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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   33869 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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I do not see anybody, anywhere, downplay the importance of vaccines and antibiotics.

RFK supporters I know personally are highly vaccine skeptical and believe in a kind of vaccine/autism link bailey. They do not support vaccinating kids for e.g. measles due to low death rates and are convinced that the only reason kids get so many vaccines is due to the pernicious influence of pharma companies. They are members of Facebook groups of hundreds of people where the consensus view aligns with their beliefs.

The vaccine schedule now includes hundreds of vaccines and the incentives are all screwed up. I think it's pretty reasonable to believe in vaccines as a technology in general and that a lot of them have been captured by special interests.

The vaccine schedule now includes hundreds of vaccines

False. I count 32 doses recommended to all children from age 0 to 18, not counting a yearly flu vaccine and one dose of a covid vaccine.

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines-children/schedules/index.html

This is a perfect example of the belief set I am talking about. The RFK supporters I know believe that kids are getting tens of vaccines in a single day.

I think it's pretty reasonable to believe in vaccines as a technology in general and that a lot of them have been captured by special interests.

Okay. Which vaccines in particular do you believe in?

I count 32 doses recommended to all children

how many of these doses include multiple vaccines?

to be frank, it's asinine to claim someone "wrong" if they believe MMR is 3 vaccines instead of one

not counting a yearly flu vaccine and one dose of a covid vaccine.

why wouldn't you count these?

"hundreds" is wrong, but so is "32" even if we accept 1 dose=1 vaccine which is hardly some sort of objective fact

Sure, we can break down dtap and mmr into three vaccinations. That brings the total to 48. Still a far cry from hundreds, so I don't see what's asinine about saying that hundreds is wrong. There's just no way you can torture the numbers to get to hundreds.

why wouldn't you count these?

Simply because in my experience most kids don't get these on a regular basis.

Simply because in my experience most kids don't get these on a regular basis.

they're on the schedule

hundreds is wrong, but so is 32

the number of vaccines on the CDC schedule for a child born today through age 18 is ~80

How is it 80? 48 I counted above, plus 18 flu, plus 2 covid makes 68.

boosters and multi year shots and "ask your doctor about RSV" means, in practicality, you should get the RSV "vaccine"

What boosters and multi year shots? I counted the boosters. Seriously, show your math, because I am pretty sure you are hiding the ball.

and "ask your doctor about RSV" means, in practicality, you should get the RSV "vaccine"

RSV vaccine is not recommended for all children. If we're going to stick to what's recommended on the schedule, let's stick to the schedule.

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What’s your experience?

My mistake, I should have said dozens. I think I saw "hundreds" somewhere recently and internalized that for some reason.

Okay. Which vaccines in particular do you believe in?

The technology for smallpox vaccines could be totally sound, and the company that makes the shots puts too much mercury in them or something. A batch could be bad. Maybe the adjuvants are too strong. We have good heuristics for noticing when something causes noticeable immediate side effects, but not when something contributes to chronic stress. Maybe every shot contains one of the 32 arms of Exodia, and you need to catch them all to visit the shadow realm.

Children in the US are no longer vaccinated for smallpox because the disease is extinct.

So... there's no actual vaccine that you "believe in", and your belief is strictly in the theoretical (but so far unattained) possibility of producing a good vaccine?

It's imminently reasonable to suspect that some vaccines are not manufactured well. That would be a very explanation for why 1) vaccines are a good technology that save lives 2) some people seem to be getting sick from them.

But there's no way to distinguish well manufactured and poorly manufactured vaccines?

Let's not do the thing where the poster is directionally correct, but we're nitpicking the details. Yeah, it's not 100 shots, but it's a lot, and it's a lot more than before.

Let's flip it. Why should an infant be receiving Hep B and Covid vaccines? Why should they receive any vaccines that they didn't in 1990 (or whenever the Chicken Pox vaccine came out).

The post-1990s vaccines to have vanishingly little benefit and unquantified risk.

Let's not do the thing where the poster is directionally correct, but we're nitpicking the details. Yeah, it's not 100 shots, but it's a lot, and it's a lot more than before.

Wait a second. There is no "directionally correct" here - the poster said not 100 but "hundreds" and the true number is around 30. It's "directionally correct" in the sense that the sign is right, but that's about it. If he said "thousands", would that still be "directionally correct"?

And it's not a semantic nit, because we can mostly all agree that the ideal number of vaccines is greater than 0 and less than "hundreds". So where exactly we are on that spectrum is basically the entire discussion.

Let's flip it. Why should an infant be receiving Hep B and Covid vaccines? Why should they receive any vaccines that they didn't in 1990 (or whenever the Chicken Pox vaccine came out).

I don't think there's a good reason to vaccinate infants against COVID.

I don't know why infants are vaccinated against hep B but it's been recommended for newborns since the 1991 (and patented in 1972), so by your heuristic that one seems pretty safe.

The post-1990s vaccines to have vanishingly little benefit and unquantified risk.

It's not clear to me that this is the case, but I'd be curious to see if anyone has actually looked at this rigorously. I don't know off the top of my head which ones are post 1990s.

the poster said not 100 but "hundreds" and the true number is around 30.

*not including the annual flu shots (sometimes multiple) and covid shots

I guess we'll just forget those even exist

Please show your math for "hundreds" of vaccinations on the schedule. I went through and counted, you can surely put some minimal effort in rather than low effort sneers.

where did I claim there were "hundreds" of vaccines on the schedule? It's around 17 "vaccines" and 80 "doses"

The RFK supporters I know believe that kids are getting tens of vaccines in a single day.

The RFK-associated site I saw claimed 7 shots in one day, which appears to be true. (RSV, Hep B, Rotavirus, DTaP, Hib, Pneumococcal, Polio).

That's much closer to the truth but not necessarily true.

  • RSV is required depending on the mother's antibody status.
  • Hep B can be done in the second month of life.
  • So can the RSV vaccine.

So taking those two at 2 months instead of 3 months cuts the number to 5.

And polio is a going concern only in a couple of third world eastern hemisphere countries, so you can safely skip that one.

Polio doesn't work like that.

IPV which we use in the US (and basically anywhere where with the infrastructure to manage the necessary cold-chain) has no effect on infection or transmission of polio. It is highly effective at preventing severe disease (although polio normally presents as just a cold with no distinguishing symptoms, so we've never actually studied the vaccine's impact on mild disease), which is what we mean when we say the US has "eradicated polio". In practice, polio spreads largely through poor sanitation, not direct person-to-person contact, so improved sanitation has probably actually reduced spread a fair bit, but there's no reason to believe the vaccine has done so. And we don't know because no one tests for polio (although there's some small push to start doing some wastewater testing).

Genuinely didn't know that, thought polio being eradicated in the western hemisphere+even slightly non-shithole parts of the eastern hemisphere was due to vaccines, like smallpox. Thanks for the context.

In practice I suspect countries which don't have to worry about cholera can skip polio shots, but I now understand why it's still on the vaccine schedule.

What's old is new again

Ah, yes, third world migrants are the gift that keeps on giving.

7 shots in one appointment, however, is a plausible claim, even if it isn't necessary to do it that way.

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