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Why is your example alternative vaccine Covaxin, which is not available in the US, and not Novavax, which is actually available in the US? Do you think the protein subunit technique used by Novavax is also not a sufficiently old-fashioned way of making vaccines? My understanding is that it looks to be on par with the mRNA vaccines for effectiveness while having much less in the way of side effects, while the inactivated vaccines like Covaxin work significantly worse.
This is an incredible failure of public health messaging. While risk goes down for older children, COVID-19 is significantly more dangerous for children under 4. This CDC table shows triple the rate of hospitalization on somewhat fewer cases.
Novavax is a novel virus-like particle. I personally would much prefer Novavax over mRNA, and probably over adenovirus vectors.
I just don't like the threat of heart problems that mRNA presents. Such a large, dark downside to the products, to remodel your heart.
I thought the adenovirus vector vaccines had a higher incidence of heart problems than the mRNA vaccines. Am I misremembering? I could also see there being a lack of data on head-to-head comparisons given where the different vaccines got used.
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Fair point. There's a lot of public health messaging that gets ignored.
Most childhood vaccines have a 90%+ uptake; I think that's a pretty clear success. While the recent increase in norovirus prevalence shows we could do better, handwashing is at least accepted as something you're expected to do (as opposed to, say, public health campaigns about the amount of alcohol you're "supposed" to drink which no one takes seriously). Talking of vices, smoking has gotten a lot less popular, which probably counts as a successful public health campaign. Not exactly in the same realm, but seatbeats also now fairly widely used.
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How so? The table you linked shows children ages 0-4 having higher death rates than children ages 5-17, but lower death rates than adults. The stats @Inflamed_Heart_Liberal linked shows children ages 0-4 having higher up-to-date rates then children ages 5-11 and 12-17, but lower rates than adults. This seems like exactly what we would expect from a well- informed population: groups with higher death rates are more likely to be up to date.
7.9% is an extremely low vaccination rate. Normally when people talk about being worried about "low" vaccination rates, they mean 95% or 90%. And COVID-19 is both more dangerous and more common than many of the illnesses we vaccinate children for. If you for some reason decided you had a limited number of vaccinations budget and were rationally optimizing which childhood vaccinations to omit to maximize wellbeing, COVID-19 would not be your first pick (not sure exactly what would be... probably chickenpox? They all suck, this is a terrible choice to be making.). But that's clearly not the optimization people are making; somehow they (and/or their pediatricians) haven't gotten the message that it's actually an important vaccination. And we're going to have a lot more children with long-term health consequences (some of them dead) because of that.
(I'm having trouble finding definitions on their website of what they mean by "up-to-date": the relevant thing to care about is getting the full 3-dose series; past that, for most people, additional doses at best give an ~3 month window of protection from infection, but no significant additional protection from severe disease/death, so the public health benefit is minimal.)
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From an incredibly low baseline, and even then it's still a <1 multiple.
I guess that was part of the show. Vaccines were already so safe and bullet proof, people cannot notice when one that's 10x dangerous is released, and information censored online, and physicians told to be disinterested.
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