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Emergency Declared in NY over Measles: Unvaccinated Barred from Public Spaces:
Plagued by a tenacious outbreak of measles that began last October, New York's Rockland County declared a state of emergency Tuesday and issued a directive barring unvaccinated children from all public spaces.
Effective at midnight Wednesday, March 27, anyone aged 18 or younger who has not been vaccinated against the measles is prohibited from public spaces in Rockland for 30 days or until they get vaccinated. Public spaces are defined broadly in the directive as any places:
[W]here more than 10 persons are intended to congregate for purposes such as civic, governmental, social, or religious functions, or for recreation or shopping, or for food or drink consumption, or awaiting transportation, or for daycare or educational purposes, or for medical treatment. A place of public assembly shall also include public transportation vehicles, including but not limited to, publicly or privately owned buses or trains...
The directive follows an order from the county last December that barred unvaccinated children from schools that did not reach a minimum of 95 percent vaccination rate. That order—and the directive issued today—are intended to thwart the long-standing outbreak, which has sickened 153 people, mostly children.
What were they waiting for? A pox on them all?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by driverless on Wednesday March 27 2019, @12:39PM (33 children)
They're not anti-vaccination, they're pro-disease.
The sad thing is that they're not auto-darwinating, it's their children that they're doing it to.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 27 2019, @01:15PM (2 children)
um... technically the Darwin awards are given to those who take themselves out of the genepool.
I think you can argue that those who kill their kids qualify.
in all seriousness though, the problem is not that their (to be pitied) children get the disease. the problem is that they transmit it further on to others who could not get the vaccine for legitimate medical reasons (for instance they are below the age limit, I think it's 12 months).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 27 2019, @08:52PM
You aren't in the gene pool if none of your kids reach puberty.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday March 27 2019, @09:09PM
Unless they are sterilized, there remains they might have more children to pass their genes to.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 27 2019, @01:51PM (12 children)
It is very unlikely measles is going kill anyone, unless they are elderly whose immunity waned. Mortality rates before vaccines in the US/UK were like 1 in 100k:
https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=30329&page=1&cid=807987#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]
https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=30329&commentsort=0&mode=threadtos&threshold=-1&highlightthresh=-1&page=1&cid=808691#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 27 2019, @05:18PM (11 children)
It would help human health a lot of people did not spread lies.
Mortality rates are 1-2 per 1000, not per 100k, and the risk groups are worse!
https://www.cdc.gov/measles/downloads/measlesdataandstatsslideset.pdf [cdc.gov]
Not to mention that hospitalization and permanent damage are not irrelevant either.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 27 2019, @07:37PM (10 children)
Well, there are a number of problems with those slides (eg attributing all of a drop in deaths due to measles 100% to the vaccine rather than giving credit to sanitation, anti-biotics, people not spreading measles on purpose, etc).
But for that 1 in 1k number they cite this page:
https://www.cdc.gov/measles/about/complications.html [cdc.gov]
Which seems to cite this page where there is no source given:
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pubs/pinkbook/meas.html#complications [cdc.gov]
I will stick with the numbers that have been associated with an actual dataset, but I expect wherever that number came from only looked at reported cases (which will tend to be especially bad) and ignored all the others.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 27 2019, @08:19PM (9 children)
The page you cite for 1 per 100k is PER YEAR!!! If people get 50 years old, that translates to about 1 in 2000 and is more or less in line with the other numbers.
That is what happens when relying on shittly written papers with no proper scales, suddenly you are a factor 50 to 80 of from reality (being > 100x off from official CDC numbers should have been a hint that something is wrong...)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 27 2019, @08:38PM (1 child)
No, because people only got measles once.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 27 2019, @08:49PM
How often people get measles is irrelevant, the graph was showing deaths per 100k POPULATION (not per infected, and not per previous uninfected population) per YEAR.
So a value of "1" means over a time of 50 years 50 people will have died per 100k population.
The fact that you can get measles only once just means that a relatively small portion of the population gets infected each year because most are immune.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 27 2019, @08:42PM (6 children)
In stats terminology, you are assuming the probability of a person dying from measles each year is independent of the last:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence_(probability_theory)#Two_events [wikipedia.org]
This model is very wrong since once you had measles (usually before 5 years old) the probability dropped to near zero.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 27 2019, @08:57PM (5 children)
No I don't assume any such thing.
I just take the numbers, which say in a population of 100k, 1 dies of measles every year.
Which means that after 50 years 50 have died.
I.e. 50 out of 100k will have died, making it a 1 in 2k chance. There is no need to consider the probability distribution or independence for that calculation.
I do admit it is not exact though, since it does not take into account all the mess of people dying of other causes in those 50 years and new people being born (if that wasn't the case, the "you get measles only once" would of course mean the deaths per year number would drop like a stone over time).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 27 2019, @09:17PM (4 children)
This is not what the numbers represent because new people are being born who didn't get measles yet and old people are dying who were immune to measles. The "population" is in flux.
As shown in the link the math of 50 years * (1/100k people/yr) assumes independence. If you have an alternate derivation that works out to something near that for a population with births and deaths I would love to see it (no sarcasm).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 27 2019, @11:06PM (3 children)
Let me start by what I think is your mistake here. You seem to think I am somehow combining probabilities, calculating a joint probability or something.
That is not the case.
I just took the given simple fact of 1 disease death per 100k population per year. That is a given (approximated) fact from the tables.
If we assume the population is fixed at 100 million, that means every year 1000 people die from the disease. There surely is no question on that?
If every year 1000 people die from disease, surely it is also clear that after 50 years 50000 people died from disease?
If we want the probability for an individual person to die, all we have to do is to divide the number of people who died by the number of people overall.
This is where it gets complicated, but if approximate is good enough it's not so hard.
How many different people have lived during those 50 years? At least 100 million. At worst, 50 years would be 3 generations, so 300 million.
How many people can at most die of disease before everyone is dead of old age at 100 years after our original 50 years? 150000.
So now we have upper and lower limits of how many people ever existed in the time range, and upper and lower limits of how many of those died of disease.
At that point, calculating the probability is really nothing more than a division.
Giving 50000 / 300 million = 16 per 100k as lower limit and
150000 / 100 million = 150 per 100k as upper limit
Now a factor 10 is not really satisfactory, but it's enough to show that 1 per 100k and 1 per 100k PER YEAR are completely different.
The lower limit that assumes everyone has all their children before age 17 surely could be refined more.
Ok, I admit maybe for you the range 0.2 to 2 out of 1000 die isn't good enough to "confirm" the 1-2 out of 1000 from the CDC, for me it's good enough because either is utterly unacceptable to me, and nowhere remotely close to 1 out of 100k.
Also note that this also includes an unknown number of people who never got infected for example, or that showed no symptoms. So the "mortality of people showing symptoms" number will of course be higher.
Different, more hands-on but unrealistic approach:
The more concrete point that it is not NECESSARY to have independence to get the same ballpark value is easy to prove manually.
Let's switch to 1 in 100 instead of 1 in 100k for simplicity, and consider the most extreme case where everyone is infected in their birth year.
Constant 100 people population, start out immune.
Year 1: Number 1 dies of old age. 2 to 100 infected and now immune. Number 101 born and immediately dies of disease. Number 102 born and survives.
Year 2: Number 2 dies of old age. 3 to 102 infected and now immune. Number 103 born and immediately dies of disease. Number 104 born and survives.
...
Year 50: Number 50 dies of old age. 51 to 198 infected and now immune. Number 199 born and immediately dies of disease. Number 200 born and survives
Result: 50 dead of disease, 200 people overall. Makes a 1/4 probability over the time observed. Not the same as a simplistic 50(years) * (1 in 100 per year) = 1/2 but not massively off either.
Doing that with 100k and a realistic birth rate is left as an exercise to the reader ;)
Now proving that this all works the same if you have random subset infected and random ages of death gets too complicated for me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 28 2019, @12:04AM (2 children)
Yes.
No, it means the frequency with which that happened was 1/1000 for that year. The frequency is free to (and did) change by many orders of magnitude over the years.
The data does not say "every year x = 1000 people die from disease", it says x percent of people were dying from the disease and this has decreased over time (for some reason) to a much lower number.
If we were able to stop all measles vaccinations now, what would happen is nothing like the world just before it was introduced in the 1960s. There would be huge chaos.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 28 2019, @07:52AM (1 child)
I'm sorry, but at this point all I can say is that I have no clue what you think the numbers in the paper say or how they were derived.
They simply took the number of people who died in that year and divided it by the population in 100k.
Thus multiplying that probability by the population again gives the number of people that died/would die again.
If you can't agree to that all discussion is pointless. But feel free to get the exact absolute numbers for people who lived during that time and how many died from measles and do the calculation yourself. It's just basic arithmetic, no statistics required. Only relying on pre-converted data is what messes things up and makes it difficult.
And what is that nonsense about first agreeing to the approximated value of 1 and then disagreeing arguing that it fluctuated by an order of magnitude? How is anyone supposed to discuss with you when you say the opposite of before 2 sentences later?
If using the average is not acceptable, then giving an average makes no sense. It was not me who came up with that average. I only said the person quoting it was badly misleading by a factor > 20.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 28 2019, @05:39PM
Yes.
The number you are calculating by doing 50 years X (1/100K deaths/year) = 1/2000 is not the measles mortality rate. Does it help if I point out it has units of "deaths" rather than deaths/year?
This is the claim I took issue with:
This is your "other numbers":
You are comparing apples and oranges.
Just look figure 1 in the paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1522578/ [nih.gov]
Death rate was not constant. It was 10 per 100k in 1912 and 0.2 per 100k in 1960. This is two orders of magnitude.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Sourcery42 on Wednesday March 27 2019, @03:04PM (9 children)
It's not limited to anti-vaxxers or their children either. Those who are too young to be vaccinated or have legitimate medical reasons for not being vaccinated also benefit from herd immunity. Anti-vaxxers choices put them at risk too.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 27 2019, @03:23PM (3 children)
This is the most dangerous myth about vaccines out there. Please stop repeating it.
The "too young" children are not vaccinated because they are already protected by maternal antibodies. The problem is that if the mother was vaccinated these maternal antibodies wane faster. So the age of vaccination needs to be moved up, but it isnt socially acceptable because of people like you.
Just by the sheer numbers of people repeating this myth it is far worse than any effect a small number of "anti-vaxxers" could have. I repeat: You are putting children in danger by spreading this myth.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21133659 [nih.gov]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 27 2019, @05:15PM (1 child)
You do realize what you write says in order to be vaccinated you must be susceptible to measles?
Which means the first vaccination date will have to be AFTER the babies have lost the protection, ergo they are unprotected and at risk for some time in-between.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 27 2019, @06:01PM
Ideally they would individually test for maternal antibodies to drop below a certain level, but yea the goal is to minimize this time as much as possible. People who spread this myth are causing this time to be extended needlessly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 27 2019, @08:58PM
There is research in the area that suggests that difference (among other differences) is that an actual measles infection results in a latent infection. Similar to herpes or chicken pox, you don't completely fight off measles, but rather it self-limits and then your body gets it under control. It also makes sense that mothers who got measles would provide more antibodies, as a higher level is needed to keep the latent infection under control.
(Score: 1, Troll) by stormreaver on Wednesday March 27 2019, @04:51PM (3 children)
Which makes no sense whatsoever, once you understand that the vaccine does not protect against transmission. The only one affected by the vaccine is the one receiving it. The vaccinated and unvaccinated alike are both transmission vectors. The vaccinated are probably more likely to spread Measles since there is a 100% chance that they carry the virus for at least several days (and possibly much longer) after receiving the vaccine. While the unvaccinated have a lesser chance of carrying the virus, since they weren't purposely injected with it.
There's more, but this NY policy is a swing and a miss.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 27 2019, @05:13PM (2 children)
I can only hope someone downvotes this because it is complete nonsense.
While the virus used for vaccination is live, it is not only weakened but also not just any random strain. Even if transmission should be possible, you do NOT infect people with actual measles.
That would be like calling the bird flu H1N1 just because they are both a flu virus. Wrong and misleading.
(Score: 2) by stormreaver on Thursday March 28 2019, @01:16AM (1 child)
So Merck marketing people say. But they are known to have lied to protect Merck's vaccine profits at the expense of the public.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 28 2019, @02:13AM
According to their latest financial filing, MMR2 made up just under 1.42% of sales, and markedly less than that of profit. Yeah, in terms of raw dollars, the money they make in sales sounds like a lot, but compared to the tens of billions of dollars in profit, let alone raw sales, it is basically a rounding error. Plus, big companies care about profit margins and vaccines have almost none compared to the latest and greatest drugs they pump out.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 28 2019, @03:41AM
Sadly, children under 1, the most vulnerable, used to be protected from measles by being breastfed by mothers with natural immunity. Vaccines put our most vulnerable in harms way.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 27 2019, @03:20PM (1 child)
They are stupid fucks, but they are anti-vax and not pro-disease. Your statement is a good joke, but the insightful mod makes me wary people think it's true. It is literally a false statement, but a good joke.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 27 2019, @04:19PM
If you actually think I'm trolling then we either have radically different definitions of "pro-" (intent vs outcome) or you're incredibly stupid.
(Score: 2) by exaeta on Wednesday March 27 2019, @03:33PM (3 children)
The Government is a Bird
(Score: 2, Insightful) by RandomFactor on Wednesday March 27 2019, @04:28PM (1 child)
If true, that wing of the movement sure is a heck of a lot quieter than the causes autism wing.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 2) by exaeta on Wednesday March 27 2019, @07:09PM
The Government is a Bird
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 27 2019, @04:41PM
If they were truly pro-life, they'd not be pro-disease among other issues. They are just pro-fetus. Once it's born, their concern stops.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 27 2019, @04:57PM
stfu, you stupid goddamn bitch.