Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Leafsnail]

The second graph is the same as the first one only zoomed out a bit more, how does it demonstrate that extending a temporary linear trend forever is valid?  In fact I'd say it looks like the rate of decrease in measles deaths had dramatically reduced by the time the vaccine was introduced.  Seriously, if you tried to fit a linear trendline to the data up to 1940 you'd expect to see the natural eradication of measles in 1955 or so.

[GavJ]

. . .
Could I ask where these ideas of not having vaccines benefiting you stemmed from? As in, direct causes.
Because I'm very against the [perceived essence] of this thread as it is.

It comes from being a professional life sciences researcher for the last 10 years, and just reading and being exposed to various vaccine articles and discussions on facebook and the like from friends and media, and realizing that there is for some reason this crazy amount of fetishism on one side and paranoia on the other, and NOBODY seems to be even attempting to apply reasonable science anywhere on a normal basis.

The way this discourse has been playing out in recent years is in every way in direct contradiction to my training as a researcher Not the outcomes/conclusions, just the methods and attitudes. The comment that youre fundamentally "against" the "essence" of a thread that is trying to apply objective math and reasoning seemingly prior to even considering the content would being a prime example, if I'm reading that correctly.

I have become more and more perplexed and concerned and then bordering on pissed off about how ridiculously it's been handled, over time.

The second graph is the same as the first one only zoomed out a bit more, how does it demonstrate that extending a temporary linear trend forever is valid?  In fact I'd say it looks like the rate of decrease in measles deaths had dramatically reduced by the time the vaccine was introduced.  Seriously, if you tried to fit a linear trendline to the data up to 1940 you'd expect to see the natural eradication of measles in 1955 or so.

Sure, I put that together in like 5 minutes. If you have more time and inclination, go ahead and plot some points and solve for the more likely exponential equation, be my guest. It will still end up predicting at some point an absurdly low incidence, even if it's in 2136 instead of 2005, and either way, long before 2014 you'll have a line way below 1960s levels and way above the rate at which we have so far established vaccine complications at or below, which is all that matters.

[Leafsnail]

Ok you seem to have once again ignored the actual main point I was making in favour of a  minor one, so this time I will state nothing but my main point in block capitals.

YOU CANNOT ASSUME THAT ANY TREND, LINEAR OR OTHERWISE, WILL CONTINUE FOREVER

IT IS LIKELY THAT THERE'S A LIMIT TO HOW MUCH IMPROVED SANITATION AND HEALTHCARE WILL REDUCE MEASLES DEATHS, THAT'S WHY WE STILL HAVE THEM WHENEVER AN OUTBREAK OCCURS

[Tiruin]

-snip-

The basis is...?
Because there's an ethical [law? Unsure of the term but its a universal belief] in medicine--even before anyone practicing it--that they are entrusted in knowledge more than the masses due to the complex nature of medical work. Vaccines are tried and tested...objects, hence that.

What is the direct cause here? There is some controversy in the efficiency of vaccines? What 'ridiculously handled' is there?
There's a reason behind everything and I can't grasp what exactly it is in the last 50 or so replies in this thread.

Sorry for bad semantics. Words aren't working right today here.

[dwarf_reform]

WARNING: the following post is laden with hard facts and correct numbers. That, or is generally not worth reading. One of those!

The last time I got a flu shot was the last time I got the flu*, in 1997.. Also, since 1997, I've quit hanging around large groups of people and only go out to town once or twice a week, so my overall exposure to others is low enough that I pass on the flu shot

And my aunt had no feeling in her legs from lack of a polio vaccine.. I'm also a carrier of HPV, which happened a year or three before the vaccine was available :> I think the entire thing is a gray area, and is generally optional (though a barrage of shots are required to be allowed to go to public school, at the moment I've got a tetanus shot appointment to set up within the next 30 days or the kiddo shall be booted from school..), though the benefit generally outweighs the danger, at least on a global scale.. Overall vaccines in general would have to cause a lot of death and/or tragedy to over-run the good they've done, regardless of the idiotic commercialized approach they're taking..
 
*Your results may vary!

[GavJ]

YOU CANNOT ASSUME THAT ANY TREND, LINEAR OR OTHERWISE, WILL CONTINUE FOREVER

No, this IS a minor point, because as I pointed out, it's entirely unnecessary and tangential.

It is important to keep in mind that my math in the opening post is based on 1960 death rates extrapolated, as if they flatlined perfectly horizontally.

That's where I got 1/60,000,000 from.  ANY amount below that in death rates (since they went down faster than infection rates), whether linear or a more likely exponential curve or whatever, is only going to make it even further out of reach. How much so? Dunno, maybe 1/70,000,000 maybe 1/120,000,000 who knows. But all still impossibly tiny numbers that prove the main point just as well.

In other words, it matters not a whit whether that linear trend I drew in my one post would actually happen or not. Even if you make it horizontal, the conclusion is still that we have a vanishingly small fraction of the data we would need to know whether vaccines help us more or hurt us more, either way, here and now.

It was only an off the cuff mini side conversation that was somewhat interesting to muse about. If you don't buy the predictions, then don't buy them, okay. Back to regularly scheduled programming.

What is the direct cause here? There is some controversy in the efficiency of vaccines? What 'ridiculously handled' is there?

A few examples:
1) Just the rabid push for vaccinating anyone and everyone to completely irresponsible levels without any thought of logic. I have a friend for instance who had an allergic reaction to vaccines twice in a row as a kid. Nothing hugely major, but like many allergic situations, every exposure generally gets worse, so if she got another one might actually be serious. Yet still every time she goes to any doctor's appointment in the fall, they look at her chart, which clearly says "contraindicated immunizations" and then ask her "Have you gotten your flu shot? Would you like to get one?" She says "um no, you told me years ago it might kill me" and the doctors go "Yes we know. We wouldn't actually give you one, but we are required by blanket, no-exceptions hospital policy to ask anyway no matter what" wtf is that about?

2) The degree of flaming and blind hatred that spews out of everybody in most communities (ones not as cool as bay12, which is why I posted this here!) as soon as anybody mentions anything about this. For instance, I actually got banned from "I fucking love science"s facebook page for posting absolutely nothing other than a solitary link to VAERS with no comment in direct response to somebody in a comment thread asking whether there was any organization that kept track of vaccine outcomes. I had not previously engaged in any conversations about it at all on that page. Lol?

3) I've seriously had a internist medical doctor walk into a routine physical of mine, in November, with bloodshot eyes and a runny nose and a hacking cough, sneeze on a tongue depressor, then ask me to open my mouth. And when I was like "hell no! What the eff?" (in more polite terms) and he said, and I quote "No it's fine, don't worry, I've had my flu shot." (which is on average 65-ish% effective according to the CDC for those of you out there who don't know)...

4) Have heard at least 2-3 friends of mine refer to vaccines in general as "force field" or "repellant bubbles" etc.

Just shit like that.  My motivations are anecdotal, obviously, and I'm not suggesting you use the above things as evidence for any actual conclusions. Merely responding to the question about original motivation for getting interested in it and researching it.

[Leafsnail]

I'm honestly kindof baffled then because you're making a claim that's very clearly contradicted by your own graphs.  According to your first graph there were ~400 measles deaths per year (I'm getting 500 from other sources, but let's take your figure) before mass vaccination started.  The US had around 190 million people in it at that time, so that's a rate of about 1/500,000 (and that's rounding generously) rather than this 1/60,000,000 number you've pulled out of nowhere.  I feel quite confident in saying that no, the measles vaccine (or even the MMR vaccine as a whole) does not have a fatality rate of anything close to that (severe allergic reactions are already a 1/1,000,000 event, and deaths are so rare that it's virtually impossible to measure the chance).

[Leafsnail]

And this isn't even getting into the fact that if we stay the course and eliminate measles then both the harms from measles and the harms from the vaccine will be zero forevermore, as with smallpox.  Don't you think that's a very desirable outcome?

[BFEL]

YOU CANNOT ASSUME THAT ANY TREND, LINEAR OR OTHERWISE, WILL CONTINUE FOREVER

No, this IS a minor point, because as I pointed out, it's entirely unnecessary and tangential.

Basic logic is "unnecessary and tangential"?
WHUT

[GavJ]

I'm honestly kindof baffled then because you're making a claim that's very clearly contradicted by your own graphs.  According to your first graph there were ~400 measles deaths per year (I'm getting 500 from other sources, but let's take your figure) before mass vaccination started.  The US had around 190 million people in it at that time, so that's a rate of about 1/500,000 (and that's rounding generously) rather than this 1/60,000,000 number you've pulled out of nowhere.  I feel quite confident in saying that no, the measles vaccine (or even the MMR vaccine as a whole) has a death rate that is absolutely nowhere near that level (severe allergic reactions are already a 1/1,000,000 event, and deaths are so rare that it's virtually impossible to measure the chance).

Ah, well this is just a simple miscommunication then.

Nowhere do I suggest ceasing vaccination for all of America. What I did say was that if we were omniscient, the likely optimal strategy would probably in fact be something middling value like 20% or 40% or 60% vaccination or who knows, depending on where the exact risk value falls for a given vaccine.  Here, I'll post the graph again:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

We don't know where the red bar actually lies. It's unlikely to be at that top position (this is what both your and my math regarding 1960s numbers shows us). However, it also seems very unlikey to be at the bottom position (which would be even less than 1/60,000,000 vaccine death complications).

It's probably in reality somewhere in the middle, intersecting with the benefit curve (which slopes due to herd immunity effects). Wherever it is, the intersection point would be the optimal vaccination rate, which is probably neither 0% nor 100%.



Note that, if vaccines improved in safety in the future, the red line would drop, and optimal rate would increase. At the same time, if medical care improves (nearly perfect and trivially cheap non-invasive fever control technology, for example, or just common viral cures), then the blue line would drop, and the optimal rate would decrease.

[LordBucket]

The problem, GavJ, is that people overall are not very smart. "Vaccines good" and "vaccines bad" are concepts they can internalize. "Vaccines can be an overall net benefit in many cases, therefore it's probably a good idea to use them in those cases but they can also have side effects and sometimes the side effects are worse than the problem they're supposed to fix, so maybe vaccinating against every little thing every time all the time isn't a good idea let's be more selective" is more than some people can handle.

[Leafsnail]

So we're back to my original rebuttal to Section 5.

Section 5 is seriously hurting my brain.  As far as I can tell your argument runs:
- It may be that the optional vaccination level is not 100%
- I can't be bothered to do any research or calculations to work out what this level is
- Therefore herd immunity doesn't exist

You're aware that there's a critical threshold of vaccination coverage that prevents outbreaks, right?  Like, let's imagine you have a disease that (on average) is spread to 20 new people per carrier.  If over 95% of the population is vaccination then on average you'll have less than one infection resulting from that disease, and it will burn out quickly.  If you have less coverage than that then the number of people infected will grow exponentially, you'll get major outbreaks and a lot of people will die.

Since this threshold is generally pretty high "vaccinate everyone that can be vaccinated" is generally a safe bet.

I would further add that in order to eliminate measles (and thus eliminate all harms associated with both the disease and the vaccine forever) we need to first get as close to 100% vaccination levels as possible.

[GavJ]

And this isn't even getting into the fact that if we stay the course and eliminate measles then both the harms from measles and the harms from the vaccine will be zero forevermore, as with smallpox.  Don't you think that's a very desirable outcome?

Totally depends. Right now in the United States, it is reasonable to predict about 1 death from measles per 20 years, total. And we are WAY below endemic levels.

Since all you really need to do is have everybody in the world below endemic levels for a pretty rapid eradication, we may be overdoing it, yet not really helping out the world any more than we would be otherwise.

It all depends on the death rate from vaccination, which we don't know. I strongly suspect it's higher than 1 per 20 years though. If so, then we would want to scale back to some lower level of vaccination (not 0%! Likely not even close to 0%!), as long as it is simultaneously above the risk/benefit equilibrium AND well below endemic rates.

So yeah, that's actually a good addendum to the theory, I admit.  We should seek to achieve EITHER equilibrium risk/benefit, OR some safety buffer below endemic levels, whichever one = a higher vaccination rate out of those two considerations. In order to save the most lives while we wait for other areas of the world like Africa to catch up and the disease to go bye bye.

^

But that's just the strategy for dreamy omniscience world. I have no idea what we should do in the real world where we simply don't know enough.  I guess my real world call to action is:

Mainly I just want people to stop spitting hatred at each other in this country over things that have no actual obvious right answer

[Cthulhu]

Personally I disagree with the American notion that an individual has the right to make personal decisions that jeopardize the group as a whole.  As George Costanza says, we live in a society, or at least we purport to. 

I think the wants of an individual are subordinate to the needs of the group he's in.  If you don't want to pay that price you can leave society and go play Rambo in the woods with the other rugged individualists.

[BFEL]

Mainly I just want people to stop spitting hatred at each other in this country over things that have no actual obvious right answer

"Vaccines can be an overall net benefit in many cases, therefore it's probably a good idea to use them in those cases but they can also have side effects and sometimes the side effects are worse than the problem they're supposed to fix, so maybe vaccinating against every little thing every time all the time isn't a good idea let's be more selective"

Its not that there aren't "actual obvious right answers" its that some people can't digest the obvious right answer and vomit up whatever they manage to take from it. And then other people eat that vomit.

Personally I disagree with the American notion that an individual has the right to make personal decisions that jeopardize the group as a whole.  As George Costanza says, we live in a society, or at least we purport to. 

I think the wants of an individual are subordinate to the needs of the group he's in.  If you don't want to pay that price you can leave society and go play Rambo in the woods with the other rugged individualists.

So Hitler was right then?
And no we can't really "go play Rambo in the woods" because those societies already claimed those woods. ALL the woods. And want people to pay for the pleasure of breathing air from those woods.