Hacker News Reader

Comment by buellerbueller | Hacker News Reader

These religious fundamentalist groups have always existed, yet Canada and other places eliminated measles. I wonder what changed?

Oh yeah, the spread of misinformation on the internet.

View on HN

What changed was less funding to the agencies that surveil for disease spread so they can intercept outbreaks. The US CDC funded these programs all over the world.

And still did until this year. American vaccine hesitancy has grown since long before even covid.

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/data-investigatio...

Just stop sanewashing this.

What changed was that they were free-riders on the rest of the population and one day the rest of the population no longer met the threshold.

One could say it is because of the spread of misinformation and that might be the proximate cause.

But if a drug addict periodically overdoses and needs naloxone, and one day a supply chain issue makes it hard to access and he dies, did the supply chain kill him or his drug addiction? Perhaps monocausal explanations are insufficient.

It's a little hard to believe that people who famously don't use computers were infected by an "misinformation", a rather loathsome neologism. There was famously a really serious outbreak in the NYC Orthodox community from 1989 to about 1991. Unvaccinated communities are a sort of immunological tinder box, and you never know when a stray spark might land.

This is the result of a failure of public health to reach out to these religious communities in effective ways for decades.

I think the point was, it's not limited to those isolated groups anymore.

It mostly is limited to people in those groups or people in contact with them. [1] The big hot spot in Alberta is the Mennonite community.

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-mexican-menno...

That stray spark’s survival is heavily influenced by the herd immunity of the rest of the population.

Put another way if the overall population sees an average of 0.5 or 0.95 infections per case there’s zero chance of a huge outbreak. But odds of a case making it to a vulnerable population is wildly higher in the second case.

> There was famously a really serious outbreak in the NYC Orthodox community from 1989 to about 1991.

They never really stopped, it's been every few years since then: https://forward.com/news/417390/measles-is-hitting-ultra-ort...

The Amish are/were undervaccinated but it wasn't due to religious objections. It just seems uncommon in communities to see a dr, unless it's needed: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/ohio-amish-reconsider-va... It's also hard to get an official count (I've seen estimates below 20% vs almost 90% for non-amish communities in same state, but then you read stuff like this which suggests even the old older is above 80% https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article-abstract/128... ) since these communities are grandfathered into their own healthcare systems and often exempt from the normal federal welfare systems: https://www.ssa.gov/faqs/en/questions/KA-02411.html

I'm not sure about Mennonites. One of their communities writes about it and seems to suggest only 1 of the 40 or so communities is hardliners against vaccination. But I also note this is written in a really neutral way (could be to placate government, dunno): https://www.mennoniteusa.org/measles/

They don't use computers but they turned up for trump so they are definitely falling for misinformation somewhere

It's not the amish whose vaccination status changed. It's the maha fools who fell for vaccine misinformation whose vax status did.

But it's the Mennonites who were the source and primary locus of the outbreak, not some MAHA dummies.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com