From my understanding - there are two main “strains” for polio; one that is “wild”; endemic to Afghanistan and Pakistan, and one derived from the oral vaccine, endemic in Africa and a lot of conflict zones, from Asia to
Europe to Central / Southern Americas.
The oral vaccine in use in a lot of the world contains a weakened version of the virus, and allows your body to fight it off without any negative effects. This is usually a 3 or 4 course vaccine.
This specifically engineered weakened virus has been shown to mutate and infect other partially or non vaccinated individuals, including causing paralysis, and is the one now popping up in more developed / inoculated areas - but again, in unvaccinated individuals.
Note - from what I have read, you can still get and spread polio even if you are vaccinated (much like Covid), but it’s an incredibly low chance - and furthermore, your risk of serious disease / paralysis / death is even lower (so we know the vaccines work). The oral vaccine (weakened virus) efficacy is much higher than the injected (inactive virus) vaccine too, and boosters are offered for those who had the vaccines as children and are now adults.
There is also another oral vaccine, with a weakened virus, that has been engineered to prevent certain mutations that cause it to spread (if I read some articles correctly), but is not currently approved for use in the US / UK.
Polio was one of the first few horrible diseases almost eradicated by vaccines. Whatever your stance on getting vaccinated, do understand that Polio has a 1 in 200 chance of resulting in severe symptoms and paralysis, and there is no treatment for it - only prevention via inoculation. It is not like Covid where mostly the older, more immunocompromised suffer - it will ravage children and healthy adults too.
Whilst the attenuated polio virus vaccine may carry a tiny risk it cannot be reasonably compared with the dangers of not being vaccinated.
Anti-vaxxers and those who've not gotten around to being vaccinated should look very carefully at those photos especially the one with the rows of poor kids in iron lungs, it's so tragic I want to cry.
I know, I lived through that 1950s/60s polio epidemic and whilst I was lucky and didn't get polio other kids at my school did. One died and another in my class ended up not being able to walk without calipers on his legs. It was terrible.
I've since had both the Salk and Sabin vaccines, back then when the vaccines finally arrived everyone rushed to them (despite a few tragic mishaps with a bad batch of early vaccine).
At that time the term 'anti-vaxxer' didn't exist - as the concept was almost inconceivable.
At least some of the images that come up in that Google Images search are from the Cutter Incident, which was caused by a Polio vaccine, much like the current outbreaks that we're seeing, so that probably wasn't the best example.
It's worth noting that the Cutter incident involved contaminated/improperly produced inactivated-virus vaccines.
The article implicates live virus vaccines, not inactivated virus vaccines, in periodic outbreaks primarily outside the US and Europe (which do not use live-virus polio vaccines)
The 1 in 200 chance is an old statistic. Since that time obesity and Vitamin D deficiency have both increased along with various other measures of health. There is good reason to believe that modern people have immune systems that will be less effective against polio infections and negative outcomes.
Im tired of saying this but it’s absolutely mind boggling how fucked up it is that one of the main exports from America today is vaccine hesitancy.
Science skepticism has always been a thing; its only in recent years though that internet has allowed the rapid spread of disinformation. Glossy content created for misinforming Americans inspires copycats in other countries. It’s really depressing.
You're very kind calling it "hesitancy", too! I know that's the soft euphemism that the media has coalesced around, but "hesitancy" implies that one is on the fence, unsure, open to debate and open to being convinced. That's not what America is exporting.
America's Anti-Vax movement is religiously sure of itself. They aren't on the fence. They're not weighing the pros and cons. They're convinced that they know the secret capital-T Truth, and that spreading their gospel saves lives. COVID brought it mainstream, but if you look back at the "Anti-vax Moms groups" long before COVID, there was still no hesitancy. Their minds were also made up.
The vaccine-hesitant group is much larger than the anti-vaxx group, and the anti-vaxx group wields a very disproportionate influence on the undecided, vaccine-hesitant group, than actual real expert groups do. We know this.
I think fully differentiating anti-vax and vax-hesitatant lacks nuance.
There is no way there is a sharp line between the groups. Is it a coincidence that the increase in prevalence of vax hesitance correlates with the increase in prevalence full-on anti-vax, which went from niche to mainstream?
The data are clear. How we resolve and educate the fence sitters is the relevant question. Browbeating or shaming either group isn't productive. (arguably Trolling the mainstream is one goal of anti-vaxers.) Regrettably we are up against Brandolini's Law , where anti-vax misinformation has reached a critical mass with 'respected' personalities in media and politics participating, splashing this misinformation way beyond the niche conspiracy theorists that used to be the core.
My original comment was based on anecdotal data tho. None of the people I know that refused the Covid vaccine (initially) had any issues taking other vaccines. One friend for example who was a vocal critic of Covid vaccines, didn’t have any issues vaccinating his child this year against other things.
Basically they wanted a vaccine with a “track record” was my conclusion.
When you lump these type of people with people who think the vaccines are from the deep state or stuff like that, you can’t create good and effective policies IMO.
There were no quarantine camps for antivaxxers in Australia.
There was mandatory hotel quarantine for two weeks for incoming international travellers. Some states built 'camps' to take over from the hotels and provide future capacity, though these largely remained unused. You couldn't travel here at all for a while without a good reason, and even then you had to be vaccinated. The restrictions on incoming travellers have largely been lifted now.
There were some restrictions on going to pubs and restaurants, and even to the liquor store if you were unvaccinated. Again, lifted now.
But antivaxxers in Australia were never put in 'camps'.
It is not only an American thing. Andrew Wakefield's actions have contributed to this problem since 1998, and he is British, so it's not just being lead from the USA, it's an international con.
José María Fernández Sousa-Faro, the founder, CEO and president of the European pharmaceutical giant PharmaMar, a pharmaceutical company that creates and distributes drugs to treat coronavirus, was caught with fake paperwork that stated he was fully vaccinated.
I am not sure why someone leading a large pharmaceutical company would decide not to take the vaccine and pay a large sum of money to get fake paperwork with the risk of being caught but he was also obviously VERY hesitant.
Hearing that fact and then concluding he must just "not know better" is exactly the sort of vaccine fanaticism that creates anti vaxxers and vast numbers of hesitants. The obvious conclusion is that a highly informed person - who would also have access to non public information - thought the risks significantly outweighed the benefits for him and that he wanted to avoid taking it badly enough to break the law. Yet to people on HN it's just a totally inexplicable mystery why anyone wouldn't want to take a new experimental vaccine every morning with their breakfast cereal.
Note that the German health minister was also caught lying about his own vaccine history. He claimed to have taken a fourth shot but then rather stupidly flashed his own vaccine passport on TV, so other people scanned it and found he'd actually never done so.
Given these sorts of facts the truly disturbing anti-rationalists are out in abundance on this thread, and they're not the hesitants!
> Science skepticism has always been a thing; its only in recent years though that internet has allowed the rapid spread of disinformation. Glossy content created for misinforming Americans inspires copycats in other countries. It’s really depressing.
It may be depressing, but it's not helpful to associate it with "science skepticism".
The vaccine "hesitant" you refer to are not skeptical of science. They freely use the language and processes of science as their argument. You or I may think they misuse the language, make unconvincing assumptions, etc, but there's nothing to it that's skeptical of science.
Where vaccine hesitancy is rooted in science skepticism, you see the hesitant relying on alternative means of knowing why vaccines aren't right for them. You can think of the classic faith healing communities l̶i̶k̶e̶ ̶C̶h̶r̶i̶s̶t̶i̶a̶n̶ ̶S̶c̶i̶e̶n̶t̶i̶s̶t̶s̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶J̶e̶h̶o̶v̶a̶h̶'̶s̶ ̶W̶i̶t̶n̶e̶s̶s̶e̶s̶ as an example of that.
The contagious skepticism that you're talking about is of institutions and authority. They don't trust Fauci or the CDC or the WHO or Pfizer or whomever to to communicate honestly, objectively, and in their own interests. They believe that these institutions can not be trusted to communicate scientific knowledge free of political bias.
And when you look at it that way, of course America is the exporter of that. While responsible for founding some impressive modern institutions, the founding myth of the nation is all about skepticism of institution and authority. The country is constitutionally designed to live in perpetual tension with itself, and that's what's getting exported now.
> They freely use the language and processes of science as their argument. You or I may think they misuse the language, make unconvincing assumptions, etc, but there's nothing to it that's skeptical of science.
Words are different than the things they refer to. Using "sciency" words doesn't neccesarily mean people are following the scientific method just like how soverign citizens aren't actually lawyers.
What matters is the meaning of the words, not what they superficially sound like.
* to be clear, im not saying that all antivaccine people are neccesarily anti-science, just that the superficial form of the words they use is irrelavent.
Sure, but practicing science poorly, or communicating about it naively, is not the same as being science skeptical or anti-science. That's the point.
If it helps to situate it in a different truth system: Heresy may be wrong according to the prevailing doctrine or theologically unsound, but it's still operating within the religious system of belief.
Professing belief unitarianism is not atheism, and making unconvincing or unsound scientific arguments is not anti-science.
That cuts in both directions. COVID proved beyond any doubt at all for those paying attention that the public health institutions are overrun with pseudo-science. Their claims are literally nothing but sciency words, and lots of people who refuse to take vaccines now point to that fact (which is easily proven) as a good reason to stay away from them.
Actually it's worse than institutions just using science incorrectly. They just flat out make up scientific sounding claims. The claim that everyone had to take the vaxx even if they weren't elderly was rooted in claims that the COVID vaccines would create herd immunity by stopping transmission. Go try and find the underlying scientific evidence that led to that belief - there isn't any. They just made it up because they knew it'd cause the Vaccine True Believers to force everyone around them to take it. And those people were now revealed to not only be idiots: the vaccines have never stopped transmission, but in many case flat out evil authoritarians as well.
>They believe that these institutions can not be trusted to communicate scientific knowledge free of political bias.
>And when you look at it that way, of course America is the exporter of that.
Yes, we Americans are a distrustful bunch. But there's more to this outcome than just being a stubborn, cranky and untrusting people.
As Peter Medawar[0] described[1]:
The USA is so enormous, and so numerous are its schools,
colleges and religious seminaries, many devoted to special
religious beliefs ranging from the unorthodox to the dotty,
that we can hardly wonder at its yielding a more bounteous
harvest of gobbledygook than the rest of the world put
together.
That's one of the other (related, but distinct) circumstances at play in this sort of "gobbledygook."
You hit the nail on the head. It’s about power and authority.
The tragic situation in New York with respect to polio is all about the intersection of religion, power and control. People seeking that power need it attack the credibility of government institutions because they are a threat. If people die or suffer, so be it. It’s cynical and gross.
Jehovah's Witnesses are not a faith healing community and their religion is not anti-vaccination [1] [2]. Christian Scientists do first turn to prayer for healing, but it is not part of the dogma. Their church is fine with members who get vaccinated [3].
Good to know! I was wary about naming names and am now bummed I labeled them wrongly, but had wanted to illustrate a familiar example of skepticism towards a system as distinct from debate within a system.
The Declaration of Independence and Constitution establish that all governments are vulnerable to becoming tyrannical, and the Bill of Rights establishes that people have specific rights that supersede the sovereign bodies that govern them. It insists on the government providing allowance for rights that may be used against it.
You can say that's a good and admirable thing, but it also takes a revolutionary tension between people and government and structures into the national identity.
Thank you-- the CIA's fake vaccine operation should be in the first or second paragraph of every article that discusses polio outbreaks. It has had a huge effect on public health.
Yeah, I wish it was only America, but the UK have their own antivaxx propagandists. What's the motivation behind this anyways?
Aren't there other topics to make money off off, like spreading flat earth information?
It became a political tool during the pandemic. People who were already campaigning on a general distrust of government institutions capitalized on this as a way to attract idiots into voting for them.
To be fair, America-induced vaccine hesitancy isn't just a byproduct of the modern zeitgeist; the CIA has been using vaccine drives as cover for foreign operations for decades, including the most recent documented use in 2011.
I’ve been pro vaccine since forever but the idea that vaccines with decades of testing have the same risk profile as an experimental vaccine rushed through the labs to combat a deadly new disease is absurd.
Nothing goes through decades of testing, they go through human trials and then monitor safety at a mass scale for a year or two and then they're done. Same as with the covid vaccines.
You can amass 1000 person-years of testing with 10 subjects and 100 years, or with 1000 subjects and 1 year. Or with some intermediate ramp-up plan.
The "decades of public use" metric needs to also take into account how widespread that use is.
Now consider how many doses of mRNA vaccines have been given worldwide (1), since the public rollouts began in December 2020. mRNA vaccines are no longer unknown, at all.
Makes me wonder if we should be specifically engineering really weak but way more infectious strains of dangerous infectious diseases. Let them spread and outcompete the harmful strains
You are not wrong that polio spreads through feces of infected individuals, your intestines are where it usually replicates. I might add though that in the 20th century counterintuitively it was the improvements in bathroom hygiene in the western world that have caused the high ratios of polio induced paralysis. Mostly because with really bad bathroom hygiene, even babies get infected with the virus, who still receive antibodies through their mother's milk and are protected by them. The immune system can deal with an infection and gain immunity in a safer environment. Now, in places with improved bathroom hygiene more children get exposed at later ages, like e.g. the toddler age. At that point, polio is way more dangerous as the immune system is not helped by the mother's antibodies.
I wasn't sure what you meant, so I looked it up: "poor bathroom hygiene" is not like toilet seat wiping or other in-bathroom stuff, but rather about pathways that make trace amounts of someone else's feces end up in your mouth.
> [Polio] is transmitted primarily via the fecal–oral route, by ingesting contaminated food or water. (--en.wikipedia.org/wiki/polio)
This can take many forms, some obvious such as if someone doesn't wash their hands after using the toilet, shakes your hand, and you later eat something; others less obvious such as if someone poops into la Meuse in France and someone gets some water in their mouth in what is known as de Maas in the Netherlands. (Not sure how many pathogens survive French wastewater treatment or how many people swim in Maas-connected water bodies during hot weather, but you get the idea.)
An ethical route would have been the decent approach even if it took a little longer.
Those sort of tactics bring the whole system into disrepute. It's similar to when cops plant evidence on a criminal for whom they suspect but don't have sufficient evidence to convict.
It's better to let a criminal go free than for due process to be fucked up and have people lose faith and trust in it. Loss of trust can spread like wildfire and overall much more damage is done.
China definitely had a lot of polio in the early 20th through mid 20th century. There are still some young people (~late 20s) who were affected as children.
Two years ago I read an article that said a recent polio vaccination offered some crossover immunity (5%) against Covid, so I got re-vaccinated against polio.
A friend of mine at Boeing told me he spent a year in an iron lung as a kid.
> An iron lung is a type of negative pressure ventilator (NPV), a mechanical respirator which encloses most of a person's body, and varies the air pressure in the enclosed space, to stimulate breathing.
Holy crap that sounds uncomfortable, I already hate the few mbar pressure difference between ground level and 6th floor, let alone doing that 30 times a minute (resting breathing rate: 12-15 breaths/minute -> switching from breathing in, to breathing out, means 2 pressure changes per breath). Surely there are more comfortable solutions to operating one's chest, something like shaving and a (number of) large suction cup(s) to operate the chest, perhaps aided by weak glue around the edges?
Edit: "in which a person is laid, with their head protruding from a hole in the end of the cylinder" whew. Does make me wonder how to prevent hyperventilation (too high a rate) while providing enough oxygen at all times (like during stress or other exertion, resting rate may not be enough).
> Positive pressure ventilation systems are now more common than negative pressure systems. Positive pressure ventilators work by blowing air into the patient's lungs via intubation through the airway [...] [this has] the advantage of not restricting patients' movements or caregivers' ability to examine the patients
Doesn't sound that much better, as I've heard that intubation is its own kind of hell. (On intubation, Wikipedia just mentions "Patients are generally anesthetized beforehand.")
>Perceiving a pressure difference from 6 floors of elevation does not seem legit.
I generally don't notice it myself, but if you do the math (office building floor height averages ~14 feet/4.27 metres), six stories of altitude difference would change ambient air pressure by ~.3kPa.
Humans can detect very small (much smaller than .3kPa) changes in air pressure, although some folks are more sensitive than others.
Dunno, I generally complain about it being uncomfortable before other people do (also on a train going through a tunnel for example), if it's an illness I don't know.
Note, this is vaccine-derived polio. This is when the oral polio vaccine (which uses a live poliovirus) mutates and reverts to a more virulent form. This version of the polio vaccine is rather outdated, and in fact a new one with much better genetic stability is already being produced. https://polioeradication.org/nopv2/
We really need to switch away from the old vaccine ASAP.
A lot of the news coverage dances around the issue, but the direct cause of this actually seems to be a catastrophically failed attempt to switch away from the previous polio vaccine. Vaccine-derived poliovirus outbreaks used to be pretty rare because the vaccine kept them under control, but there was always the fear that some war or other disruption to vaccination would trigger a major outbreak. So the WHO came up with a plan: everyone around the world would stop using oral polio vaccines with the type 2 poliovirus components (which is the main culprit and protects against a variant that's been eradicated in the wild), they'd estroy all their old trivalent vaccines and switch to bivalent type 1 and 3 ones, any outbreaks of vaccine-derived poliovirus would be mopped up with a special type 2 only vaccine reserved for that purpose, and then it'd be gone for good. Instead vaccine-derived poliovirus outbreaks exploded all over the world. The nOPV2 vaccine was then rushed out through development and into production to try and patch up the mess. (In theory they could've just switched back to the old vaccine temporarily, but that would mean admitting failure and besides they didn't have the big stockpiles of it anymore.)
To be sure I understood correctly, it sounds like the WHO's plan was a good one, given the information available and outlook at the time, and it had a good chance of success, except the low chance of failure materialized? (Aside from the part where they avoided admitting defeat afterwards, although given "and besides they didn't have the big stockpiles of it anymore" it wouldn't have been a solution anyhow.)
They introduced a real vulnerability throughout the entire system to deal with a perceived future vulnerability in part of the system. It might have been a good idea, depending on the details of the outlook at the time.. but the plan itself was a compromise and possibly not a particularly well modeled or tested one.
> a catastrophically failed attempt to switch away from the previous polio vaccine
There are broadly two types of polio vaccines: the kind that inoculates the gut (OPV), taken orally, and the kind that inoculates in the blood (IPV), administered intravenously [1]. (the "I" stands for inactivated.) Both prevent polio, the disease. But only the former is sterilizing, i.e. keeps you from spreading poliovirus. It is also, unfortunately, the one that can leave the vaccinated person's gut to infect someone who is unvaccinated.
So if you have a polio outbreak in a vaccine-deficient population, administering non-sterilizing vaccine will keep those people unparalyzed. But it will do nothing to stop the spread. The sterilizing vaccine will help stop the spread. But at the cost of introducing vaccine-derived polio into the mix.
We had the luxury of using only the non-spreading, non-sterilizing vaccine in America. That's the benefit of elimination: you can switch to the lower-risk version. It does not seem that we were able to keep it.
Is this vaccine-derived polio "medically resistant" (or vaccine resistant), or does it just infect people who may have waning immunity, no immunity, etc?
The latter - it is attenuated virus from the live oral vaccine that has reverted to a form causing paralysis. Both forms of the polio vaccine are still effective against it.
<s>Why worry? Poliomyelitis is mild, most cases are asymptomatic, only one in 200 cases result in paralysis, and fatality rates are even lower.</s>
The benefit of the attenuated live virus is that it can replicate and go on to infect others, spreading protection from virulent polio to unvaccinated people.
One of the covid-19 origin theories was that China was trying to make an attenuated live virus SARS vaccine that would self propagate through the population
It can hang out in the gut biomes of people who get the vaccine, but typically with no ill effects unless the unvaccinated person comes into contact with the excretions of an orally vaccinated person who's carrying polio with a certain mutation.
The mistake produced 120,000 doses of polio vaccine that contained live polio virus. Of children who received the vaccine, 40,000 developed abortive poliomyelitis (a form of the disease that does not involve the central nervous system), 56 developed paralytic poliomyelitis—and of these, five children died from polio.
The Cutter incident is a story of bad vaccines. The viruses were supposed to be inactivated. Cutter's were not [1].
That is not what is happening here. Nobody got a bad vaccine. This is the story of an unvaccinated individual being exposed to a weakened poliovirus, administered instead of the inactivated kind because it's sterilizing, and then going home to a community of other unvaccinated people who had no protection against polioviruses of any kind.
In both stories, vaccines are reason of infection.
I personally know few people that get Covid few days after vaccination. I don't know if they get infection in vaccination centre from others or from vaccine itself, but again... Vaccine was a reason of spreading infection.
If you understand the limitations of the two types of vaccines, then polio showing up in the wastewater in international cities seems expected.
The US and England vaccinate with the non-live version. This non-live version cannot mutate, but it is non-sterilizing- the vaccinated can still become infected in their gut- the vaccine prevents it from getting into their bloodstream and becoming poliomyelitis.
So Polio will continue to spread among the fully vaccinated going unnoticed- particularly in international cities where they can import new cases. And we have seen a tragic outcome where someone is not vaccinated and ends up acquiring poliomyelitis.
It’s only when you have low enough vaccine coverage that the strains can circulate. Rockland County, NY where it first started in the US had only 60% vaccine coverage.
Children missing vaccine appointments due Covid19 and pockets of vaccine hesitancy have created this situation. For example, Hasidic Jews have anti-vaxxer tendencies.
If this only affected adults, then I'd be fine; those idiots choose not to get vaccinated so they get to live (or die) with the consequences.
Unfortunately polio heavily impacts children, who aren't given a choice. As far as I'm concerned, anti-vaxxers are murdering kids and getting away with it.
It's kind of dumb. I was in a daily standup and someone brought up a really obnoxious blocker that I don't even really remember. I blurted out "that makes me want to punch a baby."
Later that day my boss was hovering around my cubicle with his ukelele singing a song that called me "the baby puncher" and the nickname stuck.
Isn't it time to retire the live vaccine and sponsor complete eradication using the inactivated vaccine? Yes, it's more expensive, but we live in an era where we face many challenges from new diseases like Covid-19, Monkey Pox, super-resistant bacteria strains, and the antivaxxer movements. We should finally tie up that loose end and create a success story for modern medicine.
You're probably correct. The trouble is that it's so much easier to put a couple of live vaccine drops on the tongue than to vaccinate by needle.
No matter how painless modern injections are people still don't like having them thus the deterrence rate is higher. It's a key factor if we're trying vaccinate the whole population.
The live vaccine is a sterilizing vaccine, the inactivated is not. Additionally because it's live it confers immunity to tons of people near the person being vaccinated.
It's not easily replaced, even if you had the money.
Honest query: Since I didn't see this asked in other answer threads, are only children at risk or adults can contract it too? How likely is it to spread from indected individual. The vaccination is done in childhood. I received three doses before 8 y.o., but I am not certain if this is relevant to adults & getting infected in e.g 30s. Thx in advance
It may seem simple, but there is a deep rabbit hole when you pair liberty and things seen to reduce the impact of illness on a population. For example: it is statistically more likely for homosexual men to have HIV and other fatal transmissible illnesses. Therefore, they should not be free to donate blood, so goes the tradition, since this overall increases the health of a population. This rule has come under contention lately, and if you agree that gay men should be able to donate blood, you now have a counterexample. Notwithstanding of course the arguments about better testing, and so on; statistically: it helps.
I'm not presenting an argument in either direction. I'm simply saying it's a more complex issue than "this thing makes everyone healthier, therefore it should be law."
There is a very small escalation needed to make the jump from the concept of collective negative liberty ("freedom from disease") to involuntary treatment resulting in Nazi-aligned pogroms for collective hygiene. That step is typically cloaked with good intentions and then used mercilessly without compunction by any inheritors of the system.
Also, in the real non-hypothetical world, the previous forced vaccination campaigns were the precident that lead to Buck v. Bell and forcible eugenic sterilization of people deemed unfit to have children in the USA. Which, in turn, directly inspired Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Back in the day the ACLU used to be opposed to forced vaccination for exactly this reason (including arguing that forced vaccination for smallpox was an unnecessary and counter-productive attack on civil liberties). As far as I can tell the people involved changed their minds for purely partisan reasons; there is no intellectual justification to go from there to supporting mandatory Covid vaccination and they gave none. If I remember rightly it was literally the exact same folks that argued doing so was immoral for smallpox, and their entire argument when Covid hit was just that it was obvious mandatory vaccination actually defended people's civil liberties...
Eugenics deliberately harms individuals in favour of society(I do not believe in this it favours society), but vaccines never are given with no known harm intended. In fact to the best of our knowledge we avoid given them when we know people might be harmed. I am sure you can recognise there is a very clear difference.
If you deny the possibility of forced vaccination on top of abundance of caution due to archaic examples then you will never trust progress.:)
> You have no authority over someone else's body. It sucks, but it's reality.
That's obviously untrue. For example the state claims the right to confine (and sometimes even execute) the body of people convicted of murder. And most people are ok with that.
Where the line is, is of course a complicated question, but the absolute version where the state cannot ever control people at all, is obviously false.
I had a reply similar to that on my draft. It is incredible that people believe such things.
When I was 18 year old I had similar ideas, but later I found a great song by the clash that goes by as: “I fought the law but the law won”[1].
Even the rebellious spirit of 70s punk acknowledges that one may fight(and should) but the law wins, and has power over your body however the law says so. To fight the law you cannot use your body but your mind.
> You have no authority over someone else's body. It sucks, but it's reality.
This is obviously untrue: the state can lock up and kill you, is currently asserting its right to restrict people from having abortions performed on them, and has been increasingly aggressive about attack peoples' right to undergo hormone replacement therapy, among many many other examples. Mandatory vaccination has very much been something the state has historically exercised its powers to enforce, quite successfully in the case of smallpox.
We're extremely inconsistent about what authority we exercise over others' bodies, generally, but we're a very far cry from never exercising it or acting as if doing so were simply beyond the pale.
agreeing generally with that sentiment, as a WEIRD though (western-educated-industrialized-rich). Many social systems on Earth today do not have nearly the individual autonomy that is normal to some readers here. Those social systems are stable in some way. Big sailing ships and steam-powered railroad engines aside, there is no absolute truth here.
Excuse me sir, your deeply authoritarian side is showing.
It comes down to this: your collectivism ends where my individualism begins. Can you compel me to take an unwanted vaccine against my will? You can't? It's still my choice? Then kiss my ass.
> akin to an hiv infected person exercising the freedom of having non consensual unprotected sex
I think the voluntarily (EDIT: polio) unvaccinated are misled or idiots, but this is a bad comparison. Non-consensual sex is violence. Full stop. We can start arguing that giving people an infectious disease is like violence, or this or that, mais ceci n'est pas une pipe.
What it is analogous to is getting "stranded after driving around barricades to enter a flooded stretch of roadway" [1].
> What it is analogous to is getting "stranded after driving around barricades to enter a flooded stretch of roadway"
Kind of? But in this case somehow the driver is driving a bus, or their car is pulling other cars in due to gravity, or something? A motorist who ends up on a flooded motorway endangers themselves and some first responders - which yes, is dumb, but after that initial ripple it doesn't continue to propagate the problem to other people. You can't spread car stranding.
Yes. But if my choice involves pulling a trigger on a gun, then "My body, my choice" means little here should that bullet hit someone innocent.
What's more interesting is the efforts the conservatives in the US have done to deny people their rights in this regard. And I'm not even talking about abortion. Conservatives have worked extra hard to deny Americans their rights when it comes to vaccinations and their private lives.
Broadly speaking, yes. The narrow point here is on how to deal with choices that hurt others.
On the prescriptive side, we could foreclose that choice. That's mandatory vaccination. On the reactive side, we can assign liability. That's the point of my analogy.
doesnt matter. show that an infection was caught from unvaccinated vs vaccinated. applies to polio or covid. only when u have sterilising immunity from vaccination could u mandate vaccinations or worse apply liability on the unvaxxed.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. The article is very explicit that the current polio outbreak is poliovirus derived from live-virus vaccines.
The only obvious conclusion is that people who can get a polio vaccine but didn't should reconsider getting it, because the virus is spreading again and herd immunity against polio has collapsed. Even the vaccine that is implicated in the outbreak still provides protection against polio at lower risk than getting infected; so it's not as simple as "just stop using the oral vaccine".
Impressive that one can write a sentence that can be validly parsed as "vaccination is a good idea" and "vaccination is a bad idea".
Though I'd say the obvious takeaway is that vaccination is still a good idea even if you don't personally know anyone who was disabled by whatever it protects against.
Probably that Zionist Israel's longtime allies are also reporting the virus in their countries. Many theorize the Rothschilds still run things, via the WEF and other NGOs and that Zionists in Israel were behind COVID-19 and are the real movers and shakers. At least it sounds like it's following the lines of this conspiracy / theory to me.
>At least it sounds like it's following the lines of this conspiracy / theory to me.
Not a conspiracy or a theory[0]. I get my IJC[1] bonus checks every month, and they've increased by 25% over the past year. Thanks, goyim!
We own you. You don't even realize it. We're taking the profits of the "inflation" we caused. We're forcing tracking chips[2] into every one of you morons^Wgentiles who get "vaccinated."
Yes, this is satire. Yes, it will annoy folks who believe in this garbage. But you know what, this kind of stuff hurts[3][4] people and should be roundly criticized, debunked and ridiculed. Just doing my part here.
N.B.: While I am of Eastern European Jewish extraction, I am a (non)practicing atheist. I don't buy that "imaginary sky daddy" stuff any more than I do the drivel I referenced above.
It's hard to talk about the COVID vaccine in the context of other vaccines.
The history of our attempts at developing traditional vaccines for this type of virus goes back 50 years, and we've been very unsuccessful at it, not for lack of trying.
I don't think it's unreasonable to believe that we wont ever be able to develop a vaccine for this type of virus in the same manner that we have for e.g. polio.
Is it true more-or-less that the technology chains involved in the USA/Western Covid-19 vaccines, are under development as a 'platform' for new, novel treatments for a wide range of illness? Is it possible that the billions upon billions of dollars that have changed hands in the last thirty months, are an incentive to "pile on" new treatments, and perhaps new required treatments in the future?
Wtf are you getting at? Yes mRNA vaccines are under development for many many other diseases. It’s a new technology. Would you expect the invention of a new technology to have a single application and then be put on a shelf somewhere, perhaps in that secret government warehouse where they store the Ark, and maybe the Lindbergh baby?
FYI mRNA vaccines were first developed 5-10 years prior to the events of the past few years, and deployed in veterinary medicine. Having a global pandemic led to the urgency to adapt them to human conditions where they have saved millions of lives
>Having a global pandemic led to the urgency to adapt them to human conditions where they have saved millions of lives
They've been trying for 10 years to get approval for human use. COVID was just the battering ram used to get them authorized for emergency use.
And your last point on saving millions of lives is complete speculation which is unknowable and unprovable. I can just as easily make the claim that cross reactive immunity from a precious Coronaviris infection saved millions of lives.
I don't think anyone's tried to push mRNA vaccines for polio yet, and if they did it would be a really obvious swindle - they'd run right into the same problems with the vaccines not being sterilizing that we already did with Covid and with the existing, well-tested inactivated polio vaccines that almost everyone in the developed world already has. In principle it's more or less the same problem even (inadequate mucosal immune response, though in different mucosa...) They'd just be harder to manufacture, ship, and give to people than the existing inactivated vaccines, when those are already the main problems stopping the existing ones being deployed more widely around the world.
The oral vaccine in use in a lot of the world contains a weakened version of the virus, and allows your body to fight it off without any negative effects. This is usually a 3 or 4 course vaccine.
This specifically engineered weakened virus has been shown to mutate and infect other partially or non vaccinated individuals, including causing paralysis, and is the one now popping up in more developed / inoculated areas - but again, in unvaccinated individuals.
Note - from what I have read, you can still get and spread polio even if you are vaccinated (much like Covid), but it’s an incredibly low chance - and furthermore, your risk of serious disease / paralysis / death is even lower (so we know the vaccines work). The oral vaccine (weakened virus) efficacy is much higher than the injected (inactive virus) vaccine too, and boosters are offered for those who had the vaccines as children and are now adults.
There is also another oral vaccine, with a weakened virus, that has been engineered to prevent certain mutations that cause it to spread (if I read some articles correctly), but is not currently approved for use in the US / UK.
Polio was one of the first few horrible diseases almost eradicated by vaccines. Whatever your stance on getting vaccinated, do understand that Polio has a 1 in 200 chance of resulting in severe symptoms and paralysis, and there is no treatment for it - only prevention via inoculation. It is not like Covid where mostly the older, more immunocompromised suffer - it will ravage children and healthy adults too.