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I am a parent. It's not that I don't think some children should be vaccinated; some should. Overweight, diabetic, etc. We know where the risk is, and we know th
by spfzero 4y ago
I am a parent. It's not that I don't think some children should be vaccinated; some should. Overweight, diabetic, etc. We know where the risk is, and we know the vaccine reduces serious outcomes. It's recommending it across-the-board that I object to.
Now if your argument is "what's the harm?, why not vaccinate everyone?" my answer would be we don't actually know what the harm might be to these kids later in life. No one does. Probably no harm, I guess? Maybe a 3/1,000,000 chance of harm? no one knows.
- xracy 4y ago> It's recommending it across-the-board that I object to. Early on, the goal was to reach herd immunity while we still had vaccines that were fairly effective at reducing transmission against the variants we had had, before they mutated. But also, I don't know how familiar you are with gov't messaging. But the more widespread you make a message, the less nuanced you can make it. People at large don't take nuance very well, and people at large are bad at evaluating circumstances. So if you give them a message like "People over the age of 65 should get 3 doses, and people over 30 should get 2 doses, etc." You're going to end up with most of the people not knowing what to do. To add to that, you have people "doing their own research" who have no idea what the requirements for actual peer-reviewed research is, screaming from the rooftops that you can't trust anything coming out of anyone's mouth. And they will latch onto any piece of nuance and tear it to shreds. Now, I still think that American institutions have done a bad job communicating, but considering they were undermined at every step of the process, I'm inclined to believe that it's more reasonable for them to give a blanket across-the-board recommendation than it is to destroy their own goal by adding confusion of "nuanced recommendations".
- spfzero 4y agoIt does not need to be that nuanced. It's basically if you (think you might) have these X conditions, get vaccinated. You can give the detailed recommendations to doctors and other caregivers, and refer the public to them and the CDC website to check more in case they don't know.
- xracy 4y agoWhat are the conditions, please list all of them in a way that makes it easy for me to find? What age groups does this affect? I think I have condition Y so I should go get vaccinated, but I have conflicting information on that from multiple doctors. Should I get vaccinated? Also, in the US people often take advertised medications to their doctors and ask if they should take it, rather than doctors recommending things to people. Finally, there are large segments of the population that don't consult doctors for varying reasons. You wanna try and make that message simpler?
- ls15 4y ago> Early on, the goal was to reach herd immunity while we still had vaccines that were fairly effective at reducing transmission against the variants we had had, before they mutated. The mRNA vaccines weren't even tested for transmission during the early trials. It was impossible to make educated statements about reaching herd immunity through mass vaccination without any data. This did not stop people from introducing mandates in some places, even after it became clear that herd immunity will not be reached, which goes a little beyond bad communication.
- xracy 4y agoI think that was a reasonable assumption given our understanding of infectious diseases. In hindsight, that was incorrect, but you can't criticize a decision made with limited information with perfect information, and pretend like you would've seen the perfect information at the time. It is reasonable to assume that viruses would be subject to herd immunity, because it's been true for the vast majority of viruses we've interacted with in the past.
- ls15 4y ago> you can't criticize a decision made with limited information with perfect information, and pretend like you would've seen the perfect information at the time. I can absolutely criticize handwavy low knowledge / high impact decisions afterwards, because that's what they were and that was clear to many at that time already. Consensus wasn't reached based on knowledge, but based on power. Luckily I came to that conclusion early during the pandemic, so I don't feel compelled to defend unethical decisions now.