6 ms·

Hopefully some people will realise that all vaccines do entail risks, too

wonderwonder 4y ago
I don't think most people see zero risk with vaccines but they are smart enough to look at the real (not anti vax) statistics and realize that the risks are far outweighed by the benefits to both the individual and the community. Polio, a virus that used to cause 15k cases of paralysis a year in the us and 2k deaths is virtually eliminated due to the vaccine. The risk of course is when the vaccines are defective such as with The Cutter Incident in the 1955. This was probably the root of the modern anti-vax movement. There is also always the chance of a negative reaction to the vaccine as well. With that said, the modern anti-vax movement is for the most part a conspiracy driven group of people that look only for proof that support what they want to see and they are quite happy to not look to deeply into the source of that proof or quite often to even read further than what the local mom posted on facebook.
- benjaminwootton 4y ago
  Agree. In my entire life I don’t think I’ve heard anyone question if the usual childhood vaccinations are worth taking. They know that risk is greater than reward. There was however a lot of skepticism and debate about the Covid vaccine because risk/reward is much more ambiguous.
  - wonderwonder 4y ago
    Covid was interesting from an antivax perspective. It started off as pretty dangerous and scary. Lots of people dying very fast. Then it started to get less dangerous quickly as it mutated. In the meantime the vaccine was rolled out and people questioned why should I take a novel vaccine for something that for the most part appears no worse than the flu. Which I completely get. Then they started associating every single negative thing that happened to being vaccinated and things went off the deep end. With that said, my brother is not vaccinated against covid and I totally get it.
  - Fomite 4y ago
    The COVID-19 vaccine has fully spilled over into outright skepticism about childhood vaccines: https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/health/2021/07/13/tennessee-halts-all-vaccine-outreach-minors-not-just-covid-19/7928701002/ https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/health/2021/07/13/tenn...
    - benjaminwootton 4y ago
      Which is why their strategy of overselling it and coercion was dangerous. People are left with less trust in governments, the media and healthcare professionals.
- EL_Loco 4y ago
  I live in a developing south american country. Whenever I'm in a conversation and someone starts questioning vaccines, the first thing I say is "Stop. Tell me, when was the last time you saw or heard of someone getting child paralysis?" They have no answer, because usually the only people you can find carrying the effects of this terrible disease are over fifty years old. The last case documented in my country was in 1989.
  - wonderwonder 4y ago
    Only argument I have heard against the polio vaccine was from my brother who argued that the infection rates were declining before the vaccine. He couldn't really explain why there is still polio in Pakistan and Afghanistan the only to places that have barriers to vaccination.
  - linuxftw 4y ago
    It happens all the time, we just call it something else now: https://www.ninds.nih.gov/health-information/patient-caregiver-education/fact-sheets/guillain-barre-syndrome-fact-sheet https://www.ninds.nih.gov/health-information/patient-caregiv... That's just one of a myriad of conditions that cause paralysis.
    - EL_Loco 4y ago
      You know I was talking specifically about poliomyelitis, the infectious disease caused by the poliovirus, which in many countries (mine included) is called 'child paralysis'.
      - linuxftw 4y ago
        Remember the part where I said 'they call it something different now?' You don't have poliomyelitis anymore, you have Guillain Barre, and unfortunately, nobody knows what causes that shrugs. Some other paralyzing ailments are ALS and MS.
- native_samples 4y ago
  "they are smart enough to look at the real (not anti vax) statistics and realize that the risks are far outweighed by the benefits" What are "anti vax statistics"? Do you think people who refused to take the COVID vaccines were making up their own data from whole cloth? I never saw that. What we do see is that the stats presented by health authorities are often mangled by inappropriate methodologies that appear to be picked in order to arrive at pre-chosen outcomes. When the raw data is obtained and re-analyzed correctly, we get papers like this one: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4125239 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4125239 "The excess risk of serious adverse events of special interest surpassed the risk reduction for COVID-19 hospitalization relative to the placebo group in both Pfizer and Moderna trials (2.3 and 6.4 per 10,000 participants, respectively)." In case you're the sort of person who evaluates arguments based on credentials not merit, the authors of this paper are all from universities or health services. One is an editor of the BMJ. One is a professional statistician and epidemiologist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sander_Greenland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sander_Greenland) You assert that the modern COVID anti-vax movement is "conspiracy driven". But there are two problems with this argument: 1. It's not really true. Refusal arises because public health officials have repeatedly lied about the vaccines, saying things like they are 95% effective against infection, or that they'll turn people into "dead ends" for the virus. That second one was the rationale for mandates and it was known to be false from the start - the trials never showed any such thing and they had no reason to believe this given that non-sterilizing vaccines are common. As for the first, the governments that publish actual case rates by vaccine status show that they have effectiveness in the minus 300-400% range i.e. vaccinated people get COVID at a much higher rate than unvaccinated people. So that wasn't true either. 2. Even if it was the case that it was all driven by conspiracy thinking, so what? It's already been proven beyond all reasonable doubt that public health leaders engaged in multiple conspiracies throughout COVID, e.g. virologists writing in private emails that they thought the virus looked like it'd been modified in a lab, and then days later signing an open letter saying the opposite. Or public health flipping from "masks are useless" to "masks are essential" overnight without any new science to drive it. Given this history the argument that anyone proposing the existence of a conspiracy is illegitimate is, well, extremely naive. "The risk of course is when the vaccines are defective such as with The Cutter Incident in the 1955. This was probably the root of the modern anti-vax movement" The anti-vax movement existed from the very start. Research the history of the smallpox vaccine. Parents were choosing to go to prison for violating mandate laws rather than let their children be vaccinated because they'd seen that vaccinated children came down with actual smallpox at much higher rates than expected. Just like today, public health refused to countenance the possibility that there were any possible problems in the vaccination process. They never change. It's a psychological issue.

I don't think most people see zero risk with vaccines but they are smart enough to look at the real (not anti vax) statistics and realize that the risks are far outweighed by the benefits to both the individual and the community. Polio, a virus that used to cause 15k cases of paralysis a year in the us and 2k deaths is virtually eliminated due to the vaccine. The risk of course is when the vaccines are defective such as with The Cutter Incident in the 1955. This was probably the root of the modern anti-vax movement. There is also always the chance of a negative reaction to the vaccine as well. With that said, the modern anti-vax movement is for the most part a conspiracy driven group of people that look only for proof that support what they want to see and they are quite happy to not look to deeply into the source of that proof or quite often to even read further than what the local mom posted on facebook.

benjaminwootton 4y ago
Agree. In my entire life I don’t think I’ve heard anyone question if the usual childhood vaccinations are worth taking. They know that risk is greater than reward. There was however a lot of skepticism and debate about the Covid vaccine because risk/reward is much more ambiguous.
- wonderwonder 4y ago
  Covid was interesting from an antivax perspective. It started off as pretty dangerous and scary. Lots of people dying very fast. Then it started to get less dangerous quickly as it mutated. In the meantime the vaccine was rolled out and people questioned why should I take a novel vaccine for something that for the most part appears no worse than the flu. Which I completely get. Then they started associating every single negative thing that happened to being vaccinated and things went off the deep end. With that said, my brother is not vaccinated against covid and I totally get it.
- Fomite 4y ago
  The COVID-19 vaccine has fully spilled over into outright skepticism about childhood vaccines: https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/health/2021/07/13/tennessee-halts-all-vaccine-outreach-minors-not-just-covid-19/7928701002/ https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/health/2021/07/13/tenn...
  - benjaminwootton 4y ago
    Which is why their strategy of overselling it and coercion was dangerous. People are left with less trust in governments, the media and healthcare professionals.
EL_Loco 4y ago
I live in a developing south american country. Whenever I'm in a conversation and someone starts questioning vaccines, the first thing I say is "Stop. Tell me, when was the last time you saw or heard of someone getting child paralysis?" They have no answer, because usually the only people you can find carrying the effects of this terrible disease are over fifty years old. The last case documented in my country was in 1989.
- wonderwonder 4y ago
  Only argument I have heard against the polio vaccine was from my brother who argued that the infection rates were declining before the vaccine. He couldn't really explain why there is still polio in Pakistan and Afghanistan the only to places that have barriers to vaccination.
- linuxftw 4y ago
  It happens all the time, we just call it something else now: https://www.ninds.nih.gov/health-information/patient-caregiver-education/fact-sheets/guillain-barre-syndrome-fact-sheet https://www.ninds.nih.gov/health-information/patient-caregiv... That's just one of a myriad of conditions that cause paralysis.
  - EL_Loco 4y ago
    You know I was talking specifically about poliomyelitis, the infectious disease caused by the poliovirus, which in many countries (mine included) is called 'child paralysis'.
    - linuxftw 4y ago
      Remember the part where I said 'they call it something different now?' You don't have poliomyelitis anymore, you have Guillain Barre, and unfortunately, nobody knows what causes that shrugs. Some other paralyzing ailments are ALS and MS.
native_samples 4y ago
"they are smart enough to look at the real (not anti vax) statistics and realize that the risks are far outweighed by the benefits" What are "anti vax statistics"? Do you think people who refused to take the COVID vaccines were making up their own data from whole cloth? I never saw that. What we do see is that the stats presented by health authorities are often mangled by inappropriate methodologies that appear to be picked in order to arrive at pre-chosen outcomes. When the raw data is obtained and re-analyzed correctly, we get papers like this one: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4125239 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4125239 "The excess risk of serious adverse events of special interest surpassed the risk reduction for COVID-19 hospitalization relative to the placebo group in both Pfizer and Moderna trials (2.3 and 6.4 per 10,000 participants, respectively)." In case you're the sort of person who evaluates arguments based on credentials not merit, the authors of this paper are all from universities or health services. One is an editor of the BMJ. One is a professional statistician and epidemiologist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sander_Greenland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sander_Greenland) You assert that the modern COVID anti-vax movement is "conspiracy driven". But there are two problems with this argument: 1. It's not really true. Refusal arises because public health officials have repeatedly lied about the vaccines, saying things like they are 95% effective against infection, or that they'll turn people into "dead ends" for the virus. That second one was the rationale for mandates and it was known to be false from the start - the trials never showed any such thing and they had no reason to believe this given that non-sterilizing vaccines are common. As for the first, the governments that publish actual case rates by vaccine status show that they have effectiveness in the minus 300-400% range i.e. vaccinated people get COVID at a much higher rate than unvaccinated people. So that wasn't true either. 2. Even if it was the case that it was all driven by conspiracy thinking, so what? It's already been proven beyond all reasonable doubt that public health leaders engaged in multiple conspiracies throughout COVID, e.g. virologists writing in private emails that they thought the virus looked like it'd been modified in a lab, and then days later signing an open letter saying the opposite. Or public health flipping from "masks are useless" to "masks are essential" overnight without any new science to drive it. Given this history the argument that anyone proposing the existence of a conspiracy is illegitimate is, well, extremely naive. "The risk of course is when the vaccines are defective such as with The Cutter Incident in the 1955. This was probably the root of the modern anti-vax movement" The anti-vax movement existed from the very start. Research the history of the smallpox vaccine. Parents were choosing to go to prison for violating mandate laws rather than let their children be vaccinated because they'd seen that vaccinated children came down with actual smallpox at much higher rates than expected. Just like today, public health refused to countenance the possibility that there were any possible problems in the vaccination process. They never change. It's a psychological issue.