"we" being rich countries. Measles was never wholly eradicated worldwide. (I know this because I wanted to do an "Anti-vaxxers kill more Congolese people than Ebola!" thing, but measles was never eradicated there.)
Like any scam, there's a tiny kernel of truth upon which the edifice of the scam rests. We have a vaccine court to deal with the very small number of serious adverse reactions -- because of the numbers of people taking vaccines, even a small number of bad reactions means that over $4 billion has been paid out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Vaccine_Injury_Compensation_Program
Some anti-vaxxers are just unable to understand risk/benefit calculations. I blame math teachers.
2: The anti-vaxxers' Samoa-focused work began last year when two children died after nurses injected them with a vaccine mixed with a muscle relaxant. The nurses were convicted of manslaughter and the country's vaccination rate for measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) plummeted from roughly 60 percent to 31 percent as the country halted its vaccination program to investigate
Does anybody understand how this could happen? I'm assuming the nurses didn't do this on purpose.
According to police facts tendered in court, standard procedures for preparing vaccines were not followed at the Tuasivi Hospital on the morning of the incident, including a requirement that registered nurses thoroughly check the labels on the components used to mix vaccines.Luse mixed the M.M.R. vaccine powder with an expired anaesthetic, the Court was told.
"Unfortunately Luse, without checking the vial, mixed the powder of vaccine with what she thought was a proper [substance for dilution]," the facts state.
"It was not."
Justice Vui found that the vial containing anaesthetic was clearly labelled but not checked.
Why doesn't the vaccine come pre-mixed?
It happened at Tuasivi? I've been treated in the Tuasivi Hospital.
Hospital, in the 90s at least, meant a one-room building with a nurse in it, no doctors.
I'd hurt myself pretty badly jogging -- fell on a sharp rock, which cut my knee open to the point where I could see something shiny and white which I thought was cartilage. I bandaged it up (disinfectant, maxi-pad, adhesive tape) and whined to the school principal until he let the schoolbus drive me the twenty miles to Tuasivi. When I got there, the nurse didn't bother rebandaging my knee -- said I'd probably done as good a job as he would have. He did give me a shot of antibiotics, though. I've still got the scar.
Couldn't walk really for a couple of weeks -- I could put weight on the leg but stepping forward wouldn't work. The students imitated me mercilessly.
5: Apparently longer shelf life, easier shipping. The nurses were supposed to use water.
Medical error, where the vaccine is prepared for injection incorrectly and the wrong substance is injected. This is what was found to have occurred, expired muscle relaxant anaesthetic was mixed with the MMR vaccine powder instead of water for injection supplied in a vial with the vaccine
But yeah, I'd be unsurprised at any level of erratic incompetence. It is very much a developing country without a lot of trained medical professionals.
7: Do you have arthritis in your knee yet?
Between this and having just watched Knives Out I could decide to go beyond the anti-vaxxers and become anti-injection.
Atul Gawande would have been ticked off at that injection-related final twist in Knives Out, as it elevates intuition over checklist procedures.
12: I was pissed off! She didn't check the labels, and that was supposed to prove she was a good nurse?!
The mercury keeps the spoilers out.
11: Nope, other than the scar I seem to have gotten away with it with no repercussions. And it's almost thirty years ago now, so it's been a while.
That's a good fall. Pretty much everyone who falls hard enough to have trouble walking for that long gets arthritis.
Or maybe Samoan healthcare is actually better than it looks.
Certainly by removing the chance the doctor could try surgery, you are in a better place for long term recovery.
Duke Hospitals had a case in the early aughts whereby elevator hydraulic fluid was drained into empty bottles of surgical disinfectant conveniently located nearby. Said bottles were then used to clean tools for surgeries for many weeks thereafter, despite their users repeated complaints of stickiness and smells.
Erratic incompetence is a worldwide phenomenon, generally exacerbated by profit motives and management structures not receptive to feedback.
Right, I didn't mean so much that erratic incompetence was a Samoan as opposed to a general human thing, but that it was a poor enough country that understaffing and lack of redundant systems to avoid error and so on would explain a whole lot of peculiar sounding mistakes.
That was about the time Duke put the wrong heart in a person.
They really need to take care of the elevator hydraulic fluid. What if kids find it and use it to get high?
The lesson clearly is that US healthcare could save a zillion dollars a year substituting used hydraulic fluid for overpriced unnecessary surgical disinfectant.
22 we've got that Doonesbury. Baby Doc Medical School!
The ACA hasn't been huge for me personally, because we had Romney / Commonwealth Care in 2005. Part of my decision to move back to MA though was motivated by the fact that we've had guaranteed issue, community rating for a long time.
If you maintained continuous coverage, they could not exclude coverage of pre-existing conditions on individual plans. If you went more than 60 days without coverage they could exclude non-emergency care for a pre-existing condition for a few months.
Basically, they didn't want people dropping g coverage and then signing up when they needed care.
Pre-ACA there were lots of places I would not consider moving to, so I guess I feel some greater freedom.
26 was meant to go in the other thread, obviously.
I'm old enough (dear God, I just turned 55: how did this happen?!) that I belong to that generation for whom vaccinations were magic, and seriously life-saving. My smallpox vaccine scar is on the underside of my left arm. My pediatrician did not not want me to have a scar on the exposed part of my arm (it was the 1960s, so), in case I wanted to go to the prom, or something like that,
I don't have a smallpox vaccine scar. I feel left out. And also unvaccinated. Unrelatedly, I want Creme Soda, and doubt seriously that it is available in this jurisdiction.
The kids one year older than me had the scar, but I missed it too.
Still, when I went to prom, my arms were not bare.
Modesty is becoming, in a well-ripped young man.
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Legion, thus far, is much better than it has any right to be.
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Or just in a pale, flabby Midwestern fella. As appropriate.
the recent news re measles wiping out previously acquired immunities made sense of my childhood extended run of infections. something about the measles vaccine didn't take for me and post measles i came down with full blown everything - mumps, chicken pox, scarlet fever, repeated strep throat (that lasted into my twenties), etc etc etc. it was an absolute misery, anyone who puts their kid through that or encourages someone else to do so is best case scenario delusional and the inevitable result is cruelty whether intended or not.
I actually made an informed decision to not get vaccinated once. I was planning to visit someplace in Peru that had experienced some cases of yellow fever. I looked at the infection rate and the rate of complications from the vaccine. They were comparable. Considering that it was the dry season and so the mosquito population was reduced, I chose to forgo the vaccination. I am the only person I know of to actually make a rational decision to not vaccinate.
37: I think people make similar decisions about rabies vaccines and some of the other travel vaccines.
I'm, 37 was not to itself but to 36.
It's not exactly a vaccine, but it's similar enough. The official recommendations for whether I needed malaria medication for my Belize were somewhat ambiguous and leaning towards yes, but when I looked into actual malaria cases in Belize it seemed pretty clear that it wasn't actually necessary for where I'd be.
I didn't realize Belize was yours. Maybe you should change the name to Unfogged Honduras?
From the OP:
Anti-vaxxers are a mix of malicious players, more or less like Russian disinformation campaigns (and probably intersecting) and gullible dupes who have nameless dread about the world but can't evaluate information sources.
It was my uninformed impression that after Wakefield there wasn't much actual malice, but , but apparently I was wrong.
Boy does typo-shame karma come back quickly.
Hypothetically, just how malicious do you need to be to get a wine cave?
Maybe a wine abandoned coal mine? But I think all of the good abandoned coal mines are used for growing mushrooms or storing documents nobody expects to need again.
So that's how all those coal seam fires get started.
Oh hey? It's the darkest day of the year. I'm going to pretend that I totally planned that. Well done, me.
In retrospect this thread was unsettlingly prescient