511 sats \ 32 replies \ @oliverweiss 30 Mar \ on: Childhood Vaccine Schedule Thoughts and Questions health
I understand your concerns. I think this chart can give yet another perspective.
The life expectancy increased dramatically exactly because we could save the little ones. With vaccines. One of the greatest inventions ever. Now, with all this anti vaccination stuff we see child diseases in the developed world we haven’t seen for a while.
This! As a parent these ARE the facts and I agree you can do research, but many vaccines have and will saves children’s lives.
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Why lump them all together though? Not every disease is very risky or even likely to be encountered, but every vaccine has known risks.
It seems like there's both an aggregation error and a myopic focus of the harms on one side of the ledger, while ignoring the harms on the other.
Where's the assessment of tradeoffs? Risk-benefit analysis?
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What do you mean by lump them all together? As far as I know there is always a “vaccine holiday” in between.
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I mean conceptually. Saying that vaccines save kids lives is a blanket statement that puts all vaccines in the same category category.
For instance, small-pox and chicken-pox are very different. Just because the small-pox vaccine has saved an incredible number of lives, does not mean anything about the value of the chicken-pox vaccine.
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What is the difference from getting a small load from a vaccine than a load from another kid, e.g., at a chickenpox party? If we talk about chickenpox vaccine specifically. Btw., chickenpox vaccine is optional and given much later, at least where I live.
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The differences are however the risks of the vaccine compare to the risks of chicken pox. I'm not an expert on that, but I am confident that the difference between those two things is smaller for chicken pox than it is for small pox.
Some vaccines are great, some are marginal, some are harmful for certain people. My point is that making blanket statements about how great vaccines are omits all nuance on the topic.
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This is it: some are harmful for certain people. And I would emphasize the word certain here.
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Yup exactly it’s a big bundle!
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Also, wealthier families can afford better medical treatments, so their kids survive infections more often.
It would be much more informative to see when some of the big vaccines were introduced, so that we could see if it corresponds to anything on the graph.
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Indeed. I tried to find a date of introduction of vaccines in Brazil and found the seventies according to one English source. So my very quick conclusion was that there is not even correlation in his graph. However just one random source is not enough and it was not an official source in Portuguese so I am not sure.
For transparency my source is:
https://www.scielo.br/j/csp/a/XxZCT7tKQjP3V6pCyywtXMx/?lang=en
It says 1973, but it would require more investigation to be sure.
It depends on the vaccine which vary in safety and efficacy
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That's a point I should have included. The conversation is so universal that "vaccines are safe and effective" that people don't even discuss how safe and how effective (and what exactly the side effects are) of each one.
As kepford noted, "safe" and "effective" are not Boolean, they're scalars.
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It’s probably the biggest factor
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Not at all. Consider smallpox as an example, it was not eradicated because of sanitation or whatnot, but vaccine! Unfortunately this is the only disease eradicated to date.
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They got pretty close with Polio, but now that's reemerging, possibly in part because people are getting it from the vaccines.
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Maybe, maybe not. It sounds strange to me however: we got it almost eradicated using vaccines but now the vaccines cause its reemergence? I would say it is because of insufficient collective immunity.
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I'm certainly not an expert, but you can read up on the phenomenon here if you want to. The search I did just now indicates that it's a well recognized phenomenon.
The situation is that the vaccine has a very small chance of actually creating polio in the recipient and since the disease had been nearly eliminated many current cases are from the vaccines.
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People do get it from vaccines. The only polio vaccine that prevents you from giving it to others is live polio. If you give a bunch of people the live polio vaccine, some of them will get polio. Since polio hardly exists in the wild anymore, as we're close to eradicating it with the polio vaccine, the main way people get polio is the polio vaccine.
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That's what I recall having read, too.
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Of course, it does!
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I was looking for this comment thx to reminding us about it. Such a shame that some people lack of trust (generally in institutions and big companies) make them think vaccines, doctors, etc. are bad. I can understand why tho Bad individual economics, misinformation, abuses due to ultracapitalistic policies .. I just want to remind that lot of psychological studies show that our minds fell really easily into conspiracy. Mainly because it’s the easiest way to explain something. Our brains prefer to be lazy.
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I'd remind you that I didn't say anything about conspiracy theories and you said nothing about anything I actually said.
As you said, "Our brains prefer to be lazy."
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Wasn’t about you but against all those internet people who think they are different or see things better than specialists. Anyway, I encourage you to talk with more professionals/experts if you didn’t studied it. And be aware that even antivax theories serve another purpose than really searching “truth” or secret “health”.
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Does it cause you any concern that no one on the "Pro Vax" side had an answer for any of the issues I brought up?
We're talking about dozens of medical interventions during the earliest stages of development and it doesn't seem like anyone who supports them knows much about it. I would think the burden would be on the pro-intervention side to have answers for concerns about the interventions.
I have talked to professionals and specialists about this and they are often unaware of this information or other basic facts that you'd think were relevant. The problem with living in a censorious bubble is that you don't find out what the actual criticisms of your position are.
Notice that I'm not pushing a particular position in this post. My hope was to find out that I was missing something.
I'm very familiar with this kind of situation, from my own academic work that often touches on politically charged topics. Most "experts" in those areas have no clue what the counterarguments/critiques/questions are from "the other side" either.
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Exactly. Progress is good. E/acc.
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I appreciate that. Like I said, I do believe they are effective at preventing their target illness. I would much rather every child got these vaccines than no child got them, but I'm interested in whether we're making the right assessments at the margins.
Also, it's not clear how much of the decline to attribute to vaccines since the trend predates these vaccines.
I think it's misguided to conclude we're under vaccinating just because there are some occurrences of the disease. We have to know how to weigh those instances of infection against whatever the costs would be to vaccinate enough kids to have prevented it.