Story is about Africa, primarily Somalia. I imagine vaccine hesitancy must be rising in the US as well, but this is about Africa.
Interestingly, our paediatrician in the US gave us a long lecture about why vaccines are important and this and that. He's an older gentleman and wouldn't brook any of my interruptions that I've been through this and to please proceed with the vaccination schedule and that I've had measles[0] when I was a young child and have no intention of subjecting my children to it. Presumably his insistence on the subject was because of hesitancy.
In the end, we got the usual ones but didn't give our daughter the COVID vaccine. I can't say it's a super principled position, except that I think I do want to minimize the number of vaccinations she gets to the ones that are the highest risk for her. That's the usual meningococcal, hepatitis for a neonate; the Tdap for an infant, and the subsequent measles et al. for older children. I think I'm content to leave the tail risk items in the tail.
0: I was eight months old, my parents were the only doctors in the rural Indian village, and consequently a local brought their very sick child to our home. The child was in the room for just a few moments before my mother rushed me to the other room. As it so happened it was too late for me. I became quite sick as well.
> I imagine vaccine hesitancy must be rising in the US as well, but this is about Africa.
You strike an interesting point.
From a scientific PoV, vaccine rejection in the West is pretty much unjustifiable according to mainstream medicine. But the not-worst-case, fairly bad outcome is kinda manageable. Your child gets measles, is probably OK, but if not, goes to an expensive hospital and will probably be fine. Even without vaccinations, it's probably not a life or death scenario. I'm not saying it's good, only that the price tag is likely low.
But of course it's completely different in poorer countries, many places in Africa among them. These are also places with poorer education on average, I'd imagine. And what do they think when the West is sending them (or they're buying out or scarce resources) stuff that we refuse because it's "dangerous"?
And if you get a measles outbreak in Somalia, you won't be worrying about childcare and copayment, it will literally be life and death.
People who peddle anti vaccine BS should think about this too.
> Your child gets measles, is probably OK, but if not, goes to an expensive hospital and will probably be fine. Even without vaccinations, it's probably not a life or death scenario. I'm not saying it's good, only that the price tag is likely low.
I don't understand this take, if you are a parent. For example, RSV (respiratory syncytial virus), rarely causes death in developed countries. But 1) like SARS-CoV-2, almost every children will get infected at least once in their first two years of age and 2) a respectable number of non-deadly consequences come from this virus, some of them long term.
My point is death is not the only consequence you should weight. Just having your baby a couple of weeks in "expensive hospital" (i.e. ICU), with a chance short term consequences like respiratory problems and secondary infections, or long term non-deathly consequences like asthma and alergies, sounds like a danger serious enough to me. It seems like a very poor parent decision to not vaccinate your children against RSV, even if it's almost impossible for RSV to kill your baby.
That's really not my point. My point is, for the statistical parent in the West who doesn't vaccinate their children, the outcome is pretty benign (for the child, really). Median child doesn't even get sick. You'd have to go to the 99th+ percentile to get to a really nasty outcome. Most unvaccinated kids will be fine, because they're in a rich country. Not because it's a good idea, but because there's a secondary safety net that will still catch them.
I'm not sure why you say "price tag is low". It's not low at all, and it's totally avoidable at the cost of a few thousands shots. In the age of medical system underfunding (or in any case, affected by cuts) the health management must look at every avoidable expense, and IC beds are quite some expense. Add to that the increased predictability of a vaccinated population and you have the winner option. I'm only talking money here, and I'll leave the societal and personal implications for others to look at.
I think I get your point. My point is that I work in health sector, and people usually get very surprised when you tell them you have 5 babies in ICU caused by preventable / vaccinable diseases. For us is another monday, for their parents is a terrible experience.
The babies usually don't die, and usually get a full recovery. So it doesn't come up in the news. But you, as a parent, don't want to have your baby hospitalized or in ICU: it's very stressful, it has health consequences short and long term. My point is "don't reduce consequences to life-death", because there are a lot of in between consequences you don't want for your kid.
I like your "secondary safety net" image. It's secondary because you vaccine (the first safety net), but when people trust blindly the secondary safety net so they get rid of the first safety net, you only have one primary safety net. It's like getting rid of the safety belt now the cars have airbags.
This is a dilemma of the prisoner: you can "bet" your children won't get infected even without vaccine and even if he catches the infection he would get through it easily, so you don't have any risks from the vaccine. That works if non-vaccinated are only a few, but above some point the herd immunity is lost and the most vulnerable kids will have to suffer serious consequences.
If I didn't want to vaccinate my kids, I would fight tooth and nail as a pro-vaccines, so the herd immunity covers them.
Pity you got whacked. I think people read the "you will survive even getting the disease" and assumed you were anti-vax when the reasoning is second order: if the First World won't use these drugs it signals danger to those who don't have the tools to independently verify.
An interesting angle, though I wouldn't say I agree. As one example, I believe all of us in India routinely receive the BCG vaccine against TB right after birth. It's not routinely done in the US (unless I'm wrong and don't remember it). The US choosing not to do it doesn't make Indian people want to not get it.
More likely, there's something else that's making people worried about the standard vaccines.
I wonder if India is different to other places. One, if you look at education levels vs GDP per capita, India seems an outlier to the positive. Education seems to be (?) very good for a relatively poor country.
But then my understanding is that there's in particular higher levels of distrust against Western medicine in parts of Africa, following the AIDS epidemic.
> From a scientific PoV, vaccine rejection in the West is pretty much unjustifiable according to mainstream medicine. But the not-worst-case, fairly bad outcome is kinda manageable. Your child gets measles, is probably OK, but if not, goes to an expensive hospital and will probably be fine. Even without vaccinations, it's probably not a life or death scenario. I'm not saying it's good, only that the price tag is likely low.
What an incredibly selfish point of view. Both for ignoring the risks of measles in your own child, and more importantly, for completely leaving out of the equation the likelihood that they will spread it to someone who for medical reasons cannot be vaccinated or for whom the virus is even more dangerous.
Well, measles, in a rich country with good healthcare and healthy children is mostly (mostly!) an inconvenience. You can expect to survive it without much consequence. Wikipedia quotes death rate of 0.2% in the US in the period 1985-1992. Perhaps countries with universal access to healthcare would do much better. It would surely be much better today again with better healthcare, and even the unvaccinated will mostly never get it. I quite clearly exclude the left tail from my post.
But it's much worse if anyone from a poorer country takes notice and tries to copy.
> our paediatrician in the US gave us a long lecture about why vaccines are important and this and that. He's an older gentleman and wouldn't brook any of my interruptions that I've been through this and to please proceed with the vaccination schedule [...]
> Presumably his insistence on the subject was because of hesitancy.
> In the end, we got the usual ones but didn't give our daughter the COVID vaccine
Considering many (most?) countries such as the UK, Germany, Australia, Spain, etc. don’t vaccinate healthy children for COVID because there’s basically no reason to, which presumably the doctor knows, he probably wasn’t disappointed. Having a blanket policy of vaccinating healthy children against COVID, especially now, was a terrible ideologically-driven idea that almost certainly drove more people to be antivaxers.
Haha you guys are funny. We went along with every one that he recommended. Just a straightforward Yes To All. The COVID vaccine wasn't on the list. No manual opt-out. There's a manual opt-in but I'm fine with things as they stand.
I should have known better than to mention that. For obvious reasons this one virus is a bit of a politicized subject and activates the outrage machine.
I've got no problem with our paediatrician. Rather like him, if I'm being honest. Wouldn't be going back for every subsequent appointment if I did have a problem. The "long lecture" bit is more affectionate than complaining.
COVID vaccination for healthy children is not necessary because the benefit is small compared to the risk (but still considered positive and vaccination is recommended when there are certain risk factors). It is indeed unfortunate that this discussion is politicized.
Covid is a serious illness. It can cause a wide range of effects from death, to myocarditis, to immune system resets, to long covid, to permanent scarring on the lungs, mood disorders, embolisms, and permanently reduced mental capacity.
Covid is not a tail risk.
Additionally, by not getting a vaccine, you potentially put people at risk who cannot get a vaccine -- immunocompromised folks, etc. Vaccinating your child also protects everyone in their communities.
Choosing not to vaccinate because you want to limit the number for no expressed reason is vaccine hesitancy. You have expressed a position of vaccine hesitancy here.
Like the flu (the real flu). Viruses are always dangerous and carry a risk of long term neurological issues, always.
He did all the mandatory vaccines, the rest is a tail risk. Unless you vaccinate yourself against the flu and your children for both flu and COVID, I don't think you have any leg to stand on.
Everything you listed are tail risks of COVID, even in individuals with comorbidities, and are far more characteristic of the early strains than what’s circulating today. The only exception in your list of side effects is myocarditis, which is also a side effect of the COVID vaccine. Furthermore, the vaccine’s target population is individuals over 65 years old, immunocompromised individuals, obese individuals… not newborns or infants.
Alarmism, militant shaming, and omission of details like the ones I mentioned above are three strategies that steer vaccine hesitant people away from taking vaccine advocates seriously. Personally, I would raise concerns about anything but COVID and ease up on the Newspeak.
> Except long term effects from COVID are not fully understood yet, especially in children.
Most European countries don't offer vaccines for under 18's unless there's a very specific reason. Some don't offer the vaccine for general public except for vulnerable groups. Why? All medical interventions carry a risk and there is always a threshold where that risk outweighs any potential benefit. This is what sensible public health policy looks like.
Covid was literally 10x more dangerous than the vaccine for those without comorbidities, but it's played out now. The vaccine is about as effective as a flu jab.
This seems like a bad way to phrase it. The vaccine is certainly a lot (many orders of magnitude) less dangerous than just 0.1x as dangerous as COVID. Maybe you wanted to say that the risks from COVID are only 10x more without vaccination than with it due to limited effectiveness of the vaccine?
I've discounted the other effects as they were generally associated with comorbidities (lung scaring was a % of hospitalized people).
I've also discounted long-covid because of comorbidities, self-reporting bias, nocebo effective, and depression/anxiety overlap. Yes I know its still real, but the true rates are difficult to know.
In healthy children the chances of any of that happening are effectively 0, and while vaccine injuries and significant side effects are rare in their case it might actually be more likely. That’s why very few countries other than the US ever vaccinated healthy children, especially post-pandemic.
Almost literally everyone has and will continue to get COVID at this point. Not vaccinating your child, or all of the children in the US, won’t prevent that. I don’t know a single person that hasn’t had it, vaccinated or not. So, your child gets the vaccine. They’re then, what, maybe 50% less likely to get COVID for 6 months? Not exactly moving the needle as far as community transmission goes. This isn’t 2021 anymore.
If we had a better, longer lasting vaccine you might have an argument. Very, very few parents are going to do the COVID vaccine for their child every year. At the very least you’re risking them picking up something more serious just by going to a clinic or pharmacy to get it.
I don't know that I've had covid. My SO had it twice during the pandemic and i was testing myself daily but never tested positive. I like to joke that I'm immune. Of course I also had the vaccine but I understand that I should still get the disease, just less severe.
Anyway I haven't tested since the pandemic so I wouldn't have known if I'd had it afterwards.
Yeah, did self-tests and have thought the same. I definitely followed the instructions and my SO is a nurse so she knew how to do it, but who knows. I also had some very mild symptoms at least one of the times.
Could be something like our viral load wasn't high enough to register on the test, maybe our immune systems just dealt well with covid.
You are incorrect and are harming public trust in vaccination with your comments.
COVID-19 vaccines are no longer indicated for most healthy children (or most healthy young adults) in most jurisdictions as the risk benefit analysis no longer supports it.
>Additionally, by not getting a vaccine, you potentially put people at risk who cannot get a vaccine -- immunocompromised folks, etc. Vaccinating your child also protects everyone in their communities.
No. You probably thinking some other vaccine and infection, not covid. For covid once infected, vaccinated people express similar number of virus in their saliva as unvaccinated (see for example [1]). Additionally, infected vaccinated people have lower intensity symptoms or now symptoms at all, and thus more likely to go about their business as usual (and thus spread the virus) than to stay home like unvaccinated. As a result the vaccinated people do possibly spread more infection than unvaccinated. The obviously propagandistic and using government force push "do it for the good of the community" (very USSR style) for covid vaccinations against the science - as those results were already known at the end of 2021 - drove a lot of new people into vaccine-sceptic crowd.
"new study from the University of California, Davis, Genome Center, UC San Francisco and the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub shows no significant difference in viral load between vaccinated and unvaccinated people who tested positive for the delta variant of SARS-CoV-2. It also found no significant difference between infected people with or without symptoms.
...
Although vaccinated people with a breakthrough infection are much less likely to become severely ill than unvaccinated, the new study shows that they can be carrying similar amounts of virus and could potentially spread the virus to other people."
> I do want to minimize the number of vaccinations she gets
Imagine saying this about anything else that's good for children. I want to minimize the amount of food she eats. I want to minimize the number of friends she has. Insane mindset, tbh.
Haha, I can simultaneously try to minimize neither kinds of food nor number of friends while minimizing number of medical interventions. I suppose to some people all three of these must either go down or all three must go up, but I think I can move the three for my child in different directions with different intensity.
It is. But then you have ultra-processed food, junk food, food you might be allergic to...
Some medicines are good, some medicines are the lesser bad, some medicines will kill you if you take them when not needed, some medicines you might be allergic too, and some medicines are just a patch to have you feel well and keep you going.
Everything has risks, every time you go out of for a run you can injure yourself, fall badly on the head and die. Nearly all Life decision are about risk/benefits
Yes, but as the pandemic has shown people are phenomenally bad at guesstimating the risk of vaccinations.
The cool thing about medicine is that we get pretty good numbers pretty fast for everything. So in the end that choice would just be about knowing the numbers and picking your poison.
But that isn't how people make these choices. They will say "it is unnatural to stick a needle into a child" and then have their child infect half of their school plus the parents with measels.
The cost/benefit analysis of that hypothetical case is a damn no-brainer for the vaccination, yet that isn't how people act. Meaning if we talk about regular vaccinations (flu, corona, measels, tetanus) just getting all of them is the better choice for the society and yourself.
Unless those are crazy expensive for some reason in your place. Where I live all of those are free and take at max 20 minutes for me to get including the walk to the doctor's office. Not having the flu in the winter season is cool, because lying in bed for a week sucks more than a little sting of the needle with no noticable side effects.
There is no downside to taking any vaccine. I've taken 4 different covid vaccines alongside all their associated boosters when they were available for free.
For anyone that isn't afraid of needles and a little arm pain, it's worth it for the peace of mind alone.
The downsides of a very new, experimental vaccine that the covid vaccine is, have not been clearly established yet. Partially due to tribal, adherent behaviours like the one you are displaying right now.
I think it is a reasonable point of view to not want to be the testbed for vaccines that were also rushed to the market to reap the profits, let me remind you.
Oh and, I've gotten the vaccine. I'm just not tribal about it.
Until people with your mentality allow proper, unbiased science to tell us the facts. Are you suggesting that you are certain that the covid vaccine is entirely safe, and the benefits outweigh the risks ? And what are your credentials ?
So of the 13.84 billion doses administered how many people have seen serious harm and why did I never hear of them?
Note that 13.84 billion is a huge number, if every dose was a powerball lottery ticket we should see around 64 jackbot winners. That means nearly every weird thing that can happen by chance, will happen. And since people were on the edge every weird thing will be reported. But even these reports are all like "yeah that person eas already on the verge of dying or had some other weird medical condition and we can't really establish a clear chain of causality".
Maybe I am a bit allergic to a generic anti-modern-medicine stance, since my neighbour (my best friends mom), died of a preventable disease because she didn't want to get the known-safe medical remedy and spent a fortune on shamans and other greedy healers instead. She wanted a natural thing and died (as was natural before the advent of modern medicine).
A bit over 70% of the world population has received covid vaccines as of April 2024. Over 13 billion doses. With the law of big numbers we can assume that nearly all of the worst things that could have happend with the vaccine have been already seen and widely known. The illness itself killed between 7 and 18 million people worldwide. For the vaccines we don't know exactly because it was so rare and that tells you something. Even if we assume lying medical professionals: Everybody knows somebody whose relative died from covid. Nearly nobody knows somebody whose relative died from the vaccine. I don't really see how this is tribal. Maybe it has been tribal to some people at some point, but the years have passed and we have better data now.
Given the biological mechanism of these vaccines, the risks are well-known at this point. The mRNA does not integrate into DNA and degrades within hours to days. We were extremely lucky we had years of science on the mechanisms when the pandemic broke out (+won the scientist who did it a Nobel price). The major serious (but rare) side effects are (1) myocarditis in young men with mRNA vaccines and (2) thrombosis with adenovirus-based vaccines. Both were either known already or identified quickly because of the mentioned huge number of doses given and the careful monitoring then. These risks are measurable, have clear incidence rates, and are lower than the same complications from infection (otherwise millions would have had them).
There is no plausible mechanism for any delayed catastrophic effects years down the line without any signal in the first billions of doses, neither for this vaccine nor for others. At this stage the vaccines are not exactly what I would call "experimental" anymore. They one of the most heavily observed medical interventions in history.
So if you believe there ought to be something wrong with the numbers (incompetence/grand conspiracy) or some weird thing is gonna happens with a delay of multiple years (black swan mechanism), the burden of proof IMO on your side.
I am not from the US, so I might not be up to speed with the tribal pandemic conflicts emerging in your culture. So you may call me tribal, but I prefer to mitigate real risks for my family and me, rather than hypothetical ones proposed by people who don't go into detail beyond a "who knows".
Exactly. But was it really the claim parent made that they don't? I understood the claim more like: Vaccines help, but economic divides will perpetuate the problem in different ways.
And there is something to that claim. Because who doesn't get vaccinations? Because where are sanitary conditions so bad new variants develop? In places where people (and potentially animals) are crammed together without the ability of ill people to self quarantine. And those places are not typically rich and wealthy.
If you asked a top virologist if there is an socioeconomic component to virus contagion I'd expect most experts to agree that there is one.
It looks like you've been downvoted but no one has replied to tell you that your comment seems to be very under-informed about diseases and vaccines. I suggest you google Tetanus for a start
