Health experts plead for unvaxxed Americans to get measles shot as cases rise | Hacker News Reader

Health experts plead for unvaxxed Americans to get measles shot as cases rise

arstechnica.com

18 pointsrntn13 comments

Experts were also warned that getting government involved in vaccine mandates when the pandemic was ending would result in such a predictable backlash.

Fifteen years ago vaccines were not seen as profitable by the drug companies. Then Gardisil was released and the pharmaceutical lobbyists went around urging governments to require this vaccine. Regardless of its effectiveness, it was a drug the pharmaceutical companies were telling government's that it needs to be mandatory, and coincidentally guarantee profits.

My concern has always been the capitalist conundrum with vaccines. If you are a drug company and create a vaccine, the natural business question is "how can we make this vaccine a requirement" to guarantee profits? We should NOT want drug companies to view vaccines as a profit generating drug, because then they will find ways to make them mandatory, regardless if they are effective or even needed.

There is very little to stop a drug company from creating a vaccine out of thin air, regardless of its efficacy, convincing government that it must be mandatory, and then sitting back as the profits roll in.

I wonder if this is really true or just an excuse. Certainly the argument "if the government needs to tell you to get vaccinated then it can't be that good" has been made but one could just as easily imagine the opposite argument: "if the government isn't recommending the vaccine it must not be that important".

These backlash arguments also lead into a very cynical place where bad ideas either can't be countered at all or can only be countered through reverse psychology.

There is a grim irony in how the push to get everyone vaccinated for COVID (justified, given the data) might have lost us untold numbers of future vaccinations for even worse diseases. Which isn't to say that they shouldn't have had such a push, but... clearly, something has gone wrong in the approach. We can (should) speculate on what, beyond, "People are stupid/ideological."

My intuition leads me to suspect that a part of it may be the state of the healthcare system as a whole, and in particular the corporatization of care, and lack of accessibility otherwise; the government, which has not deigned to care enough to get the system in order, suddenly wanted to get this one shot into every arm they could (but make sure CVS and Rite Aid get their kickbacks). A rational read might be that the scope of the crisis finally got gears turning (and, cynically, of course, limited physician capacity would lead eyes to Minute Clinic et al.), but there is just enough daylight - cranked open by histories like Tuskegee - for paranoia to slip in even before you consider that many vote with their emotions (and we absolutely should have considered that). Amidst MAGAmerica? Boy, I wonder if we should have seen this coming.

The irony of this particular situation is that measles basically clears your immune system's memory, so any "my body will learn how to fight it" arguments are going to be painfully and probably fatally disproven.

If you're just going to get one vaccine, it should probably be the MMR.

> The irony of this particular situation is that measles basically clears your immune system's memory

More information on this? Wouldn't this make getting measles a bruteforce fix for autoimmune diseases?

Literally closing paragraph of the article:

The virus can also destroy immune responses to previous infections—a phenomenon known as "immune amnesia"—which can leave children vulnerable to various other infections for years afterward.

There's a link in the article.

We have a baby too young to get MMR, and several older children who are up-to-date.

The older kids hang out with quite a few unvaccinated people. Can the vaccinated children act as asymptomatic carriers, and bring measles home to the baby? A quick search doesn't answer that question.

If the answer is "yes", would you not let your children play with the other unvaccinated children?

I'm curious about your risk tolerance.

I'm not sure yet. It's too much brain-load to make hypothetical decisions. I'd be more cautious and keep a close eye on outbreak locations I think.

Looks like, at current rates, this will be a better year (fewer outbreaks) than 2019 and 2014. So no need to panic right now.

Probably not much reason to panic anyhow. If you live within 20 minutes of a hospital (probably, in 2024), know what measles looks like, and ensure Vitamin A in your family diet, there's a very low likely-hood that even if your family contracts the disease, your infant's symptoms will be mild. IANAD, so this isn't gospel, but I do think it helps to learn and understand risk before panic. There is plenty that can still hurt or kill us in this world, but in general, our ancestors would love to have the peace of mind we have from our modern health care system.

I say all this having had the lived experience of my infant developing necrotic pneumonia from an otherwise innocuous RSV strain that went through our house and spending two weeks in the NICU wondering if she would survive. Prevention is great, and I would never wish anyone to go through what we went through. But I also refuse to panic or live in fear.

EDIT: I had not heard of immune amnesia before. That sucks. I will exercise more caution around measles.

Gee, I wonder why so many Americans are reluctant to get vaccinated, after the COVID clusterfuck -- in the end, even the official government stance was that the vaxx didn't protect against COVID and also didn't prevent transmission. So it was all downside risk.

We'll need a citation that shows the vaccine had 0% efficacy.

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