No. It’s irrelevant to the actual topic, which is how well vaccines work.
And the answer is “pretty goddamn well.”
Samllpox has been eliminated from mankind as a disease. Due to vaccines.
You’re of course welcome to continue disputing this, kanic…but please let me know how keeping small quantities of the virus that causes smallpox relates in any way to whether or not vaccines should be mandatory.
With all due respect…who gives a shit? You can’t realistically know how many kids in your community are vaccinated at any one time, so you can’t ever realistically know whether or not you’re really in a position to take full advantage of herd immunity. Official statistics might say that the vaccination rate in your town is 98%, but what if your friends and neighbours are all part of the 2% who don’t vaccinate? You can’t ever truly know. If that were the case, then vaccinating your kid would obviously be the safe and sensible decision.
Virtually everything you do in life, from crossing the road to eating a sandwich, is more dangerous than getting a vaccine. It’s difficult to imagine a safer medical intervention. Sure, you can cite the occasional tragically adverse reaction, but never forget that tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people are vaccinated every year without incident.
Sure, you could still say “Ah, but that’s still not a risk I’m prepared to take.” But what about the risk that you have overestimated how many people in your community have been vaccinated? What if herd immunity isn’t as strong as you think it is? Then, your decision to not vaccinate your child directly puts him in danger. Given that vaccines are so overwhelmingly safe, and given how are notoriously bad most people are at estimating anything, and given how vaccination uptake statistics don’t always tell the whole story (ie. even if the vaccination rate in your town is very high, you could still unknowingly be living in the middle of a cluster of people who don’t vaccinate), vaccinating is always the safer and more sensible choice.
Yes. We have eliminated the disease from humanity with the use of the vaccine. The virus is not the disease. The virus *causes *the disease. We have chosen not to eliminate the virus from the world, but the *vaccine *has eliminated the *disease *from humanity.
Your assertion wasn’t that humans are incapable of eliminating a virus, your assertion was that a vaccine was incapable of eliminating a disease.
Humans may be incapable of eliminating a virus. Our love for life is so strong that we cannot bring ourselves to knowingly render another organism entirely extinct, even one that causes nothing but pain and suffering and death. But that is a completely separate issue from whether or not a vaccine can eliminate a disease. It can, and it has.
All the DNA exists that we need to create a wooly mammoth. It’s even possible that sometime in the not so distant future, scientists will indeed clone a wooly mammoth. The wooly mammoth may live one day in the future. But that doesn’t change the fact that right now, the wooly mammoth has been eliminated from the planet. We still have the potential for the wooly mammoth, but we don’t have any wooly mammoths. We still have the potential for the smallpox disease, but we don’t have any smallpox disease.
The virus isn’t the disease. The disease is the disease. The vaccine eliminated the disease.
Yes I agree, needed some time to consider it, particularly of the issue as to why we are preserving the virus. I think also I have come to peace with this issue.
If we can wipe it out (or have that as a possibility), then I agree it’s a good idea for mandatory vaccination
if we can’t wipe it out, then it’s a judgement call based on heard immunity levels and the disease itself (how bad is it) if there is room for a non-vaccinated percentage of the population.
I don’t know if it’s been mentioned, but I’d say the abortion debate answers this question. We’ve established that medical decisions are between patients and their doctors and the government has no right to intervene. Nor can the government force people to undergo medical procedures. If you can’t force people to undergo ultrasounds, you can’t force people to have needles stuck in them.
Plus, people do die from vaccines. The risk is tiny, but in a large population, some do die, and making people buy that particular lottery ticket is not justifiable.
I think the anti-vax crowd has done the country a lot of harm, but we’re talking basic rights here.
Then why don’t you read the thread and find out? Why should we have to pretend that the conversation started when you arrived and that none of the previous points addressing your concerns haven’t already been made? Sometimes it’s like a take-off of that Sandler/Barrymore comedy, Fifty First Dates, only with this topic( and a few other I could mention) it’s Fifty First Posts.
And a few people die from being trapped in burning autos after accidents when their seat belts cannot be unfastened. Ban seatbelts!
We just can’t tolerate any restrictions on people’s rights, no matter what the compelling societal interest may be.
Or, we can consider these issues on an individual basis without resorting to absolutes.
Well, since we have actually established that we cannot force people to undergo medical procedures, I’d say it’s an open and shut case.
The topic is open, your mind is shut, and you have no case.
Like with most analogies people try to draw with vaccination, this fails at a very simple hurdle. The list of people affected by abortion are:
- The person undergoing the procedure
- The fetus
…And that’s being generous and assuming the fetus as a person, which I don’t. Here’s the list of people affected by vaccination: - The person undergoing the procedure
- Every single person in that person’s community
Bit of a difference, wouldn’t you think? The reason it can be justified to mandate that people receive vaccines is because refusing vaccines without an actual medical reason to do so puts the community around you at a heightened risk for no good reason. It also really doesn’t help your case that this is a TOTAL strawman. Yes, we absolutely can force people to undergo medical procedures, or force people to subject their children to medical procedures. It’s just that in the case of vaginal ultrasounds, literally the sole purpose of mandating that procedure is to shame women into not having abortions. It served no medical necessity, neither for the patient nor for anyone else.
People also die from chemotherapy, but if you would tell me that it’s unjustified for the government to force parents to allow their child to undergo chemotherapy that raises the chance of survival from something like 10% to something like 80%, I wouldn’t think very highly of you. Yes, there’s an extremely tiny risk of severe adverse side effects. The CDC seems pretty convinced that there have been zero deaths that could be proven to be attributed to vaccinations, though.. The risk of dying from the prevented diseases, though, are decently high. Anyone who would decline vaccination because they were afraid of vaccine injury, save for the rare few who suffer from allergies or the like, has failed completely and utterly at risk assessment, and their right to be idiots doesn’t trump a society’s demand for decent herd immunity.
Yes, the basic right to be an antisocial idiot! If you feel that you need to take your rights-as-absolutes stance that far, you’ve lost track of the entire point we have the concept of “rights”. I’ll give you a hint - it’s not for its own sake. It’s because they are demonstrably beneficial for society. And of course, in the case of vaccination, we can still argue around that, on the simple premise that by not vaccinating, you are putting others at heightened risk. By refusing to vaccinate when you could, you’re essentially threatening all of us.
We can and do force people to undergo medical procedures though it has to be done in a way that the person is not able to object to. Being unconscious counts, but so does not able to make sound decisions.
I don’t know if we want to establish the precedent that unwillingness to get vaccinated = unsound decision, but for the case of a horrible disease such as smallpox and with the chance of world wide eradication I suppose that stretch can be made on the basis of risk to themselves and others.
In what world is that a stretch? And in what world is a complete and utter failure of risk assessment that puts both you and others at a higher risk for infectious disease not an unsound decision?
Because the person is unlikely to get infected if most of the population is vaccinated so there risk of harming anyone is near zero. The person would be at greater risk to self and others driving a car, yet we allow that.
You… don’t see the problem with this logic at all, do you?
There actually are instances where medical procedures can be forced. They are rare, and there has to be a compelling case made that the harm is outweighed by the benefit.
This, by the way, is why quarantine of a contagious person is legal - sure we’re restricting someone’s rights, but we’re also protecting the rights of other people not to be made ill with a serious disease when that can be prevented.
But the goal is not to get it near zero, where those that cannot be immunized are at a constant risk-the goal is to maintain herd immunity until the risk is zero. Imagine that there is a roof over your head that almost protects you perfectly from inclement weather, except for a very small number of spots that just can’t be fixed until the stuff you bought to fill the holes slowly expands to completely fill the gaps. Your neighbors come over and start poking holes in your roof saying that, since your roof isn’t already perfect, what’s a few more holes going to hurt?
Please show the statistical analysis you’ve used to come to this conclusion.
Czarcasm, you should know better than to directly insult another poster.
Warning issued, try to control that in the future.
You have already conceded the point on your post #166.