NO BUT LET ME TELL YOU!
If you haven’t seen it yet on the fediverse (because I keep telling people, because it’s worth repeating) I had measles as a kid! Not any antivaxx BS, just regular old neglectful parents.
It was the most horrific damn thing I’ve experienced. What I never hear anyone talking about is the pain you feel, and how we were told to put me in a dark room with the windows covered because the pain in my head and my eyes could have BLINDED ME if I was exposed to sunlight!
I was sick for two goddamned weeks! And it was absolute torture! Every single minute! And because light hurt my eyes so badly, I couldn’t read, I couldn’t watch TV, I could do nothing but wait and hurt.
People like me have been the absolute first in line every single time they offered a vaccine or a booster. The absolute entitlement of people to ignore stories like mine! If you choose not to vaccinate, and you catch the thing, I feel zero sympathy for you! You have countless stories, countless evidence of what a world without vaccines is like and that world is hell!
I had Measles, Mumps, and Chicken Pox all in grade 3. That was not a fun year.
I’m so, so glad you’re alive. And so, so devoid of any jealousy whatsoever.
I almost think my step dad was trying to off me.
don’t forget that shingles vacc :)
I had chicken pox twice as a child, because apparently the first time didn’t build a strong enough immune response. I don’t blame my parents, though. The vaccine simply wasn’t available back then.
The best evidence are the graves that have multiple kids of varying ages all dying within weeks. You can usually find one of those at most old cemeteries.
Other examples welcome.
Four of my grandpa’s seven siblings died within 10 days from polio, just months before the Salk vaccine.
Remember when we walked on the moon, or proved the world was round, or even that the earth revolves around the sun? I sure hope the dumb people don’t lead us back to the stone ages. Trust science.
I remember talking to a coworker when the Covid vaccines were available. She said she didn’t want to get them because she read they were killing people. I asked her did she ask her Doctor (scientist) about it. She said yea and he said to get the vaccine. I told her, I’d believe my doctor over dumb strangers on the internet.
Dumb leader and not a scientist Donald Trump believed the human body was like a battery, with a finite amount of energy, which exercise only depleted.
Science can take you to the moon, but religion will fly you into buildings.
Don’t trust science. Use it, scrutinize actual published science with it, and apply it within the bounds that the studies were done.
It’s unrealistic to expect most people to get through the jargon and statistics that are involved in pretty straightforward papers. When you include meta analysis in that, most lay people would need to head back to school for a couple of years to get the necessary background.
This is where effective science communication are necessary. The scientific community needs to be able to speak to people directly to explain findings.
This is where the media of old would pick up the findings and condense them into a 10 min segment run every 2 hours for a few days.
But that requires integrity, skill, understanding, and doesn’t help the anti-science political agenda.
(Yes, I am calling out FOX)
Fuck, I know multiple hospital nurses that were mask and vaccine skeptics during the massive outbreaks.
Also, unfortunately here in America, the only economically advanced society on the planet that allows for prescription drugs to be advertised on TV, there are and have been huge amounts of over prescriptions of drugs of all kinds that are massively expensive and have many side effects that are costly in many ways, when its often the case that if people simply could actually afford the time and money to do regular screenings, checkups, and even just an actually basically healthy diet with some routine light exercise, many of these drugs would never be needed at all in many cases.
I agree with you on trust the science, but when it comes to medicine, the unfortunate truth is that our healthcare system is so broken that you often cannot trust/afford it generally, opening up people to be susceptible to both officially approved and proffered solutions which are dubious (opiod crisis, sackler family) as well as absolute nonsense quackery like homeopathy, or drinking bleach, or even urine.
Even Nurses with a bachelor’s degree have a very light core science foundation. They take Biology for Health Sciences 1 and 2 instead of the Biology 1, 2, 3, and 4 that biology majors take. I had a nurse ask me if creatinine had a “nice little abbreviation” like Sodium (Na) and Magnesium (Mg)… Creatinine isn’t an element on the periodic table so no, it doesn’t. It is lots of C’s H’s O’s and probably some N’s. I had another nurse ask me to explain saturation. Nurses sent cookies to the lab (a “dirty zone”) in the same carrier tubes that hold sputum, blood, urine, and stool. Then they were confused on why we threw the cookies away and scolded them for the unsafe practice. Their education prepares them for the job of nursing not research scientist.
Worth pointing out that nurses are not part of the scientific community.
One eye opener for me of the pandemic was the large number of nurses who completely ignore accepted medical science.
Silent Gen grandparents raised me. Mom really made an impact on my young mind talking about polio. How scared the kids and parents were, how thankful they were for the vaccine. This was a disease I was only aware of from elementary classes.
When I was a child, anti-vaccine talk simply didn’t exist. Kinda like Nazis. Even if you felt that way, you damned sure wouldn’t say anything because society would shun you.
Worst part is they don’t understand the concept of herd immunity or statistics/probability in general so they are like “I have not vaccinated my kid and he did not catch any childhood diseases!”
Is that a quote from Michael Okuda, who famously designed the Star Trek LCARS displays?
I don’t know if that’s his quote, but that’s immediately what I thought of too.
Yup, father of the Okudagrams. His twitter is marvellous
My father’s doctor told his parents he was going to die from polio. That he survived and I exist is all I need to know about why vaccines rock.
IRK!? People don’t seem to realize - nor care - that the death rate in ye olden eras was, and I am not kidding you,
FOURTH FIFTHSedit: my apologies I was way off on the exact numbers but it was still shockingly high at 40%.They didn’t even bother to name a child until it reached 5 years of age, hence religious ceremonies celebrating a youngling reaching that age and finally become an actual “human” that was worth investing some emotion into.
There are pics of Charles Darwin as an infant in a girl’s dress, in large part b/c the child that family had previously had been a girl, so it was readily available.
God Himself has killed off millions upon millions of babies for MILLENNIA, but now we lose our damn minds when people pull necrotic tissue out of wombs or remove an ectopic situation? Science illiteracy - or maybe I should say fact illiteracy - is one of the top killers in this nation, that and plain raw stupidity (obesity situations like >500lb and heart disease that goes unchecked for decades, drunk driving despite extremely easy access to both alcohol at home or rides when away, and yes deciding not to give oneself or a young child a vaccine b/c of fear of “side effects”). Except when we talk about communicable diseases (and drunk driving I suppose), THEIR decisions impact US as well. :-(
I mean sure your point is well taken, but your facts are whackadoodle.
All infants wore dresses in the early 1900s and before. Teddy Roosevelt has pictures as a baby in dresses.
“God himself” -> lol shut up. Tell me about Santa’s elves next.
Abortion is a different topic and while I agree with you this is a shoe horn.
Obesity is a different topic as well because WW2 government ads focused on fattening up depression era recruits and we kept it / dont really promote more affordable options, and also doctors up until 1950 told us how GOOD smoking was for you.
Basically there’s good science AND evidence for getting vaccinated, there is NO evidence for religious arguments, and religion and other health problems as discussion points are a) non sequiturs and b) not as clear cut as vaccinating for polio.
I think their God arguement was a counter to those who discuss thoughts and prayers, or gods will, or God will provide, or the Bible doesn’t like this.
The number I found was 40%, which is still horrifying, but not as much as 80%.
Thank you very much for the correction. I don’t know if I misremembered a peak rate at some particular time (perhaps when America was still a colony and lacking access to great medical care facilities) or mere statistical trickery like also including stillborn deaths (at which point it might be even higher, bc the rate of auto-abortion by the fetus itself in the very early stages of pregnancy when no symptoms are yet showing I thought was unknown, though later on when pregnancy becomes detectable it is said to be 30-40%) or what, but I edited my response to avoid spreading misinformation.
I Row Knight
In countries where vaccination is available and affordable there is also responsibility towards other places where People cannot vaccinate.
Even when someone can push through the sickness with relatively good medical care, this obviously isn’t true for many other places…
We live in a time where everything that is good is converted into money with a side dish of shit. Don’t give me that “we had this good thing since so long ago” bullshit. That is exactly the entryway for corporations to sell you the shit you don’t need today. Don’t belittle people for recognizing that pattern and rejecting the latest offer of happiness. People are fed an endless amount of lies and misinformation every day, but with this one they can really trust the powerful leaders? Pinky promise? Don’t act like it’s a no-brainer to pump the latest chemicals into your child. Vaccinate your own fucking ass and stfu
Folks, this is an excellent example of the selfishness that is eroding herd immunity.
May someone you love face the consequences of your actions so that you are forced to learn empathy.
Don’t get me wrong, I get vaccinated myself
I’m pro vaccine and am vaccinated. But I’ve also had covid three times since I was able to be vaccinated, and one time before then. That’s different than the polio vaccine and basically all vaccines except the flu shot. If your rhetoric around this vaccine doesn’t acknowledge this and give reasons to get it anyway, you’re not even trying.
except the flu shot.
You already have your answer there. The purpose is to reduce the risk of severe illness and death, not make you immune.
The Covid vaccine didn’t guarantee that you would not get Covid. It gave you a better chance you wouldn’t get hospital sick and die. My boss was anti vaccine. He died in the hospital 3 years ago. I still miss him, he was a great boss. He listened to right wing media and Alex Jones and voted for Trump.
Covid has mutated and has variants now.
The Covid vaccine didn’t guarantee that you would not get Covid.
It was a bit different with the original strain of the virus though. Transmission was sufficiently reduced that with a fairly high vaccination rate, I’d would have fizzled out. We were so hopeful…
But with the new variants and 90%+ vaccinated populations, it still circulates 😞
It reduces the risk of it developing into a full infection, and it reduces the severity of an infection that does develop
Infective diseases aren’t binary things, there’s a gradient of how badly it hits you. That’s why catching the same illness at different times might hit you with varying levels. You can think back to the three times you had COVID and how bad each instance of it was
The “battle” analogy works well for most of the infective diseases stuff, and different diseases behave in different ways.
Why do some vaccines work better
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Vaccines tell you what the infective agent looks/behaves like. It might be a part of the infective agent, a killed one, a weakened one, or it might be some byproduct it creates, etc. Depending on how good that message is, the vaccine will work better or worse.
- What method to use also depends on what the infective agent is. If it’s very similar to something harmless, you don’t want to be triggering false positives. Lots of immune diseases are caused by the immune system becoming active when it shouldn’t. So sometimes you CAN’T (with our current knowledge) make it any stronger
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Some diseases, like polio, need time to settle, and they need to go through certain steps (think setting up camp) before they cause the visible symptoms. Part of that is also dependent on where the infective agent enters, and where it can cause the harm/symptoms (nervous system vs respiratory tract). This is also where the vaccine is important. Maybe you still get the cold symptoms, but the vaccine makes it so COVID doesn’t get to the point where it messes up your sense of smell.
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Another aspect of vaccines is to stop transmission. Similar to the reasons above, how well it can stop transmission will vary. Also important is how many people get the vaccine and how fast it is spreading. Diseases that spread rapidly, or cases when not enough people are vaccinated, will make it hard to eradicate
Some other ways different infections might be better/worse
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it depends on how badly you were exposed. If a whole lot of viruses manage to land and make camp in/on a part of the body where they can multiply, your infection will be worse.
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it depends on how strong your immune system was / how well it was functioning. This is pretty self explanatory, and depends on things like diet, rest, stress, etc.
A fun sub point to the above is that maybe you got exposed a bunch of times, where a tiny landing party arrived and got killed off easily. This might be part of why some people never get a bad infection without the vaccine (in addition to being lucky in general). Maybe the person had a bunch of near misses and built up immunity that way.
Why get COVID vaccine
Like people said elsewhere, it lowers risk a significant amount.
Yes there is a risk of certain complications, but those complications are also present (in a much worse severity) with the disease itself. So if you’re at risk from the vaccine, you’re likely at a bigger risk from the disease and you should talk to your doctor to weigh the pros and cons (do you take the vaccine and have them monitor you for a bit, or do you isolate entirely and mask up more than others).
Ultimately it’s hard to prove that the vaccine helped you without having two timelines and comparing what happened to you in each. But with our current understanding of immunology and microbiology, the vaccine most likely helped you
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There’s a whole suite of vaccines which do not provide what you’re asking for: sterilizing immunity. That’s the penultimate ability of a vaccine. It’s incredible we’re even able to create anything of that character given we’re fighting against living, evolving things.
Setting the minimum bar to “I must never get sick” instead of “won’t find myself in a grave” or “I wasn’t able to work for a month and was stuck in a hospital for three weeks” is a crazy thing to hang onto.
Just because you don’t understand what vaccinations do doesn’t mean they don’t work.
The covid vaccines, to my knowledge, reduced the death rates very significantly. Hence I think that talking about cemeteries would not be too inaccurate in that context.
However, there surely are vaccines that “just” reduce non lethal risks, but from a short post, addressing the general topic of vaccines and people who oppose them in general, I don’t demand too many details.
That’s different than the polio vaccine and basically all vaccines except the flu shot.
I thought that the reason why you don’t catch measles, polio, etc. is partly due to the fact that you got the vaccine, but also largely because everybody else got the vaccine, too. This is called “herd immunity”. Every time you get exposed to a virus, you roll the dice. Getting a vaccine gives you a hefty bonus to that dice roll, but you still want to roll those dice as little as possible, because no vaccine is 100% effective.
One way that influenza and COVID are different is that they mutate like crazy, which is why you have to keep getting updated booster shots every year. With COVID, not only do we have a bunch of different strains flying around, but we also have people who refuse to get the vaccine, wear a mask, stay home when they’re sick, and so on, and COVID is super-contagious. So, while getting a vaccine will help load the dice in your favor, the odds of you never getting it are extremely low, even if you do everything right. But that dice bonus will still lower the odds of you getting sick, and it also lowers the odds of severe illness if you do get sick.
