The Gaming Den

mean_liar wrote:Individuals can safely skip the immunization without threatening herd immunity, so go fuck yourself right back. Adverse reactions from DT(A)P are more common than the disease.

You're one of those people who thinks that always defecting is the optimum move in Prisoner's Dilemmas, aren't you.

Not that we're down to sound bites: no reputable medical organization in the world agrees with your conclusions.

I suggest, for the sake of argument, that the entire global medical community may in fact be more likely to be correct in this matter than you are.

-Username17

mean_liar wrote:Individuals can safely skip the immunization without threatening herd immunity, so go fuck yourself right back. Adverse reactions from DT(A)P are more common than the disease.

And just how would we know which individuals would have the adverse reaction and which people who could survive it just fine?

If you stopped vaccinating half of the population, you'd still get half of the damn allergic reactions you're so choked up about but then you'd also have many times more people suffering from diphtheria or whatever the fuck.

In order to actually prevent the allergic reactions, you'd either have to:

A) End vaccinations entirely or nearly-entirely. But once you have like half or even 80% of people vaccinated, you lose herd immunity.
B) Have enough prescience to know which people in the populace would have the allergic reaction so you could avoid shooting them up.

But how do you know who's going to react allergically. You don't know. Your experiment is fucking intellectually bankrupt. It doesn't even pass the basic 4th-grade math test.

Seriously Frank, you're allowed to say, "the population has to be encouraged to vaccinate because at some critical point the chance of an epidemic increases exponentially". Instead, what you said is, "even though there have only been three cases in seven years in the US and DTAP killed 20 people last year, you're better off taking that risk with the DTAP".

You're arguing from a public policy perspective and that's fine when talking about populations, but that's irrelevant to an individual.

You know the math so why the fuck are you lying about it?

Lago PARANOIA wrote:If you stopped vaccinating half of the population, you'd still get half of the damn allergic reactions you're so choked up about but then you'd also have many times more people suffering from diphtheria or whatever the fuck.

There's a reason I've been mentioning critical mass.

mean_liar wrote:The herd immunity link earlier spelled it out for you already, as well as the discussion on US diphtheria rates. If 3% of the population in the US lacks immunity to diphtheria and there's so few cases of it, making it 3%+1 does not present a substantial change to the chance of an outbreak or even an individual's chance of exposure and infection.

mean_liar wrote:Actually, given that some of the risks of vaccination are ID'd, diphtheria isn't really an active American problem, one person can forego the vaccine and sidestep the tiny chance of adverse effects from the vaccine. It's not irrational from an individual's perspective, given the incidence rates. If they're traveling to the NIS it's still a good idea.

Yes, there is a critical mass of opt-outs that would cause the system to collapse. Judging by the reactions on this thread I doubt that would actually happen.

mean_liar wrote: You're arguing from a public policy perspective and that's fine when talking about populations, but that's irrelevant to an individual.

Wait. What?

Odds of individual American diphtheria infection:

Given 3 cases of domestic infection in the past seven years, let's just say one person gets it a year, which is twice the current infection rate. The last American to die of it went in 2003.

Last year, there were 352 serious adverse reactions from diphtheria immunization; 77 of the reactions were life-threatening, and 20 resulted in death.

On death rate alone you're looking at twenty times the chance that the diphtheria vaccination will kill you. The odds are 350x higher that you'll probably have to go the hospital.

The reason why this is a bad idea from a public policy perspective is that if enough people opt out, then the incidence rate will increase and then instead of 1 death it will be more. At twenty deaths you're even with the vaccine, and any more than that is a net loss for humanity. Twenty deaths is very easy to achieve, given the disease's mortality rate.

[quot=mean liar]You know the math so why the fuck are you lying about it?[/quoe]

Fuck off?

Individual policy is public policy. When individuals don't get vaccinated, they create a population that is unvaccinated. When individuals accept your logic we get the measles deaths in England or the diphtheria deaths in Ukraine.

The fact is that your risks of dying from vaccines are only higher than your risks of dying from the disease if you get the vaccine. If you get the vaccine, your chance of dying from the disease is almost zero. If you don't get the vaccine, your chance of dying from the vaccine is zero. And whichever way you go, your chance of dying from the other one becomes a lot less like zero.

And the fact is that your chances of dying from DPT goes up to a larger value if unvaccinated than your chances of dying from the vaccine do if you vaccinate. Public policy, individual policy, it doesn't make any difference in this case. Sure, it's even more of an obvious slam dunk in the case of public policy because unvaccinated people are a leech on public resources and a breeding ground for new evolutions of deadly bacteria. But it seriously isn't important.

mean liar wrote: Instead, what you said is, "even though there have only been three cases in seven years in the US and DTAP killed 20 people last year, you're better off taking that risk with the DTAP".

Wait, you said there were zero cases in the last ten years. How come all the shocking statistics you produce are bullshit?

-Username17

Actually, I said there were three. I said there were no mortalities, but this turned out to be incorrect.

So we're now at three cases in seven years, with the last one being the death of a 63-year-old man in 2003.

BUT YOU KNOW THIS SINCE YOU FOUND THE LINK.

So, yes, some of my data needed correction. But your math is a piece of shit and I'm arguing this honestly, unlike you.

mean_liar wrote: The herd immunity link earlier spelled it out for you already, as well as the discussion on US diphtheria rates. If 3% of the population in the US lacks immunity to diphtheria and there's so few cases of it, making it 3%+1 does not present a substantial change to the chance of an outbreak or even an individual's chance of exposure and infection.

Great! You reduced allergic reaction deaths by a whopping 3%, because since you don't know who is going to have the allergic reaction you're just throwing darts at a board!

You put a lot more people at risk to save the life of one person you don't even know about. May I ask what was the point of that?

That 3% is actually the percent of the population that don't have immunity due to lack of booster shots or lack of effective immunization despite vaccination, according to the source you were using earlier.

That one person has a negligible effect on the overall percent of people.

There's this constant assumption that any crack in the wall will destroy the whole edifice, and its just bullshit. There is a substantial population of people that haven't been taking their 20yr diphtheria boosters (and yes, without that every 20 years your immunization drops dramatically) at any given time, and yet somehow everything still manages to chug along.

Somehow.

mean_liar wrote: The reason why this is a bad idea from a public policy perspective is that if enough people opt out, then the incidence rate will increase and then instead of 1 death it will be more. At twenty deaths you're even with the vaccine, and any more than that is a net loss for humanity. Twenty deaths is very easy to achieve, given the disease's mortality rate.

No, I understand all the things about the vaccine. What has me confused was your "public policy is irrelevant for an individual" rubbish.

mean_liar wrote:That 3% is actually the percent of the population that don't have immunity due to lack of booster shots or lack of effective immunization despite vaccination, according to the source you were using earlier.

No, mean_liar, I'm talking about proportions.

If you intentionally exclude more vaccinations for individuals like you propose, you are going to end up with a greater number of people than we already have unvaccinated.

But how do we know that the unvaccinated people are lazy/poor/religiously insane and are just being douchebags and who would actually be in danger of vaccination? We don't.

If you have 50 people die of allergic reactions to vaccination a year with 100% of the population vaccinated and then drop to 80% of the population vaccination, you're still only saving 10 people at the cost of losing herd immunity.

Because the disease can sustain a certain population of people that are not effectively immunized. It's a public policy goal to have the population of immunized people as low as possible; it's an individual's goal to maintain protection by virtue of the herd while foregoing the additional risk of vaccination.

The Army wants more troops, but from your perspective as long as the Army has enough troops, you're not in danger and there's no pressing need to actually join the Army.

The individual's goals are different from public policy's: the individual merely wants to be safe, but policy wants to have as wide a buffer as possible. There's a gap between those goals.

The thing about your statistics is that they are still wrong. Checking up on news stories from this month, and bam:
A poorly written news story.

Myocarditis is not a virus, it's a symptom. And yeah, that was quite likely our friend Diphtheria. People die at a pretty regular rate from diphtheria even in the United States. The fact that it doesn't even matter from the standpoint of risk analysis is of course the real point. But the fact that even your numbers are wrong is certainly illustrative.

-Username17

Lago PARANOIA wrote:If you have 50 people die of allergic reactions to vaccination a year with 100% of the population vaccinated and then drop to 80% of the population vaccination, you're still only saving 10 people at the cost of losing herd immunity.

Yes, this is entirely true. What that number is appears to be variable, but low in developed countries.

For example, Spain was at 29% immunity ten years ago:

http://tinyurl.com/yzuzntt

However, they haven't had any cases reported to the WHO since 1997:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Diphterie.png

So when do the claxons go off and you force everyone to get a shot that could kill them? The CDC is trying to maintain as close to 100% immunity as they can, but what's the cost of that? Can lower immunity rates be safely sustained?

In the case of Spain, it seems so. The NIS outbreaks (again) were in extremely vulnerable populations with dramatically different demographics and public policy reactivity.

And lest we forget, the Diphtheria vaccine is actually DPT: Diphtheria, Pertussis, Tetanus. And all three are killers.
And they all still kill Americans. And hey, remember that lowering the rates of Pertussis saves actual babies.

But hey, I guess those babies don't have any spiritual potential worth, what with being born alive and all.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:The thing about your statistics is that they are still wrong. Checking up on news stories from this month, and bam:
A poorly written news story.

Myocarditis is not a virus, it's a symptom. And yeah, that was quite likely our friend Diphtheria. People die at a pretty regular rate from diphtheria even in the United States. The fact that it doesn't even matter from the standpoint of risk analysis is of course the real point. But the fact that even your numbers are wrong is certainly illustrative.

Maybe they'll report it to the CDC and the WHO. Or maybe you're just full of shit (again), and arguing dishonestly (again).

I'd quote the baby comment but it's clear that you're just trolling.

I completely believe that Pertussis is worth vaccinating against. Tetanus as well.

mean_liar wrote: It's a public policy goal to have the population of immunized people as low as possible;

Don't you mean as high as possible? When you say as low as possible it sounds like you're saying shit like personal freedom is more important than prevent disease outbreaks.

mean_liar wrote:it's an individual's goal to maintain protection by virtue of the herd while foregoing the additional risk of vaccination.

It's also an individual goal to accumulate as much money as quickly as possible. SHOULD we just let them rob banks? SHOULD we just let them cheat on taxes, and just consider it the cost of freedom? Or should we force compliance with this shitbirds whenever possible, taking money out of their paychecks and sending them to prison for robbery?

Honestly, who cares what the fuck these people want? They want a selfish goal for no reason other than to preserve their little baby feelings and/or to appease their scatological rape fairy.

mean_liar wrote: The Army wants more troops, but from your perspective as long as the Army has enough troops, you're not in danger and there's no pressing need to actually join the Army.

These two things are comparable only in the most asinine of ways. You only need about 1-2% of your population in the military to have national defense. You need a much higher proportion of your population to be immunized to have a defense against disease.

mean_liar wrote: The individual's goals are different from public policy's: the individual merely wants to be safe, but policy wants to have as wide a buffer as possible. There's a gap between those goals.

Then fuck them. If their goal leads to instituting a tragedy of the commons situation then they should shut their goddamn traps and stop being such a selfish tittybaby.

Considering Spain got by with 29% immunity starting two decades ago, I'm thinking that the gap between shit bird and overly zealous immunization is pretty large.

Of course that doesn't fit the "everyone dies" hypothesis you and Frank and Kaelik like to trot out, as if hygiene and living conditions don't count for anything.

It's not "everyone dies" it's thousands die. The State of Texas alone gets two thousand Pertussis cases a year. Which is by itself more than the combined negative reactions to DPT vaccinations nation wide. Pertussis kills 40 Americans every year. This is also more than the deaths from negative reactions against the DPT vaccine.

Even if the DPT vaccine had no protective value against Diphtheria or Tetanus, you would still be a monster for suggesting its removal. But of course, it does protect against those things too.

-Username17

Mean_Liar,

Consider it this way, you can't know that the next generation isn't going to think just like you, and refuse to get their vax. Get your vax, it saves you from having to bring the next generation up to put duty to their fellow man before their own interests, and I know you're totally against that kind of shit.

FrankTrollman wrote:It's not "everyone dies" it's thousands die. The State of Texas alone gets two thousand Pertussis cases a year. Which is by itself more than the combined negative reactions to DPT vaccinations nation wide. Pertussis kills 40 Americans every year. This is also more than the deaths from negative reactions against the DPT vaccine.

Even if the DPT vaccine had no protective value against Diphtheria or Tetanus, you would still be a monster for suggesting its removal. But of course, it does protect against those things too.

-Username17

But that's not the argument - it's entirely possible to get Pertussis as a vaccine on its own, as well as Tetanus.

Also, you already know this, you dishonest fucker.

Heath Robinson wrote:Mean_Liar,

Consider it this way, you can't know that the next generation isn't going to think just like you, and refuse to get their vax. Get your vax, it saves you from having to bring the next generation up to put duty to their fellow man before their own interests, and I know you're totally against that kind of shit.

In cases where incidences increase and a need for control is imminent it's incumbent on a citizen to get vaccinated. But as a general matter of course I simply don't believe it needs to be pursued so aggressively - with regard to diphtheria in the US as the only real fatal disease I'm aware of with such low incidences where the population can sustain such high numbers of unimmunized people.

Just so we're totally clear, when public policy has a goal that conflicts with individual actors, it's up to the public policy to ensure compliance.

The classic example is tax collection. I don't want to pay taxes but I do like having fire department coverage, driving on roads, and having a military. If the government let me enjoy these things without paying taxes I would. But they don't.

But I don't pay my taxes anyway--there isn't any punishment for not paying them so I don't. I don't even have the punishment of not having these services anymore because the other people in my city/state/country are footing the bill.

Yet I'm not the only one who doesn't want to pay taxes but enjoys tax-provided services. Say I have a bunch of other people who feel the same way I do and stop paying taxes. It wouldn't be long before the fire department went on strike, the roads stopped being maintained, and the military either disbanded or mutinied.

So what the fuck happened here? It's simple. My individual selfishness (get a free lunch), when multiplied across the population caused a tragedy (no tax-funded services). But my government really, really wants to have these things, especially the military, so what are they going to do when they have a constituency of selfish dillweeds such as myself? They start kicking ass and garnishing wages, sending threatening letters, and sending men with guns to take us to court/prison if we resist long enough.


That's why your individual actor thing is a complete ball of crazy. It's one thing if you're being fucked by public policy to resist it, but when you want to enjoy the benefits of the public policy but don't want to pay the price when you clearly could you are being a douchemeteor.

Mutilated Liar, the fact that it is "D" "P" "T" completely defeats your point.

Tetanus is literally everywhere, and you will never get rid of it. Therefore, the optimal number of tetanus vaccinations is and always will be 100%, and individuals who don't get the vaccine are making an irrational choice.

Since your whole complaint is the evil number of vaccinations, and not some stupid polio claim that the vaccine itself is murdering people, you have no argument at all.

I want you to type and submit the words "Every single person in the US should have the DPT vaccine." Because the whole point was that you think that the number of vaccines is too much, but since you agree that everyone needs Tetanus (or you are a moron) therefore, the DPT is mandatory, and any person who doesn't get it is increasing their risk with absolutely no gain of any fucking kind.

So shove your auto-immune bullshit up you ass and die. Or you know, present some evidence that it has any relation at all to vaccines, because of course it doesn't, and no one with any kind of medical training outside of faith healing thinks it does.

Re: Entire medical establishment v Internet Kook conspiracy theorist.

mean_liar wrote: But that's not the argument - it's entirely possible to get Pertussis as a vaccine on its own, as well as Tetanus.

Also, you already know this, you dishonest fucker.

For some reason (probably poor genetic material), you sure like to trot out the 'why haven't you answered my question' bullshit when you don't answer peoples' questions yourselves.

You recommended doing this earlier with rubella/mumps/measles and then I asked you why the fuck would we do that? Gee, I never got an answer to that. Could it be that there's no answer that wouldn't have undermine your point? If you got rid of the rubella part it wouldn't be an argument against vaccination, it would be an argument against the rubella vaccine--which of course would undermine your entire point by tacitly admitting that vaccines do do shit after all.


If you want to argue against the efficacy of certain vaccines rather than the idea of vaccination period, that's one thing, but that's not what you did.

You look for one disease that you think is 'cured' that happens to be part of the batch and then use that reasoning to throw out the entire batch.

Who's the dishonest one now, mean_liar?