This is wrong, due to anti-vaxers the vaccination rate has dropped and measles is enjoying a resurgence in the US once again.
No actually i just looked up the up to date numbers earlier tonight and calculated this brand new spanking fresh. It is 100 cases per year for the last 10 years on average (which to my eye looked an appropriate range due to high variability year to year).
If you're gonna trust NBC in their choice of dramatic terms like "surge" without actually looking up the real numbers, then you need to work on your media consumption habits, IMO. I'd be surprised if I could get through any network news story without hearing "resurge" "explosion" "plague" etc. at least 10 times, even if it were about stuffed animals.
As they point out, the number so far is 129 in the US, which is a modest difference from recent years and well within the variance rate from recently.
We don't know the death rate from vaccination because it is so incredibly fucking small.
Just like the death rate from measles.
Even at 1960's death rates for those with the disease, 100 people recent average = about 1 death per 20 years, just like I said. That is "incredibly fucking small"
By comparison, the number of people mauled to death by cougars is about 10x higher http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_cougar_attacks_in_North_America(Curiously though I don't see anybody flipping out online about how we need to make a "strong push" in this country to eliminate the looming cougar threat)
And again I'm pointing out that the necessary rate of vaccination for herd immunity is a matter of epidemiology, not some kind of unsolvable cosmic mystery.
I agree. The exact shape and size of the blue curve in my graph is probably entirely solvable by epidemiologists, if they chose to do so. What is not known is the red line, and you need both to determine an optimal policy.
Measles is a very contagious disease and it's thought that a population needs to have over 95% coverage in order to prevent outbreaks
Preventing outbreaks =/= preventing endemic self-sustainability.
The outbreaks are fueled by imported carriers from other endemic countries, and if/when all countries are below endemic rates at once, it should die out. That's the threshold that matters long term, not just "any outbreaks ever"
Also, please note that
I at no point suggested our vaccination rate is currently too high. I said it MIGHT be too high, depending on information nobody knows. It MIGHT also be too low. "We do not have the data" is in no way the same thing as "omg stop vaccinating!"
So in other words more people in the US need to be vaccinated to prevent outbreaks like the ones that are currently happening (which will get worse if people continue to not vaccinate their children).
Yes, if "stopping all outbreaks" was the correct goal.
But it isn't the correct goal. The correct goal is "minimizing total number of deaths."
If eliminating an outbreak that has a 5% chance of killing a single person or something would require enough extra vaccinations that you would kill 3 people with them, then vaccinating more would be the incorrect choice in that situation. It would save more lives in that example to intentionally allow that level of outbreaks to continue occurring, or in fact to even slightly lower vaccinations until the number of deaths from either choice is equally low.
I have no idea if that's actually the case, versus whether the vaccines have a lower chance currently of killing than the outbreak. Neither do you. That's the point. Nobody does.
You've done nothing to demonstrate that it's "impossible to know", you've only shown that you don't know the science required to calculate the critical coverage level and can't be bothered to look it up.
I know how to look it up. But since it's not the number the matters, I have no reason to. I don't think this term means what you think it means.