unsound, but it's still operating within the religious system of belief.
Professing belief unitarianism is not atheism, and making unconvincing or unsound scientific arguments is not anti-science.
Actually it's worse than institutions just using science incorrectly. They just flat out make up scientific sounding claims. The claim that everyone had to take the vaxx even if they weren't elderly was rooted in claims that the COVID vaccines would create herd immunity by stopping transmission. Go try and find the underlying scientific evidence that led to that belief - there isn't any. They just made it up because they knew it'd cause the Vaccine True Believers to force everyone around them to take it. And those people were now revealed to not only be idiots: the vaccines have never stopped transmission, but in many case flat out evil authoritarians as well.
[1] https://www.jw.org/en/library/magazines/wp20101001/Do-Jehova...
[2] https://www.jw.org/en/jehovahs-witnesses/faq/jw-vaccines-imm...
[3] https://www.christianscience.com/press-room/a-christian-scie...
>And when you look at it that way, of course America is the exporter of that.
Yes, we Americans are a distrustful bunch. But there's more to this outcome than just being a stubborn, cranky and untrusting people.
As Peter Medawar[0] described[1]:
The USA is so enormous, and so numerous are its schools,
colleges and religious seminaries, many devoted to special
religious beliefs ranging from the unorthodox to the dotty,
that we can hardly wonder at its yielding a more bounteous
harvest of gobbledygook than the rest of the world put
together.
The tragic situation in New York with respect to polio is all about the intersection of religion, power and control. People seeking that power need it attack the credibility of government institutions because they are a threat. If people die or suffer, so be it. It’s cynical and gross.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/11/cia-fake-vacci...
Fun fact, the Omicron BA.5 booster isn't tested at all.
The "decades of public use" metric needs to also take into account how widespread that use is.
Now consider how many doses of mRNA vaccines have been given worldwide (1), since the public rollouts began in December 2020. mRNA vaccines are no longer unknown, at all.
1) Billions of doses https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/covid-vaccine-tracker-glo...
José María Fernández Sousa-Faro, the founder, CEO and president of the European pharmaceutical giant PharmaMar, a pharmaceutical company that creates and distributes drugs to treat coronavirus, was caught with fake paperwork that stated he was fully vaccinated.
I am not sure why someone leading a large pharmaceutical company would decide not to take the vaccine and pay a large sum of money to get fake paperwork with the risk of being caught but he was also obviously VERY hesitant.
You would think he knows better...
Note that the German health minister was also caught lying about his own vaccine history. He claimed to have taken a fourth shot but then rather stupidly flashed his own vaccine passport on TV, so other people scanned it and found he'd actually never done so.
Given these sorts of facts the truly disturbing anti-rationalists are out in abundance on this thread, and they're not the hesitants!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wakefield
And more recently there's Piers Corbyn and co
Horrible disease.
The article implicates live virus vaccines, not inactivated virus vaccines, in periodic outbreaks primarily outside the US and Europe (which do not use live-virus polio vaccines)
Anti-vaxxers and those who've not gotten around to being vaccinated should look very carefully at those photos especially the one with the rows of poor kids in iron lungs, it's so tragic I want to cry.
I know, I lived through that 1950s/60s polio epidemic and whilst I was lucky and didn't get polio other kids at my school did. One died and another in my class ended up not being able to walk without calipers on his legs. It was terrible.
I've since had both the Salk and Sabin vaccines, back then when the vaccines finally arrived everyone rushed to them (despite a few tragic mishaps with a bad batch of early vaccine).
At that time the term 'anti-vaxxer' didn't exist - as the concept was almost inconceivable.
As a result, there have been a number of targeted attacks on polio vaccination workers that continue to this day. [0]
It is no surprise then, that as the grand parent comment mentions, this is the last region where polio exists.
[0] https://www.voanews.com/a/attack-on-pakistan-anti-polio-team...
The takeaway is "military operations should never, ever use vaccination campaigns as a cover".
But giving thousands of innocent civilians fake vaccines when you could just as easily have given them real ones, is bafflingly needless cruelty.
Those sort of tactics bring the whole system into disrepute. It's similar to when cops plant evidence on a criminal for whom they suspect but don't have sufficient evidence to convict.
It's better to let a criminal go free than for due process to be fucked up and have people lose faith and trust in it. Loss of trust can spread like wildfire and overall much more damage is done.
A friend of mine at Boeing told me he spent a year in an iron lung as a kid.
Holy crap that sounds uncomfortable, I already hate the few mbar pressure difference between ground level and 6th floor, let alone doing that 30 times a minute (resting breathing rate: 12-15 breaths/minute -> switching from breathing in, to breathing out, means 2 pressure changes per breath). Surely there are more comfortable solutions to operating one's chest, something like shaving and a (number of) large suction cup(s) to operate the chest, perhaps aided by weak glue around the edges?
Edit: "in which a person is laid, with their head protruding from a hole in the end of the cylinder" whew. Does make me wonder how to prevent hyperventilation (too high a rate) while providing enough oxygen at all times (like during stress or other exertion, resting rate may not be enough).
> Positive pressure ventilation systems are now more common than negative pressure systems. Positive pressure ventilators work by blowing air into the patient's lungs via intubation through the airway [...] [this has] the advantage of not restricting patients' movements or caregivers' ability to examine the patients
Doesn't sound that much better, as I've heard that intubation is its own kind of hell. (On intubation, Wikipedia just mentions "Patients are generally anesthetized beforehand.")
I generally don't notice it myself, but if you do the math (office building floor height averages ~14 feet/4.27 metres), six stories of altitude difference would change ambient air pressure by ~.3kPa.
Humans can detect very small (much smaller than .3kPa) changes in air pressure, although some folks are more sensitive than others.
> [Polio] is transmitted primarily via the fecal–oral route, by ingesting contaminated food or water. (--en.wikipedia.org/wiki/polio)
This can take many forms, some obvious such as if someone doesn't wash their hands after using the toilet, shakes your hand, and you later eat something; others less obvious such as if someone poops into la Meuse in France and someone gets some water in their mouth in what is known as de Maas in the Netherlands. (Not sure how many pathogens survive French wastewater treatment or how many people swim in Maas-connected water bodies during hot weather, but you get the idea.)
More info on this route at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fecal%E2%80%93oral_route
https://nextnature.net/story/2014/how-modern-sanitation-gave...
(I know viruses aren't 'alive')
We really need to switch away from the old vaccine ASAP.
<s>Why worry? Poliomyelitis is mild, most cases are asymptomatic, only one in 200 cases result in paralysis, and fatality rates are even lower.</s>
One of the covid-19 origin theories was that China was trying to make an attenuated live virus SARS vaccine that would self propagate through the population
There are broadly two types of polio vaccines: the kind that inoculates the gut (OPV), taken orally, and the kind that inoculates in the blood (IPV), administered intravenously [1]. (the "I" stands for inactivated.) Both prevent polio, the disease. But only the former is sterilizing, i.e. keeps you from spreading poliovirus. It is also, unfortunately, the one that can leave the vaccinated person's gut to infect someone who is unvaccinated.
So if you have a polio outbreak in a vaccine-deficient population, administering non-sterilizing vaccine will keep those people unparalyzed. But it will do nothing to stop the spread. The sterilizing vaccine will help stop the spread. But at the cost of introducing vaccine-derived polio into the mix.
We had the luxury of using only the non-spreading, non-sterilizing vaccine in America. That's the benefit of elimination: you can switch to the lower-risk version. It does not seem that we were able to keep it.
The mistake produced 120,000 doses of polio vaccine that contained live polio virus. Of children who received the vaccine, 40,000 developed abortive poliomyelitis (a form of the disease that does not involve the central nervous system), 56 developed paralytic poliomyelitis—and of these, five children died from polio.
The Cutter incident is a story of bad vaccines. The viruses were supposed to be inactivated. Cutter's were not [1].
That is not what is happening here. Nobody got a bad vaccine. This is the story of an unvaccinated individual being exposed to a weakened poliovirus, administered instead of the inactivated kind because it's sterilizing, and then going home to a community of other unvaccinated people who had no protection against polioviruses of any kind.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutter_Laboratories#Cutter_inc...
I personally know few people that get Covid few days after vaccination. I don't know if they get infection in vaccination centre from others or from vaccine itself, but again... Vaccine was a reason of spreading infection.
The US and England vaccinate with the non-live version. This non-live version cannot mutate, but it is non-sterilizing- the vaccinated can still become infected in their gut- the vaccine prevents it from getting into their bloodstream and becoming poliomyelitis.
So Polio will continue to spread among the fully vaccinated going unnoticed- particularly in international cities where they can import new cases. And we have seen a tragic outcome where someone is not vaccinated and ends up acquiring poliomyelitis.
Children missing vaccine appointments due Covid19 and pockets of vaccine hesitancy have created this situation. For example, Hasidic Jews have anti-vaxxer tendencies.
Unfortunately polio heavily impacts children, who aren't given a choice. As far as I'm concerned, anti-vaxxers are murdering kids and getting away with it.
Later that day my boss was hovering around my cubicle with his ukelele singing a song that called me "the baby puncher" and the nickname stuck.
No matter how painless modern injections are people still don't like having them thus the deterrence rate is higher. It's a key factor if we're trying vaccinate the whole population.
It's not easily replaced, even if you had the money.
Now we have the problem that people constantly get reinfected in omicron waves which puts a heavy burden on the immune system and damages the system.
The history of our attempts at developing traditional vaccines for this type of virus goes back 50 years, and we've been very unsuccessful at it, not for lack of trying.
I don't think it's unreasonable to believe that we wont ever be able to develop a vaccine for this type of virus in the same manner that we have for e.g. polio.
FYI mRNA vaccines were first developed 5-10 years prior to the events of the past few years, and deployed in veterinary medicine. Having a global pandemic led to the urgency to adapt them to human conditions where they have saved millions of lives
They've been trying for 10 years to get approval for human use. COVID was just the battering ram used to get them authorized for emergency use.
And your last point on saving millions of lives is complete speculation which is unknowable and unprovable. I can just as easily make the claim that cross reactive immunity from a precious Coronaviris infection saved millions of lives.