We're all approaching this wrong.

Politicizing this was one of the greatest electoral innovations of all time.

Somebody realized that calling people ignorant and telling them they had to do something pissed people off and lionized them. So they took the vaccine issue and made it political. They knew the "nerdy folks" would just continue pushing and prodding, and that would continue to rile up the other side's voters.

The "institutions" (which are easy to throw shade at) telling folks they had to comply or lose work - that's a cause to fight. There's much more energy in this than in opposing it, and opposition just inflames the other side even further.

Genius political move.

The correct response to a vaccine critic isn't to call them stupid or tell them they must get a vaccine or lose their job. The correct response is, "you do you, but the supply runs out next week".

Hank Green had a nice video essay about this (I'll try to find the link).

I grew up in the South. These are reasonable folks, and they can be reached, but it's being approached the wrong way. The current methodology is only making it worse.

This is like a viral "meme" that actually causes harm. And the more you try to get rid of it, the deeper it digs. You have to try a new approach. The current one -- and it feels so righteous to call them out -- does the exact opposite of what you want.

This just seems like we're asking for it. We have historical examples of polio ripping through the US causing tremendous amounts of damage. We're going to have an unvaccinated populace and someone's going to get exposed.

Visitors from other countries could bring polio and US switched to 100% inactivated polio vaccine in 2000 to eliminate the risk of Vaccine-Associated Paralytic Polio.

If the polio vaccine was banned in the US starting tomorrow, would you expect the next cohort of newborns to experience higher levels of polio, similar levels of polio, or lower levels of polio over the next 10 years?

It absolutely weighed risks and benefits.

Polio was a deadly disease, paralyzing thousands of children for life, every year. Vaccines were seen as a blessing to the first generation that got them.

And now, people who've never opened a history book can confidently claim they are useless, and that polio disappeared on its own so vaccines were never required, and are even harmful! Fuck that particular brand of ignorance.

Not mentioned here is the risk of importing polio from another country. The need for the vaccine can certainly be discussed, but I'm not going to pretend that the country exists in a vacuum

> We know that severe adverse affects vastly out number the cases of Polio in the US.

This just sounds like "It's working too well" to me. The cases of polio have dropped to near nothing because we have so many people vaccinated. We're left with a couple hundred bad effects over the sample size of the entire country.

>What is needed here are laws making it a crime to conceal that you have or had a communicable disease, so infections can be tracked and fault determined.

Absolutely not. We tried this with HIV and it just incentivizes people to not seek treatment, and then they spread the disease more.

It should be a crime to accuse someone who is innocent of any intent to cause harm, and a crime to manufacture evidence to that effect, because basically you could never prove that Alice infected Bob, let alone with malicious intent.

It is hysterical and illogical for people to make these accusations. Get real.

The anti-vax movement was built entirely on a foundation of fraud [1]. That leaves us with two main categories of people who are anti-vaccination:

1. People who are ignorant 2. People who are using anti-vax propaganda for some kind of gain

In the US, category two have gone all-in on using category one to gain political power. The "health official" in this post is clearly in category two, and might be in category one as well, but he is absolutely deserving of invectives.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wakefield

What I learned during Covid is that some people really want to blame someone else for when they get sick. Other people think of disease as inevitable and part of nature. The truth lies somewhere in between

Ignorance is neutral. It's not an assignation of blame, merely an acknowledgement of deficit.

You created a straw man; the parent specifically wrote "ignorance" which is very different from "dumb" or "cruel".

Well, what do you call a person who refuses to even look at the evidence for why we know many vaccines work? That person is ignorant. Calling them ignorant to their face probably won't change their mind, but that's a different question

It's a strange, sort of fatalistic cognitive dissonance to believe that parents have the right to risk their children's lives by exposing them to preventable deadly diseases while at same time making it illegal for women to terminate pregnancies.

"Your kid deserves to die so because I don't trust science" is certainly a position.

Seatbelts aren’t perfect either

I generally support vaccination and there is an argument that public health can sometimes trump individual rights or even health. That said, the example that has always bugged me though the default of giving babies Hepatitis B vaccine even if there is no possible vector for them to get the disease. The other example is chickenpox where we are trading off a potentially mild disease (everyone I know had it as a child) to the risk of getting it as an adult where it is more severe. These tradeoffs are not straightforward and the health authorities are also not transparent about how they weigh the risks.

I've also done something similar with my children. Make a determination for a specific vaccine and schedule. This is a combination of both weighing their health above public health and applying my particular circumstances (e.g. stay at home mom vs. daycare) to adjust the risks. They ended up getting most vaccines, just on a different schedule.

> we make a disease-by-disease risk/reward determination and do a slower schedule once they're a little older

This was honestly the weirdest part of that whole post.

So after all that “not everything is safe”, it sounds like you … wait a little while and then do it anyway? Is it less risky because your kids are a little older?? This seems so unlikely to me.

Anyway, I think a lot of that post demonstrates a failure of an ability to have a dialog (radicalized positions don’t lead to understanding imo).

What about the trillions of dangerous and live viruses that are cultured in order to make vaccines in the first place? Would those be harmful if they escaped into the wild? Or what about if they were ... deliberately released somehow?

Are they OK to stockpile those viruses and culture trillions more, on an industrial scale, in every American state? What about in Venezuela? North Korea?

What "state-sponsored violence" are you referring to? You can't go to jail for refusing childhood vaccines in the US, as far as I'm aware. But you also can't expect the rest of us to let you inflict violence on our children, by exposing them to deadly communicable diseases which you could easily vaccinate your own children against.

You should also pay more for school fees to cover additional insurance when the school gets sued for letting voluntary unvaccinated child attend who infects another child, who couldn't get vaccinated for legitimate medical reasons.

Should there be similar consequences for the people killed due to wasted health care resources? Or family members affected by an alcoholic?

What about smokers and second hand smoke?

Conspiratorial amnesia?

Well, there also seems to be concerns over testosterone levels & fertility. Combined with attempts to reduce birth control & abortion, and you come away with an expectation they intend to breed their way out of losses (returning again to the eugenics overtones). Someone was also recently quoted as saying measles outbreaks "are the cost of doing business".

someone possessed by thier beliefs, is not making factually based decisions.

some snakeoil salesmen know they are pushing bunk, a frightful number actually believe in what they are peddling.

It's a death cult. I know that's an inflammatory way to phrase it, but I genuinely think it's the only accurate diagnosis. The regime doesn't have some deep strategic logic for how children dying from polio will benefit them, they just don't care so much about death in general and don't understand why we would.

[dead]

It's more accurate to say the wild poliovirus eradication effort has been stagnant in Afghanistan and Pakistan for over a decade.

I did a simple search, here it is. A .gov site:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9577438/

There were other articles I have seen over the last few years talking about polio and the US.