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Comment by UncleMeat | Hacker News Reader

When people live longer they develop more chronic conditions. And our view of health widens, so stuff that was previously just “Bob has bad knees” becomes a chronic condition.

I assure you that banning vaccines isn’t going to fix people’s back pain.

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Many chronic conditions are also "chronic" now but just two or three generations ago were either a swift or slow and painful death sentence. We see more adults with <insert major health problem here> because now they actually survive into adulthood and can reasonably participate in society rather than being confined to their homes (or to a home).

1 in 3 adolescents has pre-diabetes.

https://diabetes.org/about-diabetes/prediabetes/adolescents-...

It's mystery to me why people rush to defend such extreme levels of failure.

You can’t pick your parents. ~40% of pregnancies every year in the US are unintended [1], and a similar percentage of births are paid for by Medicaid [2] (~50% in rural communities). Lots of kids born into some combination of poverty and parents who aren’t providing the nutrition and exercise kids need to not be pre-diabetic (poverty rates are highest for rural children). The only solution to that is to help everyone who doesn’t want kids to not have them (robustly accessible contraceptives) if we’re not going to provide robust social support to parents who need it to raise healthy children (all evidence points to “we are not going to do this” for the foreseeable future). Are you expecting the government to do something different? Because they were providing food assistance (SNAP) and child healthcare (Medicaid) which is getting reduced or removed (depending on state or circumstance) by this administration.

Like “Who pays the tariffs?” in this context the question is, “Who do you think has the primary responsibility of raising healthy children? And why aren’t they able to?” [3] [4] [5] I think it’s highly unlikely changing vaccination requirements is going to improve the outcomes you’re stating are the problems in this thread.

[1] https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/unintended-pregnancy-u...

[2] https://www.aha.org/fact-sheets/2025-02-07-fact-sheet-medica...

[3] https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/parents-under-pressu...

[4] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/12/poverty-rate-...

[5] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/chart-...

Have you read the list of remedial actions at the bottom of your source? What can the medical establishment do to enforce these actions?

And how will banning vaccines will help with any of the problems you pointed out?

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