Timothy Markus wrote:
Greg Martin wrote:For me, I'm very thankful for vaccinations. I'd be worried that with our population density and the high level of travel in the modern world we'd experience mass suffering without good vaccination programs.
I understand that concern. What I don't get is why it has to be 100% vaccinations. If the vacs work, anyone can protect themselves by getting it. I don't understand what the risk is for those who are vacced. If you're willing to take the risk of not getting the shot and you get whatever it protects against, how is there an epidemic if 98% of the people are vacced?
I've had the flu shot many times but each time I end up getting the flu. I know it's not from the vac, as there's no live viruses, but it always happens. I think that the vac taxes my immune system and I end up getting one of the strains that aren't included in the vac. The last few years I haven't had it and I've caught the flu about half the time, so I'd rather take my chances there.
edited for clarity
The science is fairly clear on this, and the vast (overwhelmingly vast) majority of the scientific community and evidence supports the notion that vaccines are safe and effective. The beginning of the anti-vax movement was due to a (now debunked) medical article by a doctors whose licence to practice medicine has been revoked, who was being paid by attorneys hoping to sue a vaccine company, had a severely restricted subject pool, and straight lied about the condition of the subjects prior to receiving the vaccines (two of the three subjects who were later diagnosed as autistic had several annotations of "devlopmental delays" and abnormal facial features generally associated with mental handicaps). Here's a scholarly article that goes through this in more detail:
https://www.bmj.com/content/342/bmj.c5347
If you went to 99 doctors, all of whom currently practice medicine, and they told you that surgery was the best option to remove a cancerous tumor, but then you went to this one former doctor who lost his license due to malpractice and he told you, "the other doctors just want to operate on you so they can charge you money. You just need to rub some dandelion flowers on tumor to make it go away" ... who would you believe?
The chances of your independent, non-peer-reviewed research proving the
exact same ingredients (as opposed to different isotopes of certain ingredients which may be metabolized differently) of certain vaccines (which have been proven to be safe in clinical trials) to be harmful is likely quite low; since I shared a scholarly article with you to support my answer to your question, I would ask that you do the same here.
Beyond this, vaccines work most effectively when a certain percentage of the population receives the vaccine. This is called "herd immunity". If the healthy (non-immunocompromised) individuals in a given group are all vaccinated, those who suffer from immunocompromising conditions are exponentially less likely to be exposed to the contagion. If even a small percerntage of the healthy individuals in a given society are unvaccinated, they can pick up the disease and spread it to those who were unable to receive the vaccine, but would have chosen to had they been able to. This is, at the very least, putting other people's lives in danger in a completely avoidable way for selfish, though not malicious, reasons.
All of this to say, no, I don't feel as if the noose is tightening. While the government does many things I dislike and do think it important to keep the power of the government in check, I think suggesting that mandatory vaccines and criminalizing "questioning mainstream medical messages" is a touch paranoid.
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