3 ms·

I'm not sure people understand the scale that vaccines work at. Right now--because we are close to wiping out polio--more people die every year from the polio

by deeg 6y ago

I'm not sure people understand the scale that vaccines work at. Right now--because we are close to wiping out polio--more people die every year from the polio vaccine than the actual disease. When you give billions of people a vaccine, even a one-in-a-million problem will still lead to thousands of deaths. It could be very hard to have wide-scale vaccines if we allowed people to sue for every death. (Just to be clear: I am very pro-vax. Get all recommended vaccinations.)

gus_massa 6y ago
I agree. Just to clarify: The problem is with the oral Sabin vaccine, not with the injectable Salk vaccine. And the problem is not for the kid that got the injection, but for it has a live virus that escape and after a few infections it can become dangerous to an unvaccinated person. Anyway, a few years ago they removed strain 2 from the oral Sabin vaccine that was the strain that usually cause the problems, and when a country has no cases for long enough they switch and use only the injectable Salk vaccine.
tialaramex 6y ago
How many people are actually dying from Polio vaccine? Which kind? There are two kinds of Polio vaccine in widespread use. OPV is more effective but involves an attenuated (thus, "live") polio virus in the vaccine itself, you are in effect being deliberately infected with a version of the virus that should be helpless long enough for your immune system to figure out what it is and wipe it out. Because it actually is the live virus and eventually attenuation will wear off if the virus isn't destroyed, it can "leak" working copies of the virus into a population. If everybody in that population was immunised that hardly matters, but if so why are you still vaccinating... The injectable vaccine used in many developed countries is both less effective and more expensive, but it's "dead", so can't result in anybody getting Polio. Since developed countries do not have endemic Polio it makes sense to just bite the budgetary bullet and use a less effective and more expensive vaccine. The killed vaccine will only be causing side effects that you'd get from injecting almost anything. Side effects like anaphylaxis - similar to if a person with a severe nut allergy ate a nut. That's a "serious but rare" one-in-a-million type problem, but in the developed world the people who administer vaccines all know about anaphylaxis and will "just" fix it like my friend with a nut allergy would if he's given food with nuts in it by mistake. It's not fun but death should be extremely rare even for that one-in-a-million if prompt intervention occurs. A more common side effect is syncope. Especially in teenage girls, some fraction of them will faint. It doesn't really matter what's in the shot, they just do. It's often psychosomatic, so it's important other patients don't see it happen (e.g. use a curtain) or it'll spread. Alone and unsupervised syncope could be fatal (you fall down, maybe smack your head on something), but that's extremely rare when supervised, you're usually sat down to get a shot, so you should just sort of slump over and get put into recovery by the person administering the shots. Some vaccines are associated with GBS but it's fuzzy, the numbers are all over the place - they might actually cause less GBS than not being vaccinated, given how mysterious GBS is that could even make sense, maybe getting and fighting off diseases triggers the syndrome more often than the vaccination does.
- gus_massa 6y ago
  I think it doesn't cause death but from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine#Vaccine-induced_polio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine#Vaccine-induced_... > Thus, in areas with poor sanitation and low vaccination coverage, the spontaneous reversal of the vaccine[OPV]-derived virus to a virulent form and its spreading in the environment can lead to unvaccinated people becoming infected. Clinical disease, including paralysis, caused by vaccine-derived poliovirus (VDPV) is indistinguishable from that caused by wild polioviruses. The numbers are in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Number_of_cVDPV_cases_since_2000.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Number_of_cVDPV_cases_sin... > 2017: 96 cases > 2018: 104 cases > 2019: 364 cases For even more details and numbers of cases by country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_eradication#2017 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_eradication#2017
  - tialaramex 6y ago
    Right, and if OPV is what they're focused on, the thing is: Nobody is attempting a live attenuated coronavirus vaccine. So the OPV reversion situation is completely irrelevant to this exemption. So that's why I asked which Polio vaccine.

by deeg 6y ago

gus_massa 6y ago

I agree. Just to clarify: The problem is with the oral Sabin vaccine, not with the injectable Salk vaccine. And the problem is not for the kid that got the injection, but for it has a live virus that escape and after a few infections it can become dangerous to an unvaccinated person. Anyway, a few years ago they removed strain 2 from the oral Sabin vaccine that was the strain that usually cause the problems, and when a country has no cases for long enough they switch and use only the injectable Salk vaccine.

tialaramex 6y ago

How many people are actually dying from Polio vaccine? Which kind? There are two kinds of Polio vaccine in widespread use. OPV is more effective but involves an attenuated (thus, "live") polio virus in the vaccine itself, you are in effect being deliberately infected with a version of the virus that should be helpless long enough for your immune system to figure out what it is and wipe it out. Because it actually is the live virus and eventually attenuation will wear off if the virus isn't destroyed, it can "leak" working copies of the virus into a population. If everybody in that population was immunised that hardly matters, but if so why are you still vaccinating... The injectable vaccine used in many developed countries is both less effective and more expensive, but it's "dead", so can't result in anybody getting Polio. Since developed countries do not have endemic Polio it makes sense to just bite the budgetary bullet and use a less effective and more expensive vaccine. The killed vaccine will only be causing side effects that you'd get from injecting almost anything. Side effects like anaphylaxis - similar to if a person with a severe nut allergy ate a nut. That's a "serious but rare" one-in-a-million type problem, but in the developed world the people who administer vaccines all know about anaphylaxis and will "just" fix it like my friend with a nut allergy would if he's given food with nuts in it by mistake. It's not fun but death should be extremely rare even for that one-in-a-million if prompt intervention occurs. A more common side effect is syncope. Especially in teenage girls, some fraction of them will faint. It doesn't really matter what's in the shot, they just do. It's often psychosomatic, so it's important other patients don't see it happen (e.g. use a curtain) or it'll spread. Alone and unsupervised syncope could be fatal (you fall down, maybe smack your head on something), but that's extremely rare when supervised, you're usually sat down to get a shot, so you should just sort of slump over and get put into recovery by the person administering the shots. Some vaccines are associated with GBS but it's fuzzy, the numbers are all over the place - they might actually cause less GBS than not being vaccinated, given how mysterious GBS is that could even make sense, maybe getting and fighting off diseases triggers the syndrome more often than the vaccination does.

gus_massa 6y ago
I think it doesn't cause death but from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine#Vaccine-induced_polio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine#Vaccine-induced_... > Thus, in areas with poor sanitation and low vaccination coverage, the spontaneous reversal of the vaccine[OPV]-derived virus to a virulent form and its spreading in the environment can lead to unvaccinated people becoming infected. Clinical disease, including paralysis, caused by vaccine-derived poliovirus (VDPV) is indistinguishable from that caused by wild polioviruses. The numbers are in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Number_of_cVDPV_cases_since_2000.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Number_of_cVDPV_cases_sin... > 2017: 96 cases > 2018: 104 cases > 2019: 364 cases For even more details and numbers of cases by country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_eradication#2017 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_eradication#2017
- tialaramex 6y ago
  Right, and if OPV is what they're focused on, the thing is: Nobody is attempting a live attenuated coronavirus vaccine. So the OPV reversion situation is completely irrelevant to this exemption. So that's why I asked which Polio vaccine.