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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: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 30 2019, @07:02PM (5 children)
Not entirely true, though I will grant you that a 50% vaccination rate would be just about ideal for "viral training" against the vaccine. If the vaccination rate were near 0%, the virus would have little chance to practice on the vaccine and little incentive to take on costly changes to help circumvent it.
We're destroying the efficacy of our antibiotics through overuse, pointless prescription, and use of active antibiotics as a placebo against viral disease. We may well be accelerating the evolutionary arrival of the next super-bug that wreaks historically unprecedented havoc in our ecosystem through our broad application of highly developed antibiotics. But, that's of little consequence if we knock the CO2 balance far enough off kilter.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 30 2019, @08:03PM (4 children)
Not sure where you are getting this. To maximize selection for resistance you want to kill off as many of the non-resistant strains as possible so that the resistant ones make up the vast majority of what remains. Ie, vaccinate at just below eradication levels (also known as the current measles vaccination policy).
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 30 2019, @09:00PM (3 children)
If you're vaccinating at the current rate, there are barely 100 cases per year, 100 chances for the virus to mutate to a resistant form.
If you vaccinate 50% of the population, infection rates will be something just over 50% that of an unvaccinated population, you'll have hundreds of thousands of chances per year for a mutation form and spread into the vaccinated population. Seems faster, to me.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 01 2019, @12:11AM (2 children)
The mutation can form, but why would it spread without selection pressure? Presumably any meaningful mutation would have some negative impact on the viruses ability to reproduce, and so won't propagate unless there is selection for it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 01 2019, @01:08AM (1 child)
No Joe's right. Any virus that mutated to be immune to the vaccine* is going to have a vast new field to spread into, whether that is 50% or 97% of the population. Either way it will spread like wildfire. Reducing the number of actual cases reduces the chance of forming a vaccine-resistant strain.
*not really immune to the vaccine, but changed enough that the vaccine doesn't provoke immune protection. Same effect.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 01 2019, @02:14AM
So now I am bothering to discuss this with people who use the concept that a virus is "immune" to a vaccine... Good god. Sorry, waste of my time.