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Definitely. We have a tremendous amount of risk aversion these days and a culture that has disdain for risk, even calculated abstract risks. What many don't rea

Definitely. We have a tremendous amount of risk aversion these days and a culture that has disdain for risk, even calculated abstract risks. What many don't realize is being too risk averse comes with its own risks, it also requires accurate risk assessment so you can make the correct decisions on when to take a risk and not. You could lockup in complete fear akin to analysis paralysis where non-zero risk keeps you from doing anything. Just skimming the CDC list of common vaccines in use in the US, do most really need vaccines for everything: anthrax, Japanese encephalitis, polio, rabies, smallpox, tetanus, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, and yellow fever? If you're not traveling outside the US and living a fairly normal life, most likely not and some of these have potentially nasty yet rare side effects. If they were given/taken at the scale COVID vaccines were, many would die from such side effect who otherwise would have lived healthy lives, all because they took an unnecessary risk trying to prevent a very low risk. COVID is an exception because of exposure and transmissibiliy, the rare side effects are worth the risk for most people because the chance of getting it and having a life ending result is relatively high. TB, tetanus, and rabies may be useful vaccines for some professions or life exposures in high risk cases, say veteranarians and healthcare workers, but for the most part, you probably don't need it. If you travel a lot to certain locations and say do missionary type work or whatever, perhaps some others make sense as well. Should every sexually active person take PrEP regularly since HIV is a potential risk to everyone? No, there are populations of risk exposure where it makes sense though. Your dentist only takes x-rays every so often because the x-ray exposure increases risk of various forms of cancer. You could get x-rays more frequently to detect issues that might not be obvious to your dentist but it's pretty low risk, there has been a lot of study into the rate of progression of disease and risk tradeoff to help your dentist determine a reasonable frequency for x-rays vs radiation exposure. If you start looking at your regular risks, you take many risks across a lot of aspects of life every single day, even in a modestly safe life style, from hopping in a car to picking up takeout at a local resturaunt or even walking down a street. A massive unknown asteroid could be on a collision course with Earth right now that results in mass extinction ending the human race or a gamma ray burst from inside our galaxy could set the atmosphere on fire and radiate us all to death near instantly... they are all non-zero yet incredibly low risk to our understanding probabilisticly. They're so low and some even inactionable that we need to ignore them and/or treat them with low priority and continue on with life. It's good to have a preventative mindset and take preventative action to try and control and manage risk, but in order to do this effectively, be sure you assess your risks, or have someone knowledgable (like a doctor when it comes to vaccines) lay it out for you so you can make a good decision about what you should or shouldn't do. If you truly can do the assessment yourself then by all means do it but it doesn't hurt to explain your assessment and rationale to someone knowledgeable to make sure you're not overlooking something. It certainly is possible to perform a better risk assessment for yourself than anyone else will be able to because you can know your behaviors and exposures better than anyone else but be careful playing this game.

CorrectHorseBat 5y ago
We are very risk averse of taking vaccines, while they are incredibly safe and barely have any risk associated with them. Probably more harm is done because people are too afraid of taking a vaccine than the opposite (not only looking at covid19 vaccines). The biggest harm done by taking vaccines you don't really need is probably that the money could have been used for something more useful.
- ekianjo 5y ago
  > while they are incredibly safe and barely have any risk associated with them Alternative explanation: nobody knows the risks in details, and side-effects are widely under-reported anyway. Ask any doctor how often they report even serious side effects, you will be very surprised.
- majkinetor 5y ago
  Barely have any acute risk. Its almost impossible to find out what happens after long time, say a decade, with the current approach. > The biggest harm done by taking vaccines you don't really need is probably that the money could have been used for something more useful. What kind of nonsense is that? Its the same as saying "there is no problem in taking any drug, the worst it can get is lose some money". You can't clamp entire technology as good or wrong. Vaccine as technology obviously has merit. Any particular vaccine may be problematic or not. Think H1N1 and narcolepsy, anthrax vaccine in gulf war etc. This kind of trash talk is exactly the same as anti-vax talk. I have no sympathy for either clan. As usual, people convert complex topic into binary decision which is madness.
  - derefr 5y ago
    > Its almost impossible to find out what happens after long time, say a decade, with the current approach. Most vaccines are much older than a decade. We know who gets vaccines; it's in their medical record, if not centralized anywhere. Longitudinal studies aren't impossible. So any random hospital could do a longitudinal retrospective data-collection study on the consequences for their own patients of either having received a given vaccination decades previous or not, no? > What kind of nonsense is that? I understood what they meant, and they're right. They're making an incomplete-information decision-theory argument. To rephrase them with more precision: Selecting a person from the population at random; and taking the category of "vaccines that will confer absolutely no benefits to that person specifically", and selecting a vaccine at random from that category; that person will, with high probability, incur more QALY-risk from paying for the vaccine (because they'll then have fewer dollars to pay for unplanned expenses, which can be quite problematic for the median member of the population), than they will from any iatrogenic illness induced by getting the vaccine itself. Outlier vaccines do nothing to change this, any more than those few poisoned bottles of aspirin did anything to increase the non-contingent risk profile of taking aspirin. Especially because, like the poisoned aspirin, outlier vaccines aren't on the market for very long compared to safe vaccines.

CorrectHorseBat 5y ago

We are very risk averse of taking vaccines, while they are incredibly safe and barely have any risk associated with them. Probably more harm is done because people are too afraid of taking a vaccine than the opposite (not only looking at covid19 vaccines). The biggest harm done by taking vaccines you don't really need is probably that the money could have been used for something more useful.

ekianjo 5y ago
> while they are incredibly safe and barely have any risk associated with them Alternative explanation: nobody knows the risks in details, and side-effects are widely under-reported anyway. Ask any doctor how often they report even serious side effects, you will be very surprised.
majkinetor 5y ago
Barely have any acute risk. Its almost impossible to find out what happens after long time, say a decade, with the current approach. > The biggest harm done by taking vaccines you don't really need is probably that the money could have been used for something more useful. What kind of nonsense is that? Its the same as saying "there is no problem in taking any drug, the worst it can get is lose some money". You can't clamp entire technology as good or wrong. Vaccine as technology obviously has merit. Any particular vaccine may be problematic or not. Think H1N1 and narcolepsy, anthrax vaccine in gulf war etc. This kind of trash talk is exactly the same as anti-vax talk. I have no sympathy for either clan. As usual, people convert complex topic into binary decision which is madness.
- derefr 5y ago
  > Its almost impossible to find out what happens after long time, say a decade, with the current approach. Most vaccines are much older than a decade. We know who gets vaccines; it's in their medical record, if not centralized anywhere. Longitudinal studies aren't impossible. So any random hospital could do a longitudinal retrospective data-collection study on the consequences for their own patients of either having received a given vaccination decades previous or not, no? > What kind of nonsense is that? I understood what they meant, and they're right. They're making an incomplete-information decision-theory argument. To rephrase them with more precision: Selecting a person from the population at random; and taking the category of "vaccines that will confer absolutely no benefits to that person specifically", and selecting a vaccine at random from that category; that person will, with high probability, incur more QALY-risk from paying for the vaccine (because they'll then have fewer dollars to pay for unplanned expenses, which can be quite problematic for the median member of the population), than they will from any iatrogenic illness induced by getting the vaccine itself. Outlier vaccines do nothing to change this, any more than those few poisoned bottles of aspirin did anything to increase the non-contingent risk profile of taking aspirin. Especially because, like the poisoned aspirin, outlier vaccines aren't on the market for very long compared to safe vaccines.