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Some old pictures of what it looked like in hospitals: https://www.google.com/search?source=univ&tbm=isch&q=images+...

Horrible disease.

At least some of the images that come up in that Google Images search are from the Cutter Incident, which was caused by a Polio vaccine, much like the current outbreaks that we're seeing, so that probably wasn't the best example.

It's worth noting that the Cutter incident involved contaminated/improperly produced inactivated-virus vaccines.

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)

Whilst the attenuated polio virus vaccine may carry a tiny risk it cannot be reasonably compared with the dangers of not being vaccinated.

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.

The 1 in 200 chance is an old statistic. Since that time obesity and Vitamin D deficiency have both increased along with various other measures of health. There is good reason to believe that modern people have immune systems that will be less effective against polio infections and negative outcomes.

Im tired of saying this but it’s absolutely mind boggling how fucked up it is that one of the main exports from America today is vaccine hesitancy.

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.

You're very kind calling it "hesitancy", too! I know that's the soft euphemism that the media has coalesced around, but "hesitancy" implies that one is on the fence, unsure, open to debate and open to being convinced. That's not what America is exporting.

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 seems to be a international effort, sadly. Article is also pre-covid.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6137759/

> America's Anti-Vax movement is religiously sure of itself. They aren't on the fence. They're not weighing the pros and cons.

This is the activist wing of the movement. Many more Americans are genuinely, in many cases reasonably, hesitant.

I don't actually believe this anymore. Hesitancy is a cover for those who lack the confidence to publicly affirm their anti-vaccination attitudes.

You don't have to guess, we have data on this.

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.

The big question is why the 'undecided' are undecided and why anti-vaxx groups have such a large influence.

I think we actually know the answers to these questions but we're too frightened to tackle the problem head-on.

IMO the answer is clear: at the root, it’s a lack of basic science education intertwined with a deep anti-intellectualism culture in western society.

(biochemist, no conflict of interest)

"...are genuinely, in many cases reasonably, hesitant."

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.

There are hesitant people and there are anti-vax people. Unfortunately discourse here seems to lump both groups together. Why can’t we see nuances?

Edit: Actually, it’s not just HN. It’s quite unfortunate.

I think fully differentiating anti-vax and vax-hesitatant lacks nuance. There is no way there is a sharp line between the groups. Is it a coincidence that the increase in prevalence of vax hesitance correlates with the increase in prevalence full-on anti-vax, which went from niche to mainstream? The data are clear. How we resolve and educate the fence sitters is the relevant question. Browbeating or shaming either group isn't productive. (arguably Trolling the mainstream is one goal of anti-vaxers.) Regrettably we are up against Brandolini's Law , where anti-vax misinformation has reached a critical mass with 'respected' personalities in media and politics participating, splashing this misinformation way beyond the niche conspiracy theorists that used to be the core.

What data are you referring to?

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.

Anti-vaxx and vaccine-hesitancy, while both extremely dangerous and concerning, are two different parts of the same spectrum.

The origin of the term "vaccine hesitancy" is actually scholarly research on the subject, not the media.

> 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.

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.

Can you expand on what you mean by 'The country is constitutionally designed to live in perpetual tension with itself'?

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...

Thank you-- the CIA's fake vaccine operation should be in the first or second paragraph of every article that discusses polio outbreaks. It has had a huge effect on public health.

The Declaration of Independence and Constitution establish that all governments are vulnerable to becoming tyrannical, and the Bill of Rights establishes that people have specific rights that supersede the sovereign bodies that govern them. It insists on the government providing allowance for rights that may be used against it.

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.

Thank you.

> 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.

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.

Sure, but practicing science poorly, or communicating about it naively, is not the same as being science skeptical or anti-science. That's the point.

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.

That cuts in both directions. COVID proved beyond any doubt at all for those paying attention that the public health institutions are overrun with pseudo-science. Their claims are literally nothing but sciency words, and lots of people who refuse to take vaccines now point to that fact (which is easily proven) as a good reason to stay away from them.

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.

Jehovah's Witnesses are not a faith healing community and their religion is not anti-vaccination [1] [2]. Christian Scientists do first turn to prayer for healing, but it is not part of the dogma. Their church is fine with members who get vaccinated [3].

[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...

Good to know! I was wary about naming names and am now bummed I labeled them wrongly, but had wanted to illustrate a familiar example of skepticism towards a system as distinct from debate within a system.

>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.

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.

That's one of the other (related, but distinct) circumstances at play in this sort of "gobbledygook."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Medawar

[1] https://www.azquotes.com/author/21678-Peter_Medawar

Medawar being Medawar, you can believe it!

You hit the nail on the head. It’s about power and authority.

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.

Yeah, I wish it was only America, but the UK have their own antivaxx propagandists. What's the motivation behind this anyways? Aren't there other topics to make money off off, like spreading flat earth information?

Most people spreading flat earth memes never make a penny from it. Their payoff is the arguments and frustration it causes. Trolls, not shills.

It became a political tool during the pandemic. People who were already campaigning on a general distrust of government institutions capitalized on this as a way to attract idiots into voting for them.

To be fair, America-induced vaccine hesitancy isn't just a byproduct of the modern zeitgeist; the CIA has been using vaccine drives as cover for foreign operations for decades, including the most recent documented use in 2011.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/11/cia-fake-vacci...

I’ve been pro vaccine since forever but the idea that vaccines with decades of testing have the same risk profile as an experimental vaccine rushed through the labs to combat a deadly new disease is absurd.

Nothing goes through decades of testing, they go through human trials and then monitor safety at a mass scale for a year or two and then they're done. Same as with the covid vaccines.

I read spaceman’s comment as saying decades of public use is the additional testing.

The previous average vaccine testing duration was ~5 years. Let's not pretend that the mRNA vaccines were even close to that.

Fun fact, the Omicron BA.5 booster isn't tested at all.

You can amass 1000 person-years of testing with 10 subjects and 100 years, or with 1000 subjects and 1 year. Or with some intermediate ramp-up plan.

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...

Apparently it is not only an American thing.

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...

Not getting the covid vaccine and not getting the polio vaccine are 2 entirely different things. Most of the population is not at risk from covid

Hearing that fact and then concluding he must just "not know better" is exactly the sort of vaccine fanaticism that creates anti vaxxers and vast numbers of hesitants. The obvious conclusion is that a highly informed person - who would also have access to non public information - thought the risks significantly outweighed the benefits for him and that he wanted to avoid taking it badly enough to break the law. Yet to people on HN it's just a totally inexplicable mystery why anyone wouldn't want to take a new experimental vaccine every morning with their breakfast cereal.

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!

I dispair. That people can think so irrationally that they'd risk dying in preference to being vaccinated has truly shaken my faith in humanity.

It is not only an American thing. Andrew Wakefield's actions have contributed to this problem since 1998, and he is British, so it's not just being lead from the USA, it's an international con.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wakefield

And more recently there's Piers Corbyn and co

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piers_Corbyn

Makes me wonder if we should be specifically engineering really weak but way more infectious strains of dangerous infectious diseases. Let them spread and outcompete the harmful strains

As someone that worked with viruses for a couple decades, I do not endorse this. Life finds a way.

(I know viruses aren't 'alive')

Fair enough. I suppose HGT gone wrong could lead to a pretty major disaster

BTW, polio is spread through poor bathroom hygiene.

I wasn't sure what you meant, so I looked it up: "poor bathroom hygiene" is not like toilet seat wiping or other in-bathroom stuff, but rather about pathways that make trace amounts of someone else's feces end up in your mouth.

> [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

You are not wrong that polio spreads through feces of infected individuals, your intestines are where it usually replicates. I might add though that in the 20th century counterintuitively it was the improvements in bathroom hygiene in the western world that have caused the high ratios of polio induced paralysis. Mostly because with really bad bathroom hygiene, even babies get infected with the virus, who still receive antibodies through their mother's milk and are protected by them. The immune system can deal with an infection and gain immunity in a safer environment. Now, in places with improved bathroom hygiene more children get exposed at later ages, like e.g. the toddler age. At that point, polio is way more dangerous as the immune system is not helped by the mother's antibodies.

https://nextnature.net/story/2014/how-modern-sanitation-gave...

Crazy. Did not know!

While we are on it, if people dont know, CIA used polio vaccine to carry out secret operations creating distrust in vaccines.

It was the CIA organizing a fake hepatitis vaccine drive in Pakistan to get the DNA of Bin Laden's children.

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...

Why could they not use a real vaccine??

That's not the takeaway here.

The takeaway is "military operations should never, ever use vaccination campaigns as a cover".

We disagree. Many worse things have been done in military operations, and often rightly so.

But giving thousands of innocent civilians fake vaccines when you could just as easily have given them real ones, is bafflingly needless cruelty.

They did use a real vaccine. It was real in every way - except they also collected data.

Was it worth it to get Osama? I guess Obama thought so.

An ethical route would have been the decent approach even if it took a little longer.

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.

China definitely had a lot of polio in the early 20th through mid 20th century. There are still some young people (~late 20s) who were affected as children.

Two years ago I read an article that said a recent polio vaccination offered some crossover immunity (5%) against Covid, so I got re-vaccinated against polio.

A friend of mine at Boeing told me he spent a year in an iron lung as a kid.

> An iron lung is a type of negative pressure ventilator (NPV), a mechanical respirator which encloses most of a person's body, and varies the air pressure in the enclosed space, to stimulate breathing.

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.")

The iron lung doesnt change the pressure of the air around your head, which is probably what you find uncomfortable.

There is still someone living in one https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/may/26/last-iron-lu...

Hmm. Perceiving a pressure difference from 6 floors of elevation does not seem legit. Do you have some condition that would exacerbate this?

>Perceiving a pressure difference from 6 floors of elevation does not seem legit.

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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_pressure

Dunno, I generally complain about it being uncomfortable before other people do (also on a train going through a tunnel for example), if it's an illness I don't know.