Canada Loses Its Measles-Free Status, with Us on Track to Follow
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Canada has lost its measles-free status due to low vaccination rates in certain communities, sparking concerns about the role of anti-vaccine rhetoric and complacency, while also highlighting issues with vaccine accessibility.
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The challenge is that solving this is easier but only if people are willing to get vaccinated.
Sure, we just call that an anecdote, and deprecate it appropriately.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/09/06/partisan-...
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/09/23/gop-voters-vaccines...
Vaccines are incredibly effective, and we're wasting all that again and children will needlessly suffer and die.
Sweden took a much more pragmatic approach and didn’t suffer for it. They’ve got a lesson we can learn.
If you want to have a good faith version of this conversation, I've seen many people have voiced rational concerns and be shouted down because people simply don't want to hear it.
Primary example - Many parents, including myself, made sure our kids got every single one of their vaccines...but we wanted to avoided giving more than 2 per month so we altered the schedule slightly.
Fully vaccinated, just took a simple precaution that put our minds at ease.
The number of people who will call you "antivax" for that, for simply questioning the dosing schedule and taking a minor precaution is shocking. And that's what really made all of this so much worse.
Nobody that I saw, prior to the Covid vax at least, questioned whether or not vaccines did what they said they do. People just question whether sometimes there can be side effects. The answer to that is obviously yes. There are vaccine courts and people have been awarded lots of money from them. So the next rational question that anyone would ask is..."If there can sometimes be side effects, in what circumstances are they likely? Are there any precautions that can be taken if we can identify what those circumstances may be?"
It's no different than if somebody is lactose intolerant, has a gluten allergy or a peanut allergy. Some people are predisposed not to respond well to conditions that many of us have no issue with.
That's not a rational basis for disagreeing on the efficacy of vaccines themselves. It is a rational basis to ask about the conditions that can create unintended side effects; we already know they are happening. Denying that is irrational on its own...so why not have the conversation?
Okay, but why does it matter what morons say? A doctor or immunologist would usually say "Eh, whatever" to this request. Did a doctor call you an anti-vaxxer?
>it's no different than if somebody is lactose intolerant, has a gluten allergy or a peanut allergy.
Guess what! A bunch of doctors 15 years ago were scared of peanut allergies and suggested without evidence "a simple precaution", of "don't give young kids peanuts", and now something like 8 million people have peanut allergies that could have been maybe prevented.
That's what this is all about. "Smart" humans don't exist. Tons of times what we expected is not what science finds. That 15 year advice that lead to millions of peanut allergies was overturned not by random people getting uncomfortable about not understanding things, but by doctors studying the actual question and coming to a conclusion that fit the data.
Is there any data any which way on your belief that a delayed vaccination schedule like that is "Safer"? Safer than what? Safer how? What theory is it done under? But your doctor didn't care. Tons of parents do that. Some researcher will pull those stats someday and say clearly "Eh, it doesn't do anything good or bad" or "it's clearly better/worse" and then we can make an educated decision.
Until then, it is unscientific by definition. Does that make you feel bad? It shouldn't, most of what humans do is unscientific. But that won't make it wrong.
There is zero "safe" things you can do to a human body. Giving someone a sandwich is not safe and in rigorous study would result in a "side effect" list a mile long, and maybe even a death. 1.7 out of 100k deaths are from choking.
>Nobody that I saw, prior to the Covid vax at least, questioned whether or not vaccines did what they said they do
There is tons of public information to the contrary. Jenny McCarthy for example was anti-vax two decades ago and shouting it from the rooftops.
>"If there can sometimes be side effects, in what circumstances are they likely? Are there any precautions that can be taken if we can identify what those circumstances may be?"
And we did that with the Covid vaccine and every vaccine ever made before it and it has always been clear that the vaccine is just as safe as any other. Anti-vaxxers are people who don't understand the statistics of that studying.
The conversation was had, anti-vaxxers don't like the outcome of the conversation.
The doctor did act like it was a hassle and their office now has a sign refusing service to any parents who wish to deviate from the official schedule.
> There is tons of public information to the contrary. Jenny McCarthy for example was anti-vax two decades ago and shouting it from the rooftops.
Did she ever challenge whether or not vaccines worked to prevent what they were supposed to prevent? Pretty sure she was just talking about total volume.
Why do you consider this a rational concern/precaution? What evidence lead you to believe the vaccination schedule, which is generally-accepted in the medical community, should be spread out?
I can give you a reason it's likely not rational: babies are protected by their mother's immunity for approximately 6 months after birth. The current vaccination schedule[1] is largely built with this in mind. Delaying vaccines for no other reason than "it's too many too fast" concerns does nothing but increase the chance your child ultimately gets infected with one of the pathogens vaccinated against.
1. https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/imz-schedules/child-easyread.ht...
Based on that people are left to speculate as to what influences appear to be probable on their own. One of the simplest correlations to make is of course, the sheer volume of vaccines on the schedule and whether the combined effect is creating any impact.
My wife and I went far beyond that and did speak to a retired OB who shared his own career observations with us. His explanation was that people naturally filter heavy metals, like aluminum, out of their systems but some people do it slower than others. Since aluminum is used in many vaccines, he recommended spreading them out to reduce the stress on the body to filter it out.
He went on to explain that he eventually started testing pregnant mothers and identified that when the high levels were often present in the mother, then many children ended up with the same issue. He started recommending a specific prenatal regiment to the expecting mothers to help correct it. Would even go as far as testing couples who were planning to try to have a baby before they were even pregnant.
Very kind man.
It's a small step from there to the people who chided -me- because I said I was no longer willing to discuss in good faith with people who argued about "post birth abortions" (that they knew to be a lie) or adrenachrome farming from babies in pizza parlor basements. That it was my fault for these views propagating for not being willing to "understand" their perspective.
Their perspectives are a lie They know they're a lie. They just don't. fucking. care.
And then they whine about people being "dismissive" of them.
> And in several Demoncrat [sic] states, abortion is legal up until one month post-delivery! That is evil!
What do these morons (the ones who might actually believe what they say) think that looks like? Have birth, go home with your child, a few weeks later you're just not feeling it, and you go back to the hospital and hand over your infant and say "I'd like my post-birth abortion, please?"?!?
Notably, Mary Mallon (Typhoid Mary) was never convinced either. This didn't make her less dangerous. The big difference is the average lethality. If we were talking about Polio, people's paranoia is a lot less important.
I don't blame anyone for not trusting the government. Anyone who's read (or lived) history and with a rational mind would scrutinize every single thing coming from them, particularly if their health is involved.
Another thing that doesn't help, but this is almost exclusively a memerican problem, is that people enjoy polarizing these issues to their absolute extremes. Things are either vantablack or HDR-white. And if you happen to be on the other end "you should die or go to prison".
Chill. It's OK to question things.
The more obvious stupidity was around face masks, first by denying they worked at all, and then by acting like coarse weave cloth was as good as N95 or FFP3.
iirc that was the prevailing theory until after the vaccines came out. I don't recall it ever being in the news when it was determined to be airborne. By that time, COVID wasn't even newsworthy.
I'm on team "ball was dropped badly re pandemic policy and communication", though I personally don't extend that to blind distrust in institutions in general. It was a tough (arguably unprecedented) situation in a media landscape primed for misinformation.
There were also scary studies coming out of China (though this was later) showing a single positive guy going for a run in a park infecting loads of people. The dynamics have only changed because people have partial immunity now, but it was like wildfire and it is still going up and down in terms of transmission.
To be honest, I think it's fine there was some over-reaction. Millions of people died. I think it's ok to be slightly uncomfortable for a little bit under such extreme circumstances. To be quite honest, there was an under-reaction. We had an opportunity to shut it down and decided not to follow the science like China did because of American exceptionalism. Now we are living with it forever until there is a better vaccine.
China protected their entire population until a vaccine was made available. This means their death rate was likely a third of ours. Their official statistics paint too rosy a picture (they claim only ~60k died), but a simple back of the napkin calculation 0.1% vaccinated die, 1% unvaccinated die, means they did 10x better than let-it-rip. We did something like 3x better than let-it-rip.
The real danger for most people wasn’t the virus, it was the hospitals being so overwhelmed by the virus that they would no longer be able to provide care for other stuff.
It was not overblown.
Covid was the #1 killer of cops for a while. It killed enough old people that it is mathematically possible that it caused Trump to lose the election.
Tons of people are permanently disabled.
China was welding doors shut to keep people from leaving their apartments.
At the level the epidemic reached in some area of China that may have been necessary to slow the flood, no different than rationing during famine.
I have some issues with China (corruption, nepotism, pervasive tracking), but this is not really one of them.
It happened more than once.
Uploaded 2022-01-06: Xi’an. Clearly a front door. https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/rxddgp/chin...
Uploaded 2022-05-03: Residents locked inside homes with wires and bolts due to Covid-19 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpfKZVTSp3I
Uploaded 2022-05-06: Shanghai https://www.reddit.com/r/oddlyterrifying/comments/ujoj33/in_...
Uploaded 2022-11-30: Unidentified city; worker shown welding a back entrance shut. https://www.reddit.com/r/CrazyFuckingVideos/comments/z8fpzy/...
Enforcing public safety rules is hard. Knowing where to draw the line is hard for individual enforcement officers. That's what, in times of public crisis, it's important to overlook edge cases like these because they serve the larger purpose.
I played a small role in this that allowed me to see how these decisions were made. I think we should be honest at this point about how much of the policy was driven by vibes and politics. We had better data than people assume and it had almost no bearing on the decisions that were made.
Multiple governments had high-quality models that suggested a much lower IFR than what was widely reported, and in hindsight were proven correct. The news cycle was captured by people pushing doomsday scenarios and many people decided it was politically inconvenient to contradict that prevailing narrative. There weren't any complex motives, it was cowardice mixed with a bit of opportunism. I got to see this from the inside and I have no doubt that it would happen again, which gives me little confidence in the institutions.
There was an enormous amount of pressure to be seen to be doing something from the top in most countries, which led to a lot of the pointless theater that happened.
It is unfortunate but the poor reputation of public health officials due to COVID is well-deserved.
Not only that. If the line is way too far on one side or the other, everyone agrees that it is, and then it's shifted. If the line is approximately at the optimum, some agree it is, and those that disagree are about half convinced that it's too far this way, half it's too far that way.
So, having maximum disagreement is in itself arguably an indicator that you got it approximately right.
People are responsible for themselves. Mindlessly doing the opposite of what the government says is as dogmatic as blindly following it.
People collectively are sufficiently manipulable that society only functions when certain manipulations are forbidden.
This is true even though, as you say, mindlessly doing the opposite of what the government says is as dogmatic as blindly following it (a lesson I learned as a toddler, from my sister doing the "yes no yes no yes no no yes oops" trick on me).
Public communications is hard at the best of times let alone during a novel pandemic with high uncertainty on correct actions, but it's what the government needs to be good at to function, so them messing communications up is… well, I was going to say "blame worthy", but then I remember that air travel got good by avoiding blame culture, so shall we say "a learning opportunity"?
One position asks you to get jabbed with a needle, the other asks you to do nothing. So people are very happy to do nothing if they're not forced to get jabbed.
- effective, widespread vaccine deployment
- the virus naturally evolving to a less-lethal state
- it all having been overblown from the get-go
My instinct is like 60/30/10, but it would be great to see someone make an actual case based on hard data, of which surely there is plenty.
This "effect" is massively overblown. Covid still attacks the same receptors with are all over the body and still causes damaging inflammation. Grandma getting COVID is still terrifying, just like it's always been terrifying when they get the flu. Meanwhile my mom has permanent heart damage from Covid. Not the early strain either.
The vaccines have been a huge help but more generally, everyone developed some amount of immunity, even people who are anti-vaxxers. It's just around now, and our body's have had to adapt to fighting it off all the time. It's endemic. "There's a second version of virulent seasonal respiratory (but not just that) infection now" isn't exactly a great outcome.
Primarily what happened is we learned better treatment, so it isn't so deadly even when you have it bad. Ventilation is much rarer for example.
Covid hasn't gone away. How can you possibly think that? I know like ten people who seem to catch covid (tested, not just random diseases) multiple times a year now.
Instead a lot of people with strong ideological reasons to believe it's not a big deal insist on ignoring it's everpresent negative effects. Including our current presidential administration.
e.g. this source says 99.7%: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7062568/
I don't think those people stopped being antivax, if anything they feel vindicated.
Don’t use govt control to suppress speech on social media. It’s not conducive to any sort of trust building.
Before I’m labelled a “maga/trump” talking points peddler - my kids are vaccinated (yes, including the hpv), I haven’t done covid shots more than the one required time. We do flu shots but not picky about it. Kids have had the flu (a & b) and they’ve handled it pretty well.
I rarely get sick. I haven't had flu or even a cold in at least 10 years. I don't get flu vaccines because in my estimation I don't need them. By contrast, for something like tetanus vaccines, I do get those periodically as my hobbies expose me to cuts and dirt.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/covid-effe...
It has been affirmed that the risks of the vaccine are less than the risks of the virus. Still, we shouldn’t shout “the vaccines are safe” so loudly that we can’t document and discuss real side effects and relative risks between competing solutions.
We’ve ultimately reached the correct outcome here, removing an inferior product from the market.
[1]: https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/coronavirus-vaccine-blood-...
When people say “vaccines are safe” they usually mean “vaccines are generally safe” but when people say “vaccines are not safe” they usually mean “all vaccines are not safe at all times”. Those two are very different opinions and you’re demanding accountability from the side that already willing to display it.
I think general aches and chills were not an issue. But myocarditis and blood clots should be looked at and not brushed under “minuscule”
https://newsroom.heart.org/news/myocarditis-risk-significant...
The federal government lied about masks. Local governments lied about lockdowns. Nobody lied about vaccines.
The folks who can’t be fucked to not get and spread measles weren’t tipped over the edge by the mask lies because they’re the same folks who wouldn’t follow a mask mandate.
Sure they did. Go back and listen to what the media and politicians were saying about the vaccines when they were first released: you won't get COVID, you won't spread COVID. We ended up at "you'll still get COVID and spread COVID, but your symptoms will be lessened".
I'm not anti-vaccine by any means, but the story around COVID vaccines changed...a lot.
You’re making the claim. Show me.
I remember this debate happening online. It was stupid then as it is now. The clinical outcomes were clear as day: reduced hospitalisation. And Jonas Salk’s original polio vaccine was non-sterilising and not only not non-infecting, but actively infecting.
The fact that you are unaware of it means you've got your head-in-the-sand.
"Calling on Americans to get vaccinated against Covid-19, Biden said, “If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized, you’re not going to be in the ICU unit and you’re not going to die.”"
Are those facts?
https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/22/politics/fact-check-biden-cnn...
What part of this says “you won't get COVID, you won't spread COVID”?
You made the claim: >Nobody lied about vaccines.
I posted a link from a left-leaning source, fact-checking the PRESIDENT literally lying about vaccine efficacy. Then you move on to something else.
Well, that's in there too, but you didn't read, did you?
"You’re not going to get Covid if you have these vaccinations.”"
I posted one resource, I'm not doing your research for you. The fact that you deny this indicates you are completely brain-rotted. Enjoy.
Someone doubted you. You responded by posting a quote from President Biden: "If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized, you’re not going to be in the ICU unit and you’re not going to die."
That does not support your earlier claim. There is support for your earlier claim at the site you took the quote from, but the usual convention here is that if you quote a site you quote the part that supports your argument.
It's... literally the next paragraph. Right next to the part you quoted.
I see it now. That's misleading. It contains a nugget of truth inasmuch as a vaccinated person has lower odds of a SARS-CoV-2 infection turning into Covid, but it's not a guarantee. (Nothing in immunology is, but that's a punt.)
It should have been couched, it wasn't, and I can see someone seeing that as lying.
That said, if Biden had used more delicate words, do you think these folks would have taken their MMRs? Are people who make stupid decisions for the next decade because Trump lies about everything sympathetic because they couldn't evaluate source authority?
> Right next to the part you quoted
I was quoting the comment I responded to.
Now you are pretending that someone can't go on YouTube and find more lies about the vaccines from the likes of people like Rachel Maddow. People have assembled long clips, it's a meme.
"Nuggets of truth", my lord, pure delusion.
"But but but what about some hypothetical scenario where the president didn't lie?"
We will never know, will we?
These people will lie. Deny. Gaslight. Move goalposts. Ask for sources they have no intention of looking at. Then lie some more.
Imagine claiming, "No one lied about the vaccines" in 2025 and asking for proof when challenged. It's absurd.
An yet, he has a long posting history here; we know he's not oblivious. So what are the incentives to pretend it never happened?
It's wrong for a politican to lie. But if someone is confusing the President and CDC, I'm not seeing any bright paths ahead for them.
“In early 2020, Fauci and other public health officials advised against mask use by the general public, citing both doubts about efficacy and a need to preserve limited supplies for healthcare workers” [1]. That second part brings it close to a lie. (There was no need to advise against mask use.)
America fucked up thrice: the mask misinformation in March, talking down the lab-release hypothesis (which would have motivated right-wing nutters into being less selfish), and not regulating local jurisdictions who took specific measures (e.g. no public outdoor gatherings in San Francisco, or vaccine mandates in open-air venues in New York).
Otherwise, we did pretty well. And I’m sceptical someone willing to put their family and community at risk would see things differently if any of the above changed.
[1] https://case.hks.harvard.edu/a-noble-lie-dr-anthony-fauci-an...
Huge stretch to consider this intent to deceive. This is as much of a lie as imposing rations during wartime. And not even that much, since Fauci's statements were suggestions and not mandates. They were basically saying, "We're not yet sure if they work well, but we're looking into it. But for now, supplies are limited, so let's not deprive healthcare workers who actually need them."
No, they could have said that. In fact, they should have said that. Instead what they said was some convoluted statement actually saying something like there was no evidence for masks working (null hypothesis), worded such that most people not skilled in critical reading would interpret it as an indication that masks didn't work.
It was most certainly a black mark on public health officials, along with the various closures of open air venues - parks, beaches, etc. (of course not that these things justify any of the abject denialist craziness of the "other side")
But even in your framing, I think they could have simply not said anything for a few days to the general public while healthcare workers went and scooped up whatever was still floating around in the consumer inventory. Coming clean and saying we think this might help, but the supply is low and they're more important for healthcare workers would have built trust rather than creating another transparent move that undermined it.
I do get they were under significant pressure, especially with the anti-leadership above them causing unnecessary chaos for political gains. I just think if we're doing a postmortem here we should acknowledge that the lying was a mistake.
The bigger fuck up was having an anti-leader in the bully pulpit amplifying outlandish anti-society positions. The usual mainstream conservative right wing opinion would have been something like "wear a mask / stay home / etc to protect yourself and your own family". This would set normative societal behavior, even though some people would do otherwise for their own reasons (with one possible reason being a headstrong individualist desire to exercise freedom). But instead a large group of mainstream people, who would have otherwise been perfectly content following along with the system's recommendations, were basically goaded into denialism as mainstream pop culture. It's hard to look at this and conclude anything other that the occupier of said bully pulpit is either directly a foreign agent sowing division for division's sake, or at the very least demented in a social media bubble managed by foreign agents.
1: Unfortunately, that direction was a series of ridiculous overseas wars, but that's besides the point.
It wasn't, in part, because of how we reacted to 9/11. (Afghanistan was probably fine. But wtf with Iraq.)
That is not known for sure.
Disclaimer for those who missed Rational Debate 101: this does not mean they are connected.
I wish I had cataloged all of the stuff I read and listened to in 2020. There are things where the references are basically impossible to find. All of it mainstream news sources. There was concern expressed in 2020 that the covid vaccine could trigger resistance to other existing vaccines, and that's exactly what happened.
Also worth name dropping one of the most interesting books I've ever read: _The Pox of Liberty: How the Constitution Left Americans Rich, Free, and Prone to Infection_. Apparently so obscure that Amazon tries to auto correct the search.
I don't think so. Biden pushed the Covid vaccines even harder than Trump did. If Trump had been in the White House I don't think Covid vaccines would have been mandated.
I looked up that article. Nowhere does it indicate that papers like the NYT were opposed to speeding up the development, approval, and distribution of vaccines.
Are you implying that if it were Democrats in the white house we would've had protracted approval?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/04/opinion/coronavirus-vacci...
==
Vaccines often take 10 years to bring to market. We want a new vaccine as fast as possible, where each month matters.
The fact is that starting from the early stages of development, most vaccines fail. We cannot afford to fail, so we need to plan for success. To do that, we must think and invest as ambitiously as we can — and that means in a Covid vaccine advance market commitment.
So then how do you deal with other state actors who have whole machineries spreading lies and disinformation on social networks?
I’ve come to discount the opinion of anyone who earnestly accuses some of being an anti-vaxxer. They have no moral or scientific high ground and obviously do not understand nuance.
Same. The way the COVID vaccine was used as a political wedge issue contributed to suspicions. I hope lessons were learned on both sides but I doubt it.
This is not a fact, and spreading this misinformation is very concerning.
The core issue isn't with "antivaxxers" but with the continual erosion of trust that created the sentiment in the first place. The foundation of being willing to inject yourself with something that you personally can't verify the effectiveness or safety of is trust. At every level our social institutions: the government, large corporations, and academia, have continually chipped away at the foundations of social trust necessary for these things.
Moderna has no opioid division.
And while Mennonites have a multinational drug problem [1][2], I see no evidence they were “disproportionately” impacted by opioids.
This sounds like post hoc rationalisation, not causation. These folks were never going to get vaccinated.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-jan-28-me-18060...
[2] https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/1.2937000
True. That is a fact I believe
But pull out a bit for a wider view: The establishment that said "trust us" over vaccines was the same establishment that made billions from killing millions by "fueling the current opioid crisis"
Conflating the "establishment" into a false monolith is rhetorically convenient. It's also wrong.
"Purdue Pharma hired Rudolph Giuliani, the former New York mayor and now Donald Trump’s lawyer, to head off a federal investigation in the mid-2000s into the company’s marketing of the powerful prescription painkiller at the" [1]. (The Sacklers disproportionately donated to the GOP [2]. I see no evidence of them continuing that under MAGA.)
To the extent the people who "kill[ed] millions by 'fueling the current opioid crisis'" had a role in the vaccine debate, it's by hitching up to the anti-vaxers.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/may/22/rudy-giulian...
[2] https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2019/04/purdue-pharma-and-t...
Nonsense
How is a person supposed to tell the fine grained difference between the perpetrators of cruelty?
It is all the establishment. Largely private actors ( doctors, lawyers, school teachers...) backed up with state scantioned violence in the end
Why, then, does "the establishment" (by your conflation of these things) sue itself?
"The establishment" is a relative term. It is all those %!! over there.
All those you mention are a part of it, a grinding machine that gobbles up people's lives and destroys them, because rules.
...and blah blah blah
You get all those services if you conform and obey.
Not sure what world you’re living in. But in mine, most people are not committing mass murder.
People have knee-jerk reaction to arguments like yours: oh so you don't trust the government, but choose to trust random facebook and youtube posts?
Unfortunately this is the exact problem. Governments think they have an infinite amount of trust to spend because "at least it's not random facebook posts."
The moment some people see a single slip up from the latter, they distrust them forever, but you can show study after study debunking autism links, for example, and those same people either disregard the evidence or merely move the goal posts.
In other words: these people are intellectually dishonest. They start with a conclusion and will contort or discard any facts that threaten said conclusion.
They'd never lie and conspire for years and years. That couldn't possibly happen.
However, being as that is merely a to quoque fallacy, I'm rather curious: do you have any examples of said campaigns run by the healthcare/pharma industry? And, more importantly, do you have any evidence such campaigns have anything to do with vaccines?
Note: the Purdue/Sackler campaign surrounding opiods is already well-known, but AFAICT, it has no relationship with vaccines.
Pharmaceutical companies betraying the trust of people has nothing to do with the people not trusting the pharmaceutical companies?
You think the opioid campaign is the only real wrongdoing by pharmaceutical companies??
> You think the opioid campaign is the only real wrongdoing by pharmaceutical companies??
I'm open to the possibility of there being additional wrongdoing by Purdue or other pharmaceutical companies, perhaps even related to vaccines. However, the fact that one pharmaceutical company engaged in (admittedly pretty egregious) wrongdoing with respect to opioids does not itself prove any wrongdoing regarding vaccines made by itself or other companies. Assuming otherwise is falling victim to a syllogistic fallacy.
Answering my call for evidence of wrongdoing specific to vaccines with such a conspiratorial-minded question suggests you have no such evidence. I implore you to prove me incorrect.
I'm talking about perceived industry wide reputational damage by the public as a cause for distrust.
Who cares about fallacies?
Beliefs triumph over logic. Public perception > truth.
Further reputational damages are not unwarranted. Thalidomide is an old example. There are many more recent ones outside of opioid. You're free to look up actual court cases.
They don't make opiods.
The reproducibility crisis also doesn't really affect vaccine safety data.
But most of the vaccines that are recommended for all preschool children in the US are not recent, long predating the opioid crisis.
The MMR vaccine became recommended in 1971, replacing separate vaccines for measles, mumps, and rubella.
Pertussis, diphtheria, and tetanus vaccination become recommended in 1914, 1926, and 1938, respectively and were combined into the DTP combo vaccine in the '40s.
Polio vaccination became recommended in 1955.
There is no good reason to be skeptical of any of those or other similar ones I've left off. We've got 60-100+ years of widespread use which has generated a ton of data spanning multiple generations showing they are safe and effective.
We continually see people online who step outside the line and are torn down by downvotes, comments, etc. And these cultural viewpoints lack all nuance so you are forced to either shove yourself into the box wholly or be ridiculed. Even if you are 90% onboard with the popular viewpoint, you cannot let that questioning 10% show. The end result is a bunch of people wandering around with their secret "bad" thoughts being driven further against whatever populist issue they should be jumping into next.
People have lower trust in doctors, hospitals and pharma companies because people they do trust (Trump, RFK and the parade of misfits now running US health policy) lie to them to get them to distrust doctors and pharma companies. It’s not some complicated bank shot.
The "erosion of trust" which you think is a natural reaction is, in fact, a constructed one created by rhetoric which holds science up to unreasonable standards of reliability and then complains about how it can't get everything right.
Its absolutely true that public health authorities didn't get everything right during the pandemic. Its also absolutely true that studies have less epistemological power than people often make them out to have (which is what the replication crisis is really about). But it is a rhetorical angle that the appropriate response to either of those states of affairs is a rejection of science or trust in authority. People should understand the limits of science and put an appropriate amount of credence in it, but the idea that scientific authority should be outright rejected is a cultural movement with very little attachment to reality and one which is astroturfed and exploited, primarily by the political right, to whip up their base.
More broadly speaking, I think its wrong to blame the institutions themselves when elements of the american political system have been working tirelessly to discredit institutions and science for decades. It isn't a spontaneous, natural thing.
Vaccines in principle are good, not all implementations are equally good.
Vaccines made of inactivated (killed) or attenuated (alive, but defective) pathogens are usually more dangerous. Inactivation may not be effective and a virulent pathogen may survive and attenuated pathogens may pick up virulence factors and become fully functional from a different (related) patogen that happes to infect the patient at the same time. Also, when vaccines are prepared from infected animals, manufacturing accidents may happen, such as contamination with something else infectious.
These types of vaccines were mostly replaced by fully synthetic vaccines.
You may read about the old polio vaccine:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine
Are we too dumb to believe some vaccines are life saving miracles and that others may not be necessary? Why is it so all or none?
Especially given things like most European nations not vaccinating against RSV, Hep A or Varicella. Are they all psycho anti-vax nutjobs? It seems much better to go through them one by one, and say: "Measles is universally recommended, has saved countless lives, lets do that one. Covid-19 vaccine for a 6 month old, USA is the only country still recommending it, skip it."
Herd immunity matters.
I’ve sort of accepted society will bifurcate into diseased and undiseased branches. As long as the latter don’t have to pay for the former’s stupidity, I’m over it.
(By analogy: “the ‘stupid motorist law’ is a law in the U.S. state of Arizona that states that any motorist who becomes stranded after driving around barricades to enter a flooded stretch of roadway may be charged for the cost of their rescue” [1].)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stupid_motorist_law
The Lancet started it with that stupid Wakefield "study" that it refused to retract for a decade, which launched something that was associated with crystal healing into the mainstream; the destruction of the reputation of the integrity of medical research through bribery of scientists and doctors continued it; and covid lies made it permanent. It's over. Not vaccines, but any trust in medicine. We've gone from trusting the "consensus" far too much, to realizing how the "consensus" is constructed and not trusting anything any more. Just drifting with no moorings.
It's no different than when the US used fake vaccination programs in order to find Osama bin Laden, which led to local vaccination volunteers being murdered, and many people in the Middle East deciding that vaccination was a Western plot. You may not know about this because people in the West don't care when other people die unless it is socially useful for them; don't care unless it affects us and our lifestyles. Even during covid, the US launched a multimillion dollar antivax propaganda program in the Philippines in order to convince people that Sinovax would kill them just to get one up on China. Harris explained in a speech (and she wasn't alone) how she would be wary to take any vaccine from any Trump administration-directed program.
This fanatical chauvinism is only important in the West in order to get one up on other people. To display that you're more supportive of institutions than your stupid, evil populist neighbor. To show that there's nothing that they can do to kill your loyalty, because you understand subtlety. You're pragmatic, you know that the dummies need to be lied to to be herded into the right direction.
But if you're loyal no matter what and avoid talking about public failures when they are most relevant, even beatifying the architects of those failures, who has been herded? Take your vaccines and ask people if they're vaccinated before you let them around your infants. Don't pretend that your lording it over others is out of concern for them, though. It's just snotty, ultra-partisan ego inflation.
Medical science has lost the trust of the Western public because it has become completely overwhelmed by bribery and cronyism just like every other Western institution. Complete recycling of those institutions is the only way to get that trust back, and it's what the institutionalists spend all their time fighting against. Generally this is because they draw their middle-class salaries from these institutions and were active participants in these frauds - at the least dutifully shunning their families, friends and strangers for questioning them.
Not just amplifying them, but literally putting some of them in charge of vaccine policy: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/how-rfk-jr-s-hand-picked...
Funny thing is, same day I didn’t get the vaccine the grocery store receipt starting offering a free shot and $10 store credit with “most insurances” so I didn’t qualify lol.
This sorta thing that keeps Everyone safe with herd immunity you’d really think they’d want to make as easy as possible
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