Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
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Notes -
Did you read my post? Of course I am giving my kids the MMR vaccine. They’ll get all the vaccines I got plus probably chicken pox as well. But why the US schedule and not the Danish one?
Yeah sorry lemme rephrase as "please please please follow the *U.S. vaccination schedule."
Not accusing you of not going for MMR but just using it as an example of downstream effects.
Something to keep in mind is that the U.S. schedule is optimized for "we are the wealthiest country in the in world" others may have more resource limitation focused choices.
COVID you can skip.
Using your other post as a reference point (and please forgive me Peds is not my area so I my professional level knowledge of this is distant).
Also several of these can impact getting jobs or housing at university (ex: the Heps, Meningitis), and skipping them will put you in the naughty bucket in your pediatrician's mind which isn't necessarily appropriate but is the reality.
Hep A - prob rare in Denmark? Hep B - prob rare in Denmark? Chicken Pox - no idea why they aren't doing this. Per PLOS Glob Public Health. 2023 Apr 5;3(4):e0001743. doi: 10.1371/journal.pgph.0001743 eople are advocating it? Rotavirus - this one is super complex and can't really be summarized here. Covid - skip if you want. Flu - don't skip please. Tetanus (from age 12) again probably low yield. Meningitis (from age 12) - don't skip please, looks like they have it but don't give to kids? Maybe it's pre college matriculation? IDK seems strange.
Keep in mind that incidence of disease varies country to country and the sheer variety and amount of immigrants in the U.S. (as well as poor health) put people at higher risks of somethings. This impacts the schedule.
I'm just wanting to point out- if you're trying to convince a vaccine skeptic who's mistrustful of vaccines to vaccinate their kid, this is an absolutely terrible argument to make even if you believe it.
I haven't gotten a flu shot in probably 20 years, and nobody I know has unless they're an RN or over 60. Don't make already falsified arguments like 'the flu shot is very important'(this is a different thing from 'the flu shot is good' or 'it would be a better world if everyone got their flu shot') if you want to convince someone already skeptical.
That was written before I realized how adversarial this was going to be.
The argument for the flu shot is:
-Risks are nearly zero. RNs are often actually very resistant to getting the flu shot. MDs roll our eyes at them because the reasoning is always "I'm a bitch" type complaints. Typically saying that they don't like shots for instance, or that the injection site hurts. I don't think I've ever met any physician who has treated a patient who has had an actual adverse reaction. Some people do get an immune response (aka feel a little sick). If you feel a little sick from the flu shot that's good evidence that you would feel even worse with the actual flu. The response to feeling a little sick should not be whining, I admit this is some boomer energy on my part.
-The flu shot can potentially help save you. If you have significant risk factors it can save your life. Not every person with significant risk factors knows they have significant risk factors. Diabetes for instance can go a long time without getting diagnosed if their primary care follow-up is poor.
-The flu shot can potentially help you out a lot. Evidence is a bit more squishy on this but that's because "I felt like ass for a three days" vs. "I felt mildly bad for one day" is extremely expensive to research and not worth it from a public health perspective, but I know personally not needing to call out work and be miserable for a few days is worth the mild inconvenience of other people.
-You can potentially help other people. If you getting less
virulentin some way prevents you from transmitting it to someone else than that is a good thing. Especially in general plague sources like children.-Research shows that the flu shot still has some utility even when we get the mix wrong for that year, it just isn't as much.
-Even when we get the mix wrong the right mix for the vaccine you still have is still going around in the population getting people ill.
TLDR: You should get the flu shot, the risks to you are near zero and if you are healthy and well the expected benefits are also low but your health is the most important thing most people own so you should take appropriate gambles.
However it is a known problem that people are willing to be lazy about their personal health in a way that they aren't with say their personal finances. Shrug
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It's absolutely insane to inject a newborn with anything on the nonexistent risk of Hepatitis.
That's the very first one that you're begging me to trust, and I simply won't do it. It's existence on the schedule is a glaring red mark that serves to undermine trust in the rest. You cannot convince me that my children are at risk for hepatitis, and therefore trying to get me to positively intervene on the basis of what I consider to be a nonexistent risk is going to run into a brick wall.
The flu vaccine doesn't work. It doesn't reduce deaths. It doesn't even always target the dominant strain, because it's educated guesswork. The flu going around right now is doing so in spite of vaccinations.
Don't remind me, I won't reach the conclusion you want me to.
Flu: -PMID: 37247308 for a citation that disagrees with your conclucion. Outside those at high risk it does reduce symptomatic burden, as someone who has gotten real flu and vaccinated flu.....that's a big difference.
Hepatitis: Use Chesterton's fence. Why is it there? Is it because of risk of vertical transmission? Is it because it's safe to be given at that time and that's simply the best time to get it done because of logistics. Also, were you aware that the various hepatitis viruses are transmitted in different ways?
Understand why before getting made about it.
From other comments you made:
Safe Vaccines: -What's the rate of actual problems beyond mild stuff like headache? All medications have side effects. Nothing is truly safe. You can randomly die from anything. How many actual serious problems have happened. It looks like the rate of true allergy is somewhere around one in a million (1 in 900k per UK vaccine website I found which was the first google hit). The odds of getting any of these conditions are much much much higher than that.
General Dissatisfaction with Medicine Comments: -So like, are you just not going to seek medical care now because they bungled some parts of COVID? That's stupid. For anything related to COVID? Or politics? More reasonable. The "normal" vaccines are settled science. It's apples and oranges.
I don't think "I'm going to do my own research" is unreasonable but I don't think many people are actually doing that, they are just reading biased online commentary and throwing things into chat GPT.
People with a lot more knowledge than either of us very very carefully and very very publicly consider the risks and benefits of putting something on the vaccine schedule and have removed things before that were "worth it" because of disgruntled public optics.
General anti-vaxxer is a conspiracy theory level take and has been for a long time - see the whole vaccines and autism thing.
Plenty of citations available saying similar stuff about COVID vaccines -- and the motivation for that (encourage people who don't really need some vaccine to take them in protection of the elderly, opposite sex, etc) is just as present for the flu shot.
That's the thing about burning your credibility -- after you've done it on one thing, people are apt not to trust you anymore in areas where they previously did.
Do you have evidence for this?
What about alternative explanations like "this shit is complicated to study and testing was done on initial more virulent strains with more vulnerable populations?"
Evidence that the COVID vax recommendations were not primarily motivated by benefit to the individual recipients?
<gestures wildly at 'everything'>
Recommending them for children at all (or anyone under ~40 really) is a good starting point -- the age stratification of severity was never remotely uncertain.
Imagine for a second you belief the vaccines are safe.
Great, even if fatality rates for kids from COVID were super low....well what's the harm? Plus you get the added benefit of herd immunity!
This sounds like a wonderful idea.
Now we know now that the benefits don't seem to outweigh the risks in a few specific populations - but the problem was that the acute nature of the situation and the politics (as well as some considerable stress) broke a lot of people's brains. Lots of stuff does that - see both pro and anti Trump people.
None of that applies to the general issue of vaccines.
Lots of people had questions and concerns about COVID related decision making. They were forcibly muzzled.
The most right wing pediatrician I know who puts on a MAGA hat after work, his response to general vaccine hesitancy is to imagine the parents alone with him in a dark room.
Their isn't any credible debate for most of the vaccine schedule and what exists (ex: Rotavirus) is quite healthy.
Not to me -- the safety of these particular vaccines vis a vis myocarditis is still kind of up in the air AFAIC, but giving the benefit of the doubt on that due to fog of war doesn't get you off the hook. They were also produced on an accelerated timeline as compared to what's normally considered safe by the FDA, and contained some pretty new tech. Even if you believe that vaccines in general are safe, there were unknown unknowns with these ones that really require a sane cost-benefit assessment.
Anyways, if it's such a wonderful idea, why didn't the public health people make that argument instead of trotting out every cancer kid they could find who had the bad luck to die of (or with) covid and scream to anyone who would listen "GET YOUR KIDS VAXXED -- YOU DON'T WANT CHILDREN TO DIE, DO YOU?"?
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Again, the problem is we were also told this about many things during COVID that clearly had legitimate credible debate! You are arguing over benefits to the commons, while not realizing the commons was torched by public health on several different occasions during COVID because they got too caught up in #currentthing to think about what they were doing or approach things with any sort of introspection or understanding of past pandemic response policy.
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Hep A and B are rare in the US among high SES whites, which I am.
Somewhat related anecdote:
We got a bill for like $1200 for our pre-natal blood screening, which included a Syphilis test. Then, when we came back for a later appointment they wanted to give my wife a second Syphilis test in case she banged some dudes and got Syphilis in the last 3 months. We said no to that one.
I get why they give infants Hep B vaccines. Because some small percent of moms will have it and pass it to their babies where it has a high chance of causing chronic disease. But my wife doesn't have any risk factors for Hep B and also tested negative to Hep B.
A lot of this medical advice is just targeting people who have risk factors which we don't.
And I don't believe vaccine risks are as low as they say they are. They tell parents to give their children annual Covid vaccines. Insanity.
Ultimately you don't know what you don't know - see the chickenpox party bit.
Also, the COVID vaccine is uniquely politically compromised but is a. not insanity, b. has an incentive we understand for the handwringing on both sides - political bullshit.
Vaccines in general have little incentive (as many are mature at this point it's not a money thing) to over push them or hide flaws. If you do the research on say the polio vaccine you can see exactly what went wrong in the past and why and the rationale behind the U.S. (and Danish) schedules. This stuff is out in the open and risks and benefits are known and the people who decide them are extremely competent and knowledgeable.
And the risks of the vaccines are minuscule (again with little incentive to lie or minimize them) and the benefits are immense, if rarely applicable for some things like Hepatitis A in the U.S..
Not following the schedule is essentially gambling with your child's life with the justification being "eh, the risk of this bad outcome is low but I won't take very easy steps to avoid it anyway because I'm mad about COVID."
You are welcome to be obstinate about the public health response to COVID but if you are putting other people at risk, especially your own children you should really look inside yourself and think about what you are doing.
That's putting aside the whole sentencing your child to a bunch of extremely avoidable paperwork and administrative headache in the future and the risk of things like ending up with a lower quality pediatrician because you refused to follow the vaccine schedule.
Importantly, if you are going to decide not to listen to medical advice and potentially put your child's life at risk you need to actually research what you are doing. Do not just jam it into an AI which you already admitted misled you or go "well shit this can't be right because COVID." Raising a child is one of the most important things someone should do and if you decide you will not listen to the medical consensus then you must actually put in time or effort or a reasonable person may judge you a poor parent.
Generally I don't get too heated with the questionable medical content that appears here because people aren't doing anything more than promulgating misinformation (which I'm committed to allow as a free speech person) and harming themselves - and people here do come up with novel things sometimes.
Putting a kid at risk and under baking your thought process is not that however.
Oh spare me. You're putting your kid at more risk every time you put them in a car then I would be by not vaccinating for Hep B.
If I was a conflict theorist, this sounds like what a anti-vaxxer would say to reverse-psychology someone into holding their viewpoint. This type of emotionally charged and accusatory language only works to make people do the opposite of what you say.
Don't worry, it's not going to change how I feel. But something to consider.
Yes and I'm aware of that risk and I think about it and I take steps to mitigate it when appropriate.
You are choosing risk for no reason. That's the issue.
Furthermore you need to be responsible. Engage with the rest of the comment. The ask is to actually do your homework instead of being mad about COVID.
That should be easy.
It's clear you didn't even read my initial posts or replies and just want to argue with an anti-vaxxer of which I am mostly certainly not. Then you said I'm a bad parent and put my children at risk. I believe this is when a southerner would say "bless your heart".
I mean, you said you didn't want to get some vaccines? And you said it was because
riskswhatever that means and because you don't trust experts?What is it you think that anti-vaxxers say?
That vaccines cause autism/autoimmune diseases, don’t work, etc. Typically not ‘the risks of vaccinating children against STDs outweigh the benefits’.
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