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?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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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.
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.
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.
There's being wrong, and then there's being wrong with intent.
Just being wrong isn't generally cause for concern. Being wrong with intent, on the other hand, will naturally prompt back-checking of work and a "deny by default" posture until they re-earn that trust... if that's even possible. They did a lot of damage.
On the other hand, though, "number go down because a bunch of insane outgroupers had their way" is the only lever I have to pull for them to be forced to face any consequences whatsoever, so it's in my political interest that skepticism be maximized even though it would strictly speaking be better (and a local maximum of health outcome) for most people (who are themselves much dumber than the medical establishment) to blindly trust said medical establishment.
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.
Agreed. Pop quiz: substance X causes you to drop dead in 20 years with no side effects before then. It has been 10 years since substance X has been introduced. What does actuarial analysis show on the effect of substance X?
This is begging the question.
The realistic question would be, for interventions, that at the time of invention, did not have conclusive evidence in either direction regarding making people "drop dead in 20 years", what proportion were found to do so after 20 years had passed?
The answer would be almost none.
The original polio vaccine was kind of like this:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/02/the-virus-and-the-vaccine/377999/
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