The whole vaccination thing has taken a turn much like the AGW debate -- it has become religion, and people define themselves by their (painfully simplified) position on it : I have Facebook friends who post such clever articles and meme images daily, literally preaching to the converted for absolutely no gain but their own smug sense of superiority.

But here's the thing -- vaccinations carry risks. Of course they do. They have massive upsides, but they invariably have downsides, bad reactions, and so on, and it is the utter foolishness that so many try to paint it otherwise. The net result is of course a major positive -- if 1% of the population has an adverse reaction, but 10% avoids getting a painful disease, then a win for the whole (even if it sucks if you're the 1%) -- but it is infantile if not ignorant to not only pretend these risks don't exist (which is ridiculously common), but to actually question people's own assessment of their risk profile.

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2015/02/05/hpv-vaccine-ga...

All of those incidents might very well be entirely coincidental. Or maybe they aren't. Such is the nature of massive, widespread immunizations, where the abnormal immune system of one person might be sent spiraling out of control, while another might suffer a critical allergic response.

Despite endless evidence to the contrary, many seem to believe we have a complete understanding of medicine and the human body. In some ways we remain hacks, and more often than not luck upon our algorithms. But this blind march really makes the movie "The Children of Men" seem more like a prophecy than a fiction.

EDIT: -2 within a minute. HN has taken a perilous dump into garbage land -- the classic ignorant back-slapping and sophistry -- as more and more entirely ignorant people get down arrow rights.