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.
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.
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).
Just because you hadn't heard of it before 2020 doesn't mean it was brand new.
I'll never understand how the party that's famously against government red tape got away with manipulating its base to be against a reasonable streamlining of said red tape, once it was appropriate to do so.
Well it's the point isn't it? It wasn't new, but unlike classic vaccines there wasn't a decades safety data. Manufacturers knew it and demanded to be exempt from normal vaccine injury schemes, governments agreed and introduced mandates.
My wife and I got the shots as soon as we could, she got a kidney complication, like quite a few people. Too bad, says govt.
There were decades of safety data when previous vaccines came out?
Anyway:
1. All vaccines have liability protection.
2. You could know of literally 10 people who had significant adverse effects (which you don't) and, given the scale of vaccine rollout, it would still be mathematically safer than pretty much every drug on the market.
Sorry, but you've been successfully lied to on this topic.
The protection terms were more comprehensive for Covid vaccines, with shorter compensation claim terms. The vendors themselves didn't trust the new vaccines the same as old one, why should anyone else.
With previous vaccines, while they were new, there were no mandates.
"Pretty much any drug of the market" is a big stretch, and there is no mandate attached to those drugs.
Not sure where you're commenting from, but there were no mandates in the US.
> The vendors themselves didn't trust the new vaccines the same as old one, why should anyone else.
Not sure what "didn't trust the new vaccines the same as the old one" is supposed to mean. It's a totally different drug with a totally different body of evidence. The pharma companies trusted them in that their high-quality, gigantic clinical trials came back with some of the best safety and efficacy data we've ever seen in any drug trial ever.
> "Pretty much any drug of the market" is a big stretch
No, it's actually not. Even the most "common" serious adverse effects are so rare that the clinical trials would've needed to be orders of magnitude larger than the largest clinical trials ever conducted in order to detect them.
This has held true even scaled to billions of doses.
> In September 2021, the employees of all federally-funded Medicaid and Medicare-certified health care facilities, and Head Start program facilities, were required to be vaccinated, as ordered through the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).[33][34][31] Companies with more than 100 employees could either require vaccination for all (and give their workers four hours' paid time off for their vaccination appointments); or require any unvaccinated employees to wear masks and be tested weekly for COVID-19, according to an Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) Emergency Temporary Standard.[35][36] These two policies together —federally-funded healthcare facilities and large companies— would apply to 100 million workers and were scheduled to take effect on January 4, 2022.[32]
The healthcare one happened, while the OSHA one went through multiple appeals before they abandoned it (details on the page). Biden even went on record telling companies to start implementing it in preparation for when they got through the appeal.
I'm not in the US, but there sure were vaccine mandates there as well, by both private and government employers. In Australia it was even more centralized, for a time you were excluded from a great deal of life without a certificate.
It was a totally different drug with a very short term body of evidence. If pharma companies trusted them so much why did they require different liability treatment?
Just for renal side-effects, those requiring long-term treatment manifest in about 5 per million vaccinations, heart side effects even more prevalent. This is nowhere near the safety record of say MMR or DTaP.
3 years is not decades, and there was not 3 years between testing and wide-spread deployment for the polio. There was basically a year.
There was also only 3 years between the testing of the combination MMR vaccine and its license and deployment in 71. But there wasn't significant new data gathered in between those years.
Let me know when you've stopped moving the goalposts.
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.
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.
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.
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.
---
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I played sports & had whooping cough in high school and it rendered me useless for like 4 months. Not fun.
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.
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).
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Just because you hadn't heard of it before 2020 doesn't mean it was brand new.
I'll never understand how the party that's famously against government red tape got away with manipulating its base to be against a reasonable streamlining of said red tape, once it was appropriate to do so.
[flagged]
The covid one.
Why cant you use your real account, not one you made half an hour ago, to ask these things?
[flagged]
Well it's the point isn't it? It wasn't new, but unlike classic vaccines there wasn't a decades safety data. Manufacturers knew it and demanded to be exempt from normal vaccine injury schemes, governments agreed and introduced mandates.
My wife and I got the shots as soon as we could, she got a kidney complication, like quite a few people. Too bad, says govt.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000296292...
There were decades of safety data when previous vaccines came out?
Anyway:
1. All vaccines have liability protection.
2. You could know of literally 10 people who had significant adverse effects (which you don't) and, given the scale of vaccine rollout, it would still be mathematically safer than pretty much every drug on the market.
Sorry, but you've been successfully lied to on this topic.
The protection terms were more comprehensive for Covid vaccines, with shorter compensation claim terms. The vendors themselves didn't trust the new vaccines the same as old one, why should anyone else.
With previous vaccines, while they were new, there were no mandates.
"Pretty much any drug of the market" is a big stretch, and there is no mandate attached to those drugs.
Not sure where you're commenting from, but there were no mandates in the US.
> The vendors themselves didn't trust the new vaccines the same as old one, why should anyone else.
Not sure what "didn't trust the new vaccines the same as the old one" is supposed to mean. It's a totally different drug with a totally different body of evidence. The pharma companies trusted them in that their high-quality, gigantic clinical trials came back with some of the best safety and efficacy data we've ever seen in any drug trial ever.
> "Pretty much any drug of the market" is a big stretch
No, it's actually not. Even the most "common" serious adverse effects are so rare that the clinical trials would've needed to be orders of magnitude larger than the largest clinical trials ever conducted in order to detect them.
This has held true even scaled to billions of doses.
> Not sure where you're commenting from, but there were no mandates in the US.
Oh yeah there were: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_vaccination_mandates_...
In particular:
> In September 2021, the employees of all federally-funded Medicaid and Medicare-certified health care facilities, and Head Start program facilities, were required to be vaccinated, as ordered through the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).[33][34][31] Companies with more than 100 employees could either require vaccination for all (and give their workers four hours' paid time off for their vaccination appointments); or require any unvaccinated employees to wear masks and be tested weekly for COVID-19, according to an Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) Emergency Temporary Standard.[35][36] These two policies together —federally-funded healthcare facilities and large companies— would apply to 100 million workers and were scheduled to take effect on January 4, 2022.[32]
The healthcare one happened, while the OSHA one went through multiple appeals before they abandoned it (details on the page). Biden even went on record telling companies to start implementing it in preparation for when they got through the appeal.
I'm not in the US, but there sure were vaccine mandates there as well, by both private and government employers. In Australia it was even more centralized, for a time you were excluded from a great deal of life without a certificate.
It was a totally different drug with a very short term body of evidence. If pharma companies trusted them so much why did they require different liability treatment?
Just for renal side-effects, those requiring long-term treatment manifest in about 5 per million vaccinations, heart side effects even more prevalent. This is nowhere near the safety record of say MMR or DTaP.
We only have decades of safety data because those vaccines have existed for decades.
This is one of the stranger complaints of the anti-vax movement.
Well that's the point, these old vaccines were not forced on anyone while they were new.
Yes, they were, at least to the extent that we required children in schools to be vaccinated, people in the military, etc.
This is literally how we eradicated polio in children.
Christ, y'all are weird.
There was 3 years of testing between polio vaccine development and deployment, and polio was much more of a problem in term of YLL per capita.
Components of MMR and TDaP were tested for some 5-8 years before deployment (and then some for combinations).
I'm weird for sure.
3 years is not decades, and there was not 3 years between testing and wide-spread deployment for the polio. There was basically a year.
There was also only 3 years between the testing of the combination MMR vaccine and its license and deployment in 71. But there wasn't significant new data gathered in between those years.
Let me know when you've stopped moving the goalposts.
Salk developed his vaccine in 1952 and licensed in 1955. That's 3 years of staged testing over some millions of kids and adults.
Covid vaccines were tested on tens of thousands in 8-10 months.
As I said, MMR components were 5-8 years tested and then mass-deployed by the time of combination.
Mandates didn't come until the late 60s/70s for either MMR or Polio vaccines, therefore decades.
All that dealing with much higher (by YLL/DALY) impact than Covid.
[flagged]
Too far.
They earnestly want you and your children to die.
[flagged]
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.
Get in loser, we're making Polio Great Again
Meaning, let the outbreak get bad enough to remind people that vaccines are helpful?
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.
---
> 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...
It could be that the only way to remind people is to get them to see some deaths or near-deaths first-hand.
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.
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.
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.