Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
When vaccinating your kid (a US citizen) what vaccination schedule should you go with?
The standard US one
The standard of a different country which you think is better run (I picked Denmark)
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.
I’m also going to ask you to reconsider.
I realize I may have little credibility with you. Maybe this comes across like those cave diver signs. But I seriously think there’s nothing on this hill worth dying for. You’re accepting a mild risk for literally zero benefit.
The main differences between our and Denmark’s schedules appear to be COVID, Hep A and B, rotavirus, and varicella. I could make cases for most of those. Rotavirus is vaccinated in most countries; I don’t know why Denmark declined. Varicella has lower uptake, either because of cost or because it’s risky when only children are covered. On the other hand, I had it as a small child. It sucked, I still have a couple minor scars, and I get to be at risk for shingles in the future.
We’ve given ~84% of children immunity to Hep B worldwide. Between that and Universal Precautions, your child will probably be fine without such immunity. Though it’ll still be wise if he or she goes into medicine, works with the less fortunate, or wants to visit Africa or Southeast Asia. And it’s generally better to be prepared.
These vaccines aren’t novel. Everything except the COVID shots has been on our schedule since 2001. We have had decades to learn about potential side effects. We’ve also had significant political shifts. Assuming that it’s all fake and gay because of the Current Thing is a mistake. Assuming such because of a chatbot’s medical opinions is worse.
Skip the COVID shots if you want, especially if you don’t have any old or obese relatives watching the kids. But please stick with the rest of the standard schedule.
Excellent comment. One thing I'd like to add is that opting out of vaccination is, to an extent, mooching off the commons.
Herd immunity doesn't work, if parents look at the existing vaccination rates, reasons that their kids will be fine without vaccination as "everyone else" does it, and thus defects.
More than the commons mooches off of us? Citizens don't owe the commons one damn thing by default, and the balance seems tipped pretty far in the other direction lately what with all the accomodations we're expected to make around "living in a society".
If you think that citizens have no positive obligations towards improving the commons, I don't see why you'd want to make them worse off.
I don't know what you're pointing at when you say something like:
Hence I can't really engage with it.
At the very least, KMC's stated reason for opting out of vaccinating their kids, namely because other people are doing so too, and because of a minor drug reaction are terrible on merit alone. The COVID vaccine? I'm well past caring about it, or asking people to, but most others are recommended for very good reason, even for a person who doesn't care about the well-being of others.
I'm talking here about vaccines that are on the schedule with no clear benefit to the recipient -- COVID for kids, HPV for boys. 'Society' wants these administered for herd immunity reasons (I guess); 'society' also taxes us to the bone and provides pretty marginal access to services that we do want. (ADD drugs, for instance)
What has society done for me lately, that I should bend to its will?
Hold up. Below covered it but HPV related cancers are absolutely skyrocketing in men.
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I won't defend covid shots for kids. Marginal risks for marginal benefits.
HPV for boys? Infection with high risk strains can increase risk of anal, oropharyngeal and penile cancers. I have no idea if the risks are particularly high in absolute terms, at least not without doing more work than I want to this late. But unlike covid vaccines in kids, it strikes me as plausibly a good idea, even if I suspect that a lot of the net benefit is spreading herd immunity and protecting girls, where HPV actually is a big deal to my knowledge.
Total incidence rate of those I'm getting something like 1/100k/a (https://www.mcgill.ca/hitchcohort/hpvfacts) -- no idea what percentage of those would be HPV related, but that is already well, well within the OOM that I'd find plausible for unnoticed/rare serious adverse vaccine side effects.
You and @Throwaway05 may have some new news on these rates -- but then the question is raised as to why anyone would believe doctors about this sort of thing after having seen how fast & loose the relationship with facts has been, once public health gets on some hobbyhorse.
I don't know what McGill is smoking.
https://www.cdc.gov/cancer/hpv/cases.html
The rate changes are a bit odd as sexual habits change (go men on finally eating women out!) and at the same time its getting a bit more controlled as more people are vaccinated. However some of the other causes (like smoking) are going down.
You believe doctors because it's retarded to throw out the entire field of medicine because of one misstep.
I could respect it if it was "okay fine I will never listen to a doctor again, clearly everything they say is wong" but the situation is very clearly picking and choosing what things to be mad about purely depending on how someone feels about it.
General vaccinations are already different enough from what happened with COVID, but now you are saying "lets just not listen to any public health recommendations in general," "why anyone would believe doctors about this sort of thing?" <- your own quote.
Great now go light up using somebody with Ebola's vomit as bong water.
No? That doesn't seem reasonable? Well it's also a public health recommendation!
At best people are using uninformed opinions and intuitions as laymen without doing any research at all to decide when to listen to expert advice, and ignoring it otherwise, and as we see elsewhere in this thread those opinions and intuitions are absolutely trash and often can be invalidated with the slightest, minimum possible research. See in other subthreads here the comically ill-informed takes on hepatitis, chickenpox.
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Agree. And I'm willing to vaccinate myself for purely pro-social reasons with no benefit to myself, provided they are safe and effective.
That said... don't you think this reasoning makes it more likely that people are lying about vaccines risks? For example, let's say you had data that suggested vaccines are 1) good for society but 2) bad for individuals, you might lie for the greater good.
This isn't something I've given much thought before, but even on reflection, I don't think it makes much difference.
The most controversial vaccine is that for Covid. Even then, my impression (memory fades) is that the vaccines were lauded as being more effective than they turned out to be. I don't recall seeing evidence back then, that people were lying out of their teeth, they interpreted unclear, insufficient or ambiguous evidence as proof that vaccines would cut the pandemic short. They didn't, they reduced mortality, but not the spread of Covid.
I can't think of any other vaccine that was remotely as controversial, and my presumption is that the FDA and medical associations, normally do a decent cost-benefit analysis before advocating them. I know NICE does, in the UK.
The vaccines were lauded as being more effective than they had already turned out to be. Pfizer's efficacy was something like 93% in the initial study, and e.g. Biden oversimplified that as badly as "You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations."
They also turned out to be less effective than thought, with that 93% dropping to like 68% after only 6 months, which was enough to take us from "well some vaccinated people still get it but as long as we can push R<1 we can..." to "screw it, it's endemic now", even before Omicron changed the math further.
I'm not sure if this is "people were lying out of their teeth" rather than "voters aren't smart enough to avoid black-and-white thinking so they don't insist their president be smart enough either", but I think the takeaway is that you can probably trust independently repeated and reviewed studies of vaccine effects and you probably can't trust most popular interpretations of those studies.
Thank you.
That seems like an eminently sensible take, though I can only reiterate that COVID was uniquely politicized, and by the time the typical vaccine reaches market (let alone when it becomes part of a national schedule), the evidence is very strong.
Flu vaccines? Even people wanting you to take them usually stick to a pitch like "it doesn't work every year, but... can't hurt, can it?" IME. (possibly moving on to "you wouldn't want to kill grandma, would you?")
Flu vaccine? Well, if you want to single it out, then I'd be obliged to say that unless you're sickly, old, or work in healthcare, the benefits are largely a wash when compared to the minimal risk the typical annual flu strain otherwise presents. That would be the case even if the vaccine was perfectly safe. I'm on record saying the same thing, if someone wants to dig years deep into my profile.
If someone doesn't want to get it, no biggie. Hell, even I've missed shots that were offered to me for free because I didn't think it mattered enough.
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Yes, it is absolutely being a freeloader, and that's one reason why I have opted out for my own children. I don't think enough other people have bought in to the common good, and so I don't see any reason to subject my children to autoimmune disease for some supposed public good that I see constantly denigrated by others. Another casualty of lowering the trust of society. I don't think it's worth it, but that trade has already been made without anyone asking me.
My kid had very bad eczema due to the oral rotavirus vaccine, and after that I simply said no thank you.
RV is one of the ones that they don't do in Denmark. Grok 3, in the awkward position of defending both the US and Danish recommendations, tried to say it was because Denmark has better healthcare and Danes take better care of their children so there was less risk of untreated RV.
Fair enough. But, using that logic, my kid won't need the RV vaccine.
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This comment is a travesty. If it wasn't clear, it is the majority of parents opting-in for scheduled vaccinations that's what creates the commons for you to free-ride off.
Even in a purely disinterested cost-benefit analysis, the odds of your child getting an autoimmune disease from vaccines is so low that the general benefit of them getting sick less often outweighs it. The number of people avoiding vaccination isn't at the point where you're benefiting from opting out, or pointing to others doing so as an excuse. The majority of vaccines are net positive in expectation, regardless of what others do.
Meta-rationality is a hard art to practice. You point to a minority of people hitting defect to defect just as hard.
It was very clear, and I know about the free rider problem from undergraduate economics. I am actively choosing to be a free rider, and relying on others to do what I am choosing not to. That's what free rider means. Other people are paying, I'm choosing not to.
I'm doing that because I am an individual, not a herd animal, and the things I do must actually benefit me in order for me to do them. I have no shepherd who owns me and is responsible for the herd to which I belong. There exists the possibility of a world where I do things for others altruistically, but that world is not this one, and the conditions for such a world are far from being met.
Defect is the rational response to defection, and tit for tat wins iterated prisoner's dilemmas.
I don't trust your calculations, mostly because I don't fear the diseases or believe in their prevalence. I see the risks as miniscule, but deliberately overblown in order to create a far response and enforce compliance. There is no guarantee I even encounter measles or hepatitis or haemophilic influenza b, but if I take the vaccine there is a 100% exposure rate to the contents of the shot.
Furthermore, my children can simply get the shots later in life, when they are grown and have a much larger body mass with which to accommodate, after development has been mostly completed.
The eczema finally went away, and there's no way to know the counterfactual, but I think if we were on schedule I'd still be seeing rashes all over the back and legs and ankles.
You can't trust what I haven't presented. I could do so, and I strongly expect to be correct, but I already do enough trawling of medical literature when I'm being paid for it.
It's your child, and I have some respect for your right to make decisions on their behalf, even if I think they're bad decisions.
My man, you're going from wrong to confused. There's good reason why you don't see doctors or nurses pull out dose calculators to account for body weight when giving every vaccine I can think of it. It's because it doesn't matter. If little Tommy is 4'6 and 35 kilos or 4'9 and 45 makes next to no difference, and this holds true once you're past the size of a premature infant on death's door, going to a land whale who needs a mobility scooter. Vaccines aren't like paracetamol, the dose-response curves are VERY different when it's the immune system we're talking about. Someone with a peanut allergy isn't twice as likely to die if you give them two peanuts versus one.
You're not doing a good job at probabilistic reasoning, but an eczematous rash is a minor vaccine reaction, and of very little consequence. If it was life threatening, I presume you'd have pointed that out, and even then, you'd be better off consulting your pediatrician about whether they could narrow it down to a particular constituent of the two common rotavirus vaccines in the States (fetal bovine serum or porcine circovirus, if I had to guess from looking at composition), and take precautions when administering future vaccines with similar compositions. Believe it or not, most doctors would be happy to answer those questions and offer reassurance if warranted, especially if you're paying them.
I think you can use this sort of pseudo-science to justify vaccines post hoc. You can also use the same pseudo-science to justify not taking them at all.
I know quite a few people who got lasting side effects from the Covid vax, and it’s nearly heretical to talk about it. (These are people I know IRL, not internet reports) That alone makes me extremely skeptical about anyone saying how there are ~zero risks from any and all vaccines. Why is there a giant propaganda campaign to cover up the risks? Am I just some crazy statistical outlier who knows 3+ people very closely who’ve been vaccine maimed, even though it “hardly ever occurs” in the general population? I wouldn’t bet on that
I would, I guess.
Adverse reactions are going to cluster for one reason or another.
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People win the lottery despite the odds not being in their favor.
If you've bought a ticket, and then you find a million pounds in your bank account, then congratulations, knowing that the odds were stacked against you doesn't mean you've not won.
I know literally zero people who have been "vaccine maimed". I used to be responsible for a COVID ICU before vaccines too, and I can definitely tell you that I saw plenty die of it.
It is far more likely that you are either:
Lying. On the internet, anyone can be a dog, or claim to be one.
Mistaken.
Surrounded by people who are mistaken or lying.
Assuming 150 people you could "closely know" (Dunbar's number as a first approximation), then someone, somewhere, out there in the world will find 3 people who were harmed by vaccines. Because vaccines are not perfectly safe, and I've never claimed that. If you consider people who are mistaken about their illness being caused by a vaccine, then the number skyrockets.
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I suppose I am confused. Development is more important than body weight, but I'll concede the point rather than double down because of my misapprehension.
As for medical care, my child had a doctor, then she moved, and now we have a RN. As for calculations, of course you haven't presented any, but I have done my own sanity check, and I'm satisfied with my numbers.
To show my work I found this:
So, without any vaccine, we're talking 500 deaths per year, in a country of roughly 180 million (1960 census numbers). This is one death every 360,000 people, or an annual risk of .000002778 per person per year.
Traffic fatalities are about 1 per 100,000,000 miles travelled (0.8 in ten-year old data). Cancelling out all the tens and hundreds and thousands, and assuming about 10,000 miles driven in a year, I'm left with driving as 25-30x more dangerous than measles before the vaccines.
That's using pre-vaccine numbers and pre-vaccine prevalence. Post-vaccine, as a free rider, it's much lower. This doesn't justify an active intervention. It's firmly in the realm of take-it-or-leave-it.
And again, when I do these numbers on what is supposed to be the most useful, safest, most justified vaccine, I'm left wanting. When I consider Hep B which they want to give children in the first hour post-birth despite no plausible method of transmission, I'm left with the conclusion that nobody is willing to discuss the actual risks, they just want to enforce compliance. That the CDC people really do view me as sheep, or cattle, as part of their herd.
I do genuinely appreciate this, thank you.
To address the rest of your comment, I will point out what I see as potential errors:
The measles vaccine isn't given by itself in most of the world, so you're looking at calculating the combined benefits of simultaneous vaccination for measles, mumps and rubella vs the combined risks.
Restricting the potential harm to just death is incorrect. Even a mild bout of measles has quantifiable harm, and in the link you've provided, they quite clearly mentioned that before vaccination, 3/10 of measles victims had:
Ear infection
Pneumonia
Encephalitis (swelling of the brain)
Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (a disease characterized by progressive neurological deterioration and early death)
Hemorrhagic measles – includes seizures, delirium, difficulty breathing and bleeding under the skin
Clotting disorder
Death
None of these strike me as very pleasant, leaving aside that that's just one of the three diseases that the MMR shots protect against robustly.
If you wanted to quantify the harms of driving, then you also need to consider disability and not just death, and ideally monetary damages. You also need to look at the benefits, for many people in the US and elsewhere, living without access to a car is debilitating by itself.
As you can see, both I and @throaway05 are more than happy to discuss risks. And so are most other medical professionals, in my experience. The average NHS paediatrician gains nothing personally by taking extra time to talk to patients about their concerns, but does it nonetheless. They don't get to bill you extra for the privilege.
It's unfortunate that your child had a vaccine reaction, but it was a mild one. Even if their wellbeing was your only concern then you should seek to sit a doctor down and go over a proper cost-benefit analysis and even potentially figure out the likely culprit for the previous reaction.
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Hep B can be transmitted from mother to child at birth, if not medically prevented.
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