Sorry if I’m bitter, I just had a nurse tell me yesterday to not take the flu vaccine because she said it doesn’t prevent flu and why would I “put that junk in my body.”
And then unfortunately the one you met(who is probably otherwise good at their job)
A little ironic after making a plea that the world is “filled with shades of grey”
> ought not be the same as the word for those that are intended to confer herd immunity.
This is really based on a misinformed view about vaccines though.
> If we used two words, the problem of anti vaxx would be partially ameliorated it seems.
Doubt it. Even after Covid the major anti vaxx issue remains childhood vaccines such as MMR.
Is the antivax problem worse after COVID? Why doubt what is empirically very well-established?
I suspect that most doctors are bad, because in general medicine appears to be very medieval to the extent I have explored. Same goes for vaccines. Most seem to be ineffective or harmful, and when they appear to work it can be difficult to attribute it to the vaccine. Quality verifiable evidence and integrity seems to be missing in the medical sciences.
What would make you think that?
You do need to be willing to go where the evidence leads you, but that doesn't require or guarantee a fully-consistent belief system.
Where is that, exactly? Because it certainly isn’t in the US.
Geriatric nurses tend to not get paid well, but resident nurses in hospitals do.
It’s a wide field.
Try again.
We should probably stop comparing incomes to the global mean to decide if they're "fair" or "correct."
Flu vaccine efficacy has been <50% for over a decade. Usually it floats around 30-40%. So even by the official numbers, it doesn't do a lot for groups not really at risk.
This is not a surprise: The yearly shots are for a subset of flus, created in the spring/summer for the strains they think will be most prevalent in the fall.
I did it twice during the pandemic. In one case it was someone I trusted for many years.
> CDC conducts studies each year to determine how well influenza (flu) vaccines protect against flu. While vaccine effectiveness (VE) can vary, recent studies show that flu vaccination reduces the risk of flu illness by between 40% and 60% among the overall population during seasons when most circulating flu viruses are well-matched to those used to make flu vaccines
> How well flu vaccines work (or their ability to protect against a certain outcome) can vary from season to season. Protection can vary depending on who is being vaccinated. At least two factors play an important role in determining the likelihood that vaccination will protect a person from flu illness: 1) characteristics of the person being vaccinated (such as their age and health), and 2) how well the vaccines “match” the flu viruses spreading in the community. When flu vaccines are not well matched to some viruses spreading in the community, vaccination may provide little or no protection against illness caused by those viruses.
Compare it with something like tetanus vaccines:
> Today, diphtheria and tetanus are at historic low rates in the United States. No one has ever studied the efficacy of tetanus toxoid and diphtheria toxoid in a vaccine trial. However, experts infer efficacy from protective antitoxin levels. A complete vaccine series has a clinical efficacy of virtually 100% for tetanus and 97% for diphtheria.
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/dtap-tdap-td/hcp/about-vacc...
It's not crazy to behave differently around something with 40-60% efficacy and something with 97-100% efficacy.
There is a world of difference between having your healthcare provider tell you "the flu vaccine has to be made in advance and often targets the wrong strain, so can therefore be ineffective even the majority of the time" vs calling the vaccine putting "junk in [your] body".
Tangentially, there is no value in arguing with antivaxxers or conspiracy theorists. You might as well attempt to talk them out of their religion. Effort better spent elsewhere. Regardless, informed consent must be mandatory in a healthcare or medical setting, so the patient can make a choice with all available information. I am not arguing choice in this subthread. I’m also not willing to argue vaccine safety data or statistics.
Why is 50% less flu not a good thing?
This is like the sterilising argument about the Covid vaccine. It’s somehow damning for the Covid jab but not for polio.
On top of that, vaccines need >50% efficacy to get approval. If the flu vaccine was invented today, it wouldn't pass.
Having said that, as an asthmatic I've had the Flu vaccine every year for the last 20 or so years, and knock on wood haven't had Flu since. I also had the multivalent pneumonia vaccine a while ago, so fingers crossed!
My doctor friend doesn't get flu vaccine even when recommended, because, to quote her, "in my line of work, I was already exposed to everything ten times at least". She works as an ORL expert in a big hospital, so she is constantly staring down some sick throats.
Startup idea - vaccine delivery service. Pay a fee or subscription and someone comes to your house or workplace and jabs you with flu vaccine plus any travel shots required.
Not a slight against the flu shot, just a funny tidbit since it reminded me that the vaccine doesn't make me invincible from all similar disease.
"We identified a statistically significant increased risk of noninfluenza respiratory virus infection among TIV recipients (Table 3), including significant increases in the risk of rhinovirus and coxsackie/echovirus infection" [1]
That's one of the complications in assessing efficacy: if the benefit in flu vaccine is potentially quite modest (as determined by some long-running studies [2]), and it causes an increased risk of other noninfluenza respiratory viruses, then we need higher-quality, more detailed studies to understand what's happening.
But based on the discussion of the Cochrane review it seems unlikely. [3]
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3404712/
[2] https://www.cochrane.org/news/featured-review-three-updated-...
[3] https://community.cochrane.org/news/why-have-three-long-runn...
What is this referring to?
The flu vaccine is notoriously kinda like shooting in the dark because it's hard to predict which strain will dominate the winter.
> On May 16, 2014, the White House announced that the CIA will no longer use vaccination programmes as a cover for espionage. The news comes in the wake of a series of militant attacks on polio vaccination workers in Pakistan, with legitimate health-care workers targeted as being US spies. The attacks have forced organisations such as the UN to suspend polio vaccination efforts in Pakistan, and have severely hampered anti-polio efforts, with parents refusing to have their children vaccinated. News of the vaccination programme led to a banning of vaccination in areas controlled by the Pakistan Taliban, and added to existing scepticism surrounding the sincerity of public health efforts by the international health community.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/11/cia-fake-vacci...
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
If I recall correctly, the conspiracy theory that emerged was that vaccines were secretly being used to render the people sterile.
It is interesting how 8 years later nearly the same line of thinking took hold in the West (albeit with claim of injected mind control chips) amid anti-vaxxers.
That line of thinking always existed in the West, among the "Mark of the Beast" set. The interesting thing is the degree to which it, and conspiratorial politics in general, became so normalized in such a short time. Also how the anti-vax movement switched from a generally leftist ideology to being captured by right-wing identity politics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterilization_of_Native_Americ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study
Notions of conspiracy form easily when reality provides so much material.
After all, it isn’t like the government has a long history of eugenics, forcefully drugging people for weeks at a time with combinations of LSD, barbiturates, and other fun stuff, right?
Our government would never do that.
Context is everything. The US government did that in the context of their genocidal war against indigenous peoples. There were fully transparent laws on the books that rewarded people for murdering native populations. No conspiracy needed.
As for your claim from 3 years ago, you've thrown out an allegation without providing any evidence. Involuntary sterilizations likely do occur, but that's far from an indication of a systemic government conspiracy.
The context of COVID vaccines was a global pandemic, not a genocide.
Also, nobody has shown up at the hospital yet to discover that their ailments were caused by a malfunctioning mind control chip delivered in a vaccine. Defect rates for such a "chip" if it existed would not be that low.
Stop lying. You come in with a false faith argument and can’t be bothered to research elementary facts.
Where do you see the word systemic?
And once again, your question could be easily answered with Google. Seeing as how you’re the one that came in sprouting completely incorrect information that would have been easily avoided had you just bothered to skim the Wikipedia article on the topic, which would also have answered this particular question, I humbly request that you DYOR.
The ends cannot justify the means.
Oh they absolutely can in an utilitarian sense. But a basic utilitarian argument would tell that jeopardizing an entire region's vaccine rollout program to get revenge on some asshole already living the rest of his life out of a hole was not worth it.
Is that good reasoning? No.
Is it what some humans will do? Yes.
Then they aren't being utilitarian because they are not including the risk into their cost calculation.
Or at least not a good one. Definitely not "any"
edit:
Oh I see this now > who wanted to do the op
Yeah any person can make any false argument to justify a conclusion they wanna reach. You don't have to be utilitarian for that. Just unethical.
Sure they are.
They just estimate the risk much lower than you do.
You have no way to know who's right for sure.
Maybe they legitimately have found a really low-risk way to massively increase utils by cheating / mistreating a few people.
I don't know of a way to protect utilitarian systems from such conditions.
Non-immunizing treatments should not be called vaccines, the annual flu shot should not be considered a vaccine, nor should the mRNA COVID "vaccine", for which they had to change the very definition of what a vaccine is to even include it for legal purposes.
For the flu shot it is a crap shot, as there are soo many flu variants annually they make a best guess as to which one(s) will likely because prominent based on trends and package them up, often they are correct sometimes they are not...
For more traditional vaccines like Polio and other long term immunizing vaccines society ends up suffering because of the inclusion of these short term annual or less treatments and over all is a net negative
As to " politically weaponized by AI and social media algorithms" it was more than AI and Social media that made these things political, it was the political branches of government that made it so by mandates and rhetoric that pitted people against each other. Attempting to exile people that even questioned their government masters... That is what made it political.
The best vaccines are sterilizing, meaning that they prevent disease and transmission often enough that very high rates of vaccination extirpate the virus.
It might be useful for discussion purposes if "vaccine" meant "sterilizing vaccine" and vaccines which don't work as well had some other name, but that's not how it works.
yes they keep changing the definition to include more and more things legally as "vaccines" are shielded from any liability so you can not sue big pharma if they injury with their "vaccine"
this however does not change the fact that the way the law (and you) use the term is very very very different than what the ordinary person thinks and understands a vaccine to be
When this person then discovers that the government uses a different (your) "correct" definition to include things they traditionally would not think of as a vaccine this erodes trust in the entire system.
This was made very very clear with COVID.
What do you consider immunizing?
But social media did wonders at spreading & amplifying that message, since pitting people against each other in endless arguments generates lots of "engagement".