And it comes back to mathematics at this point, which I believe was my first post in this thread. When does the point of each additional immunity become statistically irrelevant in it’s benefit to society? When does the risk of harm for a person become greater then the risk of the disease? What happens when we exceed that point statistically?
Going further what is the cost to our freedom in forcing something that has no benefit over a certain level of the population? Would it not be better to let a few people slip through the mandatory vaccination system then risk either a police state enforcement or the collapse of support for the mandatory vaccination system due to public outcry?
With smallpox for some of the last few holdouts some countries actually sent in the army and vaccinated people at gunpoint.
Well, it worked - no more smallpox for anyone anywhere any more.
Hell, they used to vaccinate kids for it that, these days, would get exemptions for medical reasons. I was one of them - when I got my smallpox vaccination I also had active eczema which put me at high risk of a rather grisly death. Fortunately, that didn’t happen but such things were seen as the cost of protecting the majority of the population.
Of course, smallpox is lots worse than chickenpox.
Here’s the thing - if we take everyone currently alive now and vaccinated them (barring those who TRULY have a medical reason for not doing so) the disease would be gone. Then NO ONE would have to ever be vaccinated against it ever again, there would be no more vaccine side effects, no more chicken pox AND no more shingles for ever and ever and ever.
You make a very compelling point if the vaccine can do this - would it work for chickenpox, how about other diseases? If we have such enforcement of being vaccinated what diseases can be eliminated? What ones will simply mutate and we are yet unable to eliminate?
What I stated before involved the benefits of heard immunity and diminishing returns after a certain point, but at least for some vaccines there may be something further then heard immunity, the irradication of the disease forever.
However to note this is not yet the case for smallpox as the US and Russia still maintain the active virus in some form of containment, and with that it is still a risk. So smallpox is not eliminated - yet…
I expect that there is a point of diminishing returns after you reach herd immunity (unless you can wipe out the disease entirely). The problem is that you have to maintain that immunity after you reach it.
We know vaccinates can do this. Smallpox has been wiped out and polio is almost gone.
My understanding is that chickenpox is a human disease. There aren’t any animal vectors or reservoirs for it. If we inoculate the entire human race, the virus won’t have enough time to mutate and it will be gone forever.
Any diseases that we can contract from animals, especially animals that we have a lot of contact with such as dogs, cats or other common housepets, won’t be candidates for elimination. Any diseases that have a number of strains, any one of which could mutate into a more infectious form will be difficult to eliminate. And of course, all the diseases that we have not yet run into or that have not jumped from an animal to humans yet, will be difficult to vaccinate against.
You have proof that people are still getting smallpox? :dubious: Let’s see a cite for that.
(I believe there are still specimens of the vaccine just in case, which is wise)
If you choose not to be vaccinated, then the alternative is quarantine. (Ala Typhoid Mary).
We have laws limiting freedom all the time. Traffic laws. Laws against pollution. Laws against selling certain substances as medicine (poisons, etc).
Some people think that illness is caused by demonic possession and that the demon should be beaten out with sticks. Some people believe that modern medicine is an afront to god, and thus only prayer is allowed. You do NOT have the freedom to allow a child to suffer for your beliefs. They are YOUR beliefs – not your child’s. It is a sin, in my view, to allow a child to suffer because of some notion of freedom. No, it’s not better. Not at all.
When YOUR actions start causing the deaths of other people, then they become illegal. Drunk driving, for example. Throwing rocks at an underpass. That sort of thing.
Yes it is 1978 BUT this was after the disease was ‘wiped out’ It still can infect if it gets out of containment. Since then we have put it into stronger containment, but it’s still there and only contained by our active efforts to do so. We can not say we have actually wiped out a disease if we still have the virus.
Now it is a great thing that no one has suffered it since then, but till the stocks of this is gone we have not wiped it out.
However, kanic, the WHO did not declare smallpox to be eradicated in the general population until 1979. There have been no reported human cases since that time.
ETA: Also, its entirely possible to wipe out a disease without destroying all the virus.
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It’s not like we’re trying really really hard to contain it by posting strong burly men holding it back. It’s frozen. In a safe. Protected by security and no one goes in to look at it. (There have been proposals to destroy even those remaining samples) If no one takes it out, it will never ever come back.
It does however call into question if humans can effectively use vaccines to eradicate a disease as opposed to clear a population temperamentally, only to be possibly reintroduced after the population has had no apparent need for the vaccine and it has been discontinued*. In this case perhaps some researcher letting it out in the wild accidentally.
A point made that once world wide vaccinations were done and the disease was eliminated no one needs to get vaccinated after. My counter point, due to the storage of smallpox as our only example
It actually doesn’t do that, and it sounds like you’re suggesting maybe a disease that has been wiped out could come back through means unknown. So I think you’re just trying to find a way to avoid acknowledging that vaccines can wipe out diseases.
I am not suggesting that vaccines can not wipe out disease, but humans with vaccines have yet to prove it, and by not destroying existing smallpox viruses, it still remains unproven.
It may be the closest example to wiping out a disease world wide, but until we make that leap and destroy the known samples (or they deteriorate to a non-infectious state), we have yet to have proven to do so.
In this it is the human tendency that I hold in question, not the effectiveness of the vaccine.
Can I bring this to a bigger scale. Assuming it requires human intelligence to develop a vaccine, but that human intelligence finds it also necessary to store the virus in a means that has a non-zero risk of reinfecting the population, can we truly say that humans are capable of irradiating a disease?
If there still remains a known real mathematical probability of contracting the disease caused by human decision to store the infectious agent can we say we eliminated the disease from humanity?
Assuming we were talking in absolutes, would your hypothetical even begin to matter?
Why does this matter? Why should anyone care? We’re aiming for “this disease is essentially extinct within the human population”. The fact that smallpox may exist in weapons labs somewhere does nothing to diminish that accomplishment. Please, can we at least pretend to give a shit about practicality?
I never mentioned weapons, just research, which was the way the last known smallpox infection happened and I do feel the likely vector over ‘weapons’. I do doubt that such virus would be used for bio-warfare as it is really a world wide doomsday device.
So it’s a question of faith in humanity given the reality evident. Humans can develop a vaccine to eliminate a disease from the population but as part of that it had also proven itself unwilling to destroy the live virus, and instead trusts in it’s ability to contain it. It is the last part that calls into question if humans are capable of eliminating a disease.*