Louisiana Took Months to Sound Alarm Amid Whooping Cough Outbreak | Hacker News Reader

Louisiana Took Months to Sound Alarm Amid Whooping Cough Outbreak

undark.org

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Already told this story, but basically my mother overreacted to a vaccine in the 80s, became an early antivax, had me, only did the bare minimum, I got pertussis at 4-5yo (lucky it wasn't earlier), and since no doctor in the area ever saw pertussis (everyone being vaccinated at the time, and everybody thought I was too, through my mother antibodies), I spent 4 month coughing (I was told), until a retired doctor diagnosed me, and then a few months again, but it was manageable. I have three memories of that time, the first three memories of my life: once coughing so hard I cried on the playground, one lying on my grandmother couch, coughing while she helps me drink, and one after getting treatment (probably for the first time?).

My siblings all got vaccinated after that, and my mother stopped being antivax (still taking 'alternative' medecine, but also still taking conventional one). I guess seeing your child in so much pain and develop arythmia because of your 'beliefs' can make you change. Hopefully things like this will be less and less common.

> I guess seeing your child in so much pain and develop arythmia because of your 'beliefs' can make you change.

keyword being "can" there.

Example:

> Parents of Texas child who died of measles remain opposed to vaccine

https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/health/parents-of-texas-ch...

After reading your comment, I am a bit concerned. I get allergies really quickly, and it is difficult to gauge, at least for 2-3 days, which one it is— the allergy or a full-blown cold/infection— and sometimes it results in proper coughing, et cetera. I think I will talk to my doctor and ask whether there are any boosters needed for me in my late 30s, for which I might have been vaccinated as a child.

This is what happens when you ignore basic science and say vaccines that have worked for decades don't work, and then convince 25% of the USA into believing that it's the politically correct stance to take on the topic.

Remember: everything you see that seems odd is in service of someone's business model.

Nah, some people are definitely evil or crazy for the sheer love of the game.

I don't think the skeptics question whether these particular vaccines prevent disease. The question is whether they have other harmful effects, especially when bundled together in a broad-spectrum product to vaccinate against 30+ diseases (or whatever).

I played sports & had whooping cough in high school and it rendered me useless for like 4 months. Not fun.

Hot take: delaying without completely suppressing this alerting is the best way to change people's minds about the benefits of preventive measures like vaccination without massive loss of life.

Meaning, let the outbreak get bad enough to remind people that vaccines are helpful?

It could be that the only way to remind people is to get them to see some deaths or near-deaths first-hand.

Ah, I was thinking that’s what the argument was.

To which I’d say… maybe?

I was able to dig up this paper that showed 66% of the COVID unvaccinated regretted their decision after hospitalization. The rest were undeterred, even after hospitalization, mostly due to ideology and conspiracies.

But the problem is that I wouldn’t be comfortable risking public health to prove 2/3 of a point to vaccine skeptics who should’ve known better anyway. The Hippocratic oath is to do no harm, and I wouldn’t want a loved one with a suppressed immune system or lung problems to get seriously sick because we let the disease spread by choice.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8950102/

The real vectors of disinformation are social media, and antivax deaths are downstream of that.

But we don't have any kind of cultural immunity to the kind of propagandised and designed messaging that drives these campaigns.

In the absence of that, learning through consequences - and coming in with the messaging after they happen - is the only thing that can make a difference.

> But we don't have any kind of cultural immunity to the kind of propagandised and designed messaging that drives these campaigns

It seem like if we can find a vaccine for propaganda, we would get a lot of mileage out of it.

I'm reminded of the M.A.D.D. campaigns to reduce drunk driving with faked crash scenes in front of schools. They would set up a crashed car with dummy "bodies" strewn (and even scattered blood/glass) across walkways where everyone could see them.

I don't think it was a particularly effective tactic.

A fake crash is not be convincing, you distant cousin/neighbor/friend losing a child might be.

The least vaccinated communities also tend to be the least visible. I suspect it wouldn't be terribly effective in the large.

They are visible from within. 3 kids in your kids' school die, you do something.

I think that is what they meant. It is crazy, but there's some reasoning behind the crazy. And they did say it was a hot take.

That’s true, it was a hot take indeed.

Hot as in, I’m feeling kind of feverish because I’m now sick because we let whooping cough spread to prove a point to people who get their medical information from Facebook.

Think of it as vaccination, but cultural.

Of course it's horrific. But it's a predictable outcome of antivax culture.

When nothing else works, what are you supposed to do?

I mean you could listen to the reasons that people who have lost trust in the institutions say they lost trust, and then try and rectify those reasons. But to do that is to admit that MAYBE the US govt didn't handle COVID perfectly. And that's a conversation many folks are unwilling to have. So this is the alternative we're left with.

It's uglier this way for sure and will cause more suffering. Sucks.

> and then try and rectify those reasons.

Those reasons are simple. People they trust are lying to them for monetary and political gain about a subject they personally know nothing about.

That's it. That's all there is to it.

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> But to do that is to admit that MAYBE the US govt didn't handle COVID perfectly.

My friend, antivax bullshit has been swelling long before COVID. Turns out there's way more money and power in peddling these people snake oil than something that will help their health.

And secondly, whatever complaints you have about handling COVID, the vaccines for it were and are safe and effective, but no amount of evidence will ever convince them.

Current estimate is that some 5.6 billion people took at least one dose of a COVID vaccine[0]. You would think that if there severe complications, we would have seen them in, I don't know, hundreds of millions of people by now. Any day now, I am sure those people will all get super cancer and/or turn into zombies.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/people-vaccinated-covid?c...

Wow, super cancer sounds very bad.

Get in loser, we're making Polio Great Again

A lot of anti-vaccination people are skeptics; they don't trust the information being given to them by authoritative sources. The government deliberately withholding information, especially if done with the intent you described, would, without question, reinforce their skepticism.

So considering that, I suspect the loss of life would increase in the long run.

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