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Comment by rmason | Hacker News Reader

My father told me that goitre's were quite common when he was growing up as a boy in Detroit in the 1920's. In my generation it was totally unknown. Yet I remember people affected by polio as a boy quite well. But I bet that millennials have no personal experience with it at all. Each generation moves forward and I can only hope there is a day when no one has any first hand experience with either cancer or Alzheimer's.

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My father also grew up in Detroit and also told me about goiters being common when he was young.

Apparently Michigan helped normalize the ionization of salt in the US: https://www.michiganradio.org/show/stateside/2022-05-12/once...

There’s an entire area of the US that was called the Goiter Belt. Basically the top half. It was really common.

Only if sensible people continue to run the public health authorities.

You now have people that refuse to vaccinate their children against measles, COVID vaccine hesitancy is a widespread phenomenon with some people resorting to heresay remedies like horse dewormers instead, an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist is running for US president and polling with double digit numbers.

Health-related insights are particularly susceptible to targeted misinformation. And in an era of social media, this can quickly become a majority opinion.

A large number of people have refused the COVID vaccine for completely valid reasons. The vast majority of that group absolutely vaccinates their children against polio, measles, etc.

They aren’t the anti science luddites your comment paints them as. They are (rightly) skeptical of “the science” which often isn’t very scientific at all.

As we’ve seen, the medical science community is heavily motivated by profit and prestige, but unfortunately not always truth.

New discoveries in that field are often revealed to be bullshit. They deserve skepticism, not blind compliance.

Well said. I am a strong believer in vaccines.

Injecting code that causes all of your cells to mass produce spike protines to train your body to fight the spike proteins that your cells are producing just seems really questionable and the VAERS db seems to support my skepticism.

When I started reading the details of how this vaccine worked from the pro-mrna sites, my engineer side started ringing alarm bells and noped right out of it.

When google and others started silencing alternative viewpoints and major govt related employers mandated it, I dusted off my tinfoil hat.

They should have just let the information be free (bad or good) and not pushed so hard. Now they have created distrust.

> But I bet that millennials have no personal experience with it at all.

Mass vaccination started in the late 50s and especially early 60s (with Sabin’s oral vaccine).

Millennials start in 1981, so they would / could well have known affected adults.

Considering current antivax movement, it is not unusual for people to get sick with polio, even some got paralyzed.

It is hard to understand for me how people can intentionally increase risks of deadly diseases for their children.

Complacency and political/financial benefits for some of the people paddling that shit, a world where public policy is only a team sport and everybody's opinion on expert topics is equally "valuable".

I really hope we find a way out of this before to long.

In the end (polio) vaccines work and praying/magic doesn't, so I'm positive we will be able to learn the same lessons our ancestors did.

Antivax movement?

Are you assuming everyone who was not interested in the COVID vaccine just plain doesn’t believe in vaccines?

There is a difference in "not interested in receiving COVID vaccine" and fighting against vaccination in general, refusing to vaccinate children with mandatory shots like MMR or polio.

Yes, there absolutely is a difference and the second group is incredibly small.

I think it is important to make that distinction.

It is not small. Have you heard that vaccines cause autism? It is a popular believe of antivaxxers. So popular that >25% of kids in London are not vaccinated. 1/4 is huge and could compromise herd immunity.

> Only 74% of children under five in London have received both doses of the MMR vaccine – 9.1 points lower than in 2013–14.

I'm born around that time although before 1981.

I had some elderly neighbors with this condition and I think they lived long enough (1990 maybe?) that my two next younger brothers might have visited them too. (Why I don't know: they were not relatives or anything, my mom and aunt just used to visit them to be nice to them, so I suspect when I started school they might have taken my place.)

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