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from the have-you-ever-seen-a-single-mump? dept.
Kami Altenberg Schaal has been a professional nurse for 22 years. She is pro-vaccine. She gets the flu shot every year as a requirement for her employment, and she vaccinates her family.
[...] Her entire family has been vaccinated with the MMR vaccine, and yet 4 out of 5 members of her family came down with the mumps. Her daughter is a freshman in college, and got the mumps from school.
[...] She isolated her daughter for 5 days ("I know how to isolate a patient, I'm a nurse"), and reported her case to the department of health.
All the members of her family also got booster shots of the MMR vaccine.
17 days after her daughter's exposure, her husband and son woke up with mumps.
After notifying the health department, Kami notified her son's school district as well.
What happened next was apparently something she had not anticipated. Even though her family was fully vaccinated and she followed all the proper medical protocols for dealing with the mumps, many people in her community began to blame her, including some of her medical colleagues, for not vaccinating their children (even though she had!)
[...] Finally, Kami herself woke up with the mumps. She had been tested and was supposedly immune. She had taken the booster. But she ended up getting the mumps anyway.
[...] The department of health nurse was required to send out another letter to the school district, so Kami asked the nurse if she could "put the truth" in the letter to the school district that her son was vaccinated, because she feared being blamed in error, once again, for not vaccinating her children.
The nurse allegedly replied "no."
They will not put that in a letter, because it could give the anti-vaxx movement some fodder.
So they would not protect my family by saying we did the right things, so I had to protect my family. I'm the one who has to defend my family.
(Score: 3, Informative) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday April 30 2019, @04:31PM (37 children)
No, it was never innocent. There were just diseases to tackle with higher rates of worse complications. Some education about complications of measles pre-vaccine [cdc.gov]. Your statement is kind of like saying that a .22 is better to get shot with than a .45 because less people die from it.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 30 2019, @04:44PM (28 children)
I posted a much better source elsewhere. The CDC doesnt even say where their numbers came from, or who wrote that page, but I will gladly use that data if you can find out.
As I posted elsewhere:
https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=31338&page=1&cid=836693#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]
So if you think the dangers of measles were not "innocent" than neither are the dangers of MMR. They are pretty similar from what I can tell... although (conveniently for anyone who does not want people to be able to make their own rational decision) there is no clean comparison available where they tried to measure the exact same thing in the same population.
(Score: 2, Flamebait) by sjames on Tuesday April 30 2019, @09:15PM (2 children)
Same troll, different day, already shredded.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 30 2019, @10:00PM (1 child)
Please link to this "shredding". It was the one where taking your argument to the logical conclusion no one knows if vaccines are a better bet than measles right? And that if we don't have perfect data we should just listen blindly to corporations?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 30 2019, @10:11PM
And oh yea, I need to go to the library of congress and inspect microfiche documents to find the mythical perfect data you demand (except from the pharma corps) right? Because all this stuff isn't already digitized (and usually OCR'd too).
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday April 30 2019, @09:42PM (24 children)
Well, I'm not really sure you understood the numbers you just posted, for starters... So let's see if we agree about them. I'm going to take some of your numbers as they are without having checked them except for death. I'll trust the CDC's numbers, actually, and not provide better ones to you at this time.
The first thing to note with all the numbers is none of them seem causative on either side (normal complications of measles notwithstanding)... so if someone had an ear infection when they got the shot or came down with the disease that counts as a case on either side, for example.
Second, you're comparing apples to oranges, as the vaccine also covers Mumps and Rubella, so to be proper you'd also want incidence data on Mumps and Rubella complications (the vaccine safety article specifically calls out mumps like node swelling), but oh well.
Third, the second study you cited was a safety comparator trial of two separate vaccines but I'll take it that the complication numbers are golden.
Ear Infections
Measles_1963 = 0.025 -- So 25 out of a thousand people with Measles developed Ear Infections.
MMR_2018 = 0.015 -- So 15 out of a thousand people vaccinated developed Ear Infections.
Respiratory tract afflictions [I assume you meant infection]
Measles_1963 = 0.038 -- So 38 of one thousand had a respiratory tract infection. Since measles is a respiratory infection, however, I think your number should be closer to 1. The article you cited specifically calls out that these are respiratory complications of severe bronchitis, croup, bronchiolitis, and pneumonia, including a death count of 6 from respiratory complications.
MMR_2018 = 0.1 -- 100 of 1000 had a respiratory tract in infection. The text gives between 9 and 12%, so I'll take that, but that is any respiratory tract infection, not just "serious" ones. The devil is in the details.
Encephalitis
Measles_1963 = 0.001 -- One in a thousand developed an encephalitis.
MMR_2018 this source which is better cited than my CDC one earlier. That article states that for measles there were 380 deaths and 440,000 cases for a rate of 8.6 per 10,000 although CDC historically reported 1 in 10,000 measles deaths. There have been 462 death cases reported to NVIC where measles vaccination occurred (going back to at least 1989), and I've seen ones in there that were the vaccine was not suspected at all in the deaths. If you take just last year where there were 10,000,000 MMR vaccinations given in the US (source [cdc.gov]) and load those 480 deaths into just one year's vaccinations (completely wrong statistics that is not even right but would be a fantasy maximum possible number) you get 4.6 in 100,000 or .46 per 10,000 - the reality I'd guess is off by a factor of 20 or so. So even with stupidly ridiculous numbers attributed to vaccination it's still not close and digging out the reality of that would be too tedious for me to bother since we've already blown away all your other claims.
Fever
Measles_1963 ~ 1.0 (assumed) - Every person who got measles had a fever. Figured. At 440,000 cases of measles that would be 440,000 people.
MMR_2018 = 0.3 - Don't know where you got that number from. The study you stated says under 5% get a fever from the vaccine (4.6 I think). At 10,000,000 doses that would be 460,000 people, about on par with Measles except they ain't sick.
Rash
Measles_1963 ~ 1.0 (assumed) Every person who gets measles has a rash. 440,000.
MMR_2018 = 0.25 -- not sure where that number came from as the text states 5% got a transient rash. 1.5% develop "measles-like symptoms" which I would take to be macropapular rash. 150,000 per year. (And aren't sick overall).
So, to summarize: Everyone who gets measles gets rash and fever, but rash is far less likely in gross cases per year and vaccinated people are on par with the total number of cases per year. It looks like there is a higher rate of respiratory infection from your numbers but I would seriously challenge that conclusion. Ear infections, encephalitis, mortality: Nowhere even close when comparing vaccination to just letting measles run its course - vaccination is far safer. And if you reread your 1963 article you can see that it was strenuously arguing the point that complications from measles are serious, can be deadly, and that the disease should be stopped.
So what was your point again?
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 30 2019, @10:02PM (1 child)
Lets just start with number 1:
Yes, how else would you do it? Why is this notable to you?
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday May 01 2019, @05:47PM
Because, as my response below, the complications of Measles talked about are generally attributable to the disease process itself except that we can't scientifically claim that unless it is proven to be so.
ANY complication following vaccination administration in a safety and efficacy study is tracked regardless of if the vaccine causes it or not. (Someone with measles gets an ear infection, you can pretty much take it as read clinically that the measles spread up into the ear unless other pathology suggests something else, but a vaccinated person who develops an ear infection may well not have been caused by the vaccine. Encephalitis as a measles complication is caused by the disease process.... except you can't quite claim that. Someone has an active measles infection and dies from illness, you can pretty well bet measles had a hand to play in that process. But you can't say that every person who got a fever or died after getting a measles vaccine was killed by the vaccine.)
Thus, from the outset, the numbers you are comparing are not really not comparable from the outset.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 30 2019, @11:07PM (19 children)
I never hear people raving about mumps and rubella, it is always measles. Even the current story about mumps you can see has quickly turned to being about measles. In my country (US), everyone is worried about measles and gets MMR. The best data is available for measles (and that is not saying much). Also, no one is getting a measles-only vaccine, so there is no data for that. Don't forget I am doing this work (that the CDC/FDA/Merck should have done) for free.
Don't know what the first part of the sentence has to do with that last. Everyone got MMR in that study. There is (quite interestingly) no blinded RCT where some children get measles vaccine and others do not (although there should be).
Yes, to me those numbers are pretty much equal. I'll use this one as an example, but the same applies to the other values.
As a first approximation we would use the poisson distribution [wikipedia.org] where mean = variance.
The first had a sample size of ~50k and the second ~15k. So 95% CI would be about 1250 +/- 70 and 225 +/- 30.
So we would get rates of:
Measles_1963 = 0.0236 - 0.0264
MMR_2018 = 0.0130 - 0.0170
Then you need to consider systemic error (what could have been due to other factors, what was missed, what eas different between the studies, etc) and I would say give it at least a factor of 2. Basically the statistical error is negligible at these sample sizes, which is why I didn't bother with it.
No, I meant "afflictions". That is as comparable as I could make it:
Measles_1963: "severe affections of the respiratory tract (38 per 1,000)"
MMR_2018 : "upper respiratory tract infection (9.5% and 12.8%)""
The number should not be closer to 1 because we area talking about complications from measles, not measles itself. Sorry, the numbers are not directly comparable... not my fault. I can think of reasons they can be skewed either direction.
Not sure what happened here but you seem to be comparing encephalitis to mortality. I'll let you fix that before responding.
I assumed the value of 1 since that is a "classic" symptom. In reality only ~ 15% of cases were ever reported (eg 440k cases / 3-4M children) and it seems likely the unreported ones were less likely to have such classic symptoms.
The fever value came from this quote:
MMR_2018: "31.1% of MMR-RIT and 32.3% of MMR II-vaccinated children reporting fever ≥ 38.0°C"
I don't know why you are now multiplying one number by 440k and the other by 10 million
See above regarding fever, rash is once again a "classic" symptom that may not be present in all of the 85% unreported cases.
The rash value came from:
MMR_2018: "Rashes were reported for 24.4% of MMR-RIT and 27.4% of MMR II-vaccinated children.""
I would say at least 15%. My original source didn't report that but I assume it was 100% of reported cases.
See above, why would "gross cases per year" matter. Almost everyone got measles and now almost everyone is getting vaccinated...
Sure, the numbers could be more comparable.
Ear infections occurred at about the same rate. Whatever you said about the other two seem to have gotten lost in some formatting error?
Sure, and here is a paper from that same journal issue arguing the opposite from the same data:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1815980/ [nih.gov]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 30 2019, @11:16PM (5 children)
Same AC. And do not forget, when this was written they thought they could eradicate measles by 1967 because they drastically underestimated how long it could survive in the air. I doubt the author would have the same opinion knowing what we know now:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6939399 [nih.gov]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday May 01 2019, @11:01AM (4 children)
Whatever the mechanisms, it survives long enough to bring infections from areas of the world that aren't mass vaccinated to the areas that are. That's the real reason measles hasn't been eradicated yet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 01 2019, @12:17PM (3 children)
Any time you find your self saying the real *reason* when it comes to biology or politics, stop yourself. Nothing happens in complex systems unless multiple reasons align.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday May 02 2019, @01:45AM (2 children)
Which is useless in the absence of thinking to mention. The dynamics of immunizations were good enough to describe how measles would fare in a developed world population with near universal immunization. Without huge populations of non-immunized people, measles would indeed be extinct.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 02 2019, @09:29PM (1 child)
The population of non-immunized people is much larger now than it was before the vaccinations (pretty much only children who hadn't had measles yet)... so not sure what your argument is. Now it is something like at least 20% of the population. It will grow until a giant epidemic (most people hit will have been vaccinated decades ago) or we do something to eradicate it. Watch.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday May 13 2019, @04:13AM
Well, of course, it is. The world's population has increased greatly since the 1960s.
Sounds like you'd be well served to be more sure about my argument then!
It's simple. We live in a world with billions of people who don't receive near universal vaccines. As a result, measles is endemic among that population. There is also considerable interaction between the populations that are near so immunized, such as most of the developed world, and the populations that aren't. Hence, measles crosses over all the time. Even with that crossover, it's still about three orders of magnitude less prevalence in immunized populations than in nonimmunized populations.
Sure, it could be that much. But then where are the measles cases then among that supposedly non-immunized population? Reality isn't jibing with the narrative.
I hope you watch as well.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 30 2019, @11:32PM
Sorry, forgot to divide by sample size. But point is the same.
The first had a sample size of ~50k and the second ~15k. So 95% CI would be about 1250 +/- 70 and 225 +/- 30.
So we would get rates of:
Statistical error is negligable.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday May 01 2019, @11:04AM (4 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 01 2019, @12:22PM (3 children)
That is what you assume, it is not in the data. I wish it was there, but let's not start mixing assumptions with data and forget which is which.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday May 02 2019, @01:51AM (2 children)
Actually it is in the data. They described these categories. You are the one who has been conflating them.
Nor are we reduced to considering only your deceptive interpretations of cherry picked research data. If MMR vaccines consistently generated symptoms severe as measles as consistently as measles does, we would have noticed. It wouldn't require research to notice the large number of severely ill infants nor their connection to the vaccine.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 02 2019, @09:24PM (1 child)
"They" being the 2018 study, it wasn't in the earlier one... That is why it needed to be "conflated". Not my fault, nor does it indicate any malfeasance on my part like you imply.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday May 13 2019, @04:15AM
Sorry, no, it does not need to be conflated. As we see in this thread, that leads to misleading and erroneous conclusions.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday May 01 2019, @11:05AM (2 children)
Measles tends to be the more dangerous and infectious disease. I think that's why.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 01 2019, @12:25PM
Never really looked into mumps or rubella honestly, just focusing on understanding the situation surrounding measles took up enough of my time. I notice you have no source for your claims though.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 01 2019, @12:41PM
Here is one paper:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12443670 [nih.gov]
184 exposed. Out of those they saw 35 with clinical measles, 65 subclinical measles, and 84 no response (possibly because already immune).
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday May 01 2019, @05:41PM (3 children)
Irrelevant that you don't hear people raving about the other diseases. You're trying to compare data for measles complications against data for complications for a vaccine for Mumps and Rubella as well as Measles. Proper apples-to-apples would be to compare complications for incidences of those two diseases in addition to the body of measles complications since you're arguing the complications of the vaccine administration. (Really proper work would be to develop your own measles-only vaccine and then compare complication rates for that to those of 1963).
And you are attempting to do the work that CDC has already done time and time again but trying to force the opposite conclusion of their work with worse data. You do not need to do the work for free because the work has already been paid for, it simply states the exact opposite of what you want to see.
If you can develop such a study I would be interested. Since the efficacy and safety of MMR vaccines are proven you would have to have patients already in healthcare contact who have refused the vaccine; advocating to give the vaccine is a duty of care.
I won't delve into your math. Even assuming the numbers are pretty equal, that means giving the vaccine is, at worst, no more harmful than not giving it especially when the vaccine numbers do not take into account incidental (non-vaccine caused) otitis media where in Measles it can be an expected complication from the pathology.
Correct, they are not.
Because your encephalitis number for MMR wasn't in the study you cited. I should have just noted that and moved on while looking at the number that you gave is understandable because it shows that the vaccine is far safer than the live disease. But for fun I decided to take a far more serious complication (death) and show that the incidence there was nowhere close either. (i.e. Measles kills far more people than people who have died during the vaccination side effect period whether causative or not).
Well, let's start with pathology. Fever is the way the body responds to a pathenogenic virus. Fever, occuring 2-3 days before the rash manifests, is also one of the hallmarks of Measles diagnosis. So no, I think it is safe to say that 100% of persons with Measles will develop a fever. If you're going to claim only 15% of those infected get a fever you will have to prove that in absolute terms because it flies in the face of what is known about virology and physiology. (Could someone potentially develop Measles but have a disorder where temperature doesn't go up? Yeah, that may be biologically possible but you'd have to document that using hard numbers, not just what you think might be the case, as that would be an extraordinary claim in any quantity. Any such person is probably going to be extremely sick because it would mean the body can't using its resources to fight the disease).
Well, let's see. About 10,000,000 measles vaccinations are given annually. At the study's 4.6% fever incidence rate that means that about the same sheer number of people would develop a fever total than just the body of those who contracted the disease (440,000 out of 3-4 million). Sorry that my number was in error, as the real number is that 440,000 per year out of 10,000,000 vaccinated get a fever where 3-4 million per year did pre-vaccination. Thanks for the clarification that we'll just take it as given that fever develops in far fewer people given the vaccination (which can be any number of reasons) on average than those who got the disease (which the disease process is for). Both by sheer numbers and by percentage of incidence.
But I'm also not really sure the conclusion you're going for here. Mine was first that you're comparing apples to oranges that a macropapular rash all over the body except head is different from "my skin got red at the injection site". The latter is the kind of rash that the vaccination study is talking about. And second that the incidence rate of rash for vaccine is nothing approaching that which Measles causes. And as above, the rash is what makes Measles a case of Measles (Koplik's spots are about the only other differential diagnostic outside of serology), so 100% would be a safe assumption rate for those who have Measles. (If the rash wasn't there you'd have some other disease process with some similar symptoms, including other rash diseases).
And what we have found since 1963-1964 is pretty much what your numbers have proven: To a population, receiving the measles vaccine is effective and more safe than getting the disease itself both in comparative rates of complications and in sheer overall number of persons who develop problems.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 01 2019, @06:17PM (1 child)
Source? Link me to table like the one I created that the CDC has shared with us. If it existed (and had a description of where the numbers came from) I would ahve used it. I created that table because this comparison does not exist. If you claim it does, it should be quite easy for you to share a link.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 01 2019, @07:04PM
Please, please do not claim you cannot link to it because it is hidden away on microfiche in an unknown library like the last guy who "shredded" me. I don''t know if I can handle that amount of laughter again.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 02 2019, @09:27PM
So no source? You will go down with no defense at all for your false claims then. That is better than the microfiche in unknown library one though.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday April 30 2019, @11:36PM (1 child)
The problem with your analysis is that the figures don't include people who didn't see the doctor for their problem. This is particularly significant when you're talking about "respiratory infections" as most of those are never seen by a doctor, so they'll generally only be seen is noticed in the process of dealing with something else.
How you'd correct for that kind of data problem is unclear. Another problem is that you'll get more data from hypochondriacs than from normal people. Whether that would be significant I don't know, but once you start including things that aren't serious it might be.
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 Tuesday April 30 2019, @11:43PM
Same AC as above.
I think we can say that in the MMR_2018 study nearly everyone who had some issue probably reported it although maybe they did not include everything in the final paper or coded some stuff oddly.
In the measles_1963 study, it can go either way since on the one hand not everyone would report complications. On the other hand only ~15% of measles cases were even reported (probably the worst of them) and it was up to the doctor's opinion whether any complication was caused by measles (with no guidelines provided).
So to me, I see that they really messed this up and left us with many possible sources of systematic error.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 30 2019, @07:23PM (7 children)
If, faced with a choice of the two, yes indeed I would rather get shot with a .22.
The apparent choice facing parents is: shot with vaccine, or no shot and a miniscule (even today with 700 cases in 4 months) chance of possibly contracting the disease.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday April 30 2019, @08:15PM (6 children)
How about not being shot with a .22 (Measles) or a .45 (Mumps) because one was vaccinated against both? Especially when the odds of receiving a vaccine-related complication are far more miniscule to that of receiving a disease related complication? That's one of the reasons (not the most important) why I'm vaccinated - I understand the odds.
Aside from "miniscule" chances of not contracting the disease aside, this is the tip of the iceberg is what epidemiologists are warning. More people decide to not get vaccinated and you get an epidemic and a hell of a lot more than 700 cases in the first four months of a year.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 30 2019, @08:38PM (5 children)
Did you just ignore the entire response to you. The odds of a complication are similar.
Also, due to antibody waning you have about russian roulette odds of not getting measles in the next real epidemic if you were vaccinated ~30 years ago, worse if it was longer or you haven't been exposed to "natural boosters" in the meantime.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15106101 [nih.gov]
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22966129 [nih.gov]
Many vaccinated people are going to have great fun with adult measles (which is much worse than childhood measles).
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 30 2019, @08:47PM (4 children)
My childhood diseases kept me home from school for a total of almost 5 weeks, but never hospitalized me.
My eldest son was hospitalized with a 107 fever about 8 hours after receiving his HepA shot, aged ~3 - and I bet that never made the adverse reaction database, just like millions of other vaccine reactions that aren't recognized as such or aren't acknowledged by the admitting staff as such.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday April 30 2019, @10:29PM (3 children)
First of all, I'm sorry your son had an adverse reaction. The CDC estimate is that about one in one million doses have an adverse reaction to HepA (source [cdc.gov].) That data does not just come from voluntary reporting but safety trials and other sources where reporting is absolutely mandatory. I cannot guarantee that your son's case would or wouldn't be listed in that database, but I would think it would be if you mentioned he was vaccinated and he was hospitalized with high grade fever. As I say, I can't be sure.
I went looking for HepA complication frequency and struck out in the time I had to search. The data is out there somewhere, just couldn't lay my hands on it. This reference [immunize.org] states that the fatality rate of HepA was 0.7% of all cases reported in 2016 and I read a different source which said there were 2,007 cases in 2016, which would mean 14 people died of HepA in 2016. That translates to 7,000 cases out of 1,000,000 die from the disease. This next math and conclusion is questionable, but if the HepA vaccine is 95% effective that means that 6,650 deaths in 1,000,000 cases are prevented by the vaccine. We can also reverse the complication numbers and see that way less than 1 of 2007 immunizations 1have an adverse complication , compared to 0.7% who die from HepA per year.
That's why we vaccinate. I'm so sorry your boy had to hospitalized, that his life was at risk, and with that high of a fever I'd be surprised if there weren't severe post-febrile complications. But vaccination saves more lives (life itself) than it harms people who still live. That probably isn't comforting to you, because it's your boy who was harmed. But it's why we do it, and we can estimate but we cannot know whose lives were saved because we vaccinate.
And, given your history, I'm sorry that I was flip with you earlier about it. I should be more careful because I know you've got more on the ball than average.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Wednesday May 01 2019, @12:35AM (2 children)
I hate to do this as I am pro-vaccination, but this comparison assumes that everyone will contract HepA if not vaccinated. You really need to factor in the rate of catching HepA when not vaccinated.
For the individual : (probability_bad_outcome_vaccination) vs (probability_bad_outcome_HepA * probability_of_catching_HepA)
It's a lot more complicated really as you need to factor in vaccine effectiveness and, on a society level, the effects of herd immunity. It is quite likely that the best solution for an individual is that everyone else gets vaccinated, but that he/she doesn't.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 01 2019, @01:20AM
It is strange you present this as in some sort of conflict. People are perfectly able to make decisions that benefit their larger social group at their own personal expense. But once you are lied to over and over about the supposed benefits of various things it is rational to stop doing that...
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday May 01 2019, @04:04PM
Except that what we're looking at is for 1,000,000 confirmed cases there will be 7,000 deaths. (Will there absolutely be? No. I'm just extrapolating from the known numbers of viral caused deaths to confirmed cases for a single year of 2016, which isn't valid statistical technique). There are also many people who get HepA and aren't diagnosed because one can have the virus and present no symptoms, which is why confirmed cases are talked about. There are some statistics which can estimate how many are known from inadvertent discovery during other diagnostics, but that's a subject for another day.
But if we know 7,000 deaths would occur per 1m confirmed cases then it's a matter of knowing vaccine effectiveness, which for HepA is 95% for single dose and 97% for two doses. That means in what would have been 1,000,000 confirmed cases 95% of them (6,650) that would have died did not.... although the minutiae really would be that 950,000 cases of 1,000,000 infections would not have gotten the disease and that of that remaining 50,000 that get the virus in spite of vaccination there could still be 348 deaths. And 7,000 out of 1,000,000 are actually pretty good odds - as an individual I'd bet every time on being on the side of the 993,000 that aren't going to die if I was forced into betting.
My math was crap for a couple of other reasons, too. I only counted death and not other serious and adverse complications. I think those numbers are hard to come by because when HepA gets serious any number of bad things happen. But also for all the reasons you stated, too.
So my math is crap but the reasoning still stands. The thing is, for those who are actually paid to know the math and crunch the numbers on virology you hear one thing and only one thing which is truth: The value of vaccination to a group outweighs the adverse effects done to a vaccinated group. (Note that those adverse effects don't look at whether it was the vaccination's fault but are all adverse reactions causative or not).
It often isn't phrased that way because people already are predisposed to not listen (or to listen uncritically as well) - if the nurse was told they wouldn't publicize the family's mumps vaccinations because of giving antivaxxers ammunition such fears are not without a pretty solid grounding. Because enough individuals are selfish enough to bring down the system. Because people refuse to trust the system which is already poised to stop vaccinations where it is learned that the adverse reactions to a given vaccination outweigh the disease's pathological impact. Google "vaccination trial stopped" and you will see that there are vaccination formulas that are stopped in trial. They get stopped for many reasons but here is a Lancet article [thelancet.com] about one in particular for Dengue that got stopped because there were cases where giving the vaccine caused exacerbations and it outweighed the benefits. There's a lot more to say on the topic but what numbers show is that vaccinations are approved when the overall benefits outweigh the risks or complications, the same as any other medical therapy.
And I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir in your case. But the reality still is vaccination works better than not, and the system is primed to terminate a vaccine which fails to meet that standard.
This sig for rent.