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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   3071 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 23, 2025

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When vaccinating your kid (a US citizen) what vaccination schedule should you go with?

  1. The standard US one

  2. The standard of a different country which you think is better run (I picked Denmark)

  3. Something else

I had a discussion with Grok 3 about this, and it seemed like it wanted to defend the US schedule (35 shots) until I pressed it about the Danish schedule (11 shots). Then it claimed that US schedule is necessary in the US because of different socioeconomic conditions. It seems like the US recommendations are based on helping the underclasses. For example, Hep B. My wife doesn't have Hep B. My kid won't get Hep B as a child. But a kid whose mom is a prostitute very much needs to be vaccinated for Hep B at birth.

In any case, after the censorship and disinformation promulgated by the US health agencies during the pandemic, I don't trust them. And clearly there is a corrupting profit motive here too. In this corrupted epistemic environment we simply don't know what the effects of giving kids 35 vaccine shots (plus annual flu and Covid shots) will be. I make no strong claims about vaccine injuries, and I think most vaccines are net positive. But I think, for my child, the Danish schedule + chicken pox is sufficient. At a minimum, I am deadset against any Covid vaccines. Can't say I look forward to arguing with nurses about this.

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.

People are becoming vaccine hesitant because the medical system flushed its credibility down the toilet over a cold from China. I remember when you had to be a hardcore conspiracy nut not to get vaccinated, or the kind of crunchy rich housewife who bought stuff from goop. Back in the day was, Mississippi had the highest vaccination rate in the country.

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.

  1. 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.

  2. Medicine is obviously politically compromised when it comes to culture war topics.

  3. 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.

There is no such thing as a safe vaccine, which is why the manufacturers are shielded from liability.

That same shield from liability means that they do not have the incentives to produce useful vaccines, but rather are incentivized to lobby for increasing numbers of vaccines for any and everything. These incentives explain the expanded schedule quite nicely.

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.

It's not woke, it's common sense.

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