It's one of the reasons the anti-vax movement never made any sense to me. Flat Earth is silly, but at least it's perfectly harmless, but anti-vax?
Americans don't trust the medical system, MAGA Americans are likely to trust it less statistically due to who the opioid pandemic/over subscription issue hit (watching a potentially close family member go from productive to an addict that started on legally subscribed drugs is hard).
Patients must never become consumers.
1. It just sucks at communication. Many people have been misled because marketeers lied to them "it's scientifically proven!" while scientists did nothing to fix that, because they only cared about preserving communication channels between themselves. The mistrust in science is obvious if you take this into account.
2. At the end of the day, scientists are people who have their biases and weaknesses. There have been well-documented cases of the entire scientific community doing a massive fuckup. So when now a bunch of scientists come and say "trust us bro, this time it's legit" it's reasonable to be sceptical.
Quite on brand to go from "personal responsibility" and "you can always avoid bad businesses" to directly blaming someone else when something actually ends up affecting them personally.
I mean, look at what the vax-mandatory movement got - they enraged a bunch of people, helped secure Trump II, made vaccine scepticism a mainstream and popular position which arguably handed the US health department vaccine policy to anti-vaxers. Maybe avoiding authoritarian tactics and sticking to principle would have gotten them a better outcome? Hard to see how it could be worse, to be honest. They screwed up pretty badly.
We ran a natural experiment in Australia. Everyone got the vaccine, then everyone got COVID over the course of a month or two. The official numbers were high and aren't even accurate because there were too many cases to count, it got everywhere and the measurement kits ran out.
Thanks to vaccines? Yes. Multiple times in history.
Smallpox, polio, measles, mumps.
> vaccines famously had no significant impact on the rate of the spread.
That's quite a claim. I see you provided no sources.
As far as I remember, vaccines were the main reason things became safe enough to things to return to a sense of normalcy.
I mean, I am not from they US, so my actual response to this news is a vague shrug. I just hope the anti-vax bullshit is contained within US borders.
Why do I need to source anything? Nobody credible ever claimed the vaccines would slow the spread, no evidence was ever provided that vaccines slow the spread and theory suggests they probably won't slow the spread. The people making things up in defiance of the obvious are the ones who need to start providing sources on this one.
If you want to check the numbers; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Australia - we've got 22 million vaccinated people on a population of around 25 million in 2021. We see ~12 million confirmed COVID cases and in the immediate post-lockdown period the testing system crumbled under load. Do the math. An exponential process that everyone was exposed to was downgraded to ... still an exponentially growing process that everyone was exposed to. Maybe it spread the pandemic phase out to 2 months instead of 1 (based on my memory of watching the stats at the time).
The vaccine didn't cut down on the number of infections. It was strictly personal protection. Members of my family regularly get COVID.
How much polio or small pox have you seen?
but only 5,025 and 19,265 deaths.
Vaccination slowed the spread of the primary varients and reduced the health impacts on those that tested positive for COVID by preloading the immune response.
The people arguing that collective action knows best once again blew their credibility with COVID, making up the theory about herd immunity was a big shot in the arm for the anti-vax movement. And as you can guess I'd rather side with the anti-vaxers, they're better friends than the authoritarians.
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".
I sourced my claims: smallpox, polio, measles, mumps.
You offered vibes instead of sources.
1. That isn't what sourcing a claim means. It means to provide sources for why your claims are true; or at least where you heard the claim first. Picking specific examples is helpful, but it isn't providing a source.
And despite those examples, I still catch an infections disease ... basically annually.
2. I suppose I assumed it was going to be made obvious by context, but I don't care about smallpox, polio, measles or mumps and I'm not talking about them. Nobody forced me to do anything in relation to them, nobody threatened my livelihood over them and I don't feel at any risk of being forbidden from leaving my house because of them. It is a good point but I didn't intend to talk about it - it stands alone as a point and beyond that I don't care. Since you bought it up more then once you get this paragraph. But if it is necessary to put up with measles to put the authoritarians in a box? So be it. The anti-vaxers are the lesser of two evils, they're minnows compared to the sharks who were showing their colours through COVID; we're lucky that episode only lasted long enough for the authoritarians to do terrible economic damage.
Absolutely is. Those are examples of serious, deadly, infectious plagues that were either eradicated or seriously contained by vaccines.
> but I don't care about smallpox, polio, measles or mumps and I'm not talking about them.
I know you don't care about evidence. You care about vibes. Vaccines are icky, governments are authoritarian, you want to live in your fairy-tale self-serving world and society be damned.
I was replying to you not under any fantasy that I would convince you otherwise. I understood pretty well from the outset what sort of rhetoric you were on about.
I replied so it was made clear for others what exactly is being discussed here.
> But if it is necessary to put up with measles
It is. I am extremely grateful that the advances in medicine in the past couple of centuries allowed me to live without having to worry about serious plagues such as measles.
Either way, you didn't disappoint me. Have a great weekend.
Polio chart (US) [2] See the line go almost straight down to 0 after vaccine introduction and stay there.
Smallpox has been totally exterminated by vaccination.
Any questions?
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/measles-cases-and-death
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/prevalence-of-polio-rates...
Further, these recommendations are not new. They have a track record. You can look io the number of lives they’ve saved/reduced damage to.
The people who insist that we should throw out the expert advice based on openly available scientific research and literature in favor of one person’s feelings because he happens to hold a politically powerful position are the ones asking us to trust the government blindly. Actually, not blindly, but contrary to the evidence that our eyes see.
tl;dr: I'm ready to believe in the vaccine theory, not in the infrastructure; applied science doesn't live in a vacuum
There is no herd immunity for COVID, because you can get it more than once. Vaccination only protects for a few months, and doesn't reduce spreading much. It's not a "sterilizing vaccine".
There are sterilizing vaccines for many childhood diseases. Measles, diphtheria, polio, etc. Can't get the disease at all if vaccinated. Those vaccines can almost eliminate a disease. With smallpox, this was taken past "almost" all the way to eradication. Here's a list of 14 almost forgotten diseases, eliminated by vaccination.[1] The current generation of parents has not seen most of them.
[1] https://www.healthychildren.org/English/safety-prevention/im...