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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   3566 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 23, 2025

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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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.

Just because someone was wrong one time

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.

You can find papers with actuarial analysis

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/

Interesting, I didn't know about this, but to be fair it was before my time.

The polio vaccine hasn't remained the same since inception, for example, in India the live polio vaccine is being phased out for an inert vaccine.

This is because the live vaccine uses an attenuated variant of the virus, which is much less likely to cause harm than the real one, while also having the perk of being infectious in itself.

However, it can cause full blown polio. This was once considered acceptable, but as the number of cases of natural polio dropped, the number of iatrogenic cases became more relevant, and the decision was made to switch to forms without any living virus whatsoever.

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