Throwaway05
4mo ago
Please please please follow the vaccination schedule.
Pediatricians take a 6 figure pay cut because of how much they care about protecting kids, everything on there is for a reason - COVID nonsense aside.
If you have something specific other than COVID you have concerns about you should dig into that separately.
Keep in mind we've already started to have things like Measles outbreaks because of people become vaccine hesitant. Many of these disease are very deadly.
You also may introduce logistical problems down the line as your kid can't go to certain schools or get certain jobs (like healthcare) without jumping through extra hoops.
Also considering almost every kids gets this stuff we'd know about problems for the older stuff at this point.
Throwaway05
5mo ago
- Healthcare:
Destroy the AMA’s supply-limiting bullshit, dramatically increase the number of doctors, dramatically decrease cost of healthcare.
Reminder that physician salaries are a low percentage of healthcare expenses, that the AMA has nothing to with supply restriction, spots can be expanded by local governments and hospitals (and have been!), and that the AMA has been lobbying for a supply expansion for decades.
Throwaway05
9mo ago
Well, I guess thank you for appearing on command and making my point for me.
Throwaway05
3mo ago
With respect to Trans care-
A finicky part of this discussion is that it's really about two separate issues: 1. "Do we know if gender affirming care helps" 2. "How do we feel about it?"
Common sense is a poor guide because both sides think they have the common sense. Personally I will accept either outcome as to its usefulness, but I use the cheat of "we actively have zero idea because of poor research quality." However when most people talk about this they let question two bleed in, and that includes "what just makes the most sense?" The idea of gender identity problems is very poorly understood, including its natural history and pathophysiology (in large part because of willful blindness by advocates). It should be weird enough and unknown enough that "what makes sense" rarely applies.
With respect to COVID-
A huge problem here is the mixing of political and scientific questions. We (as in the field, but also me specifically on the old forum and with my family and so on) were upfront about lots of COVID stuff that turned out to be true. Most of it was consistent the whole time. Some of this falls into a bit of a medical talk vs regular people talk "it's just a bad flu" scares the shit out of us but most normies do not realize how bad the flu is. That's pretty normal communication problems in a fraught situation.
However when you talk about things like indefinite lock downs or nobody is allowed outside at parks those are political questions that were justified by appealing to science and having politicians (like Fauci) wear a doctor's hat. Additionally we have the problem of mandatory advocacy in the field (seriously it's a required part of medical school and residency training these days and guess which way it always leans) which resulted in a lot of doctors engaging in leftist nonsense hiding under science and medicine but it was leftist bullshit and should be treated as such - it isn't the fault of medicine or doctors its the fault of leftist institutional infiltration.
Medicine works just as well (or not well) as it always has outside the political topics. In the same way that your university or the IRS or whatever does.
The takeaway should not be "medicine is bad and we can't trust public health officials" it should be "medicine and public health officials are people and fall into the same politicking and fear and so on.
Throwaway05
6mo ago
On physician salaries:
This topic comes up from time to time and is more in the news now for obvious reasons.
Here I will point out that cutting physician salaries does little to address the healthcare cost crisis and also argue that the salaries are deserved.
Obviously yes, I am a physician and don’t want my salary to get cut, but nobody wants that to happen to them, how would you feel if people on the internet were saying you were over-compensated and demanding you take a 50% pay cut?
It’s also worth noting that everybody in the U.S. is compensated well (too well?). That includes within healthcare (see: nurses) but also outside of it. We make good money here; it’s one of the reasons so many of the successful elsewhere want to come to America.
-Okay how much of healthcare spending is doctor’s salaries?
About 8%. If you cut physician salaries by half you get 4% savings. That’s not a little but it is also not a lot.
-Can we do this?
Sure, you could, maybe, but you’ll introduce new problems, people will retire or leave the field, shortages will get even worse, and so on. Depending on how you did it, certain critical fields like surgery would vanish overnight. OB care would be financially impossible to provide (due to incredibly high malpractice burden (can be 150k per year). You can’t spend your entire salary on malpractice insurance and other expenses.
-Okay, but how are physician salaries trending, are you making more than you used to?
Doctors have been getting year after year real wage cuts for 20-30 years. Everyone else’s (in healthcare) salaries have been going up. Percentage of healthcare spending on physician salaries is going down. So, if you really want us to get paid less just wait. Our salary shrinks every year and the portion of the pie we are taking shrinks too.
-Alright, again. So, does cutting physician salaries help?
No not really, we aren’t a large enough slice of the pie and you’d cause a shit ton of new problems. We’ve already seen this a bit. More people are working part time, quitting, dropping out of residency, graduating from medical school and not doing medicine, not providing certain types of services or working in certain locations. That’s with a modest decline in salary and things like an increase in administrative burden and a decline in respect. This would shoot up if you dramatically cut salaries.
-Okay but let us just import a ton of foreign doctors.
Again, 8%. It’s not going to help that much. However, it’s worth keeping mind that a lot of what pisses people off about healthcare gets worse with foreign doctors. Yes, I believe that foreign doctors have worse training and experience than American doctors. People here seem to not like that argument, but we don’t need it. Foreign doctors are almost always coming from third world countries, not Western Europe. People hate when their doctor barely speaks English, spends little time with them, and acts like a cultural alien. All of those things are what cheaper foreign labor brings to the table. Patients in the 90s and 00s heavily pushed better customer service in medicine. It’s made things more expensive but has resulted in better customer service. Walk that back and make things cheaper if you are okay with worse customer service we can do that without breaking everything else.
-Okay DW what’s the most histrionic thing you can say on this topic, just for fun.
If you cut MD salaries by half, I think healthcare costs would actually increase. You’d see a decline in certain types of care which is unexpensive, preventative, and annoying for us to do. Example: nearly every single endocrinologist would stop practicing and go back to doing hospital medicine (they already make less than hospitalists, often to the tune of 150k and have already completed the training for that). All those unmanaged conditions would end up costing more in the long run. You’d also see an increase in “well fuck you, I’m going to be shady now in order to make this worth it.” And you’d see a huge increase in low value – high expense defensive medicine since protecting your salary becomes even more important. A more modest boiling the frog approach is already in use, and involves far too little money to solve the problem.
Switching gears.
-Okay give me some numbers.
It’s hard to tell for a variety of reasons but the number going around right now is an average of 350k (it may actually closer to 300k and we are seeing a complicated post-COVID mirage). That’s a big number but this is a situation where the median and average diverge a lot. Pediatricians often make between 180k-200k. Family medicine makes more than that but not a lot more. Those are a huge percentage of the overall jobs. Yeah, neurosurgeons can make 5-10 times that, but there aren’t a lot of them, and they work close to 24/7, they still make the average weird. A lot of “rich” doctors are a small number of people in a complicated specialty working egregious hours and not really enjoying the money. At one point the neurosurgery divorce rate was over 120%. The median physician has much more reasonable compensation. They also used to make a lot more, the mental framing of this for some is anchored around 90s compensation which just isn’t true anyway. Doctors work a lot. People who run entire departments, manage millions of dollars in research grants, or own patents and other companies are sometimes presented in these numbers.
-That’s still too much.
Okay let us talk tradeoffs. Some things to keep in mind. Doctors don’t typically make money until after they turn 30. Up till that point physicians can often live in more or less in poverty (want to live next to your hospital in the nicest part of a major city on 60k? Good luck). Once you start making money you can start paying off your 500+ thousand dollars in loans. Delightful. Up until that point you have no flexibility. You can’t leave your job or your life is over. You can’t choose where you live. If you get fired your life is over. If your boss is abusive, you say nothing. Probably most importantly, you can’t get back time. Money and time are probably most useful in your 20s. Our peers are meeting partners, going on vacation, clubbing. We are working 24-hour shifts. That’s a huge cost.
-Boring. You chose this.
Fair. But if you want American to keep choosing this you have to be aware, otherwise it ends up like the other jobs that nobody in this country wants to do.
-Okay fine, like is it even that bad of a job though?
Yes. Consider that many doctors are functionally working 2-3 full time jobs worth of work.
-Okay hold up, yeah you work 80 hours in residency but not as an attending and certainly not 120 hours.
Okay, okay lemme explain. Yes, some people are working 80 hours a week (or a lot more) as an adult. However, you are more often doing things like working 60 hours a week, but that is including things like nights, weekends, and Holidays. How many jobs involve regularly working Christmas, or three weeks in a row without a day off, or 24+ hours in a row? Any job with hourly wage and overtime is going to add up to 2 times the base salary really quick under those conditions.
Also, unlike most blue-collar labor (which is laden with mandatory and very real breaks) or white-collar labor (which involves a lot of downtime), most doctors are working nearly 100% of the time while working.
That may sound unfathomable to you, and to some extent varies specialty by specialty but can be very close to literally true. On days when I’m in the hospital for three or meals I’m lucky if I sit down and eat for one of them. Usually if I’m lucky I’m just cramming a protein bar in my face. Trainees always go “what the fuck when do you eat. Or drink. Or pee.” We usually don’t. Surgeons are notorious for regularly giving themselves mild kidney injuries because of dehydration.
Almost nobody I know who isn’t a physician has worked a 24-hour shift. Most people I know have never worked 8 hours in a row for real with no breaks, certainly not for weeks and weeks in a row. Your year-end scramble or Go-Live or tax season is our baseline, and often we are doing it for 24+ hours at age 55.
Once you break this down to hourly wage the numbers get much more reasonable.
-Hold up you work 24 hours in a row with no breaks? Is that real? Isn’t that unsafe?
Yes, at around hour 18 you become disoriented to the point where it’s not safe to drive anymore. Yes, this schedule ends up actually making a lot of sense somehow. Yes we sometimes work more than that, at any given time in a hospital there’s probably someone working a single shift longer than some of the nurses whole work-week.
-Okay but like, outside of the sheer hours it is not that bad right?
Well lack of breaks is part of that. Plenty of other stuff though. Perks are non-existent these days. Most places got rid of the physician lounge and parking lots, which mostly exist to make us faster and more efficient so not the best move in the world. Keep in mind that the chair in my office is maybe older than I am, and most places I work my personal laptop screen is bigger than the screen I’m doing my work on. Most corporate jobs are comfortable. Medicine is not. Little things like that add up and are part of why a lot of us get lured into the general workforce. For some reason I pay for parking.
Also, the job is intrinsically hard. Treat us like kings and pay us millions of dollars a year…and you are still dealing with death and entitled and demanding people all day. You can get sued and lose all your money, your job, or more likely just be miserable for five to ten years while the case gets sorted out in your favor. Most jobs if you make an inattentive mistake, you say oh shit and fix it, or somebody loses some money. Doctor fucks up and somebody dies, and you make thousands of decisions each day where if you lose that focus…
Alcoholism, drug abuse, and depression rates are high. As are suicide rates.
Sidebar: most white-collar work does not involve dealing with the dregs of society. This occasionally makes useful for for instance talking about the practicalities of the criminal underclass but is absolutely stressful.
-Okay but like, not everything is clinical work, right?
Well yes, to some extent that is part of the problem. An increase in charting and administrative work has made healthcare more expensive and restricted supply and quality since I spend less time with and working on patients. Writing bullshit notes does not increase my job satisfaction.
However, there are good other parts – leadership roles, research, teaching. Most doctors are clinical care providers, mentors and educators, and team leaders and managers all at the same time. With the demands of all of those things.
-That’s a lot of shit, anything else you want to unload?
Yeah, there’s other stuff that makes being a doctor be expensive. Board examinations and licensing can cost tens of thousands of dollars. If you get caught smoking weed you could end up losing your job and have to pay hundreds of thousands to get it back for some god forsaken reason. Everyone wants to siphon off of us because they know where the money is. This is also why NPs don’t get sued despite having less training and more bad outcomes. Less money involved.
You constantly get expensive retraining, tests and learning for the rest of your career also. Medicine changes all the time and we are required to stay up to date.
-Okay but like if I’m in the hospital I don’t see you at all what the fuck are you doing?
Operating. Teaching. Calling the lab. Writing notes. Seeing other patients. In committee meetings. I swear we are working you just aren’t seeing it, and a lot of what we do isn’t direct clinical medicine.
-Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
Throwaway05
4mo ago
The impression I've gotten in my time here is that most people are pretty much just smart enough, with a side helping of tech-bro-ism.
Medicine seems easy/simple from the outside in a large part because most people here are young and healthy and don't interact with the complicated parts of the field. Most people here also don't exist in fields where a lit review is a thing (in a large part because most of the people who do that are far left at this point). A half assed opinion piece is considered an authority and their's no need to read primary source material or contra narrative information critically.
We (docs) also get used to hardcore digging in because of skin in the game. If I pick the wrong medicine my patient fucking dies. That means I'm naturally going to have much more "informed" commitment to my medical views (even when they turn out to be a wrong) than somebody arguing on the internet without significant consequence.
Add in the political climate - nothing I say when defending medicine is going to do anything to separate me seeming like one of "those" COVID people to skeptics.
All those types of things together and more and you get my downvotes and the vitriol.
You should use this as a Gell-Mann Amnesia moment however. As my media diet continues to improve I get access to more and more better primary source material and you see things like rampant factual inaccuracy here on other topics outside of medicine that I've just happened to have been informed about.
We are still pretty good here! But outside of a few reliable posters you'll see a lot of very confidently stated low information stuff being promulgated.
Ultimately most of the people still complaining about COVID are having a tantrum. I get why they are having a tantrum, I was not happy about some of the policy decisions - but it's still a throwing the baby out with the bathwater moment.
Throwaway05
4mo ago
Yes and I'm aware of that risk and I think about it and I take steps to mitigate it when appropriate.
You are choosing risk for no reason. That's the issue.
Furthermore you need to be responsible. Engage with the rest of the comment. The ask is to actually do your homework instead of being mad about COVID.
That should be easy.
Throwaway05
4mo ago
People are becoming vaccine hesitant because the medical system flushed its credibility down the toilet over a cold from China.
Yes and it's idiotic.
-
COVID was actually very bad and I'm not going to be able to convince you because you were locked inside along with everyone else when it was bad. No, no, I'm not going to be able to convince anyone still complaining about COVID at this point so let's move on.
-
Medicine is obviously politically compromised when it comes to culture war topics.
-
The correct response to 2 is to have a high degree of suspicion when you see recommendations about trans people or whatever not ignore general and uncontroversial medical advice.
A reasonable middle ground is to do things like actual independent high quality research (like a lit review on pubmed) or ask someone who is not politically compromised (me! me!).
Just because someone was wrong one time or on one category of things doesn't mean you stop listening to them for everything. That's woke thinking and I expect better of us.
Throwaway05
4mo ago
Yeah sorry lemme rephrase as "please please please follow the *U.S. vaccination schedule."
Not accusing you of not going for MMR but just using it as an example of downstream effects.
Something to keep in mind is that the U.S. schedule is optimized for "we are the wealthiest country in the in world" others may have more resource limitation focused choices.
COVID you can skip.
Using your other post as a reference point (and please forgive me Peds is not my area so I my professional level knowledge of this is distant).
Also several of these can impact getting jobs or housing at university (ex: the Heps, Meningitis), and skipping them will put you in the naughty bucket in your pediatrician's mind which isn't necessarily appropriate but is the reality.
Hep A - prob rare in Denmark? Hep B - prob rare in Denmark? Chicken Pox - no idea why they aren't doing this. Per PLOS Glob Public Health. 2023 Apr 5;3(4):e0001743. doi: 10.1371/journal.pgph.0001743 eople are advocating it? Rotavirus - this one is super complex and can't really be summarized here. Covid - skip if you want. Flu - don't skip please. Tetanus (from age 12) again probably low yield. Meningitis (from age 12) - don't skip please, looks like they have it but don't give to kids? Maybe it's pre college matriculation? IDK seems strange.
Keep in mind that incidence of disease varies country to country and the sheer variety and amount of immigrants in the U.S. (as well as poor health) put people at higher risks of somethings. This impacts the schedule.
Throwaway05
9mo ago
The purpose of the original management of masks and the overall lockdown approach was to buy time for hospitals and other aspects of healthcare to adjust and to do things like "smooth out the curve." This was mostly a success. Messaging around this was terrible, and public health and governmental identities (and the media) couldn't stop themselves from lying and misunderstanding.
These policies overstaying their welcome has nothing to do with the early need. You of course also have other nonsense like trying to prevent people from staying outside away from each other in a park. The damage from overzealous, unscientific, and downright retarded policy decisions is immense.
But the lockdown was still a good idea.
Hospitals had to shut down elective procedures. They had ophthalmologists and dermatologists managing critical care patients. Routine medical activity and screening shut down in a way that will increase mortality and morbidity for decades. Medical education, which is expensive, complicated, and slow was paused or had quality go down for years. Many doctors and other staff died, retired, moved out of clinical practice, or dramatically reduced their hours, and the shortages and other problems caused by this are only growing worse and have a tremendous lagging effect. It's taking time and a multifactorial problem but hospitals are shutting down all over the U.S. and it's becoming increasingly impossible to get certain types of care in some states or regions.
Multiple things can be true at the same time.
Lockdowns were a violation of freedoms. They were absolutely a necessary violation of freedom for a time. They were not a necessary violation later, but persisted anyway.
Most lockdown deniers types seem to realize they were right about lockdowns being misused and then leverage that into thinking that COVID was just as bad as a regular flu, that everything was fine or a hysteria, or that because we didn't load up some random ship with COVID patients that everything was fine, or that running out ventilators will cause some people to die but cause absolutely no other problems.
It's a massive Dunning-Kruger issue that seems tremendously over represented in the population of rat-adjacent people.
Throwaway05
9mo ago
People in Medicine are really nervous, you are right that public health entities burned through basically all the credibility they had last time, but at current expectations this Avian flu would be be worse than COVID and U.S. healthcare (and likely everywhere else) has basically burned through every ounce of slack it had including things like people's willingness to work and mental health. A lot of COVID-denier types were able to miss just how close we were to total collapse because everyone was locked up at home but this could be really, really bad.
Throwaway05
4mo ago
I'm not asking people to blindly trust the medical establishment I'm asking people to actually research the thing they want to do.
You can find papers with actuarial analysis, side effect rates and presentations, justification for the schedule and so on.
So do it.
With respect to COVID the whole thing was stupidly complicated and while I don't support the rights restrictions except in very narrow cases a great deal of it was correct and just poorly implemented/messaged.
Their is also a huge problem with outright conspiracy theories that got a lot of mileage because trust was so low but that doesn't make those things not effectively insane conspiracy theories, it just hampers people getting them cleared up.
Throwaway05
9mo ago
Every single one of these consequences were because of the massively extended lockdowns and the medical/governmental apparatus refusing to lose any face. No shit the industry wasn't doing as much routine medical activity when going to urgent care required multiple tests, staying in your car, poorly-developed ass-covering questionnaires, etc. etc. etc.
No?
You think Ophthalmologists were being pulled to do critical care because of COVID tests requirements at outpatient offices?
It frustrates me how lockdown/COVID skeptics can be more or less directionally correct and still worse than the supporters at the same time. Stop and think about your claims for a second.
Throwaway05
9mo ago
I think you misunderstand, even with the reduction in cases because of lockdowns our hospital infrastructure almost collapsed (and would have without them, at least initially).
Denier/skeptic types don't realize how bad it was in the beginning. I've seen plenty of people here doubt the seriousness of COVID, call complaints of full hospitals etc as fake news, and so on.
Throwaway05
3mo ago
I really don't think that is true. People in medicine are there because they are willing to suffer to help people. They are getting it wrong because of propaganda efforts by the university administrations and journalist classes.
They are just as fooled as everyone else, even the bad actors in this case think they are helping and doing the right thing because "these things are true, if the data doesn't match we must have done something wrong!" after years of being brainwashed.
Throwaway05
4mo ago
That was written before I realized how adversarial this was going to be.
The argument for the flu shot is:
-Risks are nearly zero. RNs are often actually very resistant to getting the flu shot. MDs roll our eyes at them because the reasoning is always "I'm a bitch" type complaints. Typically saying that they don't like shots for instance, or that the injection site hurts. I don't think I've ever met any physician who has treated a patient who has had an actual adverse reaction. Some people do get an immune response (aka feel a little sick). If you feel a little sick from the flu shot that's good evidence that you would feel even worse with the actual flu. The response to feeling a little sick should not be whining, I admit this is some boomer energy on my part.
-The flu shot can potentially help save you. If you have significant risk factors it can save your life. Not every person with significant risk factors knows they have significant risk factors. Diabetes for instance can go a long time without getting diagnosed if their primary care follow-up is poor.
-The flu shot can potentially help you out a lot. Evidence is a bit more squishy on this but that's because "I felt like ass for a three days" vs. "I felt mildly bad for one day" is extremely expensive to research and not worth it from a public health perspective, but I know personally not needing to call out work and be miserable for a few days is worth the mild inconvenience of other people.
-You can potentially help other people. If you getting less virulent in some way prevents you from transmitting it to someone else than that is a good thing. Especially in general plague sources like children.
-Research shows that the flu shot still has some utility even when we get the mix wrong for that year, it just isn't as much.
-Even when we get the mix wrong the right mix for the vaccine you still have is still going around in the population getting people ill.
TLDR: You should get the flu shot, the risks to you are near zero and if you are healthy and well the expected benefits are also low but your health is the most important thing most people own so you should take appropriate gambles.
However it is a known problem that people are willing to be lazy about their personal health in a way that they aren't with say their personal finances. Shrug
Throwaway05
4mo ago
Flu: -PMID: 37247308 for a citation that disagrees with your conclucion. Outside those at high risk it does reduce symptomatic burden, as someone who has gotten real flu and vaccinated flu.....that's a big difference.
Hepatitis: Use Chesterton's fence. Why is it there? Is it because of risk of vertical transmission? Is it because it's safe to be given at that time and that's simply the best time to get it done because of logistics. Also, were you aware that the various hepatitis viruses are transmitted in different ways?
Understand why before getting made about it.
From other comments you made:
Safe Vaccines: -What's the rate of actual problems beyond mild stuff like headache? All medications have side effects. Nothing is truly safe. You can randomly die from anything. How many actual serious problems have happened. It looks like the rate of true allergy is somewhere around one in a million (1 in 900k per UK vaccine website I found which was the first google hit). The odds of getting any of these conditions are much much much higher than that.
General Dissatisfaction with Medicine Comments: -So like, are you just not going to seek medical care now because they bungled some parts of COVID? That's stupid. For anything related to COVID? Or politics? More reasonable. The "normal" vaccines are settled science. It's apples and oranges.
I don't think "I'm going to do my own research" is unreasonable but I don't think many people are actually doing that, they are just reading biased online commentary and throwing things into chat GPT.
People with a lot more knowledge than either of us very very carefully and very very publicly consider the risks and benefits of putting something on the vaccine schedule and have removed things before that were "worth it" because of disgruntled public optics.
General anti-vaxxer is a conspiracy theory level take and has been for a long time - see the whole vaccines and autism thing.
Throwaway05
6mo ago
I've talked elsewhere about the whole residency and medical school slot thing. The residency length thing is a very complicated discussion.
I do want to point out there are some advantages to the U.S. system of 4+4 years. Yes lots of places do 4 or 6 years, but the ability to go through undergrad first gives you a few advantages:
-You actually have a college experience/fun. That's important!
-You are absolutely sure this is what you want. Really fucking important.
-Better balanced people - less medical school robots.
-Opens the door for career changers, who are some of the best doctors.
Throwaway05
6mo ago
This is no longer the case (your citation is from 1965) and is a non-sequitur anyway.
If you cut doctor salaries in half and double the number of doctors, you have improved physician lifestyle at the expense of compensation but not changed costs at all.
Throwaway05
6mo ago
Some even argue that most anesthesiology could be done by a non-MD.
Jesus Christ please no haha.
The rest of your comment.
Physician ownership is dead in most specialties, nearly everybody is employed now. There are some people who still own things now but the majority of people get paid salary with some element of bonus that is RVU based (eat what you kill type stuff). It did not use to be this way, and I won't argue that era had some excess, but it is dead now.
Procedural work does pay more and there are problems with that, but it is generally much harder (on an hours worked basis if nothing else) and as a result we have much less of a problem with rationing of surgery than most countries.
There's also a lot less of these people - there's 35 times as many (Family Med/IM/EM/Peds) doctors as dermatologists.
Skim 100k-200k off of the dermatologist and you do fuck all for total healthcare costs.
Decrease doctor salaries and increase doctor supply and you'll have doctors refuse to do out of title work and demand to work a normal day. If you half doctor salary and double the number of doctors you haven't done much. Every doc is doing 2-3 people worth of work and they do it because the money is good, money stops being good and then they stop...
I'm burnt out on the price transparency issues because of other conversations on this board but keep in mind that a lot of this already exists. Check out GoodRX.com Most doctors will use these tools nowadays when they can (lots of EMRs automatically tell you the drug cost for instance) but if given the choice of a drug that costs X or 10X they are going to choose 10X 10/10 times if they think its going to reduce the risk of a lawsuit.
Throwaway05
9mo ago
The good news: it's pure "oh shit this could kick of." So far. I don't have any particular special information at this time but haven't seen anything more than all the other times it almost happens and then doesn't.
The bad news: all the revision, hysteria, and poor decisions about COVID has resulted in most people forgetting just how bad COVID was, and this will likely be worse. Our healthcare infrastructure may not survive another hit of that magnitude.
Throwaway05
3mo ago
Do you have a citation for this? Asking because it makes sense to me and I'd like to be able to use this while arguing lol.
Throwaway05
4mo ago
If it makes you feel better you can usually have a healthy conversation about this in real life if you are sufficiently skilled, I've converted anti-vaxxers before, but it's nearly impossible to do online for all the reasons most things with any amount of heat are nearly impossible to do online.
Additionally most people have some things they are absolutely retired about, with many people feeling hopelessly abused by social justice and modern leftist politics they are likely going to be retarded about anything that touches that stuff at all.
I do wonder if some of your surprise comes from being in India during COVID - the way things felt in the UK or US vs India may make for some difference in experience or expectation?
Throwaway05
4mo ago
I don't know one single person who had lasting adverse effects from the vaccine. This includes professionally. I do know many with acute effects (including myself).
I've also met a few people who have made claims of adverse effects but they've all been clearly mistaken (typically it involves active mental illness, or sometimes other clear medical causes of the problem which they attribute to COVID).
Ultimately you don't know what you don't know - see the chickenpox party bit.
Also, the COVID vaccine is uniquely politically compromised but is a. not insanity, b. has an incentive we understand for the handwringing on both sides - political bullshit.
Vaccines in general have little incentive (as many are mature at this point it's not a money thing) to over push them or hide flaws. If you do the research on say the polio vaccine you can see exactly what went wrong in the past and why and the rationale behind the U.S. (and Danish) schedules. This stuff is out in the open and risks and benefits are known and the people who decide them are extremely competent and knowledgeable.
And the risks of the vaccines are minuscule (again with little incentive to lie or minimize them) and the benefits are immense, if rarely applicable for some things like Hepatitis A in the U.S..
Not following the schedule is essentially gambling with your child's life with the justification being "eh, the risk of this bad outcome is low but I won't take very easy steps to avoid it anyway because I'm mad about COVID."
You are welcome to be obstinate about the public health response to COVID but if you are putting other people at risk, especially your own children you should really look inside yourself and think about what you are doing.
That's putting aside the whole sentencing your child to a bunch of extremely avoidable paperwork and administrative headache in the future and the risk of things like ending up with a lower quality pediatrician because you refused to follow the vaccine schedule.
Importantly, if you are going to decide not to listen to medical advice and potentially put your child's life at risk you need to actually research what you are doing. Do not just jam it into an AI which you already admitted misled you or go "well shit this can't be right because COVID." Raising a child is one of the most important things someone should do and if you decide you will not listen to the medical consensus then you must actually put in time or effort or a reasonable person may judge you a poor parent.
Generally I don't get too heated with the questionable medical content that appears here because people aren't doing anything more than promulgating misinformation (which I'm committed to allow as a free speech person) and harming themselves - and people here do come up with novel things sometimes.
Putting a kid at risk and under baking your thought process is not that however.
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