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Is this about vaccines?

brightball 1y ago
Ha! No, it wasn't intended to be. Applies to a lot of different things though.
DemocracyFTW2 1y ago
I was going to say exactly this: people get sick, a vaccine is born, people get less sick, the vaccination practice gets established, the sickness vanishes. Then efforts maybe slump because the perception of danger and living memory of the sickness have largely left the building, and then those with baseless claims against the vaccine rear their heads and gain more followers. Now you have an under-vaccinated populace with ever fewer vaccinated people and the sickness can spread again, even more fervently than it could have originally, because younger folks have never experienced the virus live and are too often not vaccinated.
- cindyllm 1y ago
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- schoen 1y ago
  Yeah, I think this can really happen, and it's just about the heart of the preparedness paradox, a term that I mentioned somewhere else in this thread. I've often said that my grandmother was so grateful for all the childhood vaccines that came out during my mom's and my aunt's childhoods, or around that time (the Baby Boom era), because my grandmother really concretely saw how terrible some of those diseases were, with people in her generation actually contracting them in childhood, maybe even dying of them. But if you've really never seen them, it's pretty natural that they start to seem like something that barely even exists at all. Like, I don't even know the different between typhus and typhoid, or what their symptoms are, or what you actually do to prevent them, or exactly how they're spread, or whether they've been eradicated in certain regions or whatever (or even whether there are any vaccines against them or whether or not I've personally received those vaccines in infancy!). I just barely have a vague sense that these are truly awful things that apparently exist in the world, probably relate to water contamination somehow, and may potentially come back in war zones or disaster zones. (Way to go, people who do ... something? ... to prevent those two!)

Ha! No, it wasn't intended to be. Applies to a lot of different things though.

I was going to say exactly this: people get sick, a vaccine is born, people get less sick, the vaccination practice gets established, the sickness vanishes. Then efforts maybe slump because the perception of danger and living memory of the sickness have largely left the building, and then those with baseless claims against the vaccine rear their heads and gain more followers. Now you have an under-vaccinated populace with ever fewer vaccinated people and the sickness can spread again, even more fervently than it could have originally, because younger folks have never experienced the virus live and are too often not vaccinated.

cindyllm 1y ago
[dead]
schoen 1y ago
Yeah, I think this can really happen, and it's just about the heart of the preparedness paradox, a term that I mentioned somewhere else in this thread. I've often said that my grandmother was so grateful for all the childhood vaccines that came out during my mom's and my aunt's childhoods, or around that time (the Baby Boom era), because my grandmother really concretely saw how terrible some of those diseases were, with people in her generation actually contracting them in childhood, maybe even dying of them. But if you've really never seen them, it's pretty natural that they start to seem like something that barely even exists at all. Like, I don't even know the different between typhus and typhoid, or what their symptoms are, or what you actually do to prevent them, or exactly how they're spread, or whether they've been eradicated in certain regions or whatever (or even whether there are any vaccines against them or whether or not I've personally received those vaccines in infancy!). I just barely have a vague sense that these are truly awful things that apparently exist in the world, probably relate to water contamination somehow, and may potentially come back in war zones or disaster zones. (Way to go, people who do ... something? ... to prevent those two!)