4 ms·

> The original polio vaccine program was dangerous... just less dangerous than the disease. A great deal less: "Oral polio vaccines cause about three cases of

> The original polio vaccine program was dangerous... just less dangerous than the disease. A great deal less: "Oral polio vaccines cause about three cases of vaccine-associated paralytic poliomyelitis per million doses given.[2] This compares with 5,000 cases per million who are paralysed following a polio infection." I think "three in a million" is well below what most people would consider "safe" in most circumstances.

cgriswald 6y ago
The numbers make it clear what the correct decision is, but I think you’re wrong about what people consider “safe”. People don’t think and feel about safety rationally. There is a qualitative difference between something bad happening to you and something bad happening to you because of something you did.
- toast0 6y ago
  > There is a qualitative difference between something bad happening to you and something bad happening to you because of something you did. Especially if you were pressured into doing it, and told it was safe to do only to find it caused something bad for your child is going to cause an immense amount of upset. I don't agree with the anti-vaxxers, but it seems like some people feel like they're being told what to do without their concerns being taken seriously, and so they just say no. In a lot of other situations, not going along with the group decision just because it's the group decision is praised, but in this situation it's demonized. The biggest publicized bad outcome of vaccines was determined to be rubbish, and the claimed harmful ingredents weren't harmful in that form and were illiminated; but vaccinating is not without risks and side effects, and it's reasonable to consider the risks vs the risk of the disease. Also, it's worth noting that long term vaccinne effect studies are usually about 1 year, which doesn't seem super long term, if you're concerned about tail risks. Many of the vaccines be delayed, too at increased risk of the disease of course, but with perhaps easier to manage side effects.
  - vvanders 6y ago
    The problem with that though is it leads to situations like today in the US where mask wearing becomes political. It's very much a framing of I could have a small chance of something bad happen vs my community will greatly benefit if we work together.
    - fzeroracer 6y ago
      I wish people would take the cases of people like Richard Rose seriously and as a warning sign for when you flaunt the virus. Because the coronavirus is not political and does not care about how you feel about masks; it'll try to kill you nonetheless. Unfortunately people will likely just shrug and go 'never gonna happen to me' until it does.
  - sandworm101 6y ago
    >> and the claimed harmful ingredents weren't harmful in that form and were illiminated That sort of thing is part of the problem. A change made to appease such people is seen, by them, as confirmation of their beliefs. We are taught to "respect" the opinions of others but we cannot allow that respect to legitimize dangerous beliefs or behaviors. Doing so creates controversy where there shouldn't be, which in turn perpetuates the incorrect beliefs. There is something to be said for not giving ground, for calling out the idiots as idiots.
- catalogia 6y ago
  > Lightning is one of the leading causes of weather-related fatalities. But the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are only around 1 in 500,000. https://www.cdc.gov/disasters/lightning/victimdata.html https://www.cdc.gov/disasters/lightning/victimdata.html You're also a few orders of magnitude more likely to die from choking on food, yet eating is generally considered safe. At odds these low, I don't think it generally matters whether you did something to precipitate it or not. Whether or not [social] media is hyping and fear mongering a scenario seems to be the foremost factor (see in particular: fear of terrorism.) In the case of fear-of-vaccines, it seems to have much more to do with Oprah than anything else.
  - sandworm101 6y ago
    Such numbers, absent context, are meaningless. To say I have a 1:1,000,000,000 chance of being eaten by a shark is ridiculous if I never go near an ocean. And that number conversely means nothing to someone floating in the water looking at a shark. Go for an ocean swim every morning? Your shark-attack risk is several orders of magnitude greater than average. I think your chance of being killed by lightning while golfing in summer, in florida, with a pacemaker installed, using metal clubs, during a rainstorm ... then it gets a little more dangerous than weather-death statistics would suggest.
    - catalogia 6y ago
      You do eat though, right? You may not surf with sharks but I wager you eat every day. Do you slice hotdogs into tiny pieces or do you chomp into them like a normal person, apathetic to the small risk of choking? You can split hairs if you like, but I think if you're honest about it you'll find that many activities in your daily routine have greater than three in a million odds of killing you. That really is my point, that the average human tolerance for danger is much higher than a few in a million. People who fear things with odds that low are being irrational. Shark attacks is actually a great example of media induced hysteria. Even if you swim in the ocean every day and therefore have orders of magnitude more risk, that elevated level of risk is still small. Fear of sharks was largely induced by the sensational horror movie Jaws and is occasionally reinforced by profit-motivated newspapers signal-boosting rare attacks; it's not a rational reaction to the actual level of risk involved. 20% of Australians supporting senseless shark culls seems very comparable to the antivaxxerism. The other 80% have a more appropriate attitude towards risk.
jimktrains2 6y ago
Even disregarding what we can call "safe", a 3-in-a-million chance vs a 5,000-in-a-million chance is a significant gap. I think I read somewhere that of the fairly wide-reaching trail of the Salk vaccine, 11 people died, and those were all traced back to a contaminated/not-correctly-processed batch from a lab in California, and that didn't temper the public's enthusiasm for the trials one bit.

cgriswald 6y ago

The numbers make it clear what the correct decision is, but I think you’re wrong about what people consider “safe”. People don’t think and feel about safety rationally. There is a qualitative difference between something bad happening to you and something bad happening to you because of something you did.

toast0 6y ago
> There is a qualitative difference between something bad happening to you and something bad happening to you because of something you did. Especially if you were pressured into doing it, and told it was safe to do only to find it caused something bad for your child is going to cause an immense amount of upset. I don't agree with the anti-vaxxers, but it seems like some people feel like they're being told what to do without their concerns being taken seriously, and so they just say no. In a lot of other situations, not going along with the group decision just because it's the group decision is praised, but in this situation it's demonized. The biggest publicized bad outcome of vaccines was determined to be rubbish, and the claimed harmful ingredents weren't harmful in that form and were illiminated; but vaccinating is not without risks and side effects, and it's reasonable to consider the risks vs the risk of the disease. Also, it's worth noting that long term vaccinne effect studies are usually about 1 year, which doesn't seem super long term, if you're concerned about tail risks. Many of the vaccines be delayed, too at increased risk of the disease of course, but with perhaps easier to manage side effects.
- vvanders 6y ago
  The problem with that though is it leads to situations like today in the US where mask wearing becomes political. It's very much a framing of I could have a small chance of something bad happen vs my community will greatly benefit if we work together.
  - fzeroracer 6y ago
    I wish people would take the cases of people like Richard Rose seriously and as a warning sign for when you flaunt the virus. Because the coronavirus is not political and does not care about how you feel about masks; it'll try to kill you nonetheless. Unfortunately people will likely just shrug and go 'never gonna happen to me' until it does.
- sandworm101 6y ago
  >> and the claimed harmful ingredents weren't harmful in that form and were illiminated That sort of thing is part of the problem. A change made to appease such people is seen, by them, as confirmation of their beliefs. We are taught to "respect" the opinions of others but we cannot allow that respect to legitimize dangerous beliefs or behaviors. Doing so creates controversy where there shouldn't be, which in turn perpetuates the incorrect beliefs. There is something to be said for not giving ground, for calling out the idiots as idiots.
catalogia 6y ago
> Lightning is one of the leading causes of weather-related fatalities. But the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are only around 1 in 500,000. https://www.cdc.gov/disasters/lightning/victimdata.html https://www.cdc.gov/disasters/lightning/victimdata.html You're also a few orders of magnitude more likely to die from choking on food, yet eating is generally considered safe. At odds these low, I don't think it generally matters whether you did something to precipitate it or not. Whether or not [social] media is hyping and fear mongering a scenario seems to be the foremost factor (see in particular: fear of terrorism.) In the case of fear-of-vaccines, it seems to have much more to do with Oprah than anything else.
- sandworm101 6y ago
  Such numbers, absent context, are meaningless. To say I have a 1:1,000,000,000 chance of being eaten by a shark is ridiculous if I never go near an ocean. And that number conversely means nothing to someone floating in the water looking at a shark. Go for an ocean swim every morning? Your shark-attack risk is several orders of magnitude greater than average. I think your chance of being killed by lightning while golfing in summer, in florida, with a pacemaker installed, using metal clubs, during a rainstorm ... then it gets a little more dangerous than weather-death statistics would suggest.
  - catalogia 6y ago
    You do eat though, right? You may not surf with sharks but I wager you eat every day. Do you slice hotdogs into tiny pieces or do you chomp into them like a normal person, apathetic to the small risk of choking? You can split hairs if you like, but I think if you're honest about it you'll find that many activities in your daily routine have greater than three in a million odds of killing you. That really is my point, that the average human tolerance for danger is much higher than a few in a million. People who fear things with odds that low are being irrational. Shark attacks is actually a great example of media induced hysteria. Even if you swim in the ocean every day and therefore have orders of magnitude more risk, that elevated level of risk is still small. Fear of sharks was largely induced by the sensational horror movie Jaws and is occasionally reinforced by profit-motivated newspapers signal-boosting rare attacks; it's not a rational reaction to the actual level of risk involved. 20% of Australians supporting senseless shark culls seems very comparable to the antivaxxerism. The other 80% have a more appropriate attitude towards risk.

jimktrains2 6y ago

Even disregarding what we can call "safe", a 3-in-a-million chance vs a 5,000-in-a-million chance is a significant gap. I think I read somewhere that of the fairly wide-reaching trail of the Salk vaccine, 11 people died, and those were all traced back to a contaminated/not-correctly-processed batch from a lab in California, and that didn't temper the public's enthusiasm for the trials one bit.