SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the smart-phones-but-no-smart-people dept.
Submitted via IRC for Bytram
Emergency declared near Portland for measles outbreak in anti-vaccine hotspot
Health officials in Clark County, Washington have declared a public health emergency for a measles outbreak in an area with a high rate of unvaccinated children.
[...] Nearly eight percent of children in Clark County were exempt from standard vaccination for the 2017-2018 school year, according to state records reported by the Washington Post. Breaking down that eight percent, about seven percent of kids had personal or religious exemptions and the remaining one percent or so had medical exemptions. Factoring in the rest of the population, the county is below the 92 percent to 94 percent range some experts consider required to prevent the spread of highly contagious diseases such as measles.
[...] “It’s really awful and really tragic and totally preventable,” Peter J. Hotez told the Post. Hotez is a professor of pediatrics and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. “Portland is a total train wreck when it comes to vaccine rates,” he added.
[...] Correction: This article has been updated to correct the state in which Clark County resides. It is in Washington State, not Oregon.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 24 2019, @06:17PM (7 children)
Wow a correlation of -0.17 using one of those study designs that allow you to prove that shark attacks are crucial to swinging elections.
https://www.aspeninstitute.org/blog-posts/votes-sharks-lottery-tickets-voters-assess-incumbents/ [aspeninstitute.org]
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday January 24 2019, @06:34PM (6 children)
Oh, yes, the evidence says the exact opposite of the dumbshit libertarian's opinion, but it's not opposite enough?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 24 2019, @10:04PM (5 children)
Im not the one drawing confident widely - applying conclusions from a 0.17 correlation in a phone survey... do you really trust this stuff? Do you believe anything as long as some gold stars get placed next to a p-value nearby?
(Score: 2) by RandomFactor on Friday January 25 2019, @01:36AM (4 children)
The lack of credulity angle is likely valid. There's been plenty of distrust fostered in conservative circles for scientific authority over the years (and understandably in some cases.)
Conversely it is liberal voices that are publicly and stridently anti-vaxx. That certainly has an influence on those who trust those voices.
I tend to be a bit skeptical regardless. For example a glaring problem is here:
Was nothing learned from polling in 2016? Conservatives are quite mistrustful of admitting their world view in polls and surveys and have been conditioned to give invalid responses when asked simply to avoid the fight or censure that results.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 25 2019, @02:04AM (1 child)
A correlation of 0.17 is literally nothing. Here is what it looks like:
https://i.ibb.co/yW9sQkj/lowcor.png [i.ibb.co]
You can see from how I generated the data there really is a relationship, but no one should care about it.
And that doesn't even get into the problems with telephone surveys (I would never do one for example...).
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 25 2019, @02:08AM
Forgot to include:
So this correlation is "statistically significant" with p-value of 6e-9!!! The LIGO and CERN people only use ~3e-7 as a cutoff. That is (only one of many reasons) why literally the only people who care about statistical significance and use it to draw conclusions are those who do not know what it means .
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Friday January 25 2019, @03:54PM (1 child)
I bet you can point to zero fucking self-identified liberals pushing this shit.
I can point to the fat fuck retard of a president you dumbshits elected to prove that your party has public figures who are antivax.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 25 2019, @09:54PM
If the correlation was only 0.17 in that study you cited, it means about as many "liberals" were on the anti-vax side as "conservatives". Apparently you have no comprehension of what you are reading and citing...