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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   3010 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 23, 2025

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.

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I suppose I am confused. Development is more important than body weight, but I'll concede the point rather than double down because of my misapprehension.

As for medical care, my child had a doctor, then she moved, and now we have a RN. As for calculations, of course you haven't presented any, but I have done my own sanity check, and I'm satisfied with my numbers.

To show my work I found this:

The effectiveness of the measles vaccine has been dramatic. Before the first measles vaccine became available in the United States (in 1963), 3-4 million people were diagnosed with measles, about 48,000 were admitted to hospitals and about 500 people died every year.

So, without any vaccine, we're talking 500 deaths per year, in a country of roughly 180 million (1960 census numbers). This is one death every 360,000 people, or an annual risk of .000002778 per person per year.

Traffic fatalities are about 1 per 100,000,000 miles travelled (0.8 in ten-year old data). Cancelling out all the tens and hundreds and thousands, and assuming about 10,000 miles driven in a year, I'm left with driving as 25-30x more dangerous than measles before the vaccines.

That's using pre-vaccine numbers and pre-vaccine prevalence. Post-vaccine, as a free rider, it's much lower. This doesn't justify an active intervention. It's firmly in the realm of take-it-or-leave-it.

And again, when I do these numbers on what is supposed to be the most useful, safest, most justified vaccine, I'm left wanting. When I consider Hep B which they want to give children in the first hour post-birth despite no plausible method of transmission, I'm left with the conclusion that nobody is willing to discuss the actual risks, they just want to enforce compliance. That the CDC people really do view me as sheep, or cattle, as part of their herd.

I suppose I am confused. Development is more important than body weight, but I'll concede the point rather than double down because of my misapprehension

I do genuinely appreciate this, thank you.

To address the rest of your comment, I will point out what I see as potential errors:

  1. The measles vaccine isn't given by itself in most of the world, so you're looking at calculating the combined benefits of simultaneous vaccination for measles, mumps and rubella vs the combined risks.

  2. Restricting the potential harm to just death is incorrect. Even a mild bout of measles has quantifiable harm, and in the link you've provided, they quite clearly mentioned that before vaccination, 3/10 of measles victims had:

Ear infection

Pneumonia

Encephalitis (swelling of the brain)

Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (a disease characterized by progressive neurological deterioration and early death)

Hemorrhagic measles – includes seizures, delirium, difficulty breathing and bleeding under the skin

Clotting disorder

Death

Pregnant women who are infected with measles can miscarry, deliver early, or have a low-birth-weight baby. People who are immune compromised are at risk of having prolonged and severe illness.

Measles infections can also pave the way for other bacterial and viral infections — even several years later. This may happen because measles infections can wipe out preexisting immunologic memory cells that protect against other infections, such as influenza. Because this same damage to immunologic memory doesn’t happen following vaccination, the measles vaccine also protects the integrity of the immune system.

None of these strike me as very pleasant, leaving aside that that's just one of the three diseases that the MMR shots protect against robustly.

If you wanted to quantify the harms of driving, then you also need to consider disability and not just death, and ideally monetary damages. You also need to look at the benefits, for many people in the US and elsewhere, living without access to a car is debilitating by itself.

I'm left with the conclusion that nobody is willing to discuss the actual risks, they just want to enforce compliance.

As you can see, both I and @throaway05 are more than happy to discuss risks. And so are most other medical professionals, in my experience. The average NHS paediatrician gains nothing personally by taking extra time to talk to patients about their concerns, but does it nonetheless. They don't get to bill you extra for the privilege.

It's unfortunate that your child had a vaccine reaction, but it was a mild one. Even if their wellbeing was your only concern then you should seek to sit a doctor down and go over a proper cost-benefit analysis and even potentially figure out the likely culprit for the previous reaction.

Hep B which they want to give children in the first hour post-birth despite no plausible method of transmission

Hep B can be transmitted from mother to child at birth, if not medically prevented.

How does post-exposure vaccination work? I can't wrap my head around it when the mother and child were sharing every bodily fluid possible for 9 months.

It's wild that it works, right?

I can't wrap my head around it when the mother and child were sharing every bodily fluid possible for 9 months.

Not quite - the whole point of the placenta is to share oxygen and nutrients without directly sharing blood, and apparently the Hep B virus generally doesn't make it through an undamaged placenta, or through an undamaged amniotic sac (which makes amniocentesis a risk for infected mothers), whereas some Hep B antibodies do make it through the placenta, and some accumulate in the placenta and may form a bit of a "barrier" there.

I'm not an expert in any of that, though, and it looks like part of the answer is "luck". Some viruses slip through the placenta much more easily than others, despite the obvious natural selection issues to the contrary.

That requires the mother to have it, which means if she doesn't, there's no plausible method of transmission.

Most mothers do not have it.

Yeah, we're down to 1000 mother-to-child transmissions a year in the US. The tradeoff here is between "a lot of babies get a vaccine they could have gotten later" vs "a few babies get a disease they can't get cured later".

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