50,000 Americans die of influenza every year, and that number would be damn near 0 if everybody got their fucking flu shots. Imagine what a pile of 50,000 corpses looks like, every year.
Hold on a sec, I thought that due to mutation rate the flu vaccine was decent but not as good/reliable as other vaccination options? Honest question. I am admittedly a person that often doesn't bother paying for the flu shot every year (but otherwise have all my shots). Important enough for me to get off my tush and actually make it a habit now that I have passable medical insurance?
It's not as good (though we may be changing that with new attempts to target the more basic and unchanging mechanisms of influenza RNA), but it still spreads based on the number of people who are infected. If you had to get the yearly flu shot to go to school, keep your job, or do anything traceable and public, the death toll would be truncated.
It's not a full solution, but I am of the general opinion that reductions in deaths by the hundreds or thousands is pretty much always worth while.
The only skepticism I have cast at vaccines is to point out that severe harmful effects have been known to occur, and given an example with evidence to back it up. That's it. So yes, it does fit my arguments up to this point.
"Severe"
You ever wonder why the worst thing that can you can
maybe link to vaccines is a
chance of triggering a
preexisting tendency to develop
narcolepsy (a nonfatal, nonpainful, and treatable condition)? It's because they test vaccines for everything severe they can think of before even releasing them to test groups, then using that information to base on whether or not it is safe for the public. Literal years are spent on this process.
I think they might have it under control.
I believe this as well. They are much better, and have done an incredible amount of good. But it doesn't affect that I don't think the government shouldn't be the one to make that call.
They don't do much good at all if allowed to run rampant on those who can't be vaccinated and mutate around our vaccine mechanisms. No infected, no mutation ground.
Look at that clip I linked, look at the tearful mother apologising to her daughter for giving her a vaccine that has triggered narcolepsy in her. It's very sad. But in my view it's far better that the girl's mother made that decision than the state.
I think that girl should be grateful she's never lived with the horror of smallpox, or polio, or measles, or mumps, or rubella, or cholera, or meningitis, or hepatitis, or rotavirus, or diphtheria, or rabies, or yellow fever, or any of the other conditions that can be prevented by vaccines. If that girl really was afflicted with narcolepsy due to a vaccine, that's sad and unfortunate. But it doesn't mean that all the right decisions weren't made.
It's not about the vaccines themselves, it's about who should be making decisions like that for children. I'm against this for the same reason I'd be against the government making sure everybody was baptised if I lived in a Catholic country.
Being baptized is not a lifesaving process when subjected to scientific scrutiny. People say "who should be making decisions" like it just automatically gives parents full autonomy over children. That has literally never been the way child raising has worked in any society, but more importantly, since the consequences effect everybody it is therefore a collective choice and not an individual one. Who makes collective health choices? The state. Why do you think the WHO was able to eradicate smallpox? The US and USSR even put the Cold War aside for that one.
The risk argument clearly works both ways. On the one hand, 'Covenant has to get vaccinated because what if he catches measles and gives it to my grandma who's too old to get vaccinated and she dies' versus 'What if I'm given a vaccine that has an unexpected side effect or unexpectedly triggers a genetic predisposition ala the narcolepsy one and I'm left disabled'.
It doesn't work both ways because the risks are not even remotely the same (as outlined above). Shit, you could at least pick out the people who are actually at risk of being killed by vaccines causing severe allergic reactions. The answer is the obvious one: because more people will suffer and die otherwise, mostly ones who did not even choose to refuse vaccines themselves.
You seem to be characterising me as if I'm saying the above, and then adding on '... so none of us should get vaccines!'. That isn't, and has never been my point.
It's functionally the same due to the collective benefit of vaccines.
Do you think because I say that I'd go around telling people they shouldn't drink alcohol because they'll go on a GTA-style rampage?
Well, people typically don't do that even when drunk, while virii always prey on humans when they are able.
I imagine there's a similarity to how many Americans feel about the prospect of their gun rights being infringed upon.
I'm all for restricting the government from doing shit it shouldn't do. But there's also shit it should do, such as this shit, and it needs to be doing that shit.
This is demonstrably false.
Your child has a genetic predisposition to heart failure. You do not know this. A new vaccine comes out against a terrible disease, albeit one you are fairly unlikely to encounter in your part of the world. Your child is vaccinated, but the vaccine works in tandem with this predisposition and causes heart failure - the testing hadn't accounted for this. Your child dies, as do a handful of others around the world. Many of millions more lives were saved because of the vaccine.
Overall, it's a net good for humanity, in a big way. But it's not an 'unambiguous good for all humanity'. Because it certainly wasn't good for you or your hypothetical child.
The world is not perfect, it is as close to an unambiguous good as we can get. Even if something like this really happened (not like heart failure isn't the very first thing any testing would check for) it would still be a good thing, because that one death would save others from the same fate.
Sometimes mothers die because their doctors chose to c-section them. That doesn't mean that c-sections are more dangerous than statistics say, or that doctors shouldn't be allowed to make that emergency call.
More importantly, your world where some people refuse, some people don't, and everybody is happy with their Individual Liberty doesn't even exist. Here's your alternative world:
Your child has a genetic predisposition to heart failure. You do not know this, because your child was one of the thousands to have died in the endemic whooping cough-g (denotes the strain number) infections that spread through maternity wards. A man who was not even fully symptomatic came to see his child be born and infected yours, but you don't know that either.
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Topic: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American: T+0 (Read 1393312 times)