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Related: there was also a strong correlation between receiving some vaccinations and not developing dementia during the next five years. This included vaccinati

Related: there was also a strong correlation between receiving some vaccinations and not developing dementia during the next five years. This included vaccinations against diseases that people normally do not get. This hints at a reason other than simply „avoided disease“. Edit: I found the submission. Actually it was a study on influenza vaccination that included a comment about other vaccines: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31899781 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31899781 I wrote a summary in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31900161 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31900161

teruakohatu 4y ago
I would be skeptical of correlated variables that defy logic. Butterflies numbers in North America likely have some correlation with dementia in New Zealand, but that does not imply causation.
- dboreham 4y ago
  People who seek vaccination may have a higher than average interest in their own health. This may cause them to live longer.
  - mathieuh 4y ago
    Isn’t it only recently that the conspiracists have gained so much ground? My whole life until Covid I knew of one person whose parents hadn’t got him routinely vaccinated, everyone in my circle found that very strange and as soon as he was able he did it himself. I’m having trouble finding information with Google because everything is about Covid now, but as far as I remember routine vaccination rates in e.g. the UK were close to 100%
    - Enginerrrd 4y ago
      Not necessarily, a lot of people have avoided flu vaccines for a long time. Also vaccine hesitancy is a centuries old phenomenon at this point. And the original (retracted) MMR vaccine / autism paper was from like 1998.
      - michaelterryio 4y ago
        You don’t have to do anything to avoid flu vaccines. I “avoid” them because you have to waste precious time and I never get sick and I don’t like the experience of getting shots.
        nullfield 4y ago
        I mean, they're a mess of "we're gonna guess which...this year", which seems really un-amusing - why can't they produce a series of shots that cover all the variants that they have any idea might be circulating, if they're so dangerous? We have to assume it's "because they're making a calculated risk assessment, weighing the benefits against the cost". If they guess right, and you get one, and you're exposed sufficiently to be infected, then they could make your infection less unpleasant (death is, after all, the worst case and unpleasant). "I never get sick" is rolling dice. So is getting a flu shot, but in a different way. In the end, people still have to have the right to make those decisions for themselves (same weighing benefits against costs), with the understanding that if they get something bad enough (not that Ebola is that common in the US, or that there's a vaccine) they might not be savable and/or might be locked in a box to prevent risk to other people.
        themitigating 4y ago
        And who defines what is "bad enough"?
        croes 4y ago
        So you don't need life vests because you never drown?
        zosima 4y ago
        Most people don't wear life-vests on dry land. Severe flu is very, very rare in most healthy people below 60 or 70. It's simply not a real risk, compared to driving to and from work.
    - autoexec 4y ago
      > Isn’t it only recently that the conspiracists have gained so much ground? It's always existed to some extent but the anti-vaxxers' attempts to promote the idea that vaccines cause autism really escalated things in the years around 2010, and covid gave them another major opportunity to raise fears and conspiracies. There's also recently been an increasing (and often well deserved) lack of trust in science and medicine. These professions have refused to police themselves and they've allowed absolute junk to get published in "peer reviewed" journals, allowed corporations to pay for research concluding whatever they want to see in a press release, and they let ineffective and harmful medications be pushed onto the public by doctors who took kickbacks and bribes. The extreme lack of oversight and accountability at every level has made it increasingly difficult for people to trust these institutions and that's made people fearful and incentivized them to try to research things themselves to find out what's safe or best. This has opened the door for a handful of charlatans and scam artists who seek to profit off of that fear through social media by deliberately misleading people who often don't have the education to know better, which isn't to say that they're not smart or even that they're generally uneducated. It's just that our education system is a joke. One of our two political parties opposes teaching critical thinking skills and casts doubt on even well established science and higher education in general. The average American reads at a 6th or 7th grade level and research papers aren't written for them (some have argued this too is often for petty and self-serving reasons) Most of the antivaxxers are just people trying to do their best for themselves and their loved ones in an environment where they don't know what's trustworthy. Mixed in with them though are nutjobs and the people who know the movement is bullshit, but want to keep making money and fame off of the scam. Meanwhile, little has been done to increase trust in science and medicine because of regulatory capture and all the money to be made pushing lies and bad medicine. An increase in antivaxxers and conspiracists is basically inevitable unless this changes.
      - heavyset_go 4y ago
        I don't think it's an education thing. I know some very well educated people who are on the anti-vax wagon. I think it's both and political and belief thing, and not a rational thing, as there are plenty of educated and discerning individuals who have weird beliefs that wouldn't pass any type of smell test. As for the it being a political thing, I remember a professor who blamed natural disasters on some states legalizing gay marriage as punishment from God/nature/etc, back when that was a political talking point on TV and talk radio. I think they know, rationally, that those types of claims are not grounded in reality, but it makes them feel good to repeat them as if they were anyway. I believe that, for some people, it comes down their perceived political opponents liking vaccines, therefore they themselves will oppose vaccines to spite them, and the rationalizations work backwards from there.
    - heavyset_go 4y ago
      Before COVID, the largest, and growing, anti-vax base were those who thought vaccines caused autism in children. Post-COVID total vaccine "skepticism" became a shibboleth for an order of magnitude more people. I watched a lot of people that I formerly thought were intelligent make the leap from "COVID vaccines are harmful" to "anything bad that has happened since vaccination became common place is the fault of vaccines". Usually it was just contained to believing vaccines cause autism, but everything under the sun is being blamed on vaccines right now, from people being fat, to allergies, cancer and excess deaths. To answer your question, there was an undercurrent of anti-vax sentiment in the past, and now it's been mainstreamed and is even dumber than it ever was. I believe you're correct in your assumptions.
    - zosima 4y ago
      I agree, I think the politicization of the covid-vaccine, and almost forced vaccination in many countries and places of e.g. people younger that 20-30 years who would stand to get no benefit from the vaccine whatsoever has created an anti-vax sentiment that will now stay with us for quite a while. Hopefully this skepticism won't spread to the many vaccines for diseases that are much more dangerous than Covid-19.
    - canadiantim 4y ago
      Yes same in Canada, but unfortunately politicians here decided to make the issue of vaccinations political so now it’s a divisive topic with more of my friends now questioning even routine vaccinations (whereas before there were none who would)
  - cperciva 4y ago
    People who get vaccinated are also necessarily not people who are excluded from vaccination for medical reasons (e.g. people with weakened immune systems can't get live virus vaccines).
  - tjpnz 4y ago
    Having crossed paths with my fair share of anti-vaxxers over the years there's now an element of spite when I ask for the shots.
    - canadiantim 4y ago
      That seems unhealthy. You should just look out for your own health and not worry about the others
- Izkata 4y ago
  Related: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
- woodruffw 4y ago
  > I would be skeptical of correlated variables that defy logic. Does this defy logic? At the worst, I'd say I lack an intuition around it, rather than that it's unintuitive.
  - waterhouse 4y ago
    Yeah, the knee-jerk response should not be "the correlation is spurious", rather it should be "the causation is different from what the authors would like it to be". (That is, whatever hypothesis they came up with, we should assume it's wrong and tell the authors to go pound sand unless they provide strong evidence otherwise.) In this case, as others are saying, the explanation that comes to my mind is: "What kind of person gets vaccinated against rare diseases that people don't normally get? Probably one who cares extra about health and has resources to spend on it, and has a proactive and vigilant doctor." Selection bias should always be considered in correlational studies.
- croes 4y ago
  We know that an Epstein-Barr-Virus infection is a necessary condition to get MS so it doesn't defy logic that other viruses cause other cell diseases and that vaccines can prevent that
auctoritas 4y ago
Vaccination may trigger some cascade that has effects beyond the intended immune response... activating processes which in some way clean the brain or filter blood more thoroughly before it passes through the BBB. The integrated nature of the immune system whatever immediate response vaccination triggers probably
- Enginerrrd 4y ago
  I once had a shoulder / joint problem that had lingered for a couple of weeks. Normal sort of thing that comes up from time to time in training. But I was going out of country and had to get a bunch of vaccines. They loaded me up with like 5 or 6 shots at the visit. Weirdly, after getting a couple of shots in the arm, I noticed that the next day my shoulder issue was totally gone. Could be coincidence, but at the time I got the impression that the extra temporary inflammation gave my body enough of a push to just go in there and fix it.
  - polishdude20 4y ago
    Makes me wonder if the pain signal was there because the previous repair process failed to fix it and then a new repair stimulant (inflammation) was needed to trigger that fix.
    - Enginerrrd 4y ago
      That's what I was thinking. While not recommended, I've heard of people fixing their months-long tendonitis by first acutely pissing it off enough to be unbearable and then all of a sudden it heals.
  - jspash 4y ago
    Sounds a bit like acupuncture? I mean, if you ignore the whole "chi energy" angle. Or whatever woo is meant to be awoken by the needles. I also had a shoulder problem for well over a year. I think it was a pinched nerve. Went to countless physios, tried pills, stretching, weight training and even acupuncture. Nothing. Not a bit of relief, and some times even more pain. Then I went on a two week holiday to Sri Lanka. Swam in 30C degree water. Laid on the hot sand. And basically did nothing for the entire two weeks. It wasn't until the plain ride home that I realised I was no longer in pain! I've been pain free ever since. Sorry.. just realised my little story had nothing to do with vaccines or inflammation.

teruakohatu 4y ago

I would be skeptical of correlated variables that defy logic. Butterflies numbers in North America likely have some correlation with dementia in New Zealand, but that does not imply causation.

dboreham 4y ago
People who seek vaccination may have a higher than average interest in their own health. This may cause them to live longer.
- mathieuh 4y ago
  Isn’t it only recently that the conspiracists have gained so much ground? My whole life until Covid I knew of one person whose parents hadn’t got him routinely vaccinated, everyone in my circle found that very strange and as soon as he was able he did it himself. I’m having trouble finding information with Google because everything is about Covid now, but as far as I remember routine vaccination rates in e.g. the UK were close to 100%
  - Enginerrrd 4y ago
    Not necessarily, a lot of people have avoided flu vaccines for a long time. Also vaccine hesitancy is a centuries old phenomenon at this point. And the original (retracted) MMR vaccine / autism paper was from like 1998.
    - michaelterryio 4y ago
      You don’t have to do anything to avoid flu vaccines. I “avoid” them because you have to waste precious time and I never get sick and I don’t like the experience of getting shots.
      - nullfield 4y ago
        I mean, they're a mess of "we're gonna guess which...this year", which seems really un-amusing - why can't they produce a series of shots that cover all the variants that they have any idea might be circulating, if they're so dangerous? We have to assume it's "because they're making a calculated risk assessment, weighing the benefits against the cost". If they guess right, and you get one, and you're exposed sufficiently to be infected, then they could make your infection less unpleasant (death is, after all, the worst case and unpleasant). "I never get sick" is rolling dice. So is getting a flu shot, but in a different way. In the end, people still have to have the right to make those decisions for themselves (same weighing benefits against costs), with the understanding that if they get something bad enough (not that Ebola is that common in the US, or that there's a vaccine) they might not be savable and/or might be locked in a box to prevent risk to other people.
        themitigating 4y ago
        And who defines what is "bad enough"?
      - croes 4y ago
        So you don't need life vests because you never drown?
        zosima 4y ago
        Most people don't wear life-vests on dry land. Severe flu is very, very rare in most healthy people below 60 or 70. It's simply not a real risk, compared to driving to and from work.
  - autoexec 4y ago
    > Isn’t it only recently that the conspiracists have gained so much ground? It's always existed to some extent but the anti-vaxxers' attempts to promote the idea that vaccines cause autism really escalated things in the years around 2010, and covid gave them another major opportunity to raise fears and conspiracies. There's also recently been an increasing (and often well deserved) lack of trust in science and medicine. These professions have refused to police themselves and they've allowed absolute junk to get published in "peer reviewed" journals, allowed corporations to pay for research concluding whatever they want to see in a press release, and they let ineffective and harmful medications be pushed onto the public by doctors who took kickbacks and bribes. The extreme lack of oversight and accountability at every level has made it increasingly difficult for people to trust these institutions and that's made people fearful and incentivized them to try to research things themselves to find out what's safe or best. This has opened the door for a handful of charlatans and scam artists who seek to profit off of that fear through social media by deliberately misleading people who often don't have the education to know better, which isn't to say that they're not smart or even that they're generally uneducated. It's just that our education system is a joke. One of our two political parties opposes teaching critical thinking skills and casts doubt on even well established science and higher education in general. The average American reads at a 6th or 7th grade level and research papers aren't written for them (some have argued this too is often for petty and self-serving reasons) Most of the antivaxxers are just people trying to do their best for themselves and their loved ones in an environment where they don't know what's trustworthy. Mixed in with them though are nutjobs and the people who know the movement is bullshit, but want to keep making money and fame off of the scam. Meanwhile, little has been done to increase trust in science and medicine because of regulatory capture and all the money to be made pushing lies and bad medicine. An increase in antivaxxers and conspiracists is basically inevitable unless this changes.
    - heavyset_go 4y ago
      I don't think it's an education thing. I know some very well educated people who are on the anti-vax wagon. I think it's both and political and belief thing, and not a rational thing, as there are plenty of educated and discerning individuals who have weird beliefs that wouldn't pass any type of smell test. As for the it being a political thing, I remember a professor who blamed natural disasters on some states legalizing gay marriage as punishment from God/nature/etc, back when that was a political talking point on TV and talk radio. I think they know, rationally, that those types of claims are not grounded in reality, but it makes them feel good to repeat them as if they were anyway. I believe that, for some people, it comes down their perceived political opponents liking vaccines, therefore they themselves will oppose vaccines to spite them, and the rationalizations work backwards from there.
  - heavyset_go 4y ago
    Before COVID, the largest, and growing, anti-vax base were those who thought vaccines caused autism in children. Post-COVID total vaccine "skepticism" became a shibboleth for an order of magnitude more people. I watched a lot of people that I formerly thought were intelligent make the leap from "COVID vaccines are harmful" to "anything bad that has happened since vaccination became common place is the fault of vaccines". Usually it was just contained to believing vaccines cause autism, but everything under the sun is being blamed on vaccines right now, from people being fat, to allergies, cancer and excess deaths. To answer your question, there was an undercurrent of anti-vax sentiment in the past, and now it's been mainstreamed and is even dumber than it ever was. I believe you're correct in your assumptions.
  - zosima 4y ago
    I agree, I think the politicization of the covid-vaccine, and almost forced vaccination in many countries and places of e.g. people younger that 20-30 years who would stand to get no benefit from the vaccine whatsoever has created an anti-vax sentiment that will now stay with us for quite a while. Hopefully this skepticism won't spread to the many vaccines for diseases that are much more dangerous than Covid-19.
  - canadiantim 4y ago
    Yes same in Canada, but unfortunately politicians here decided to make the issue of vaccinations political so now it’s a divisive topic with more of my friends now questioning even routine vaccinations (whereas before there were none who would)
- cperciva 4y ago
  People who get vaccinated are also necessarily not people who are excluded from vaccination for medical reasons (e.g. people with weakened immune systems can't get live virus vaccines).
- tjpnz 4y ago
  Having crossed paths with my fair share of anti-vaxxers over the years there's now an element of spite when I ask for the shots.
  - canadiantim 4y ago
    That seems unhealthy. You should just look out for your own health and not worry about the others
Izkata 4y ago
Related: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
woodruffw 4y ago
> I would be skeptical of correlated variables that defy logic. Does this defy logic? At the worst, I'd say I lack an intuition around it, rather than that it's unintuitive.
- waterhouse 4y ago
  Yeah, the knee-jerk response should not be "the correlation is spurious", rather it should be "the causation is different from what the authors would like it to be". (That is, whatever hypothesis they came up with, we should assume it's wrong and tell the authors to go pound sand unless they provide strong evidence otherwise.) In this case, as others are saying, the explanation that comes to my mind is: "What kind of person gets vaccinated against rare diseases that people don't normally get? Probably one who cares extra about health and has resources to spend on it, and has a proactive and vigilant doctor." Selection bias should always be considered in correlational studies.
croes 4y ago
We know that an Epstein-Barr-Virus infection is a necessary condition to get MS so it doesn't defy logic that other viruses cause other cell diseases and that vaccines can prevent that

auctoritas 4y ago

Vaccination may trigger some cascade that has effects beyond the intended immune response... activating processes which in some way clean the brain or filter blood more thoroughly before it passes through the BBB. The integrated nature of the immune system whatever immediate response vaccination triggers probably

Enginerrrd 4y ago
I once had a shoulder / joint problem that had lingered for a couple of weeks. Normal sort of thing that comes up from time to time in training. But I was going out of country and had to get a bunch of vaccines. They loaded me up with like 5 or 6 shots at the visit. Weirdly, after getting a couple of shots in the arm, I noticed that the next day my shoulder issue was totally gone. Could be coincidence, but at the time I got the impression that the extra temporary inflammation gave my body enough of a push to just go in there and fix it.
- polishdude20 4y ago
  Makes me wonder if the pain signal was there because the previous repair process failed to fix it and then a new repair stimulant (inflammation) was needed to trigger that fix.
  - Enginerrrd 4y ago
    That's what I was thinking. While not recommended, I've heard of people fixing their months-long tendonitis by first acutely pissing it off enough to be unbearable and then all of a sudden it heals.
- jspash 4y ago
  Sounds a bit like acupuncture? I mean, if you ignore the whole "chi energy" angle. Or whatever woo is meant to be awoken by the needles. I also had a shoulder problem for well over a year. I think it was a pinched nerve. Went to countless physios, tried pills, stretching, weight training and even acupuncture. Nothing. Not a bit of relief, and some times even more pain. Then I went on a two week holiday to Sri Lanka. Swam in 30C degree water. Laid on the hot sand. And basically did nothing for the entire two weeks. It wasn't until the plain ride home that I realised I was no longer in pain! I've been pain free ever since. Sorry.. just realised my little story had nothing to do with vaccines or inflammation.