This is directionally correct but methodologically flawed.
The US requires 5-10 more vaccines for children by 5 years old than Japan does. Japan also has a much more spaced out schedule over those 5 years.
Given that the American health machine is largely driven by pharmaceutical companies, it seems likely that there is some fat that can be trimmed. Did they trim it here? Who knows.
Japan has a different medical system, different levels of adherence, different cultural hygiene standards, different exposure risk profiles for different pathogens.
Comparing the U.S. to Japan, or any other system for that matter, with a simple “well the vaccine schedule is different there” is simplistic and almost certainly not useful.
What is useful is to compare the U.S. with and without a certain vaccine or when delaying certain vaccines.
And we know how that plays out because all these vaccines have been added because of specific threats and actual diseases faced by Americans.
Without the postpartum and early childcare of those countries.
Denmark doesn't do mandatory vaccines to the same degree as they catch early development of disease and treat it when it appears, consistently across the whole population.
The US has a case for mandatory multi childhood vacination as the data shows otherwise preventable childhood diseases will spread untreated and unchecked.
If you like Japan and Denmark and want the same - get onto improving the US health system for everybody regardless of employment status.
It is the sort of thing I don't mind reading about, but admittedly these easily politicized topics have poor commentary and so on. Have you considered lobste.rs?
More of everyone will die. It's not just the anti-vax children, infants, eldery, chronic, or, the immunocompromised people who get it worse when herd immunity disappears. Vaccines are risk reducers, but it's not like they are perfect + the increased toll on the hospitals make more outbreaks bad for everyone.
It's one of the reasons the anti-vax movement never made any sense to me. Flat Earth is silly, but at least it's perfectly harmless, but anti-vax?
You're applying technical info to a social problem.
Americans don't trust the medical system, MAGA Americans are likely to trust it less statistically due to who the opioid pandemic/over subscription issue hit (watching a potentially close family member go from productive to an addict that started on legally subscribed drugs is hard).
> MAGA Americans are likely to trust it less statistically due to who the opioid pandemic/over subscription issue hit
Quite on brand to go from "personal responsibility" and "you can always avoid bad businesses" to directly blaming someone else when something actually ends up affecting them personally.
Not to mention two giant problems with the entire scientific community:
1. It just sucks at communication. Many people have been misled because marketeers lied to them "it's scientifically proven!" while scientists did nothing to fix that, because they only cared about preserving communication channels between themselves. The mistrust in science is obvious if you take this into account.
2. At the end of the day, scientists are people who have their biases and weaknesses. There have been well-documented cases of the entire scientific community doing a massive fuckup. So when now a bunch of scientists come and say "trust us bro, this time it's legit" it's reasonable to be sceptical.
None of those are generally made mandatory. It's a reasonable position to say the government shouldn't be able to compel you to put any particular drugs in your body, even if it would benefit the population at large.
The opposite position is also reasonable: the government should be able to compel you to take certain medical treatments in the name of improving public health. Reasonable people not blinded by ideology can accept both of those positions and handle individual cases on their merits. In the modern liberal world we've reached a consensus something like: measles vaccine OK, sterilising people with hereditary defects not OK. But people in other times and places settle on other compromises.
Note: I'm aware that this decision isn't about forcing anyone to have the vaccine, it's just "advice". But it's only one step removed from that. Public schools already withhold services from kids who don't have CDC-recommended vaccines, and we've seen various governments willing to go much further during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Now that the original thread is flagged and hidden, we can discuss without fear.
In capitalism, the incentive of the manufactures to maintain product quality is that people won't buy the thing if it is bad, or does not appear to work.
This cannot be cheated. You cannot "bribe" a population.
But when government mandates a product, then it changes the equation greatly against the population. Manufacture is no longer incentivized to maintain quality. If the quality is not easy to identify then it becomes much more easy.
Now, they are outside capitalism. Now they can bribe the government, and enjoy perpetual sales.
So to answer your question, if it was not mandated, there would be no push against it. Such businesses will run out of business as capitalism run its course.
> if it was not mandated, there would be no push against it.
Do you really think that? You can’t think of any other health choice that has zealots protesting other people’s choices?
You get anti-vax people wanting to avoid the vaccinated, removing masks from those wearing them, claiming not to hear the voice of people wearing masks.
I just interpreted as "government icky" rhetoric that is very common around here.
Corruption is a tool of any power structure. Gesturing vaguely towards it to invalidate any societal initiative is not an argument, it is just bad-faith whinging.
"Why build roads? The government can be bribed"
"Why trust the courts? The government can be bribed"
Because their manipulators only need a couple subjects for identity politics. If they sow too many seeds of doubt, the world becomes too complex again, while the goal is the opposite.
It isn't particularly hard to understand - people should be allowed to make their own determination about what is good for their health, what isn't and what risk tolerance they are personally comfortable with. If that principle is embraced a whole heap of good things are fairly obvious - why there shouldn't be state-backed eugenics programs, why exercise is voluntary and it makes health policy a lot less charged. If the principle is thrown out then a lot of problematic policy becomes hard to reject.
I mean, look at what the vax-mandatory movement got - they enraged a bunch of people, helped secure Trump II, made vaccine scepticism a mainstream and popular position which arguably handed the US health department vaccine policy to anti-vaxers. Maybe avoiding authoritarian tactics and sticking to principle would have gotten them a better outcome? Hard to see how it could be worse, to be honest. They screwed up pretty badly.
Aren't they optional in most cases? You can opt-out of vaxing your kids today right? They just won't be welcome in public schools. I guess the other common cohort is health care workers (which seems reasonable) per https://leadingage.org/workforce-vaccine-mandates-state-who-... More than 1 million people died in the US from the COVID pandemic so it seemed reasonable to work hard to get herd immunity but the backfire effect made that counter productive. Hindsight is 20/20 though.
> More than 1 million people died in the US from the COVID pandemic so it seemed reasonable to work hard to get herd immunity but the backfire effect made that counter productive.
There is no herd immunity for COVID, because you can get it more than once. Vaccination only protects for a few months, and doesn't reduce spreading much.
It's not a "sterilizing vaccine".
There are sterilizing vaccines for many childhood diseases. Measles, diphtheria, polio, etc. Can't get the disease at all if vaccinated. Those vaccines can almost eliminate a disease. With smallpox, this was taken past "almost" all the way to eradication.
Here's a list of 14 almost forgotten diseases, eliminated by vaccination.[1]
The current generation of parents has not seen most of them.
Google Joe Rogan Measles. This is the level of information that people are using to make these decisions, being fed to them by the LARGEST mainstream media source (Joe Rogan has the largest mainstream media audience).
Have infectious diseases stopped spreading? And all this is happening in the shadows of COVID where the vaccines famously had no significant impact on the rate of the spread. The people claiming they would turned out to be part of the misinformation crowd.
We ran a natural experiment in Australia. Everyone got the vaccine, then everyone got COVID over the course of a month or two. The official numbers were high and aren't even accurate because there were too many cases to count, it got everywhere and the measurement kits ran out.
> That's quite a claim. I see you provided no sources.
Why do I need to source anything? Nobody credible ever claimed the vaccines would slow the spread, no evidence was ever provided that vaccines slow the spread and theory suggests they probably won't slow the spread. The people making things up in defiance of the obvious are the ones who need to start providing sources on this one.
If you want to check the numbers; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Australia - we've got 22 million vaccinated people on a population of around 25 million in 2021. We see ~12 million confirmed COVID cases and in the immediate post-lockdown period the testing system crumbled under load. Do the math. An exponential process that everyone was exposed to was downgraded to ... still an exponentially growing process that everyone was exposed to. Maybe it spread the pandemic phase out to 2 months instead of 1 (based on my memory of watching the stats at the time).
The vaccine didn't cut down on the number of infections. It was strictly personal protection. Members of my family regularly get COVID.
Vaccination slowed the spread of the primary varients and reduced the health impacts on those that tested positive for COVID by preloading the immune response.
Yeah. That is a really good argument for recommending people get the vaccine. But it concedes any reason to start coercive medical treatments. The COVID vaccines were very much about personal protection. It circles back quite neatly to the idea that people should be allowed to make their own determination about what is good for their health, what isn't and what risk tolerance they are personally comfortable with.
The people arguing that collective action knows best once again blew their credibility with COVID, making up the theory about herd immunity was a big shot in the arm for the anti-vax movement. And as you can guess I'd rather side with the anti-vaxers, they're better friends than the authoritarians.
> I sourced my claims: smallpox, polio, measles, mumps.
1. That isn't what sourcing a claim means. It means to provide sources for why your claims are true; or at least where you heard the claim first. Picking specific examples is helpful, but it isn't providing a source.
And despite those examples, I still catch an infections disease ... basically annually.
2. I suppose I assumed it was going to be made obvious by context, but I don't care about smallpox, polio, measles or mumps and I'm not talking about them. Nobody forced me to do anything in relation to them, nobody threatened my livelihood over them and I don't feel at any risk of being forbidden from leaving my house because of them. It is a good point but I didn't intend to talk about it - it stands alone as a point and beyond that I don't care. Since you bought it up more then once you get this paragraph. But if it is necessary to put up with measles to put the authoritarians in a box? So be it. The anti-vaxers are the lesser of two evils, they're minnows compared to the sharks who were showing their colours through COVID; we're lucky that episode only lasted long enough for the authoritarians to do terrible economic damage.
Absolutely is. Those are examples of serious, deadly, infectious plagues that were either eradicated or seriously contained by vaccines.
> but I don't care about smallpox, polio, measles or mumps and I'm not talking about them.
I know you don't care about evidence. You care about vibes. Vaccines are icky, governments are authoritarian, you want to live in your fairy-tale self-serving world and society be damned.
I was replying to you not under any fantasy that I would convince you otherwise. I understood pretty well from the outset what sort of rhetoric you were on about.
I replied so it was made clear for others what exactly is being discussed here.
> But if it is necessary to put up with measles
It is. I am extremely grateful that the advances in medicine in the past couple of centuries allowed me to live without having to worry about serious plagues such as measles.
Either way, you didn't disappoint me. Have a great weekend.
No one is asking you to “believe the government”. We’re asking to believe the scientific literature and the non partisan experts who decide these recommendations.
Further, these recommendations are not new. They have a track record. You can look io the number of lives they’ve saved/reduced damage to.
The people who insist that we should throw out the expert advice based on openly available scientific research and literature in favor of one person’s feelings because he happens to hold a politically powerful position are the ones asking us to trust the government blindly. Actually, not blindly, but contrary to the evidence that our eyes see.
I didn't write "belief" but "trust", which is a related but different thing. You'd be very naïve to think that the powers that be are automagically uninvolved in both the Scientific Truth^tm that trickles down to the layperson and the source research and studies (both due to funding, censorship and outright lies in some hot fields like sociology).
tl;dr: I'm ready to believe in the vaccine theory, not in the infrastructure; applied science doesn't live in a vacuum
No, they don't. Ask any health official. We just had a high schooler die of meningitis 3 months ago, this kid was a star student, everybody loved him. 3 days later, DEAD. Why? Because his parents had "thought it best" to not give him the 2-shot meningitis vaccine. Vaccines are safe and proven. We in pharma, you know the actual people doing the medicine, spend billions to test them against giant cohorts to ensure safety and efficacy. Some rando on the internet feels they know better? Sit down please, you do not. Go get a medical degree ... you do not have the expertise to be credible on this, and neither does RFK.
This comment is not 100% open and shut correct. But it is the correct 95% starting point and only worth deviating from after a significant amount of diligent work. If one doesn't understand this, then one simply has not yet appreciated how much work it takes to form even a single informed opinion.
Also, wasn't revisiting the overall advice in the context of smaller ethnic and gender subgroups one of the things that many researchers were doing before the angry mob overran and burnt down our institutions?
Is she in daycare? Does she hang out with daycare kiddos? How social are the grandparents, are they up to date on the vaccines?
Covid has an estimated R of ~1.1 this winter. Meaning that the current vaccination rates of the population in the US are not adequate to stop the spread. Everyone has a part to play in that spreading.
Current strains do not seem to be as 'bad' as they were in 2020, but that can change at any time, and is dependent on the individuals.
Look, our family lost 4 people to Covid, all of them above 60 years old. I miss them still. I miss my Grandmother in law, her voice, her humor, and even a little bit, her dementia (strange!). I miss my uncle, I miss his singing the 12 days of Christmas around the piano, his slight Geordie brogue, his passion for electronics. I wasn't that close to the other people, but their loss affects the family a lot still. All those memories, those empty seats at tables. Sorry, here, I'm just still going through things here even 4-5 years later.
This study involves American children, but a pubmed study from mid 2025 suggests that ~15% of children are now suffering from Long COVID, which would make it the most common chronic health problem in children[1]
Whites had highest hepatitithis B rate 2013-2020 at which point blacks "won" again. Every since, it is blacks first, whites seconds, asians, hispanics, native americans third.
The assumption that whites have lower Hep B rates is wrong.
No, I definitely intended to reference our foreign family. I was hoping that was clear enough from my saying "Indian" instead of Indian-American and saying "extended family" instead of us but anyway now I've clarified it.
Imagining isn’t the way to do this. There is hard data on the harm vaccines cause and the benefit provided. That’s the point of the scientific organisations US taxes fund.
Abandoning a scientific approach and using whatever this administration is doing is what was voted for I guess.
Vaccines are unpopular with many. I don’t see why the motives have to be more complicated than that.
But, I would say that trying a different approach that acknowledges how patients feel could help rebuild public trust in healthcare institutions. Taking a broader viewpoint, this could save lives.
As you increasingly mandate things that the public thinks are optional, eventually mandates in general start to look unimportant, and eventually you get less safety seat compliance.
If there are some illnesses we can handle with without universal vaccination, then including those vaccines as mandates means you’ll eventually get less compliance for high-priority vaccines too. This is what we’ve seen play out when the public distrusts medical authorities. We live in a democratic society and (not) listening goes both ways.
Every disease can be treated without a vaccine. But treatments aren't 100%, and treatments come with their own risk. Taking medicine isn't risk-free, and certainly not necessarily less risky than vaccinations. So, even if you believe it's fine to just treat the disease instead of trying to prevent it, that doesn't mean you skip out on risk. You could have more, just from the medicines alone, not even considering the effects of the disease itself.
How many deaths are acceptable to say we can "handle" an illness?
Public health requires over 95% vaccination. There has never been a realistic path to that other than requiring students to be vaccinated to attend school. Without that requirement, even well meaning parents forget or may not make it a priority.
It's not fair for kids and others vulnerable in society to die because certain parents are ignorant.
Are you prepared to jail people who don’t get covid vaccines? If not, then you understand that there are trade-offs and limitations to what public policies will actually be effective in the real world that actually exists.
Edit: added the following.
> Public health requires over 95% vaccination.
This statement, made without qualifiers, shows that you have more room to think about this. For example, we haven’t had anything like 95% immunizations for smallpox or tuberculosis for a long time, yet public health is no worse off for these reasons.
Huh? As I mentioned, it has always been a requirement for students to get vaccinated to attend school. My point still holds that if not for this requirement then we'd be below the critical threshold, whether it's 95% or slightly less.
I think the idea that changing stated recommendations based on the public opinion is a questionable strategy that can just backfire into more distrust and behavior that follows the "true" best practices even less as they look for the 'sensible position between extremes'[1].
There are a lot of examples from the response to COVID: frequent early mixed messages around the effectiveness of masks for preventing infection and transmission not based on the actual understanding of said effectiveness but in order to manage supply shortages, arguable overstatement about the one-time long-term effectiveness of the initial vaccines against infection and transmission and not just severity of disease, overemphasis on ineffective measures like hand hygiene or six-foot-distancing over effective measures like air cleaning and masking based on the perceived willingness of the public to follow them, reduction of the stated duration of contagiousness without evidence of such.
It's one thing if it's genuinely not known what the best practices are, but knowing and misleading can confuse people who are willing to follow them and can further alienate skeptics who may seek out charlatans promising them the "real, unfiltered truth".
Expert opinions are pluralistic, not a monolith, so there’s a judgement call when a policy is written. There is a spectrum of importance when you consider medical interventions. A pluralistic society, including pluralistic opinions among experts, is the norm outside of 1984. It’s just reality.
Policymakers could prioritize more or fewer vaccines, and the reasons to prioritize any particular vaccine would be expected to change over the decades.
Why the CDC isn’t prioritizing more vaccines might be seen as reckless to some. I think it’s a huge mistake that there isn’t a strep vaccine and a universal mandate for that, but it’s clearly not been historically prioritized. Strep has been known for decades to cause mental health conditions in children.
On the other hand, some infections might be better handled by vaccinating around where cases show up, a capability that is possible only now that we have electronic medical records, better tests, the information era, etc. Just-in-time logistics is a huge success story of the modern world.
Opinions of experts are important: expertise requires that opinions should change as the realities do.
An expertise that’s required of a policymaker is to maintain the effectiveness of their institutions by translating expertise into policies that are actually listened to. We have serious warning signs that public trust in healthcare is disintegrating, and that the vaccination campaigns are failing. Policies that are more focused could play out better.
Do you want public advice that is followed (useful) or public advice that is ignored (not useful)?
The ability to have the public accept advice is a capability that has unquestionably eroded. However smart an expert may be, they aren’t helping anyone if people won’t listen when they speak.
Public advice should be as complete and accurate as possible. If there's a recommendation that is unlikely to be followed, then that can be indicated along with the alternate next best suggestion. e.g. "COVID prevention is best with a complete Hazmat suit, but just a mask may provide some benefit"
The job of experts is mainly to provide information and the job of the public is to pay attention to relevant information. If the public decides to ignore advice (e.g. "no level of alcohol consumption is safe"), then that doesn't change what the advice should be.
I appreciate the nuance you’re bringing to this topic.
The child vaccinations schedule is a step further than public advice due to its role in clinical practice and social expectation setting. Policymakers have a job that stands apart from that of both the medical experts and the general public, and the child vaccinations schedule is a policy document, not simply a medical one.
Unrelated: MHRA approves self replicating mRNA Covid-19 vaccine (10 points, 5 days ago, 6 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46500392
The US requires 5-10 more vaccines for children by 5 years old than Japan does. Japan also has a much more spaced out schedule over those 5 years.
Given that the American health machine is largely driven by pharmaceutical companies, it seems likely that there is some fat that can be trimmed. Did they trim it here? Who knows.
Comparing the U.S. to Japan, or any other system for that matter, with a simple “well the vaccine schedule is different there” is simplistic and almost certainly not useful.
What is useful is to compare the U.S. with and without a certain vaccine or when delaying certain vaccines.
And we know how that plays out because all these vaccines have been added because of specific threats and actual diseases faced by Americans.
So with this approach, the US will be going the way of those developing countries.
Apart from the deaths, there will almost certainly be economic damage.
Denmark doesn't do mandatory vaccines to the same degree as they catch early development of disease and treat it when it appears, consistently across the whole population.
The US has a case for mandatory multi childhood vacination as the data shows otherwise preventable childhood diseases will spread untreated and unchecked.
If you like Japan and Denmark and want the same - get onto improving the US health system for everybody regardless of employment status.
https://www.jpeds.or.jp/uploads/files/20240220_Immunization_...
If I wanted bad takes from Reddit, I'd visit Reddit....
It's one of the reasons the anti-vax movement never made any sense to me. Flat Earth is silly, but at least it's perfectly harmless, but anti-vax?
Americans don't trust the medical system, MAGA Americans are likely to trust it less statistically due to who the opioid pandemic/over subscription issue hit (watching a potentially close family member go from productive to an addict that started on legally subscribed drugs is hard).
Quite on brand to go from "personal responsibility" and "you can always avoid bad businesses" to directly blaming someone else when something actually ends up affecting them personally.
Patients must never become consumers.
1. It just sucks at communication. Many people have been misled because marketeers lied to them "it's scientifically proven!" while scientists did nothing to fix that, because they only cared about preserving communication channels between themselves. The mistrust in science is obvious if you take this into account.
2. At the end of the day, scientists are people who have their biases and weaknesses. There have been well-documented cases of the entire scientific community doing a massive fuckup. So when now a bunch of scientists come and say "trust us bro, this time it's legit" it's reasonable to be sceptical.
Why not lose your mind over arthritis medication? Throat lozenges? Lice shampoo? Heart burn treatment?
The opposite position is also reasonable: the government should be able to compel you to take certain medical treatments in the name of improving public health. Reasonable people not blinded by ideology can accept both of those positions and handle individual cases on their merits. In the modern liberal world we've reached a consensus something like: measles vaccine OK, sterilising people with hereditary defects not OK. But people in other times and places settle on other compromises.
Note: I'm aware that this decision isn't about forcing anyone to have the vaccine, it's just "advice". But it's only one step removed from that. Public schools already withhold services from kids who don't have CDC-recommended vaccines, and we've seen various governments willing to go much further during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In capitalism, the incentive of the manufactures to maintain product quality is that people won't buy the thing if it is bad, or does not appear to work.
This cannot be cheated. You cannot "bribe" a population.
But when government mandates a product, then it changes the equation greatly against the population. Manufacture is no longer incentivized to maintain quality. If the quality is not easy to identify then it becomes much more easy.
Now, they are outside capitalism. Now they can bribe the government, and enjoy perpetual sales.
So to answer your question, if it was not mandated, there would be no push against it. Such businesses will run out of business as capitalism run its course.
Do you really think that? You can’t think of any other health choice that has zealots protesting other people’s choices?
You get anti-vax people wanting to avoid the vaccinated, removing masks from those wearing them, claiming not to hear the voice of people wearing masks.
Governments have regulatory powers. They can stipulate prices, control quality, etc and so forth. Companies can be fined for breaching regulation.
Ultimately, the government itself can even establish vaccine production to distribute among the population if necessary.
Which part of "bribe the government" didn't you understand, assuming you read my whole message?
> The government itself can even establish vaccine production to distribute among the population if necessary.
Right. Let that be done.
I read it.
I just interpreted as "government icky" rhetoric that is very common around here.
Corruption is a tool of any power structure. Gesturing vaguely towards it to invalidate any societal initiative is not an argument, it is just bad-faith whinging.
"Why build roads? The government can be bribed"
"Why trust the courts? The government can be bribed"
"Wefare? The government can be bribed"
Can you clarify which argument of mine are you referring to here?
It's pretty eye opening to me how inconsistent people can be with the right dose of propaganda.
RFK Jr for example, who shot up heroin for over 15 years and is probably at minimum doing some kind of steroids.
I mean, look at what the vax-mandatory movement got - they enraged a bunch of people, helped secure Trump II, made vaccine scepticism a mainstream and popular position which arguably handed the US health department vaccine policy to anti-vaxers. Maybe avoiding authoritarian tactics and sticking to principle would have gotten them a better outcome? Hard to see how it could be worse, to be honest. They screwed up pretty badly.
There is no herd immunity for COVID, because you can get it more than once. Vaccination only protects for a few months, and doesn't reduce spreading much. It's not a "sterilizing vaccine".
There are sterilizing vaccines for many childhood diseases. Measles, diphtheria, polio, etc. Can't get the disease at all if vaccinated. Those vaccines can almost eliminate a disease. With smallpox, this was taken past "almost" all the way to eradication. Here's a list of 14 almost forgotten diseases, eliminated by vaccination.[1] The current generation of parents has not seen most of them.
[1] https://www.healthychildren.org/English/safety-prevention/im...
We ran a natural experiment in Australia. Everyone got the vaccine, then everyone got COVID over the course of a month or two. The official numbers were high and aren't even accurate because there were too many cases to count, it got everywhere and the measurement kits ran out.
Thanks to vaccines? Yes. Multiple times in history.
Smallpox, polio, measles, mumps.
> vaccines famously had no significant impact on the rate of the spread.
That's quite a claim. I see you provided no sources.
As far as I remember, vaccines were the main reason things became safe enough to things to return to a sense of normalcy.
I mean, I am not from they US, so my actual response to this news is a vague shrug. I just hope the anti-vax bullshit is contained within US borders.
Why do I need to source anything? Nobody credible ever claimed the vaccines would slow the spread, no evidence was ever provided that vaccines slow the spread and theory suggests they probably won't slow the spread. The people making things up in defiance of the obvious are the ones who need to start providing sources on this one.
If you want to check the numbers; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Australia - we've got 22 million vaccinated people on a population of around 25 million in 2021. We see ~12 million confirmed COVID cases and in the immediate post-lockdown period the testing system crumbled under load. Do the math. An exponential process that everyone was exposed to was downgraded to ... still an exponentially growing process that everyone was exposed to. Maybe it spread the pandemic phase out to 2 months instead of 1 (based on my memory of watching the stats at the time).
The vaccine didn't cut down on the number of infections. It was strictly personal protection. Members of my family regularly get COVID.
but only 5,025 and 19,265 deaths.
Vaccination slowed the spread of the primary varients and reduced the health impacts on those that tested positive for COVID by preloading the immune response.
The people arguing that collective action knows best once again blew their credibility with COVID, making up the theory about herd immunity was a big shot in the arm for the anti-vax movement. And as you can guess I'd rather side with the anti-vaxers, they're better friends than the authoritarians.
How much polio or small pox have you seen?
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".
I sourced my claims: smallpox, polio, measles, mumps.
You offered vibes instead of sources.
1. That isn't what sourcing a claim means. It means to provide sources for why your claims are true; or at least where you heard the claim first. Picking specific examples is helpful, but it isn't providing a source.
And despite those examples, I still catch an infections disease ... basically annually.
2. I suppose I assumed it was going to be made obvious by context, but I don't care about smallpox, polio, measles or mumps and I'm not talking about them. Nobody forced me to do anything in relation to them, nobody threatened my livelihood over them and I don't feel at any risk of being forbidden from leaving my house because of them. It is a good point but I didn't intend to talk about it - it stands alone as a point and beyond that I don't care. Since you bought it up more then once you get this paragraph. But if it is necessary to put up with measles to put the authoritarians in a box? So be it. The anti-vaxers are the lesser of two evils, they're minnows compared to the sharks who were showing their colours through COVID; we're lucky that episode only lasted long enough for the authoritarians to do terrible economic damage.
Absolutely is. Those are examples of serious, deadly, infectious plagues that were either eradicated or seriously contained by vaccines.
> but I don't care about smallpox, polio, measles or mumps and I'm not talking about them.
I know you don't care about evidence. You care about vibes. Vaccines are icky, governments are authoritarian, you want to live in your fairy-tale self-serving world and society be damned.
I was replying to you not under any fantasy that I would convince you otherwise. I understood pretty well from the outset what sort of rhetoric you were on about.
I replied so it was made clear for others what exactly is being discussed here.
> But if it is necessary to put up with measles
It is. I am extremely grateful that the advances in medicine in the past couple of centuries allowed me to live without having to worry about serious plagues such as measles.
Either way, you didn't disappoint me. Have a great weekend.
Further, these recommendations are not new. They have a track record. You can look io the number of lives they’ve saved/reduced damage to.
The people who insist that we should throw out the expert advice based on openly available scientific research and literature in favor of one person’s feelings because he happens to hold a politically powerful position are the ones asking us to trust the government blindly. Actually, not blindly, but contrary to the evidence that our eyes see.
tl;dr: I'm ready to believe in the vaccine theory, not in the infrastructure; applied science doesn't live in a vacuum
The sad part is that the overall participation or lack of it impacts everyone, including the vaccinated, those with health problems and so on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity?wprov=sfti1#
Also, wasn't revisiting the overall advice in the context of smaller ethnic and gender subgroups one of the things that many researchers were doing before the angry mob overran and burnt down our institutions?
Covid has an estimated R of ~1.1 this winter. Meaning that the current vaccination rates of the population in the US are not adequate to stop the spread. Everyone has a part to play in that spreading.
Current strains do not seem to be as 'bad' as they were in 2020, but that can change at any time, and is dependent on the individuals.
Look, our family lost 4 people to Covid, all of them above 60 years old. I miss them still. I miss my Grandmother in law, her voice, her humor, and even a little bit, her dementia (strange!). I miss my uncle, I miss his singing the 12 days of Christmas around the piano, his slight Geordie brogue, his passion for electronics. I wasn't that close to the other people, but their loss affects the family a lot still. All those memories, those empty seats at tables. Sorry, here, I'm just still going through things here even 4-5 years later.
This study involves American children, but a pubmed study from mid 2025 suggests that ~15% of children are now suffering from Long COVID, which would make it the most common chronic health problem in children[1]
[1]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40554463/
Whites had highest hepatitithis B rate 2013-2020 at which point blacks "won" again. Every since, it is blacks first, whites seconds, asians, hispanics, native americans third.
The assumption that whites have lower Hep B rates is wrong.
OP just simply assumed the white majority must have low hep B rates.
Abandoning a scientific approach and using whatever this administration is doing is what was voted for I guess.
But, I would say that trying a different approach that acknowledges how patients feel could help rebuild public trust in healthcare institutions. Taking a broader viewpoint, this could save lives.
If there are some illnesses we can handle with without universal vaccination, then including those vaccines as mandates means you’ll eventually get less compliance for high-priority vaccines too. This is what we’ve seen play out when the public distrusts medical authorities. We live in a democratic society and (not) listening goes both ways.
Public health requires over 95% vaccination. There has never been a realistic path to that other than requiring students to be vaccinated to attend school. Without that requirement, even well meaning parents forget or may not make it a priority.
It's not fair for kids and others vulnerable in society to die because certain parents are ignorant.
Edit: added the following.
> Public health requires over 95% vaccination.
This statement, made without qualifiers, shows that you have more room to think about this. For example, we haven’t had anything like 95% immunizations for smallpox or tuberculosis for a long time, yet public health is no worse off for these reasons.
There are a lot of examples from the response to COVID: frequent early mixed messages around the effectiveness of masks for preventing infection and transmission not based on the actual understanding of said effectiveness but in order to manage supply shortages, arguable overstatement about the one-time long-term effectiveness of the initial vaccines against infection and transmission and not just severity of disease, overemphasis on ineffective measures like hand hygiene or six-foot-distancing over effective measures like air cleaning and masking based on the perceived willingness of the public to follow them, reduction of the stated duration of contagiousness without evidence of such.
It's one thing if it's genuinely not known what the best practices are, but knowing and misleading can confuse people who are willing to follow them and can further alienate skeptics who may seek out charlatans promising them the "real, unfiltered truth".
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation
Policymakers could prioritize more or fewer vaccines, and the reasons to prioritize any particular vaccine would be expected to change over the decades.
Why the CDC isn’t prioritizing more vaccines might be seen as reckless to some. I think it’s a huge mistake that there isn’t a strep vaccine and a universal mandate for that, but it’s clearly not been historically prioritized. Strep has been known for decades to cause mental health conditions in children.
On the other hand, some infections might be better handled by vaccinating around where cases show up, a capability that is possible only now that we have electronic medical records, better tests, the information era, etc. Just-in-time logistics is a huge success story of the modern world.
Opinions of experts are important: expertise requires that opinions should change as the realities do.
An expertise that’s required of a policymaker is to maintain the effectiveness of their institutions by translating expertise into policies that are actually listened to. We have serious warning signs that public trust in healthcare is disintegrating, and that the vaccination campaigns are failing. Policies that are more focused could play out better.
He wanted to make them unpopular, partially succeeded and now is trying to remove them.
The ability to have the public accept advice is a capability that has unquestionably eroded. However smart an expert may be, they aren’t helping anyone if people won’t listen when they speak.
The job of experts is mainly to provide information and the job of the public is to pay attention to relevant information. If the public decides to ignore advice (e.g. "no level of alcohol consumption is safe"), then that doesn't change what the advice should be.
The child vaccinations schedule is a step further than public advice due to its role in clinical practice and social expectation setting. Policymakers have a job that stands apart from that of both the medical experts and the general public, and the child vaccinations schedule is a policy document, not simply a medical one.