What I tried to explain is that 100% vaccination is better than randomly vaccinate people until the "optimal" percentage is reached. Take a hypothetical case of a disease with a vaccine. 10 people at risk of contracting the disease want to get vaccinated, but data shows that 10% of the people vaccinated suffer a worse reaction than the disease itself. The optimal range would be 90%, right? But the person who is going to suffer the reaction isn't random, it depends on its personal factors. So if you vaccinate 9 people and leave 1 without vaccinating, and you don't know which person is the one to suffer the reaction, there's a 90% chance that you leave without vaccinating a person who doesn't suffer a reaction and gets the disease, and the reactive person gets vaccinated and suffers the reaction. That's 2 people who get affected. If you do 100% vaccination the reactive person is sure to have a reaction, but it's the only one to be affected. (This of course assuming that disease infects all of them and vaccine has 100% effectivity.)
You're treating disease as a fixed, constant situation. It's not, diseases are dynamic and non-linear, due to herd immunity, so you can't make that assumption that disease affects all of the remainder. Which is actually the reason why optimal rates can be between 0 and 100%
See the graph in the spoiler in my first post in the thread. As vaccination rates change, the benefit of vaccination changes non-linearly. This creates 3 possible scenarios:
1) The vaccine is riskier than the disease at any level of vaccination - 0% is optimal vaccine coverage.
2) The vaccine is safer than the disease at any level of vaccination - 100% is optimal vaccine coverage
3) The vaccine risk is in the middle of the non-linear curve - somewhere in between 0% and 100% is optimal.
So yes 100% optimal rate is possible, but without more data, there's no reason to think it's any more likely than a 90% or 95% or 85% or whatever.
Vaccination seriously isn't optional for your children. Yourself, fine, go ahead and make that stupid decision and put yourself and people who can't get vaccinated in jeopardy.
This assumes out of hand that not vaccinating is a "stupid decision" and the entire point of the thread is demonstrating why we don't actually know that...
The content of your post is therefore equivalent to just writing "nope." And okay, fine, you disagree, but please justify why for more interesting discussion.
Also, this is a really utilitarian perspective on vaccination, which, as with most utilitarian arguments, is complete bollocks because it uses arbitrary statistics with no regard to other factors or considerations.
I said in my very first post in the thread that there are ethical concerns about treating vaccination as a utilitarian problem. And I have consistently considered and promoted other concepts like deontological protection of bodily integrity. I'm not sure how you're interpreting my posts as the opposite of that. I did CONSIDER the pure utilitarian math for sake of discussion, but that does not necessarily mean I endorse the ethics of the approach of using societal benefit over personal benefit (again, as laid out in the first post)
Gavj, I disagree with you
Except you DIDN'T disagree with me. I laid out a method of math. What I'm advocating is not some blanket conclusion about "raise vaccination!" or "lower vaccination!" What I'm advocating is an algorithm.
Which you followed, more or less. I.e. you agree with me.
The fact that the result of the algorithm for flu is different than for measles is not surprising. Flu vaccines make more sense than measles vaccines, I am quite happy to admit that. WAY more people die of the flu, and the vaccine coverage is MUCH lower (and thus much easier to infer a valence to whether to increase or not with less data), AND there's a lot more data about the most important strains, because a lot more version of vaccines have been developed for them and close cousin strains.
There are a bunch of problems with a study like that one you posted, but I don't want to get into tedious arguments about them, because I think in THIS case, for flu, the data is sufficient despite those problems to verify that we are helping people with our current vaccination rates (and they they could probably rise quite a good amount and still be data-supported)