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 -
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?"?
I don't disagree that the approach was mangled but I think the science is settled now and for adults its something like benefits outweigh the risks for everyone except for very young men (I don't know kids though).
This was a unique situation though where people very publicly turned off their brains because of politics. That doesn't happen very often, and it's always pretty obvious when it's happening (still the case with any medical content that is significantly woke adjacent).
Most of public health this caveat does not apply.
I'm just not sure that's true -- they lied to us about various covid related facts because they thought it was Very Important That People Do As They Are Told; thing is, they think that about the flu and HPV too. Was covid an aberration, or a removal of masks? I don't really know, but am pretty skeptical of any recommendations based on unverifiable statistical data as opposed to a clear and present benefit case. (Both I and my kids have the usual childhood vaccinations BTW, and I should probably get a tetanus booster at some point -- I'm not anti-vax per se, but I'm not a sucker either.)
Doctors weren't the source of the liberal media establishment brain download they were a recipient, just like everyone else.
In addition, most of what happened was a political problem and just like all other political problems the correct facts were arranged.
Flu and HPV do not have the same problems (at least not right now), but again look at the primary source data! Actually research! It doesn't take much effort to see that a lot of what was stated with COVID was shaky or speculative.
Meanwhile the research base for the other stuff is robust and transparent.
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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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