Just last month Malawi also had a case (the first in Africa in more than 5 years apparently). Apparently the strain matches one from Pakistan, but they don't know how it made it to Africa.
They're performing a large scale inoculation drive since apparently only 1 in 200 cases leads to paralysis (which is when it is spotted).
You might wonder how polio gets reintroduced into Israel or anywhere else. The polio vaccines we currently use are imperfect.
The oral vaccine is a weakened form but it mutates in the neighborhood of one in a million cases to become effectively wild polio and some years this accounts for most of the poliomyelitis cases.
On the other hand, the fully inactivated injected vaccine is non-sterilizing: it prevents poliomyelitis but still allows for gut infection. This eradicates the disease but not the virus. This is why they previously found the polio virus in sewage samples even though there were no poliomyelitis cases.
Most anger at the un-vaccinated (due to the assumption that they are causing the spread) seems mis-placed since those vaccinated by the injected form (that's probably you commenting on Hacker News!) will spread the polio virus as well.
This is also somewhat complicated because, as the article notes, sewage monitoring in Israel picks up polio virus with some degree of frequency, despite there being no recorded cases - there's definitely shedding going on, and it's sort of an odd case due to a number of demographic and geopolitical factors.
This is not necessarily something that can be attributed to the vaccine. Will be curious to see what the results are if they try to trace it back.
> despite there being no recorded cases - there's definitely shedding going on
> This is not necessarily something that can be attributed to the vaccine.
Some stats about polio that people seem unaware of:
* Around 72% of infections are completely asymptomatic.
* Around 25% of infections result in flu-like symptoms.
* That remaining 3% is where the serious symptoms are, with paralysis occurring in only about 0.5% of infections despite being what polio is known for.
* Searching for the death rate of polio almost always results in finding "5 to 10 percent" - but that's of paralytic polio, not polio infections in general, so if you want polio infections in general, that's 5% of 0.5%, or around 0.025 - 0.05 percent.
This "with vs from" distinction is almost entirely meaningless. Unless the person had Covid19 and got shot or drowned in the sea, Covid19 is part of what killed them. When you have multiple diseases, they all contribute to your death.
Otherwise, if we only try to look for the disease that directly caused your final moment, we get absurd conclusions - such as, "no one has ever died of AIDS", since AIDS only destroys your immune system, it doesn't kill you.
Not to mention, Covid19 is not only a pulmonary disease, it is a blood disease, and as such it has hard to measure and predict effects everywhere in your body.
A recent italian Istituto Superiore di Sanità study showed that a great majority of people dead with covid died from it or it have been a serious concurrent cause.
That's exactly what is expected from a non-sterilizing vaccine. The polio virus will still circulate in the gut of the vaccinated and be visible in sewage, etc even though there are no poliomyelitis cases.
Ugh, your post is a terrible mix of true and false, and you keep confusing IPV and OPV.
I don't like that it's flagged, since there are elements in there that are true, but you wrote them in such a confusing way (in particular confusing IPV and OPV), that maybe you deserve to be flagged.
The oral polio vaccine is a live vaccine and occasionally reverts to an actually infectious strain. This isn’t a major concern in countries where people are widely vaccinated but would be an issue if we considered it eliminated and stopped vaccinating segments of the population. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine
After some years without cases and if the country has a high vaccination rate, then the recommendation is to switch to use only the injectable vaccine. More details in the section https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine#Schedule
This bears some correction. As the article reports, the strain that caused infection was traced from Malawi/Pakistan, where there is still endemic polio because of long-lasting vaccine hesitancy.
Some interesting history on Pakistan there that has do with unforeseen consequences and why the ends never really do justify the means.
The CIA gained some intel that Bin Laden was residing in Pakistan, and in the precise vicinity, but they wanted to be certain. They way they did this was by recruiting a local doctor [1] and splashing around a ton of money to start a fake vaccine campaign. It's unclear if they bothered using real vaccines or not, but the entire point of the program was a CIA DNA collection program. The CIA was bulk harvesting Pakistani DNA and cross referencing it against DNA from Bin Laden's sister
Once it was confirmed that Bin Laden had children in the area, the program was scrapped, we invaded, he was killed, and everybody was left out to to dry. The doctor was imprisoned, charged with treason, and has since been in solitary with claims of torture for going on a decade now [2]. Local aid workers (who had no idea what they were involved in) were hunted down and killed, some districts banned vaccination drives, and Pakistanis have been extremely critical of any sort of vaccination effort since.
I don't have the emotional resevoir to find the hard numbers, but it is estimated that hundreds of doctors and aid workers have been killed because of this specific CIA action. And it turns it, from the article below, it was to possibly confirm that the compound had Bin Laden, not to actually find him.
I have a running troll with friends who are unvaccinated, it goes like this.
""" The elites know the second coming of Jesus is near, the idea they had is to kill Jesus before he is born.
Jesus can only be born from his last remaining bloodline, somewhere in the world are the last descendants of Jesus.
They need to find his parents and serialise them.
To do this they created a tracer virus that has no symptoms but is detectable to test bio security measures for when the real virus is released.
When you get PCR tested they take two swabs, one for the bio security test and one to get your DNA to see if you have Jesus's blood flowing within you.
If you have the holy blood it will render you sterile, your DNA is also tested so they can visit you and follow up on your family, those too young to get tested.
Jesus will raise again at the start of WWIII they need to kill him before he is born.
That is why the lipid nano particles concentrate in the ovaries, to sterilise Mary.
They did the same with Bin Laden who has Muhammad bloods in him.
"""
I have been adding to the troll story overtime when new bits of information surface, they find it quite believable.
I have also tried the inverse story, where its actually godly people trying to find the descendants of Jesus to save them from what's coming. So you need to take the vaccine to protect you from what's coming.
But this inverse story doesn't work at all. Conformation bias is strong.
If you want to use my troll story please quote me. It's original and took me awhile to come up with it.
If this is how you treat your friends, then you dont deserve to have any.
If one of those people ends up killing themselves, then you should understand that you may have had a hand in that.
Whatever makes you feel better.
The main point is, no-one threats their friends like this. Your original comment didn't state that your friends believed that they had holy blood, but if they did, do you think its a good idea to have fun with their beliefs for your own amusement (and some stangers on the internet for imaginary internet points)?
If world war 3 breaks out, you're probably gonna need some friends.
If these lies that you tell to your friends prevents them from getting vaccinated, then what?
I have a feeling and also some hope, that your story is just that, a long winded BS story to make yourself sound intelligent, because otherwise, you are just a sociopath.
What upsets you so much about the story, can I ask.
Is their a certain section that sounds out to you?
In my country its very common to tell yarns or tall tails, to try make them believable as possible, trying to make sense of a hard situation.
They say what if X
I say what if Y
They say no that wouldn't happen because of Z
I say factoring in Z how about YY
Its not like anyone actually believes the story, but the goal is to make it believable - almost possible. Something that you consider in the back of your mind.
For example, their was a news report of a military airplane doing circles north of my city leaving contrails.
I said well what if they are testing the release of a airborne bacteria like they did in San Francisco.
My friend said that would only be possible if the wind direction was blowing south
We checked the wind, it was blowing south.
Now we have a story, with just enough credible information to make a highly unlikely situation possible.
That is what a movie is, a story where you suspended disbelief just enough to be entertained. We are doing that but verbally, its a exchange and it is actually quite fun to see what outrageous stories you have spin to be half believable.
Part of the problem is that the weakened form is used because it doesn't require refrigeration.
So, the fully inactivated vaccine is the "better" of the two, but, because it requires refrigeration, is harder to deal with in the areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan where vaccination is most needed.
Does Israel even use the oral vaccine? As far as I know all countries that have the basic infrastructure that is needed for the injection one, use that one.
For many years, Israel used both - injection, followed by oral a few years later. At some point, it stopped with the oral - but e.g. in 2013 following some increased sewage levels detected, Israel had a population wide oral vaccine drive[0]
I'm not quite sure what the schedule is right now, but the heavy handed essentially mandated covid vaccination is reported (so far unofficially, official data not yet released) to have caused a non trivial drop in standard vaccine uptake.
Last time Israel had a vaccine mandate was for a short while in the early 50s; Since then, there were no mandate or general requirements e.g. in schools. Uptake was still very high, at over 95% or so until the MMR vaccine scare, which only dented it lightly. Officially and technically, Irsael did not have a covid vaccine mandate - but practically, it did for many people, much like it did in France until a few days ago.
> Most anger at the un-vaccinated (due to the assumption that they are causing the spread) seems mis-placed since those vaccinated by the injected form (that's probably you commenting on Hacker News!) will spread the polio virus as well.
Seriously. In what population does polio spread, the unnvacinnated or the vaccinated? In what population are you exposed to it?
> In what population does polio spread, the unnvacinnated or the vaccinated? In what population are you exposed to it?
This is all so weird. An explanation of how I understand it:
Polio definitely spreads in the unvaccinated.
If you've given the IPV vaccine, you can later be infected and spread polio (with a little less likelihood), but won't become sick.
If you're given the OPV vaccine, you eventually will have sterilizing immunity, and won't spread it, once immunity develops a small time after vaccination. But the OPV vaccine itself very rarely causes polio outbreaks.
So the recommendations are complicated. If you're in a part of the world without polio spread, you should be given the IPV vaccine.
If you're in a part of the world with endemic polio and a good health system, you should be given the IPV vaccine and then the OPV vaccine a few months later.
If you're in a part of the world with endemic polio and a lacking health system, the best bet is just giving you the OPV vaccine.
> If you've given the IPV vaccine, you can later be infected and spread polio (with a little less likelihood), but won't become sick.
> If you're given the OPV vaccine, you eventually will have sterilizing immunity, and won't spread it, once immunity develops a small time after vaccination. But the OPV vaccine itself very rarely causes polio outbreaks.
What if we have IPV first then OPV as a booster, would that give sterilizing immunity with less risk?
> > If you're in a part of the world with endemic polio and a good health system, you should be given the IPV vaccine and then the OPV vaccine a few months later.
> If you're given the OPV vaccine, you eventually will have sterilizing immunity, and won't spread it, once immunity develops a small time after vaccination. But the OPV vaccine itself very rarely causes polio outbreaks.
They are non-sterilizing ; that is, they protect the vaccinee from getting the disease, but not from getting (and shedding) the virus.
We have sterilizing oral ones. They have safety issues, both personal and population level ones.
The essentially perfect way is to give everyone the non-sterilizing one as early as possible in life, and the sterilizing one at a later stage. The non-sterilizing one protects against the safety issues in the sterilizing one.
Yes but the vaccinated would have no one to make sick around them if there isn’t anyone unvaccinated around them. Doesn’t matter as much if we all have the virus, as long as it doesn’t develop as a sickness.
The COVID vaccines suffer from a similar issue. By design they are non-sterilizing because they don't develop immunity in the nasal mucous. It's always been the case that with a large enough exposure the COVID vaccinated would still get infected in the nose and transmit the virus to others.
> Indications of the virus have been found in sewage samples in the area
Oh this decade is going to be insane. We have the technology to solve so much but people no longer have the education and thinking process to use it. Disease and war back on the front burners.
I'm pretty sure we're better educated than any time in human history.
EDIT: Thinking about it, I would guess that we don't have as much humanities education as the prior generation (because it's been devalued), and humanities are what address the questions and problems plaguing our society, the big ones that are too complex to yield to scientific method or algorithms.
> I'm pretty sure we're better educated than any time in human history.
The problem is we've had it so good for so long that we don't remember what it was like. Why take a bunch of preventative stuff for something that never happens? Feels like a waste of time.
In reality, those preventative steps are why it doesn't.
In Carl Sagan's "The Demon Haunted World" he talks about how Europe regressed and became incredibly religious. A lot of secular medicine was lost, and the Queen, the richest person in the last, was pregnant 18 times, 15 dies in childbirth and 3 did not live to be adults. Science has solved these problems not CEOs, or wealth and those are the things we worship in the US
Carl Sagan was also incredibly wrong almost every time he talked about history.
In many ways he was vanguard of the kind of hubris we commonly see today on social media, self assured of his own knowledge.
Just to give you an example. He repeated common misconception about Library of Alexandria being something unique and it's burning being the break between high civilization and barbarism. But it was nothing of the sort.[1] The very fact that the library has been ransacked, burned or otherwise damaged both before and after the "pivotal event" Sagan describes, is a strong indicator of his ignorance.
And doesn't stop there. Whenever Sagan talked about "Dark ages" or anything remotely related he was wrong. The very term has been considered inaccurate at the time, and it is even more so today.[2]
Dang, well Cosmos was a large scale production so we have several people to blame for the inaccuracies. I understand 'The Dark Ages' is considered pejorative and onver-simplified. But there was an overabundance of religous magick being practiced across Europe as the time and I think he makes a lot of good points in the book that I have experienced in my own life. People going towards crystals, or homeopathic remedies for example. And to me that's not so far from these accounts: 'In England, for example, the King’s Touch was believed to heal scrofula, a form of tuberculosis. Prayers to Christ, the Virgin, and saints were always considered the most efficacious form of help. Saint Margaret was invoked for help in childbirth (47.101.65); Saint Fiacre (25.120.227; 17.190.353) for relief from hemorrhoids."
I assume by "religious" you mean Christian. Before Europe became Christian, it wasn't secular, it followed a wide variety of other religions just as devoutly.
Religions don’t cause a uniform level of devotion. It’s easy to fall into the assumption that most religions are similar but that’s because the west is really used to a single family of religions.
> I'm pretty sure we're better educated than any time in human history.
In the past public opinion would be created by a minority of affluent people. Most people were basically peasants (even middle class with nice jobs) and had no chance to affect public opinion. Today public opinion is created by the majority (or manipulated by some shadowy figures with unknown agenda -- I can't make up my mind about it). So you could have more educated people today but still responsible for much smaller fraction of actual public message.
Also in the past the information that most people received was nicely prepared, packaged and delivered by more or less mainstream media. Clear signal, low noise. For better or worse.
Today truly educated and wise people have no access to public because the signal to noise ratio is too low for most people to be able to pick up.
> In the past public opinion would be created by a minority of affluent people. Most people were basically peasants (even middle class with nice jobs) and had no chance to affect public opinion. Today public opinion is created by the majority (or manipulated by some shadowy figures with unknown agenda -- I can't make up my mind about it).
What is this based on? And why would the "minority of affluent people" were any more accurate or good-willed than whoever influences public opinion today? I'm sure those affluent people said things that fit their own interests and experiences, but I don't believe for a moment that affluence correlates with good judgement for everyone else.
Read a detailed account of historical events - the propaganda and inflammatory rhetoric was far worse in many ways. Look at the Spanish-American War, for example.
Disinformation and misinformation may be orders of magnitude worse now, but there was no golden age.
You don't need to censor the nutbars, and it is ok to call them that.
The former is shutting down discourse, the latter is pointing out its flaws, and is a correct response.
When I was in high school, pre-Internet, we has an entire class about modern media.
We discussed advertising, profit motives, watched TV commercials and dissected them, it was all about creating awareness in youth, about something they grew up with and took for granted.
This sort of thing had value, it helps people see things through a different viewpoint, including helping people become more critical of the snakenoil salesman.
We should have such things about the Internet, and youtube, as well.
I bet the average Joe doesn't realise how profitable YouTube channels can be, and thus, how profitable lies are.
> You don't need to censor the nutbars, and it is ok to call them that.
I fully agree. Both sides can call each other nutbars and both sides should not be censored. One person’s nutbar is another person’s geniusbar.
Profit motives and understanding the finances of the media platforms is useful, but it does not address the search for truth and fact beyond the important detail of monetary motivations of the people behind the opinions. Truth and fact takes hard work. It requires access to all sides of the argument/topic, which censorship denies to people, creating a one-sided view that many times does not represent the most accurate view and in some cases has been manipulated (not always for monetary returns) by the dominant forces interested in the matter.
> We have the technology to solve so much but people no longer have the education and thinking process to use it.
To me it's rather our blind reliance on technology that is the problem. People have become dependent on pills and drugs (and vaccines) of all sorts, treating the symptoms rather than the cause more often than not.
Chronic diseases are arguably more prevalent now than at other point in time: obesity, diabetes, cancer, coronary, circulatory etc. The COVID-19 crisis, which exposed the vulnerability of a large part of the population, is a case in point. Governments have spent all that effort and money to develop and administer vaccines on an unprecedented scale, but zero effort was made to make us more resilient, to ameliorate the environment in which we live (pollution kills ~9M humans per year [1]) or the food that we eat and out eating habits (~40% of the world adult population is overweight, ~15% obese [2]).
While COVID-19 may be gone (for now at least), the root causes of why so many millions of people succumbed to it are not. Technology might prove to be a good short term solution, but I believe the required changes are rather political, societal and even moral/spiritual.
Imagine the impact on the GDP of the US if obesity was largely eliminated and diet and exercise incentives were included as part of health plans (eg free membership to fitness clubs and access to certified personal trainers with a 20$ copay). That’s a big reason why it hasn’t happened; instead the focus is on doctors and hospitals treating acute issues instead of preventing them.
Such "Wellness Programs" do exist for health plans in the US, where you get incentivized (e.g. discounts/waived fees/increased coverage) for following whatever behavioral constraints they asked for (e.g. going to a gym, exercising regularly, and so on).
They're not universal, but they are a thing in some cases.
Personal trainers don't cost much more than the equivalent of a $20 copay a session - when I had one it was $250/month (that's equal to $58/week) and I think I got three sessions a week. That's slightly less than $20 a session.
Most personal trainers that I’ve hired cost a minimum $100 per hour. You are getting quite a great deal. That rate is equivalent to the cost of a group session in my area, which does not include individual attention.
I would not rule out detection bias: you can't be diagnosed with those if you can't find it before you are dead. And death used to come s lot sooner for most in the past.
That is an oversimplification. Just to point out one important aspect of this, Vitamin D levels are strongly related to human health and immune system function and have been dropping for decades.
Given that vitamin D is created in our skins by sunlight exposure (or rather, by exposure to UV-B radiation), this corresponds with the employment distribution shifting from agricultural and other outdoor labor work towards office, cubicle-farm jobs. Additionally, making this worse, modern glass is highly impermissible for UV-B radiation [1], meaning that even if you do sit in a well-lit place you won't get enough to create enough vitamin D.
I think polio actually became more of an issue in the early 20th century because hygiene improved, which meant that people tended to get polio during childhood, rather than in infancy like before. And polio is more dangerous to children than infants.
The article does not mention this, but it's quite probably the unvaccinated child in question is from the fast-expanding Hasidic community in Jerusalem, many of whom are strongly anti-vax. This has led to measles outbreaks in the past in NYC as well, and the community was also hit especially hard by COVID.
Many vaccines aren't vegan-friendly (they're often grown in eggs), and pretty much all of them go through animal testing stages during clinic trials. It's not at all surprising that vegans would be anti-vax.
From discussions with vegans I've known, the objection to eggs and dairy is largely based on the (mis) treatment of the animals as part of industrial scale production. It's not (usually) a mystical belief about the sanctity of some life essence - more about observable apparent suffering.
Unless carefully managed, a vegan diet has a chance of lacking some critical nutrients for the development of young children. I think a vitamin B12 deficiency is common.
Meat/fish and byproducts are generally considered a "quick fix" for a great many dietary issues. Giving a baby something with meat in it once a week when they start feeding, once a month after 2 years (or more often) will fix most diets. Any real vegan diet will need to consider a great many factors.
Even vegan diets that aren't going to kill you in the long term are still going to cause problems. For example, a vegan diet with >60% fruit (or fruit and grains), will cause amino acid shortages. Too little fruit, of course, causes Vitamin C shortages.
Luckily it's easy to fool yourself into eating meat. Many forms of candy, for example, are meat byproducts. So is, of course, a latte.
> Giving a baby something with meat in it once a week when they start feeding, once a month after 2 years (or more often) will fix most diets.
That's a pretty exceptional claim, that's not something I believe without a source.
> For example, a vegan diet with >60% fruit (or fruit and grains), will cause amino acid shortages. Too little fruit, of course, causes Vitamin C shortages.
And a meat based diet that doesn't include fruit, or very little has issues too.
How is milk from a breast of a human vegan?
Is there a definition of veganism that says an animal product that was given with consent is considered vegan?
There are a few different definitions of veganism, the word itself isn't very old and has often been used to describe not just the a plant-based diet, or abstaining from all animal products, but the philosophy behind it.
This is one of the reasons why currently "plant-based diet" is gaining traction, to take the emphasis off the word vegan because it's been connected to the animal rights and ethics of the vegan movement. [1]
> " I taught cooking classes for the national non-profit, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, and during that time, the phrase "plant-based diet" came to be used as a euphemism for vegan eating, or "the 'v' word." It was developed to take the emphasis off the word vegan, because some associated it with being too extreme a position, sometimes based exclusively in animal rights versus a health rationale."
I think it's easy to argue that, specifically, milk from the breast of your mother, as an infant, is not in conflict with any possible interpretation of veganism. It's of course not plant-based, but it is a very special case, as essentially as an infant you are not entirely a separate entity from your mother, even after birth.
B12 supplementation is recommended for a vegan diet at any age. Besides that, I'm not sure what you mean by careful management. Eating a normal varied diet where the proteins come from plant sources gets you covered.
Yet on the page strictly about babies and children, the recommendation is to "[use] a moderate amount of poultry meat and some red meat as a source of protein. [...] Eating fish two to three times a week is recommended for the whole family."
There's far too many stories of babies dying of malnutrition on vegan diets. While it's possible to make them healthier for them, let's not go saying it's recommended, just like children can survive on crappy junk food (and plenty of them sadly have to), provided it's fortified with nutrients for them. There's a difference between surviving and thriving.
That site is a bit confusingly laid out; the page I linked to introduces the vegan diet for all age groups, while the part you quoted concerns the recommendations for the omnivore diet. In the material that maternity clinics hand out, the equivalent vegan recommendation for first solid proteins are tofu and red lentils. The linked full set of recommendations also covers more specifics for infants and toddlers: https://www.julkari.fi/handle/10024/137770
Basically the only exception is infant formula, unless the child has a diagnosed milk allergy. There's also a general recommendation against restricted, e.g. macrobiotic and raw diets.
> There's a difference between surviving and thriving.
And you have given no proof that a child can't thrive on a vegan diet. Surely it's not something a public health authority recommends, because people generally aren't vegan.
I can't find any study supporting that a vegan diet for infants and children can't be as healthy as a non-vegan diet. There are always outliers, but you also have children on non-vegan diets that are missing vitamins and nutrients.
That very same link states that "a carefully composed vegan diet" can be beneficial. Thats my point -- with a vegan diet you have to be much more conscientious about nutrition. Many people are not. With your average healthy omnivorous diet, you rarely have any significant nutrient deficiencies that you have to worry about. Said diet ends up being simpler to implement in practice. That's what I mean by careful management; A healthy vegan diet for children is not impossible, but it takes more effort.
You say "much more", but the models of healthy eating don't really differ that much in practice. Both prescribe a balanced plate with carbs, proteins, and "other" vegetables. The omnivore model calls for half the plate being vegetables, while the vegan plate is divided into equal thirds.
That of course being the rule of thumb, and obviously people don't necessarily build every meal to exactly that pattern. A pizza night every now and then is okay too.
> rarely have any significant nutrient deficiencies
People in the Nordics are usually already supplementing at least vitamin D due to lack of sunlight, and often iodine due to a lack of it in the soil. So in this context, switching to a combined vegan supplement that includes those as well as B12 is a relatively small change.
My ex had the same issue while on a vegan diet - and she was an adult. Random dizzy spells and faintness to the point of almost passing out.
It boggles my mind anyone would ascribe to a diet that literally requires vitamin supplements through artificial means in order to be complete. And those are just the obvious deficiencies.
Vitamin B12 is made by bacteria, it's in all dirt, and untreated water. You absorb it through your skin. It's pretty easy to see how it wasn't long ago that we would be having an abundance of vitamin b12 from everywhere.
Cows don't make it, they eat it in soil. Which, actually, because most of them are factory farmed, they are fed the supplement. Nothing natural about that; in fact, you're just skipping the middle-man and cruetly.
"But I only eat grass-grazed happy cows!" Good for you! Now how about a solution that can work for everyone.
You want to know what the real next pandemic is. It's going to come from the unbelievable abuse of antibiotics the meat industry is responsible for. Medicine will be set back a century.
> It boggles my mind anyone would ascribe to a diet that literally requires vitamin supplements through artificial means in order to be complete.
I used to think that, but at some point I thought: what's the big deal? If you're still eating healthy, still eating tasty food, and you just also consume a pill or two every day, is that really so bad, or does it just feel "wrong"?
> It boggles my mind anyone would ascribe to a diet that literally requires vitamin supplements through artificial means in order to be complete.
Most non vegans also get their B12 through supplementation. It just is fed to animals directly or indirectly as cobalt supplement.
> Most forages and feedstuffs fed to dairy and beef animals do not contain adequate quantities of cobalt to support the rumen and animal requirements. Consequently, supplemental cobalt must be added to beef and dairy rations. [1]
There's a mosque around the corner where I live. I see old people go in and out, hardly any teenagers. Just like in the church to which my parents-in-law once brought us.
How many of those hasidic jews' 4.1 children keep the faith, and how many get a career instead? 0.5, 1.5, 2.5, 3.5? If it's 3.5 I'll have to ask why they succeed so well.
"Faith" is a big word, but for many/most haredi people "community" is the more operative term. Leaving a sect means becoming an outsider. All their family and friend relationships are insider-based. Regardless of the severity of luteral shunning practices, the nature or haredi lifestyle makes these aspects severe regardless. There's a lot of variance between communities though.
In any case, people do leave. Often, it's relatively early in life. This is why haredi communities are so leery of military service, college lifestyles and such.
People also join. A lot of Chabad adjacent communities are largely converts and 2nd generation members.
I would also emphasize that lifestyle, community, belonging, mission and such tend to play as big a role as belief in convincing converts.
Judaism doesn't always emphasize belief in its definition of "faith." At least, far less than Christianity and Islam. This a philosophical tradition going way back. Faithfulness and even spirituality are often seen as concerning practice (ritual, but also moral) moreso than concerning faith.
Belief follows practice, and if it doesn't... at least you have practice. The Christian Brothers pinched this line from an old rabbi.
Faith isn't quite the right word for what I mean, but community isn't either. The particular set of opinions or practices that have the practical effect of keeping the parents (and some grown-up children) separated from the wider society. (The concrete practical effect mentioned upthread was being vaccinated.)
They succeed in part by insulating their children from Western culture (no TV, no Internet, little interaction with outsiders), and by giving them very little in terms of secular education, so that getting a career is not really an option for most.
Unfortunately, for the ultra orthodox, yes. The parliamentary system is a majority coalition, and more often than not, the ultra orthodox parties are the kingmakers, so they get a lot more influence than one would expect.
Specifically, they are exempt from the standard Israeli STEM + foreign language curriculum (which is quite comprehensive - to graduate highschool, you need passing grades in standardized tests that includes -- among other things -- English, Math, at least one of biology/physics/chemistry, literature, history, Hebrew, sometimes bible studies -- depends on the government at the time). You have to have 20 credits among these - at least 3 in English, at least 3 in Math, and there are more requirements).
About 10 years ago, there was a government they were not part of, and this exemption was removed ; but the following cycle, they were kingmakers again and it got reinstated.
Edit: Added some details about the Israeli curriculum.
Do enough medicine and you'll see just how wrong this is. Every medical issue leaves damage on your body. Mostly very small. Even fractures, the example often given, yes, a broken bone grows back stronger ... and less flexible, more brittle and heavier, more calcified, with less blood going through it a fact it will not cease to remind you off once you turn 55 or so.
Not to be misunderstood, that Nietzsche quote was a sarcastic comment on some strange lines of thought one can find in the anti-vaccination fringes.
Another one is 'God wills it' and another one is, it's 'natural' or 'pure'.
As an extreme, you can find that strange mix of sentimental almost pseudo-religious nature enthusiasm, magical thinking and barbarism in National Socialism.
They were obsessed with the healthy Aryan body, albeit its rulers themselves for the most part not exactly the most outstanding specimens.
Metaphors of health, disease, and parasitism in the racial corpus permeate the whole ideology like metastasized cancer.
Of course, the Reich just needed healthy soldiers, ruthlessly against the weak amongst themselves and the enemy.
I'm not sure that COVID anti-vax is a good example of Darwinism. Out of the 950K deaths from COVID in the US, only 6K are under 30 years old - hence less likely to have reproduced.
I find it disheartening so many people are willing to gloat over fellow humans' deaths, regardless of the reason, some notion of "karma", "Darwinism", etc.
Sympathy for their families. Acknowledgment you don’t know all the circumstances in their life, and we all have varying levels of susceptibility to disinformation.
According to the Israeli ministry of health the kid got infected with the virus from the vaccination that includes a living weak virus, a vaccine that is not given in many countries and have been not given in Israel for almost 20 years.
The decision to give the weakened virus was based on live viruses found in the sewage of Bedouin community in Rahat.
Also the ultra orthodox Jews in Jerusalem are pro-vaccine and the number of the anti-vax people among them is much lower than the anti-vax secular people in Israel.
This is what you want to believe. If you inform yourself more, which is now possible more then ever in history, then you find out, that this is just huge business with fear. I recommend book from Gerhard Buchwald - "Vaccination - A Business Based on Fear" (1994) if your are open to new research.
Remember... Scared and uninformed people are easy to be manipulated.
It is extremely concerning that this is most likely a mainstream position.
Mandatory medical procedure for the common good is a slipperly slope… and it has been made into a mainstream position with pharma marketing and PR working with politicians and “news” agencies for their short-term profits.
This could end up in someone coming to power and making high doses of copper cyanide mandatory to everyone who is pro-mandates, for the common good of course. Be careful what you wish for.
Superstition and idiocy being more important than the common good is a slippery slope... what if someone decides that putting out fires is against the will of their God?
That's a pretty quickly self-limiting population. As is the Antivax community, though the flareups of forgotten diseases will continue for a few more cycles before this group dies out naturally - So long as we don't fan the flames by actually persecuting them. More than a few will die of disease, most will learn better from seeing the results of their actions.
A significant portion of that population will develop natural immunity (mostly by natural selection) and will be the one to survive when at some point centralized supply chain is exausted out of resources and all the viruses that they had vaccines for come back with a bang.
you are being vaccinated thousands times a day by countless parasites, fungi and bacteria, yet when it's safely designed by tens of thousands of smartest people in the world it becomes... medical procedure..?
Then it's also not fine for you to leave your house because even if you are vaccinated you can still spread disease. With modern technology, there's no need to leave the home for anything but work and some essentials. So if you have this technological-integrationist view on vaccines then you might as well self-ban from any sort of outside recreation or public gatherings since you would be putting others at risk.
Between the two extremes of not getting vaccinated and self-isolating forever on the off chance you might have a virus is something called reasonable precaution. Getting vaccinated for something like Polio is just such a thing.
Who gets to draw that line? If one has the choice to self-isolate, and they are motivated by social obligation, then they should do so even if they are vaccinated because the morality of the issue doesn't scale with the severity of the virus. To knowingly risk giving others a disease for the sake of frivolity, even when the chances are relatively low, would nevertheless be an immoral act.
This is of course something I don't actually believe. Vaccines should be a personal choice because presumably they are effective enough that the argument for one's responsibility towards other people's health is greatly diminished to a point where we can decide what's a reasonable compromise. I more or less agree with what you're saying in actuality.
Well, the thing about reasonable precautions is that there's a fairly bright-line test: reasoned arguments behind those precautions. As for who should draw that line, I'd say that subject experts should have a very loud voice in the conversation. In this case, that would mean epidemiologists.
It's fine for vaccines to be a personal choice, but if epidemiologists think that an unvaccinated person is an undue risk to the general public, it's reasonable to limit that person's access to the public.
> Vaccines should be a personal choice because presumably they are effective enough that the argument for one's responsibility towards other people's health is greatly diminished to a point where we can decide what's a reasonable compromise.
Emphasis mine. Your presumption does not hold for all vaccines. Different vaccines and different strains of viruses have varying degrees of effectiveness. Epidemiologists take a data-driven approach to that decision where you're just making an assumption. Reasoned arguments must be backed by data, not just assumptions.
True but I doubt you’re as immune to persuasion and logical fallacies as your comment suggests. The point remains that we’re all human and will make many mistakes in our lifetime. Our circumstances are a huge part of that.
> Some choices are far too complex for most people to grasp. Some choices require a sense of civic duty and common will.
The results show that humans do a pretty good job and do advance, and do have civic duty (I don't know what "common will" means). IME, the problem is the people who make choices like refusing vaccines and then say humanity is fundamentally incompentent. They have an easy solution!
> Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.
That doesn't really assert anything. Many aspects will change dramatically, and often they are aspects that nobody previously imagined possible. The people who believe in change and possibility are the ones who do good things. The question is, what can we change and how much?
When people don't want change, they pull out that parent argument and apply it, through some general claim, and not actually address the issue at hand.
They are both. Theoretically they can make their own choice, but the are also heavily influenced by systems. So people who build, maintain and execute the systems have a large responsibility too.
It's not really an excuse if you think about the bigger picture. A sentiment of anti-vaxxers is that pharma and doctors cannot be trusted. And while clearly helping a lot of people, systemic problems with medicine also did a number on people, to pick just one example, consider the Opioid Epidemic in the US.
"There’s a simple, basic proposition: If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized, you’re not going to be in an ICU unit, and you’re not going to die."
This isn't only a matter of antivaxers. If you're in a country in which Polio has been eradicated, such as the US, double check that you're vaccinated. Various vaccines are no longer recommended because of the virtually nonexistent risk.
I know that Africans receive the TB vaccine as part of our regular schedule, where many developed countries do not.
As a counter example TB and some meningitis vaccines have been dropped in many EU countries because of cost/benefit, as in not enough of a disease incidence to justify covering the cost of the vaccine.
You can still get them voluntarily but you have to pay from your own pocket.
There are multiple other scenarios where the virus could become released into the wild again: infection by clearing up old storage sites, a laboratory accident, or some terrorist spending 100k US$. And all of these have happened (although the latter was "just" horse pox).
The other type of polio vaccine is still recommended (and even mandatory in many countries) so there is nothing to be worried about if you take all the recommended vaccines.
Instead of having an uneducated opinion, you should know that polio vaccines can sometimes cause... polio. Yeah, that's not even remotely debated, it's well known:
This is misleading fear mongering, the people refusing vaccines are in western developed countries, where they are offered injectable forms of the vaccine.
Refusing free and approved vaccination programmes is anti-social behaviour and a public health hazard.
It is fear mongering because this was an issue, it is no more.
It is fear mongering because this affected OPV and people are only getting vaccinated with injection based polio vaccine for which none of this applies.
First off, the reason people refusing vaccines are in western countries is because that's who can afford vaccines. Look at the corona vaccination rates in Africa, then tell me why a 30 year old Westerner needs a fourth dose.
Second, the guy posted an NPR and a CDC link to back up his statement of fact. Both articles provide plenty of context, so accusing him of "misleading fear mongering" is, ironically enough, misleading fear mongering.
What most of us consider progress is based on how we manage to spread efficiently as a species, gathering more power and possessions, developing ways to push our inevitable death further away, no matter the cost. Exploit more ressources, other humans, other animals.
And while some of us aren't driven by these things, some always will, and will essentially always capitalize on it. They can take the form of corporations, religious groups, governments... They really are any organised groups. And to make things worse, power is addictive.
It doesn't seem to matter how smart we are, if we zoom out, we're as good as a self destructing virus eating up on its ressources as if it had an infinite supply of it. Following a path driven by greed. Making us a virus that's only smarter at how it gets to the outcome, not at changing the outcome itself.
The anti-vaccine movement developed as soon as vaccines forest existed, and it developed independently on at least 3 continents. Even if you could snap your fingers and make social media disappear, people would still at various times and places refuse vaccination.
Also your assertion that free will doesn’t exist is highly suspect. Either you’re coming from a place of collectivist ideology and work backwards or your reading about Libet’s button press studies. I’ll assume the latter, since is more interesting. Trying to pick apart awareness of intention to move, RP (readiness potential) as measured by eeg or fmri, and the movement in less than 300 ms using a clock the participant has to read is highly fraught. The setup could easily be wrong. Other researchers trying different approaches to measuring the awareness of the decision point have gotten the opposite results. There’s also absolutely no consensus among researchers on this topic. If you truly believe as you say that science is the key to progress, you must admit that the science of free will is very much unsettled. And we must also consider that cognitive neuroscience research has had a lot of embarrassing missteps, e.g. replication issues.
You may choose to believe people have no free will, but I feel agency in my actions so it’s real enough to me. One must also concede that there have existed totalitarian systems in living memory that predetermine all human actions that should happen in the system, and yet some people still rebel. There must be something there.
> You will scream at me (that is, if you condescend to do so) that no one is touching my free will, that all they are concerned with is that my will should of itself, of its own free will, coincide with my own normal interests, with the laws of nature and arithmetic. Good heavens, gentlemen, what sort of free will is left when we come to tabulation and arithmetic, when it will all be a case of twice two make four? Twice two makes four without my will. As if free will meant that!
Well said - I fear you’re talking to a deaf audience, but still, well said.
Some ideas just exist outside of our ability to test hypotheses about them. If there’s an idea that could never be disproven by observation, then it exists outside of the domain of science, definitionally. Have faith or don’t, I don’t care.
You're rambling nonsense and for the past few comments. Why do you think I wrote science doesn't prove God or free will? Do you believe I didn't already classify you with persons that believe unprovable things that doesn't mix with science. In academia the worst persons to work with have been believers of God or free will. It's honestly too bad that we don't have real choice otherwise I would've requested to not be born into the world with persons that believe in such nonsense.
I wonder if it would be worthwhile to clean up (for lack of a better term) vaccine production's use of pork (and other?) animal products, aborted fetal stem cell lines, etc. to reduce some of the religious objections. Or would it not matter, and people would find something else to support their belief?
Thankfully polio is an extremely treatable disease. Vaccination is still the best form of defense against poliovirus. There’s no free lunch though, and more people are infected with polio from vaccines worldwide than with the wild virus.
This is a really dangerous comment. Thankfully polio is an extremely treatable disease -What exactly do you think is the treatment, beyond prophylaxis?
That the rate of vaccine caused infection is now higher than the rate of wild infection is no reason to stop vaccinating. It's really sad but this is why we have indemnity processes. Eradication depends on continual vaccination, well beyond any kind of epidemic. Even though it has been years since wild polio raged worldwide, this is no time to stop vaccinating.
I cannot fathom what you are trying to communicate.
After some years without cases and if the country has a high vaccination rate, the recommendation is to switch to use only the injectable vaccine that uses inactivated virus (informally "dead"), so it can not revert and cause cases later. More details in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine#Schedule
Polio has no treatment, but good physiotherapy may help with recovery. The small number of people who get paralysis need to go to hospital and may need intensive care. Some people will need long-term treatment for limb paralysis.
They're performing a large scale inoculation drive since apparently only 1 in 200 cases leads to paralysis (which is when it is spotted).