Already told this story, but basically my mother overreacted to a vaccine in the 80s, became an early antivax, had me, only did the bare minimum, I got pertussis at 4-5yo (lucky it wasn't earlier), and since no doctor in the area ever saw pertussis (everyone being vaccinated at the time, and everybody thought I was too, through my mother antibodies), I spent 4 month coughing (I was told), until a retired doctor diagnosed me, and then a few months again, but it was manageable. I have three memories of that time, the first three memories of my life: once coughing so hard I cried on the playground, one lying on my grandmother couch, coughing while she helps me drink, and one after getting treatment (probably for the first time?).
My siblings all got vaccinated after that, and my mother stopped being antivax (still taking 'alternative' medecine, but also still taking conventional one). I guess seeing your child in so much pain and develop arythmia because of your 'beliefs' can make you change. Hopefully things like this will be less and less common.
After reading your comment, I am a bit concerned. I get allergies really quickly, and it is difficult to gauge, at least for 2-3 days, which one it is— the allergy or a full-blown cold/infection— and sometimes it results in proper coughing, et cetera. I think I will talk to my doctor and ask whether there are any boosters needed for me in my late 30s, for which I might have been vaccinated as a child.
This is what happens when you ignore basic science and say vaccines that have worked for decades don't work, and then convince 25% of the USA into believing that it's the politically correct stance to take on the topic.
I don't think the skeptics question whether these particular vaccines prevent disease. The question is whether they have other harmful effects, especially when bundled together in a broad-spectrum product to vaccinate against 30+ diseases (or whatever).
Just because you hadn't heard of it before 2020 doesn't mean it was brand new.
I'll never understand how the party that's famously against government red tape got away with manipulating its base to be against a reasonable streamlining of said red tape, once it was appropriate to do so.
Well it's the point isn't it? It wasn't new, but unlike classic vaccines there wasn't a decades safety data. Manufacturers knew it and demanded to be exempt from normal vaccine injury schemes, governments agreed and introduced mandates.
My wife and I got the shots as soon as we could, she got a kidney complication, like quite a few people. Too bad, says govt.
3 years is not decades, and there was not 3 years between testing and wide-spread deployment for the polio. There was basically a year.
There was also only 3 years between the testing of the combination MMR vaccine and its license and deployment in 71. But there wasn't significant new data gathered in between those years.
Let me know when you've stopped moving the goalposts.
There was one field scale test of the polio vaccine, in 1954. It included about ~700,000 children. There was not three years of staged testing, let alone millions of children within those three years.
There were 623,000 children in the field trial (placebo/non-placebo). There was an additional million who acted as controls (not directly a part of the study, but used a baseline measure of polio incidents in the population surrounding the subject).
While the entire study took over a year, different populations were "monitored" for, at best, six months, many less.
The trial size was massive, but its generally agreed to have been overkill.
The results didn't differ much from the first 150 kids they tried it on.
There were decades of safety data when previous vaccines came out?
Anyway:
1. All vaccines have liability protection.
2. You could know of literally 10 people who had significant adverse effects (which you don't) and, given the scale of vaccine rollout, it would still be mathematically safer than pretty much every drug on the market.
Sorry, but you've been successfully lied to on this topic.
The protection terms were more comprehensive for Covid vaccines, with shorter compensation claim terms. The vendors themselves didn't trust the new vaccines the same as old one, why should anyone else.
With previous vaccines, while they were new, there were no mandates.
"Pretty much any drug of the market" is a big stretch, and there is no mandate attached to those drugs.
Not sure where you're commenting from, but there were no mandates in the US.
> The vendors themselves didn't trust the new vaccines the same as old one, why should anyone else.
Not sure what "didn't trust the new vaccines the same as the old one" is supposed to mean. It's a totally different drug with a totally different body of evidence. The pharma companies trusted them in that their high-quality, gigantic clinical trials came back with some of the best safety and efficacy data we've ever seen in any drug trial ever.
> "Pretty much any drug of the market" is a big stretch
No, it's actually not. Even the most "common" serious adverse effects are so rare that the clinical trials would've needed to be orders of magnitude larger than the largest clinical trials ever conducted in order to detect them.
This has held true even scaled to billions of doses.
I'm not in the US, but there sure were vaccine mandates there as well, by both private and government employers. In Australia it was even more centralized, for a time you were excluded from a great deal of life without a certificate.
It was a totally different drug with a very short term body of evidence. If pharma companies trusted them so much why did they require different liability treatment?
Just for renal side-effects, those requiring long-term treatment manifest in about 5 per million vaccinations, heart side effects even more prevalent. This is nowhere near the safety record of say MMR or DTaP.
> If pharma companies trusted them so much why did they require different liability treatment?
In the US they used the same liability structure that has existed for emergency vaccine scale-up since the early 2000s.
> 5 per million vaccinations
This is an unbelievably rare side effect. The fact that you're raising this as evidence of risk is actually revealing basic innumeracy.
The rate of febrile seizures from the MMR vaccine is nearly identical to the rate of myocarditis in young men from the COVID vaccine (the most likely problem for the highest risk group).
In both cases, the problem is rare and almost always relatively minor.
The reason you know and care about one is because COVID mainstreamed the cottage industry that relays numbers like "5 per million" in such a way as to make them seem scary (lol).
Myo- and pericarditis are both dramatically more serious normally. This is actually not true of the instances caused by the COVID vaccines.
And no, if you’re concerned about myo- and pericarditis from the vaccines, you should be aware that the same disorders are caused by COVID itself at a much higher rate and more serious instances.
Sorry about what happened to your wife, but the fact that infrequent events do happen to specific people (in the case to your wife) does not make those events more frequent than they actually are.
> In September 2021, the employees of all federally-funded Medicaid and Medicare-certified health care facilities, and Head Start program facilities, were required to be vaccinated, as ordered through the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).[33][34][31] Companies with more than 100 employees could either require vaccination for all (and give their workers four hours' paid time off for their vaccination appointments); or require any unvaccinated employees to wear masks and be tested weekly for COVID-19, according to an Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) Emergency Temporary Standard.[35][36] These two policies together —federally-funded healthcare facilities and large companies— would apply to 100 million workers and were scheduled to take effect on January 4, 2022.[32]
The healthcare one happened, while the OSHA one went through multiple appeals before they abandoned it (details on the page). Biden even went on record telling companies to start implementing it in preparation for when they got through the appeal.
Is that what people refer to when they talk about mandates? Healthcare providers being required to be vaccinated in order to receive Medicare and Medicaid money?
Not really? Any facility can decline CMS "mandates" by not accepting CMS money. If they want to be part of the CMS system, then yes there is a gigantic set of standards they have to meet.
Hot take: delaying without completely suppressing this alerting is the best way to change people's minds about the benefits of preventive measures like vaccination without massive loss of life.
Hot as in, I’m feeling kind of feverish because I’m now sick because we let whooping cough spread to prove a point to people who get their medical information from Facebook.
I mean you could listen to the reasons that people who have lost trust in the institutions say they lost trust, and then try and rectify those reasons. But to do that is to admit that MAYBE the US govt didn't handle COVID perfectly. And that's a conversation many folks are unwilling to have. So this is the alternative we're left with.
It's uglier this way for sure and will cause more suffering. Sucks.
Those reasons are simple. People they trust are lying to them for monetary and political gain about a subject they personally know nothing about.
That's it. That's all there is to it.
---
> But to do that is to admit that MAYBE the US govt didn't handle COVID perfectly.
My friend, antivax bullshit has been swelling long before COVID. Turns out there's way more money and power in peddling these people snake oil than something that will help their health.
And secondly, whatever complaints you have about handling COVID, the vaccines for it were and are safe and effective, but no amount of evidence will ever convince them.
Current estimate is that some 5.6 billion people took at least one dose of a COVID vaccine[0]. You would think that if there severe complications, we would have seen them in, I don't know, hundreds of millions of people by now. Any day now, I am sure those people will all get super cancer and/or turn into zombies.
I'm reminded of the M.A.D.D. campaigns to reduce drunk driving with faked crash scenes in front of schools. They would set up a crashed car with dummy "bodies" strewn (and even scattered blood/glass) across walkways where everyone could see them.
I don't think it was a particularly effective tactic.
I was able to dig up this paper that showed 66% of the COVID unvaccinated regretted their decision after hospitalization. The rest were undeterred, even after hospitalization, mostly due to ideology and conspiracies.
But the problem is that I wouldn’t be comfortable risking public health to prove 2/3 of a point to vaccine skeptics who should’ve known better anyway. The Hippocratic oath is to do no harm, and I wouldn’t want a loved one with a suppressed immune system or lung problems to get seriously sick because we let the disease spread by choice.
The real vectors of disinformation are social media, and antivax deaths are downstream of that.
But we don't have any kind of cultural immunity to the kind of propagandised and designed messaging that drives these campaigns.
In the absence of that, learning through consequences - and coming in with the messaging after they happen - is the only thing that can make a difference.
A lot of anti-vaccination people are skeptics; they don't trust the information being given to them by authoritative sources. The government deliberately withholding information, especially if done with the intent you described, would, without question, reinforce their skepticism.
So considering that, I suspect the loss of life would increase in the long run.
My siblings all got vaccinated after that, and my mother stopped being antivax (still taking 'alternative' medecine, but also still taking conventional one). I guess seeing your child in so much pain and develop arythmia because of your 'beliefs' can make you change. Hopefully things like this will be less and less common.
reply