They’re irrelevant to my OP.
What are the odds of the bad side effects? They’d have to be greater than 50% to override the odds of a 50% chance of death.
Please don’t turn this into a vacc / anti-vacc thread.
It’s a thread about acceptable risk of vaccination. How do you envision the debate?
But I can’t answer without more information. What is the mortality rate of the disease you are theorizing? What are the short- and long-term consequences? How contagious is this illness?
It’s a thread about a hypothetical question which merely uses vaccination as part of the hypothetical. He could just as easily have made it about a disease which can be prevented with tonsilectomy. I haven’t been around much lately but I can confidently state that Quartz is not trying to make some kind of antivax point.
Though I agree that the question is impossible to answer properly without more information about the virulence of the disease. A highly infectious disease like that is likely to burn out fairly quickly anyway.
I dont think so. :dubious:
I think your OP did that, and your repeated coyness/refusal to answer direct questions.
1 out of 100 is totally acceptable in this situation. I’d even take 1 in 40 or 50.
Like 37 million children dead? (Assuming everyone gets the plague.) If one in a million children catch the disease, clearly the answer changes.
So, Quartz what is the purpose of this poll again? I didn’t answer having inadequate information to do so.
What I think we need to know is what residua do people who recover from the disease have? If the vaccine can turn people into drooling morons in pain, then one assumes the disease has the potential to do that as well. ~50% die, but do the other people fully recover and have no after effects? Or do, say, 1% of them become drooling morons in pain? That makes the answer pretty easy.
Also something I want to know, is, are the children who experience the horrible side effect nonetheless still protected from the disease?
The side effect is not really a failure rate. Failure rate is failure to confer immunity. If the vaccine fails to confer immunity at a rate of say, 1 in 50, while causing the side effect to 1 in 100, it is not going to be a very effective vaccine, and not going to stop the disease very well. If, on the other hand, it confers immunity at a rate of 999 in 1,000, then it is going to make a pretty good dent in the disease. Especially if it’s communicated respiratorily (probably not a word, but you know what I mean). Those diseases tend to be diseases very much of children, with parents and teachers of young children as occasional collateral damage. If it’s bloodborne/sexually transmitted, vaccinating children isn’t going to help much at all. The disease will burn through the population, leaving the rare naturally immune, and the very lucky, picking up the pieces, before those children are old enough to be contributing to the pool of people transmitting the illness.
30% of the Fatality or Disability Rate of the disease.
I think that measure is more useful, than a flat figure.
But that is making some assumptions that I’m unsure of from the sketchy OP. Yes, 37 million dead is more than 740,000 children alone being morons and in pain the rest of their lives, but I’m unsure if that’s the whole story here (this also doesn’t include the effects presumably on adults…is it the same 1 in 100 chance? Also, what does this 1 in 100 actually mean wrt the theoretical disease? Does that mean that that’s the sum total of casualties from the outbreak, that everyone who gets the immunization is totally protected except those who have a bad reaction? :dubious:).
There is no real point beyond personal interest in learning people’s views. IMHO people imputing an agenda are being jerks.
**Quartz **has given plenty enough information. Assuming that the epidemic is killing 50% of its victims *and *that it’s ravaging your region or highly likely soon will, it is clearly wise to take the vaccine, even at 1-in-100 odds of the drooling side effects.
Wouldn’t any actuary or risk analyst in the world, given those numbers to crunch, recommend that everyone take the vaccine?
No, it’s not enough information.
For example, what if I modified the OP’s description by saying that it is a sexually transmitted disease? You still want to vaccinate pre-pubertal children?
A sexually transmitted disease isn’t likely to ravage a population like that, but some diseases are still more diseases of children, like saliva-borne diseases. It’s relatively easy to get adults to stop passing those around, but trying to get small children to stop putting their fingers in their mouths is nearly impossible.
Now, a bloodborne disease can have many routes of transmission, one of them being sexual. If HIV weren’t a delicate disease outside the body, it could devastate a population. If we had an HIV vaccine, we’d want to vaccinate children, the way we vaccinate 11-year-olds with Gardisil.
Quartz, please don’t call other people names. It’s not uncommon here for people to wonder if an OP is making a point when the OP does not contribute his or her own opinion to a thread asking for opinions.
That being said, DrDeth, I think you’ve made your point. Let’s not take the accusations any further. Unless I’m missing some history here (and I may be), I don’t think a hypothetical around a controversial topic means there’s some nefarious motivation on the OP’s part.
Hmm. Shades of the anti-vax crowd’s occasional odious insistence a child’s better off dead than autistic…
If unvaccinated children’s odds of dying are 1 in 2, and vaccinated children’s odds of catastrophic side effects are 1 in 100, of course those odds are acceptable. Sure, the odds could be better but 99 of the vaccinated kids will be fine and 50 of the unvaccinated kids will be dead, so I’d think it unconscionable not to vaccinate my own.
It is funny how there is flu vaccine every year :D:D some times many flu vaccines every year but no HIV vaccine.
We even got Ebola vaccine in not even year time. The same with swine flu vaccine in very little time.
Yet 30+ years still no HIV vaccine.