look.
I keep hearing about vaccination.
If you’re not smart enough to vaccinate, you’re a moron. If you think the government ought to force people to vaccinate, you’re a moron.
The moment the government has power to force you to do something, they abuse it. They’d make some damned anti violence vaccine and turn us all into reavers because nobody in fedgov understands unintended consequences. Witness gloebull warmening.
On the gripping hand, we need to know exactly why there is a percentage of people on whom the vaccines dont work. A 98% success rate, in say brake jobs, means you get rear ended once a week by someone. Surely we can get vaccines as effective as the high school dropout at Midas.
19 comments Og | Uncategorized
Case in point: They forced us all to buy health insurance, and look at the unintended consequences of that.
Many of which were undoubtedly planned all along.
Prezactly.
Well said Og.
And Nathan: those who remain resistant to your final observation are morons too.
But what you’re saying flies int he face of that great medical expert, Jenny McCarthy. Why anyone takes medical advice from someone whose claim to fame is willingness to remove her clothes and be photographed is beyond me.
I wasn’t vaccinated, but when I was born in 1963 many vaccines were still new. As the youngest of six children (and 12 years younger than my next-oldest sibling), my parents had the idea that “childhood diseases” were just something kids got, so I had measles, rubella, whooping cough, mumps and chickenpox. Can’t say it did me any harm, but if I had kids they’d be vaccinated because (a) they’re NOT new anymore and (b) the potential effects of the diseases are worse than the anecdotal issues with the vaccines. I’ll also note that, while I didn’t get vaccinated for “childhood diseases”, I DID get vaccinated for smallpox and polio, my parents saw the effects of those two growing up and made sure I wasn’t going to have THAT problem.
Regrettably, while vaccines are good, the temptations to lie about them to make them look better are apparently too strong for some. I’m absolutely not anti-vaccination, I’m just extremely pro-truth.
There have been reports this year’s flu shot is about 30% effective. It’s always a gamble which flu strains will be dominant, so you have to figure they’ll be wrong sometimes. Sharyl Attkisson reported that flu vaccines aren’t as effective in older folks as in younger – although they always emphasize us old guys should get them. I’ll get a shot anyway. I’d rather avoid the flu if at all possible and the only side effect I’ve ever had from the shot was a sore shoulder. It’s worth the gamble.
Last month, a whistleblower at the CDC said they actually did have evidence of linkage between MMR vaccine and autism in blacks, but covered it up.
I don’t have enough hard data to say if they were reasonable to cover it up. If the risk of bad complications from M,M, or R are several orders of magnitude higher than the risk in that link, it might be reasonable to dismiss the study. I can also see people who are innumerate not being able to understand that.
Like MarkD, I had measles, mumps and rubella as a kid. It was just part of growing up. I remember the first vaccinations for polio and still have a smallpox vax scar on my shoulder.
Surely we can get vaccines as effective as the high school dropout at Midas.
Sure, in principle, given another hundred or three years of work on it with all the resources we can spare.
Turns out human beings are … I don’t even know how many orders of magnitude more complicated than a hydraulic brake system that’s meant to be trivially easy to service.
Also, the brake systems aren’t trying to mutate into a failure state while you work on them.
Well, usually.
Really? Only a small percentage of people arent protected by that immunization and its going to take years and millions to figure out why? I guess in medecine good enough is fine. In realworldland,99% is failure.
There’s always a percentage — a tiny percentage — of people who have an adverse reaction to a vaccine. There’s no 100% guarantee on anything medical. The deal is that there’s so many more helped than hurt that it’s deemed the greater good to try to wipe out these diseases, even if there’s the occasional “oopses.” That’s no consolation to the parents of a child harmed but there’s so many children and adults harmed by not administering these vaccines.
While most children would probably sail through the “childhood diseases” with little or no permanent effect, the bigger deal is how they affect adults. Adult onset measles can be a killer; adult onset mumps makes men sterile. Most adults who come down with these diseases wind up being hospitalized.
And some children end up with adverse effects — rubella can cause deafness, for example. It’s a big enough deal that vaccinnating people is majorly in the public interest.
I understand some skepticism might be in order, but I’m from that generation that had parents that feared polio so much that they pushed hard for us to be first in line for the vaccine. Heck, I wound up getting the polio vaccine twice — once in sugar cube form and a few years later as a shot. My folks were taking no chances. They were determined that I might have something but it damn sure was not going to be polio. They did this knowing it was a mostly untested vaccine — especially those sugar cubes. They were willing to take that risk because polio sucks so hard.
(BTW, I greatly admire my mother: She lied through having five children under the age of ten go through measles, mumps, and chicken pox in one awful winter. That’s some incredible suffering all in one season, and she hung in there for all of it. It was literally months of sick children.)
The government does a lot of things in the name of social engineering. Some of it is like that old Star Trek meme: “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few … or the one.” No, I’m not advocating Marxism by quoting that, but public health is one of those “for the many” situations where there is overwhelming benefit to larger numbers.
Jenny
lied = lived. Sorry about that.
Outside of medicine, people meticulously examine failures and prevent their recurrence. There is obviously a reason people have issues with vax, and studying what makes them different is all that it takes to find out what. I remember the study they did on me when it turned out my measles shot turned out to be worthless and i got the measles anyway. Wait, no i dont, because that never happened. I got the vaccine, years later got the measles anyway, and no followup, and i would bet the farm this is usually how it happens. Once the clinical trial is over, if it doesnt help you,Well tough shit elliot. Someone please show me that it happens differently. Ill just listen to these crickets chirping in the meantime.
Born in 1963 and didn’t get vaccinated? Because they were just things kids got?
I was born in 195mumble and you can bet I got (read, “my parents got me”) every vaccination that was available. Couldn’t have gone to school without some of them. The only thing I came down with was chickenpox (and of course there was no vaccine for that). I didn’t even get the mumps, even though my sister did, and I later got the oral vaccine for that when it became available.
Shoot, I just got a pertussis booster because of the new grandson, because (surprise!) whooping cough has made an “unexpected” return.
Jenny McCarthy should be killed twice.
Having received my uterine eviction notice sometime in 1955, as with the folks above, I got the polio (oral and vax) when it was available. Even so, my brother had a very very mild case of polio…it screwed up his (left I believe) leg a bit, but with an operation or two, and some physical therapy he ended up physically fine.
And yes, all three of us went through the chicken pox , measles, german measles, and mumps. In my case, I only contracted mumps, as a child, on one side…so guess what happened to me in my early thirties….yeppers, caught it on the other side.
Are all vaccinations the greatest thing since sliced bread, I would have to say yes. Okay, the yearly flu shot sensationalism gets rather old, and I haven’t had one of those since I left the service (and subsequently never got the flu after that either…go figure…I’m an outlayer…but all my kids got their shots when needed (both the genetic hostages and the ones inherited from Deb), and any and all vaccinations have had no bearing on their current mental/physical state(s) of being…now the sensory deprivation (no PlayStation/Xbox cause they were grounded), or being forced required to eat liver on occasion, cause their mom loves it, and listening to their dad’s puns and other abuses of the English language … well that is another story altogether.
Vaccines good. Death by diseases bad.
That is pretty much it. Minted in 55 and still kicking.
Looks like you can tell people’s sell-by dates by vaccine. Or at least you can here.
We’re all certified old farts … and none of us have polio.
Og, to answer your question about the measles vaccine, you may well have already been infected before you got the shot. Or maybe you were the kid that got saline instead of the shot because somebody got careless. Or you actuallly GOT the measles from the shot; just your luck/your immune system.
I got to ask: those of you who had chicken pox, how many of you had the shingles shot? Having seen some of my family members through shingles, I’d consider it. (Not covered under my current health plan.)
And the older you get, the better idea Pneumovax is.
Jenny
Possible, Jenny. My point is the powers that be never followed up.
I haven’t had the shingles shot because I’m not 60 yet. But I’ll for damn sure get it then. I’ve known people who had shingles and I don’t want to be one of them.
With chronic bronchitis, I imagine it’s only a matter of time before the doc says I need Pneumovax, too. Dad got it every year with his flu shot, but he’d had pneumonia back in the ’70’s.
In realworldland, we’re working with machines we designed, doing tasks we spec’d them for, and can change the design until they work how we want.
Or give up, if the materials science simply can’t do the job yet, or at a price we’re willing to pay.
(Also, note: In realworldland is also rocketry, where a 99% success rate is “pretty damned good”, not failure.)
The human body, on the level of the immune system, is not a machine we designed – it’s an interconnected system of systems we barely understand in any detail, all of which mutually interact in ways we barely have any idea how to predict.
I assure you that medical science is working on it.
It’s just really, really, stupidly hard.
Great thinking, and typically, wrong. If a vaccine doesnt take there will be a reason why, and someone with some intellectual resource can figure out why. Humans are only one species, the genome has been mapped, and it is only necesary to look at failures. Except medicine is not run by people who give a shit.
“Except medicine is not run by people who give a shit.”
Au contraire mon ami. Ever since the CDC formed the level they give a shit is what the Control in their name means, and it’s not how you and I mean. In fact, the meaning of failure and 99% can be pretty grim.