And no, I'm not anti-vaccines. Just like I'm not anti modern drugs. But that doesn't mean I think it's a good idea to take _all_ of them without scrutiny, nor that they're all good for _me_ as an individual.
Is this a trick question? Humanity survived by having enough people with enough other useful traits (like thinking, including the ability to reason about disease and how to prevent it) to overcome the numbers lost to disease. Humans died to disease in enormous numbers.
> nor that they're all good for _me_ as an individual.
Herd immunity presents a real challenge to idea that people should generally be allowed to make their own choices. One's choice here affects everyone else, in a minuscule way that nonetheless adds up to many thousands of lives saved. I'm not sure what the answer is for this, but generally I come down on the side of: if a democratic process creates rules requiring us all to be immunized for the common good, that's okay with me.
You still owe me a court trial if you want to act on that in a way that reduces my rights. Prove that my individual choices are affecting anyone.
> if a democratic process creates rules requiring us all to be immunized for the common good, that's okay with me.
Drinking is universally a harm. We should ban alcohol. It's for the common good, obviously, and there are zero arguments against this. Why do we allow drinking? At the very least we should ban _public_ drinking. There's no sense in socially allowing this to occur.
The actions that cause possible bad societal harms from drinking alcohol are indeed banned or heavily penalized. Drinking and Driving. Public Intoxication. Domestic Abuse. Child Endangerment and more.
Really. We should just stop selling it. It's insane that you think you can write a set of rules that somehow prevents harm. It merely manages the consequences of the harms. Your court cases cannot bring back the dead.
Why do we tolerate this yet take a hard line stance on far less important issues?
How did Prohibition work out? Is it still going? /Why not?/
You might want to read up on the principle of informed consent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_ethics#Informed_consen...
> After receiving and understanding this information, the patient can then make a fully informed decision to either consent or refuse treatment.
You are overly simplifying vaccines as if they do not affect individuals individually. They absolutely do, for so many reasons, like allergies. But even if that wasn't the case, _all_ vaccines carry some risk/benefit tradeoff, and each individual is entirely in their right to weigh this for themselves.
Also did we learn nothing from covid?
Smallpox, polio, measles, etc
Sure, 50% to 70% of people who got smallpox survived, which also means that without vaccines you are condemning 30% to 50% of the population to die.
Same with the millions of people, specially in poorer countries, who died or were paralyzed by polio.
Vaccines have make those horrors a thing of the past, yet people today are concerned about "hat doesn't mean I think it's a good idea to take _all_ of them without scrutiny, nor that they're all good for _me_ as an individual."
Time has diminished the horrors of something that was fairly common a 100 years ago.
If so that’s ideological insanity and probably exactly why anti-vax is a rising problem: Your zealousness creates it.
My mom had measles as a kid in the 40s and as a result, had frequent ear infections for a few years afterwards. That's a bunch of real pain and suffering that could have been prevented. It wouldn't have affected the "will humans survive" question at all - she's still alive in her 80s. But her life could have had less misery and pain. I have a friend who has a twisted leg and a limp because polio vaccines were not available in Czechoslovakia when he was a kid in the 70s.
In the end, the general outcome of vaccines is to raise the quality of life of ALMOST the entire group significantly. And yes, the odd one has a bad reaction - but even then, it's most likely LESS than if they actually got the real disease.
Your same logic could be applied to food. Hungry people are suffering. Why don't we apply the same "overly motivated interference" to this issue that we did to COVID?
for most of human history, half of kids died before reaching adulthood.
My wife would also hate having to give birth a dozen times just to get enough children (that much unprotected sex is fine with me). I don't want my wife to die in childbirth which was fairly common before modern drugs as well.
The American cult of personality is ridiculous. The only winning move is not to play.
A lot of vaccines are tailored towards the mother going back to work. They could be tailored for a later schedule if there is concern about secondary effects like autism and the child is being cared for at home.
Again I’m not anti vax but I also don’t think the protocol designers are providing alternative options which they should.
It would sound more scientific and less anti-vaxxer if you said “concern about secondary effects like astrological contamination”
And yes - if kids have had serious impacts to vaccines parents should be told and providers should encourage reporting into vaers
I put autism there because it’s the most commonly used anecdote when discussing this. I’m not saying take the vax away. Eg if mmrv is the big bad vax for autism - change its schedule to be given after 2 yrs after autism tests.
On second thoughts I should have said “concern for alleged secondary effects”.
If by this you mean to ask if the new guidelines are the same as previous ones from the 80s, then no. The new pyramid is different, makes different recommendations (more meat, for instance, and less wheat and grains). The website linked to explicitly shows how it is different from the previous "food pyramid" guidelines.
For those who don't believe me - go find some old family photos of your parents or grandparents, whichever generation would have been young adults in the 1960s or 1970s. Compare them to people of the same age born any time after, say, 1990. Nothing come of one sample, but people from the previous generation just weren't fat in their 20s like we are.
Yes, there's more to it than that. But food is a big part of it.
Like, don't get me wrong, RFK will kill N*10^5, N*10^6 people with his outlook on diseases, but....how many people have had their lives wrecked by "fat makes you fat", "ketchup is a vegetable", and "eat a balanced diet composed entirely of sausage, flour, and sugar"? As a GenXer I've been dealing with the echoes of this for a long time.