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If using the law to corral antivaxxers doesn’t work at first, try, try again. At least, that seems to be the lesson learned by New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. On Tuesday, he declared a state of emergency and mandated residents of the Williamsburg neighborhood, where an outbreak of measles has been raging since last fall, get vaccinated for the viral disease. Those who choose not to will risk the penalty of a $1,000 fine.
https://gizmodo.com/new-york-city-orders-williamsburg-residents-to-get-vacc-1833917175
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New York City Orders Williamsburg Residents to Get Vaccinated for Measles or Face $1,000 Fine
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McDonald's -- Because you're worth it.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Thursday April 11 2019, @12:45PM (31 children)
I think there's a solution that would keep both sides happy, all those who choose to remain unvaccinated can live together somewhere, lets call it Petridishville, and those who get vaccinated can live somewhere other than Petridishville. Then after a couple of years they disinfect the remains of the place to kill any remaining bacteria/viruses/whatever, and the problem is solved.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 11 2019, @12:53PM (29 children)
You've got it opposite, who got wiped out by disease when Native Americans met Europeans? Populations relying on vaccination will be screwed if anything ever interrupts the supply, it is basically heroin addiction of an entire country. The original plan to eradicate measles made sense, not this.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 11 2019, @01:10PM (24 children)
LOL.
That's not an argument against vaccinations. That's an argument against civilization. You can substitute basically any modern development for 'vaccination' and that sentence will make exactly as much sense.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 11 2019, @01:19PM (22 children)
Except those other things have great value, measles vaccinations not so much. "If you're gonna get sick, can't beat the tamales" -brady bunch
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 11 2019, @01:49PM
Tamales is autocorrect for measles.
(Score: 3, Informative) by stormwyrm on Thursday April 11 2019, @02:28PM (20 children)
I see your Brady Bunch and raise you subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, a devastating complication of measles that will eventually kill up to one in 609 who get the disease.
https://respectfulinsolence.com/2016/11/01/measles-is-more-dangerous-than-we-thought-and-vaccines-are-as-safe-as-we-thought/ [respectfulinsolence.com]
There is no cure, but it doesn't affect someone who never got the measles, either because they were vaccinated or were very lucky. Most cases are from people who got the measles as infants before they were old enough to be vaccinated. It's like the shingles people get after chickenpox, but much worse, as it's almost uniformly fatal.
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 11 2019, @02:44PM (6 children)
1 in 609 is total bullshit. How many people were diagnosed with that back when everyone got measles? We're talking millions of people every year getting measles so there must have been tens of thousands getting SSPE. Just think about how idiotic that claim is.
I see they arrived at that number from 17 cases out of measles cases reported to them in 1988-1991 (looks cherry picked). The number of reported cases is going to be some small fraction of the total.
https://idsa.confex.com/idsa/2016/webprogram/Paper56915.html [confex.com]
See my post below for actual complication rates of measles and mmr, not made up nonsense.
(Score: 3, Informative) by martyb on Thursday April 11 2019, @03:27PM (5 children)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measles [wikipedia.org]:
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 11 2019, @03:33PM (4 children)
You can't compare measles complications in developing countries to the US. Instead look at the US/UK in the 1960s. Rate of complications had already dropped at least two orders of magnitude in those countries by then.
(Score: 3, Disagree) by martyb on Thursday April 11 2019, @03:44PM (3 children)
Why can't they be compared? It is because of vaccinations in those countries that the number of deaths was dramatically reduced. What you are advocating could KILL people. Especially those who are immunocompromised or on anti-rejection drugs because of organ transplants. Those people depend on "herd immunity" to reduce the number of active cases and so protect them from coming into contact with this extremely contagious disease.
This is analogous to driving without a fastened seatbelt on the off-chance one would be in an accident where being flung from the vehicle would save one's life, ignoring the far more common cases where it would prevent/reduce injury or death.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 11 2019, @04:18PM (2 children)
No, the deaths were drastically reduced before vaccinations.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1815980/ [nih.gov]
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1522578/ [nih.gov]
Not sure where I advocated anything. What I would advocate is either:
1) Go all out and eradicate measles and be done with it
2) Only vaccinate select people like healthcare workers, etc.
Right now, we are vaccinating just below the eradication threshold which is known to cause giant epidemics:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12176860 [nih.gov]
Meanwhile the immunity of hundreds of millions of adults is waning:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15106101 [nih.gov]
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22966129 [nih.gov]
Can you imagine what is going to happen when tens or hundreds of millions adults all get measles at the same time? Because that is what is going to happen if we keep doing what is advocated by the CDC. We should have never altered the epidemiology of measles to begin with if you ask me, but now that we have...
(Score: 3, Informative) by martyb on Thursday April 11 2019, @09:16PM (1 child)
Okay, maybe I am misunderstanding what you are advocating. Are you suggesting that, because of complications, people should not be vaccinated? Or that we should go all out and vaccinate everyone we can until we can eradicate the disease?
I sensed you were advocating for no vaccination. If you were advocating otherwise, I would appreciate a statement of what you are advocating.
According to the WHO (World Health Organization) in 2014 [archive.org] (emphasis added):
Their stated goal (emphasis added):
Unfortunately, recent reduced vaccination rates has precluded attaining that goal:
As I understand it, the World Health Organization is advocating for MORE vaccination participation with a goal of eradicating this disease. That makes sense to me.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 11 2019, @09:27PM
First, there isn't a single reference on that page so I have no idea where those numbers are coming from. There isn't even an author to hold responsible, so I don't consider it a reliable source.
Read carefully, they talk about "eliminating" instead of "eradicating":
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15106085 [nih.gov]
This is a huge difference, because eradication means there is no longer any excuse for the vaccine. Elimination means buying the vaccine for every new generation forever.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday April 11 2019, @10:45PM (12 children)
I guess I'm just not one of the two "unlucky ones" in my high school who's dying of that. We pretty much all had the measles back in the day, and more people died of things like drunk driving than childhood diseases. By this point, lots of us have already kicked off from cardio-vascular disease, random cancers, depression->suicide, etc. Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis just isn't on the radar as one of the big killers.
Don't get me wrong: many vaccines are great things. Polio and tetanus vaccines, for instance, are all kinds of awesome. On the other hand, there's a smorgasbord of vaccines that pediatricians push at all the new parents as part of the "standard schedule," and the political posturing tries to push people into for-all or against-all groups. It's no wonder that so many new moms simply say: NO. to all of them.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Friday April 12 2019, @01:35AM (11 children)
The 1 in 609 stat I quoted is for those people who got the measles as infants. I was one by the way, as I caught the disease when I was six months old, too young to be vaccinated, and since it's now nearly 43 years later it seems I dodged that bullet. The rate appears to go down as the age at which you get the measles goes up as I understand it. The point is that if someone gets the measles very young, not only does their risk of dying of the disease go up, even if they survive there's a chance that they might die anyway from a major complication that manifests eight or nine years later. This is why community immunity needs to be strong, to protect these very people who can't be vaccinated yet.
The CDC, by the way, didn't pull that standard vaccine schedule that is part of the standard of care for all American paediatricians out of thin air, nor did it do so at the behest of Big Pharma. It's backed by a lot of independent scientific studies, and unless you have the training to actually understand the scientific evidence they use to justify it, whining about the "smorgasbord of vaccines" is just a load of Dunning-Kruger.
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 12 2019, @03:00AM (10 children)
Keep telling yourself that - then investigate the rollout of the HPV vaccine in Texas - mandated by order of the Governor, and it was clearly demonstrated that he was in the manufacturers pocket when he did it. It turned out to be a good thing, but at the time there was nowhere near enough data to REQUIRE an HPV vaccination for teenage girls to attend Texas schools. This is just one story, one that managed to get told.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Friday April 12 2019, @04:33AM (9 children)
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 12 2019, @01:55PM (8 children)
Are you saying that Rick Perry was motivated by actual science? You obviously didn't live in Texas at the time.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Friday April 12 2019, @02:48PM (7 children)
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 12 2019, @09:57PM (6 children)
I'll go along with that, though at the time Rick Perry was mandating Gadrasil for attendance in Texas Public Schools, the science and the CDC weren't there yet - didn't stop Rick from getting his law passed.
I've lived long enough to hear the government [which I include the CDC as a politically controlled part of, just like the FDA, EPA and other agencies founded to enrich and protect the public health but ultimately answer to legislators for their budgets (read: salaries.)] spew such gems as:
Lead in paint and gasoline, it's good for the economy and harmless to your health.
Mercury in dental fillings and vaccines, harmless and besides - other stuff is needlessly more expensive.
Asbestos in treated lumber, as used in childrens' playgrounds - no cause for concern.
Thalidomide for morning sickness... oops.
and lesser known gems, mostly in the field of radiotherapy, where the science is well established since the 1960s, the safety protocols flawless, and, still, anecdotal cases of "rare ideopathic cancers" seem to crop up at alarming rates.
In other words, faith in science, particularly government funded science, is still faith, perhaps an order of magnitude more reliable than other well known faith based beliefs, but ultimately I prefer the "first, do no harm" approach to interventions to the "for the greater good, I'll take this one for the team" approach.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Saturday April 13 2019, @12:29AM (5 children)
This sounds awful like a discussion you and I have had about cryptography some years back... In this case however, I don't think either of us have any expertise in any of this whatsoever, while back then I could at least point to a career that had something to do with computer security at some point. We are not epidemiologists, immunologists, or even medical doctors. Frankly, just as I'd rather trust someone like Bruce Schneier or Vincent Rijmen for my cryptography, I'd rather trust people with the expertise in things like this than my own arrogant ignorance. And when my decisions affect other people, like with the decision to vaccinate my kids or not, it doesn't come down "first, do no harm". Not vaccinating can cause plenty of harm, and not just to you and yours, but to the population of very young children who can't be vaccinated, to people who have compromised immune systems or other conditions that prevent them from getting vaccinated. It is not just data security that is at stake this time, but the lives of people, the lives of children, in fact. Whole groups of
Yeah, and keep on arguing that science was wrong before. Science is always wrong, it only gets less wrong over time. Yeah, since at one time scientists thought lead in paint and gasoline was a good idea and they turned out to be wrong, so today, their more refined studies about epidemiology and vaccines must also be wrong too! So since science was wrong before, they must also be wrong about anything I don't like!
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday April 13 2019, @01:14AM (4 children)
No, but I have played with medical doctors, devices and the industry in general for 3 decades now at work...
And I thoroughly respect that as your right, for your own body and the bodies of your minor children.
If you haven't seen a dramatic treatment of it, look up the story of how long it took to convince the government that lead in paint and gasoline was a bad idea _after_ the science was demonstrated to a fairly overwhelming level. It's not that I don't trust scientists and science, it's that I don't trust the whole conglomerate of a system that includes scientists as a weak component of government, whereas industry tends to form a much stronger component of government that has repeatedly pushed bad science to counter genuine honest (repeatable) science. And, it is incredibly hard to really tell who is paying for your science, particularly when it comes out of a government organization, like the CDC.
Through my life/work experience I've seen, firsthand in Rockville Maryland, how politics trumps everything at the FDA. How lobbying influences what gets permission to market from the FDA and what doesn't. How "science" and I'm talking about dozens of articles from the most prestigious journals with the best independence and repeatability among the researchers, can conclude a 1/3 effectiveness rate for a particular device for a particular indication, while another perspective on the available literature with equal credibility can come to a 3% conclusion instead of 33% - and what literature people pack in their briefcase when they go on "thought influencing missions" of all kinds has everything to do with who is paying them: I have also seen a head of marketing personally flip from the 33% story to the 3% story in a heartbeat, when he got hired by the competing company.
Not that it must be wrong, but that it is most likely not telling the whole story.
There's no perfect government on Earth, and our shining carrot top is a beacon of reality about what can happen in the U.S., but... one of the things that keeps me here is the relatively high level of respect for personal choice, freedom of the individual to choose not what is best for the country in the opinion of the government, but to choose what is best for them in their own ignorant and limited perspective on the world. School shootings, Klan rallies, and crappy social support (aka 1000 points of light) for the homeless and otherwise needy, are all negative outcomes, in my opinion, of this system. But, just as science moves slowly forward, I think the U.S. also moves slowly forward with things like slavery, discrimination, abortion, etc. On that scale, I'd prefer to see the right to choose to vaccinate stick around, at least as long as the right to purchase and own assault rifles.
And, I'm happy to keep my unvaccinated children home from school when there's a potential outbreak of a disease they haven't been vaccinated for, but not to discriminate against them 100% of the time just to pressure compliance with "science" that has, in many cases, barely been established for a generation.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Saturday April 13 2019, @02:46AM (3 children)
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday April 13 2019, @03:46AM
Just offhand, Gadrasil, now a solidly recommended component of the CDC plan, was an absolutely unknown quantity 20 years ago. Is it safe? seems to be so far... I would count Jonas Salk's Polio vaccine as the earliest significant player in the field, and Salk himself was born around the same time as my grandparents, the vaccine was just barely available to my parents. As late as the 1970s, there were no widespread vaccinations for varicella, mumps, or measles - at least in my family, my children were the first to have those available in their "childhood schedule."
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 13 2019, @09:11AM
>Vaccines have been around since the days of Edward Jenner
And nutrition is necessary for the human body, this allows you to eat randomly picked mushrooms, right?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday April 13 2019, @12:08PM
Eradication of smallpox does seem to be a victory, and I'd love to see polio follow - I'm actually not sure about the measles... what if all 22 diseases or, let's be a bit more realistic, 16 of the diseases on the CDC vaccination schedule were eradicated completely from the face of the earth within the next 20 years, would that be a great victory for mankind? It might be, it might also re-regulate the human biome's gene activity to be more vulnerable to evolving threats and, like antibiotics, after 50 years or so of relative freedom from these diseases, we might well be facing new more horrible scourges that our best antibiotic & vaccination efforts can't do anything about - scourges that wouldn't have had a chance to take hold in an unvaccinated population that had been naturally building immunity to such things over tens of thousands of years, but suddenly had no need to fight and so de-expressed that gene activity.
Were I immortal, I would hope to see humanity evolve/mature to co-exist with threats like sharks in the ocean, tigers in the jungle, alligators in the swamps, and other "deadly threats" that can be avoided by the masses. As long as these threats exist, with a population of billions of humans a few are going to end up interacting with them and dying, and as long as that is by choice, I think that's not only fine, but a good thing. Coexisting with microbes that give unpleasant temporary sickness is another aspect of that. Sure, wash your hands, avoid outbreaks, but occasional microbial irritation has been part of mammal life since there have been mammals and "conquering" the microbial world is much less likely than driving the lions, tigers and bears to extinction - in the real world. This is not an argument to keep around deadly or permanently debilitating diseases like smallpox or polio, but characterizing measles as deadly almost feels like shooting every alligator on sight because of what it might do when it grows up, and certainly we are starting to dig deep with the current CDC schedule away from deadly and debilitating into borderline annoying / nuisance diseases. Should everyone get the measles? No, there is a vaccine, and a choice to vaccinate yourself and your children. There is also good monitoring of outbreaks, excellent communication of outbreaks in progress, and relatively good tracking of who is vaccinated and who is not, and even the vaccinated have a choice to stay home from school when there is an outbreak.
Put another way, my personal choice, my "religious" or at least philosophical stance is: I'll take my seasonal flu and occasional Rotavirus as it comes, and if that's the death of me when I'm 86 years old and frail, that was my choice, I'm fine with that. Maybe my natural exposure will give me superior immunity by then, or not, but I choose to opt-out of the annual flu vaccination experiment, and I expect to retain the right to pick and choose which vaccines I put into my children, at least until they are of an age and mental capacity to tell me that they choose otherwise. Do my pediatricians know more on the subject that I do? Perhaps, but when they can't budge from the "party line" of: ALL 22 vaccines on the CDC schedule are highly recommended, including the 15 in the first 15 months of life, plus a couple more if you are "lucky enough" to get them... I, somewhat sadly, find myself moving away from that stance and just a bit in the direction of the "kooks" like Jenny McCarthy (and Ivanka Trump, apparently) who have been lampooned in the media as "OMG, what idiots would follow them?" Perhaps the same kind of idiots who opted out of mercury fillings while their dentists, who know much more about the topic than them, all told them they were perfectly safe.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday April 11 2019, @06:18PM
Actually, this is a very old system of social control, dating back to at least Ancient Egypt. Provinces not supportive of the current pharaoh were subject to being denied water. In China they were more direct, and in times of famine the army came into rebellious provinces, took their food, and distributed it into loyal provinces.
So it's a real problem, and it has to do with the nature of humanity more than anything else. In particular, those in power prefer to support those who support them. And, to make things more current, this is why the police can get away with murder.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 11 2019, @01:59PM (1 child)
I didn't know Native Americans died because they were vaccinated. I thought they died because they were NOT vaccinated, because vaccination is basically exposing yourself to germs in a safe way.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday April 11 2019, @06:22PM
Actually, they died because their ancestors hadn't grown up exposed to the disease. Vaccination is sort of a work around, but it does allow those with weaker immunity to a disease to propagate. So shouldn't we reintroduce smallpox?
OTOH, if technical civilization survives, immunity will be improved via gene-line alteration, and if it doesn't the survivors will live in such small groups that diseases that depend on large dense populations will die out. So perhaps the problem isn't worth worrying aboutl
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 11 2019, @04:12PM
The unvaccinated Native Americans. Next.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday April 11 2019, @07:04PM
Only those who have forgotten medical history would be wiped out. Most vaccines can be cultured using 19th century technology or even less.
For measles, we could resort to either arm to arm innoculation (far from ideal, but a lower mortality than just letting nature take it's course), or cowpox innoculation.
It's still possible to eradicate measles, only fear and superstition have stopped us.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday April 11 2019, @10:35PM
Nobody is forcing the Amish to stay in their towns....
🌻🌻 [google.com]