3 ms·
> Also, vaccines can run horribly off the rails. One cannot mutate into a pathogen, as you say The live polio vaccine absolutely can. Before polio was largely
by roywiggins 7y ago
> Also, vaccines can run horribly off the rails. One cannot mutate into a pathogen, as you say
The live polio vaccine absolutely can. Before polio was largely eliminated, it didn't really matter, but once the risk of getting the wild-type virus dropped below the risk of getting it from the vaccine, it stopped making sense to use the live-attenuated vaccine.
http://www.virology.ws/2015/09/10/why-do-we-still-use-sabin-poliovirus-vaccine/ http://www.virology.ws/2015/09/10/why-do-we-still-use-sabin-...
- User23 7y agoThis makes me think that it's good persuasion to acknowledge that all anti-vaxxers aren't necessarily fundamentally irrational (some are I'm sure). Most people are anti-vaccine with respect to smallpox for example, as well as the polio example you give. We continue to use the vaccines we do because they improve the overall odds, not because they are a panacea with no downsides.
- roywiggins 7y agoThe modern inactivated ("killed", if you consider a virus alive) polio vaccine is nearly perfectly safe though (other than one-in-a-million allergic reactions), and can't give you polio. Nobody's used the live vaccine in the US since 2000. People don't generally get vaccinated against smallpox anymore because the pathogen has been eradicated.