Imagine there’s a pandemic sweeping the world - bubonic plague or flu, say. Scientists have a vaccine, but it can only be given to pre-pubertal children. Unfortunately the vaccine can have irreversible side-effects, leaving the child a drooling moron in constant pain for the rest of their life. What is an acceptable failure rate for you?
What’s the death rate of the pandemic?
If you catch it, upwards of 50%. There is no data on how likely you are to catch it, but so far hundreds of millions have died world-wide and there are reports of entire regions devastated.
I put 1 in 100 because of herd immunity.
ETA: Ignore this. I thought the failure rate meant the vaccine did not take effect.
I’ll take a 1/100 chance of my child being a drooling moron over a 1/2 chance of them dying.
There just isn’t sufficient information on which to do other than choose an answer at random. Epidemiologists have sophisticated mathematical models which predict the spread of a given disease and the effects of a vaccination of a particular effectiveness. Those models would be able to predict the break even point at which you would be doing more harm than good by risking the vaccine.
In your scenario where the disease itself has already killed something like 1 in 20 of the world population, something like 1 in 10 might be acceptable if the disease is not at all contained.
This. The poll is asking for an answer to half a question.
Boy, Zika really causes some people to freak out. :eek:
The OP’s premise being fantastical (worldwide plague killing over 50% of its victims, unexplained devastating side effects in some small fraction of vaccine recipients, vaccine for unknown reason only to be given to prepubertal children) I can’t respond meaningfully to such a poll. If such a pandemic did occur and an experimental vaccine was rushed into production, I’d expect testing to occur first in adult volunteers, with any idiosyncratic severe side effects emerging before the vaccine was ever given to children.
If Captain Trips was coming to my neighborhood, I might well accept the 1 in 100 odds for myself if there was a suicide pill handy.
And it’s doing so quite deliberately.
As some context, 1 in 100 would mean 740,000 children (defined as under the age of 18) in the US would be relegated to ‘a drooling moron in constant pain for the rest of their life’…and this after whatever losses happen from the plague itself. I’m unsure that would be acceptable to anyone unless the situation was truly desperate in the extreme.
If we really have only the information given by the OP, then it seems like anything less than 50% failure rate should be acceptable.
However, we have to have more information than that. By the time whole regions die, it would be impossible to hide how the disease is transmitted. There would simply be too much data to not know. Once you know a method of transmission, you have all kinds of options to address the spread of the disease.
I chose the 1 in 100. “For the rest of their life” doesn’t have to be that long and that 1 in 100 could be added to the list of those killed by the disease. So now, with proper spin, I have a 100% successful vaccine.
Am I ready for a government job now?
How droll.
Then here’s my quite deliberate answer.
I’d give my child the vaccine if the odds of them dying of the disease are higher than the odds of them developing the side-effect.
Come back when you’ve got some numbers.
I am suspicious of your motives here. :dubious:
It’s very simple: I have no specialist knowledge here.
This looks odd, given the antivax hysteria. :dubious:
I, too, would like to offer an answer, but I don’t fully understand the scenario. Without understanding how easy it is to catch this disease, I can’t judge the risk at all.
What are your thoughts on childhood vaccines and the anti-vax movement?