I had always been very pro-vaccination. Both me and my kid were fully vaccinated on the standard schedule. The situation around COVID vaccines prompted me to think critically about vaccines in general for the first time.
In absence of vaccines, how many serious diseases a human body was supposed to have seen throughout its life? Probably one or two, then you’d mostly be dead.
With our usual vaccination schedule, we now routinely prime our immune system against twelve diseases, if I’m not mistaken. Plus now COVID. As an engineer, I would be extremely worried if I did something like this to a legacy system. Yet we seem to only look at each vaccine in isolation and short term, and approve based on absence of visible side effects.
Take the difficulty in tracing side effects of COVID vaccines. For all the attention, good information is very hard to find, because it is genuinely difficult to produce. Now imagine same level of difficulty, plus no attention—because when was the last time anybody worried about side effects of a flu shot?
And that is before we mention politics, mandates, and trust in institutions.
For context, I did take the original COVID vaccine.
In absence of vaccines, how many serious diseases a human body was supposed to have seen throughout its life? Probably one or two, then you’d mostly be dead.
Why would you expect historical people to die after getting sick twice when modern people get sick all the time and usually recover without treatment (from colds / flu)?
I would expect that modern people get sick less often than people >100 years ago due to improvements in sanitation, nutrition and housing density.
Just chiming in to say that you’re very, very wrong about prevalence of minor and major disease throughout human history. For an obvious comparison, look at wild animals, which contract multiple minor infections a year, and often suffer from several fairly major ones chronically—which was typical for pre-modern humans as well.
In absence of vaccines, how many serious diseases a human body was supposed to have seen throughout its life? Probably one or two, then you’d mostly be dead.
I don’t understand where this assumption is coming from (both in terms of “one or two” specifically, and that there should be any particular number in the first place).
With our usual vaccination schedule, we now routinely prime our immune system against twelve diseases
Is the idea here that all vaccines have the same fixed risk level, regardless of what it’s vaccinating against, whereas non-serious disases have a lower risk level? And most of the twelve diseases are not in the “serious” category?
I had always been very pro-vaccination. Both me and my kid were fully vaccinated on the standard schedule. The situation around COVID vaccines prompted me to think critically about vaccines in general for the first time.
In absence of vaccines, how many serious diseases a human body was supposed to have seen throughout its life? Probably one or two, then you’d mostly be dead.
With our usual vaccination schedule, we now routinely prime our immune system against twelve diseases, if I’m not mistaken. Plus now COVID. As an engineer, I would be extremely worried if I did something like this to a legacy system. Yet we seem to only look at each vaccine in isolation and short term, and approve based on absence of visible side effects.
Take the difficulty in tracing side effects of COVID vaccines. For all the attention, good information is very hard to find, because it is genuinely difficult to produce. Now imagine same level of difficulty, plus no attention—because when was the last time anybody worried about side effects of a flu shot?
And that is before we mention politics, mandates, and trust in institutions.
For context, I did take the original COVID vaccine.
Why would you expect historical people to die after getting sick twice when modern people get sick all the time and usually recover without treatment (from colds / flu)?
I would expect that modern people get sick less often than people >100 years ago due to improvements in sanitation, nutrition and housing density.
Just chiming in to say that you’re very, very wrong about prevalence of minor and major disease throughout human history. For an obvious comparison, look at wild animals, which contract multiple minor infections a year, and often suffer from several fairly major ones chronically—which was typical for pre-modern humans as well.
I don’t understand where this assumption is coming from (both in terms of “one or two” specifically, and that there should be any particular number in the first place).
Is the idea here that all vaccines have the same fixed risk level, regardless of what it’s vaccinating against, whereas non-serious disases have a lower risk level? And most of the twelve diseases are not in the “serious” category?