Vaccines

Wait...

You predate fire ants?

 

Sure. It was a different world.

 

Why did you photoshop Jesus out of that pic?

Anti-vaxers: A global scourge

Measles has returned to four European countries this year amid a “dramatic resurgence” in the disease on the continent, the World Health Organization said on Thursday, a reversal fueled in part by a rising wave of people who are refusing to be vaccinated.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/29/world/europe/measles-uk-czech-greece-albania.html

 

This admin may also want to change their policy toward NOT vaccinating the US concentration camps population.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/...early-900-migrants-at-us-detention-facilities

 

[Guardian]Samoa measles outbreak: WHO blames anti-vaccine scare as death toll hits 39

A measles epidemic in Samoa has killed 39 people, with the World Health Organization (WHO) blaming an anti-vaccine messaging campaign for leaving the Pacific island nation vulnerable to the spread of the virus.

The UN health agency warned that a steep decline in vaccination rates in Samoa had paved the way for a “huge outbreak”, with almost 3,000 in a country of just 200,000 people.

The death toll has been rising steadily since the country declared a national measles epidemic in mid-October. The Samoan government released an update on Wednesday that confirmed the death toll had risen to 39, with 35 of those deaths children under the age of four.

Measles is caused by a virus and can lead to serious complications including pneumonia and inflammation of the brain that can cause permanent damage and be deadly, especially in small children.

Kate O’Brien, director of the WHO’s immunisation department, said in Geneva that “very low coverage of measles vaccine” was to blame for the rapid spread of the highly contagious in the country.

In 2018, only 31% of children under five had been immunised, she said. “When measles enters a country like that, there is a huge group of people who are not immune,” she said.

The tragedy, she said, was that immunisation rates used to be far higher in Samoa, with coverage measured at 84% just four years ago.

Officials have blamed the low rates in part on fears sparked last year when two babies died after receiving measles vaccination shots.

This resulted in the temporary suspension of the country’s immunisation programme and dented parents’ trust in the vaccine, even though it later turned out the deaths were caused by other medicines that were incorrectly administered.

O’Brien said that an anti-vaccine group had been stoking these fears further with a social media campaign, lamenting that “this is now being measured in the lives of children who have died in the course of this outbreak”.

Misinformation about the safety of vaccines, she said, “has had a very remarkable impact on the immunisation programme” in Samoa.

Ian Norton at WHO’s emergency medical unit meanwhile warned that the outbreak was taking a heavy toll on the small country’s entire health system. New cases had “really spiked dramatically”, he said, pointing out that more than 200 new patients arrive at hospital every day.

Apia’s main hospital, which normally has just four beds in its intensive care unit, currently has 14 children on ventilators, Norton said, stressing that this poses “a huge, huge burden”.

He said mass vaccination was the only way to rein in the epidemic.

The UN children’s agency Unicef has sent than 110,000 doses of measles vaccine and medical teams from Australia and New Zealand are helping administer them.

Norton said Britain was also preparing to send a support medical team, adding that WHO has sent out an appeal to other countries in the region to send medical teams.

 

Figured I'd bump this because we need a thread with no arguing.

Texas Anti-Vaxxers Fear Mandatory COVID-19 Vaccines More Than the Virus Itself

On Friday, just after Governor Greg Abbott declared a statewide emergency in response to the coronavirus, Sarah posted a worried plea on a local anti-vaccine Facebook group. She worried that the declaration gives the government the right to “force vaccinations” on unwilling Texans.

“If they fast-track some vaccine for coronavirus, how are all of us going to defend ourselves?” she asked. “I’ll let them vaccinate my daughter over my dead body.”

Other members of the group, Tarrant County Crunchy Mamas, chimed in.

“Hide in the floors like they hid the Jews from the Nazis,” one suggested. “Hide them in our gun safe (yes, it’s a big safe and yes, we love our guns),” said another.

Though a COVID-19 vaccine is likely still more than a year away, according to experts, concerns over mandatory vaccinations have spread throughout the anti-vaxxer community in Texas, which is one of the largest in the nation. In recent years, prominent voices in the anti-vaxxer movement have settled in and around Austin, and a vocal Facebook group formed a political action committee, Texans for Vaccine Choice. This school year, nearly 73,000, or 1.35 percent, of Texas students opted out of getting at least one required vaccine for nonmedical reasons, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services. That number does not include home schooled children.

The anti-vaccine community, at large, believes that vaccines are a tool of government control that make big pharmaceutical companies rich and have side effects that can cause lasting damage. Sarah, a Benbrook mom who asked that her last name be omitted over fears her family will be targeted by people who support vaccines, said she’s more scared that she’ll be forced to vaccinate her two-year-old daughter than she is of the virus itself.

“For a vast majority of the population, this is a few days of a high fever and a week of a lingering cough,” she said. “Once you give up rights to your body, the government owns you.”

In Texas, students are required to get a number of immunizations to attend school. But in 2003, the Legislature passed a law allowing kids to claim an exemption for “reasons of conscience, including religious belief,” provided parents sign an affidavit.

Allison Winnike, president and CEO of The Immunization Partnership, a Texas-based nonprofit aimed at eliminating vaccine-preventable diseases, said the state has the authority to make a prospective coronavirus vaccine mandatory, meaning people that don’t get it will be penalized, but notably not physically forced to get it.

There are three levels of vaccine interventions, Winnike said. The first is voluntary, which includes vaccines like the flu and HPV that are recommended but not required. The second is mandatory, for which penalties like fines or barring children from school can be applied. These include the measles, polio, and hepatitis A and B vaccines that kids have to get to attend school.

The last is compulsory, which is the category anti-vaxxers fear most. Such vaccinations occur when an infected person defies voluntary and mandatory interventions and continues to spread disease around the community. A judge can decide if the person should be taken into custody and forcibly vaccinated. Winnike said this occurs most often with tuberculosis patients, and that there’s no precedent for compulsory vaccinations on a widespread level.

Winnike believes that when a COVID-19 vaccine is eventually approved, it will likely fall into the voluntary category.

“Frankly, with COVID-19, the issue is more going to be trying to prioritize who gets to get the vaccine once it’s available because there won’t be enough initially to cover everyone,” she said.

Unfortunately, vaccines only work if enough people get them to create what’s called herd immunity, which slows rapidly spreading diseases and protects the small number of people who are prevented from getting vaccines for medical reasons. When people opt out of vaccination, the community’s collective immunity is weakened.

“This last year when we saw so many measles outbreaks, they were in places where their measles vaccine rates have been declining, and that’s no coincidence,” said Winnike, referring to 22 cases in Texas last year. “It’s hurting all the rest of Texans because now we’re losing our herd immunity status.”

But for anti-vaxxers, it’s a question of individual liberty.

“It’s our human right to be able to decide what is put into our bodies,” said Jessica Davis, a mom of five in East Texas. “I will not sacrifice my family or my body so others can feel ‘safe’ from a virus that is affecting so few people.”

Winnike said the fear that men in masks will start knocking on doors and forcing people to get vaccinated is “an invention” of the anti-vaxxer movement. “It’s part of their fear mongering,” she said. “That’s not how we do public health in the United States.”

Texans for Vaccine Choice, the PAC, posted on Facebook Saturday that they’re not against medical advancements, “as long as they are never, ever at the expense of informed consent, medical privacy, and vaccine choice.”

Reached for comment, the PAC wrote, “It is also our position that the fast-track designation of the vaccine which began human trials today is cause for concern, as essential steps in the safety assessment process will not be undertaken before administering the vaccine to healthy individuals.”

Though several vaccines will be entering the clinical trial phase in the next few months, it will still be at least a year before one is approved for widespread use, according to Dr. Peter Jay Hotez, professor and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine and codirector of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development.

Hotez said this is because vaccines have to be rigorously tested to ensure that they’re safe and effective.

“Despite what the anti-vaxxers claim, that vaccines are not adequately tested for safety, in fact, there’s no pharmaceutical that’s tested more for safety than vaccines,” Hotez said.

Still, many remain unconvinced.

Jacqueline Belowsky, 23, said she’s not concerned about the coronavirus and would treat it like she does any other illness, “naturally and not in a panic.”

Her four children, who are mostly unvaccinated, got the flu in December and she said she helped them get over it in three days.

“I will never accept any vaccine no matter how scary the government makes the situation seem,” Belowsky said. “I would refuse no matter what.”

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news/texas-anti-vaxxers-fear-mandatory-coronavirus-vaccines/

On a related note:

 

I think we should do something like

A. Make the vaccine 100% free and accesible for all

B. Give a $500 tax credit for every adult and child vaccinated.

C. Allow Jobs and Schools/daycare to demand vaccine

 

No need to give the anti vaxxers ****. Get vaccinated don't worry about bible thumping anti government freaks

 

How would the people getting vaccines be anti vaxxers?

Those are incentives that would encourage the vast majority of Americans to get vaccinated.

 

The problem is that without sufficient vaccination and or infection with recovery there won't be sufficient herd immunity. There are many who for a variety of reasons preexisting conditions can't handle vaccines. These are also the same people who could be most vulnerable to COVID 19. A significant amount of unvaccinated by choice could lead to continuing outbreaks with more resultant deaths.

Also for all these people, including those saying they are young and healthy, who keep on saying this disease is no big deal and it's just like having the flu for a few days should spend some times at an ICU. I was just talking tonight to a friend who is recovering from the disease and she's a runner in her 30's and she said this disease was one of the worst things she's experienced. Death from respiratory failure is a horrible way to go. Your lungs fill up with fluid from your body fighting the infection and you essentially drown inside your own body. The stories coming out of ICU's are not pretty. Getting intubated is shoving a tube down into your lung. Patients need to be sedated because it is such a painful experience that without sedation the patient would be thrashing in agony and the intubation wouldn't work or would try to claw the tube out.

 

i don’t think you ever digested my post in page 1. Here are some examples of risks you may want to take for which you have NO choice.

1. driving without insurance, or a license.
2. taking a dump in the middle of a public park.
3. smoking a cig in most any public building.
4. yelling fire in a pre-pandemic theater.
5. performing surgery, without a medical license, on a friend
6. and so so many others...

when your will to “risk it” puts other vulnerable people at risk, we have countless laws that actually limit your choices. It’s just the social contract.

 

This piece ties together two major stories facing the US. How the Russian disinformation campaign has been spreading anti-vax propaganda and undermining faith in American science. Ironically Putin has pushed vaccinations for Russians. Am posting highlights because it is long and behind a pay wall.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/13/...1bTsHi0ezCg405PJBRqX0zxqBnbmEShlMRtZRBUJhM1Wc

Putin’s Long War Against American Science
A decade of health disinformation promoted by President Vladimir Putin of Russia has sown wide confusion, hurt major institutions and encouraged the spread of deadly illnesses.

By William J. Broad

• April 13, 2020Updated 8:17 a.m. ET

On Feb. 3, soon after the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus to be a global health emergency, an obscure Twitter account in Moscow began retweeting an American blog. It said the pathogen was a germ weapon designed to incapacitate and kill. The headline called the evidence “irrefutable” even though top scientists had already debunked that claim and declared the novel virus to be natural.

As the pandemic has swept the globe, it has been accompanied by a dangerous surge of false information — an “infodemic,” according to the World Health Organization. Analysts say that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has played a principal role in the spread of false information as part of his wider effort to discredit the West and destroy his enemies from within.

The House, the Senate and the nation’s intelligence agencies have typically focused on election meddling in their examinations of Mr. Putin’s long campaign. But the repercussions are wider. An investigation by The New York Times — involving scores of interviews as well as a review of scholarly papers, news reports, and Russian documents, tweets and TV shows — found that Mr. Putin has spread misinformation on issues of personal health for more than a decade.

His agents have repeatedly planted and spread the idea that viral epidemics — including flu outbreaks, Ebola and now the coronavirus — were sown by American scientists. The disinformers have also sought to undermine faith in the safety of vaccines, a triumph of public health that Mr. Putin himself promotes at home.
...
“It’s all about seeding lack of trust in government institutions,” Peter Pomerantsev, author of “Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible,” a 2014 book on Kremlin disinformation, said in an interview.
...
The Kremlin’s audience for open disinformation is surprisingly large. The YouTube videos of RT, Russia’s global television network, average one million views per day, “the highest among news outlets,” according to a U.S. intelligence report. Since the founding of the Russian network in 2005, its videos have received more than four billion views, analysts recently concluded.
...
The K.G.B. campaign — which cast the deadly virus that causes AIDS as a racial weapon developed by the American military to kill black citizens — was wildly successful. By 1987, fake news stories had run in 25 languages and 80 counties, undermining American diplomacy, especially in Africa. After the Cold War, in 1992, the Russians admitted that the alarms were fraudulent.

As Russia’s president and prime minister, Mr. Putin has embraced and expanded the playbook, linking any natural outbreak to American duplicity. Attacking the American health system, and faith in it, became a hallmark of his rule.
...
The K.G.B. campaign — which cast the deadly virus that causes AIDS as a racial weapon developed by the American military to kill black citizens — was wildly successful. By 1987, fake news stories had run in 25 languages and 80 counties, undermining American diplomacy, especially in Africa. After the Cold War, in 1992, the Russians admitted that the alarms were fraudulent.
...
Cont.

 

Continued from above.

A rich opportunity arose in 2014 when Ebola swept West Africa. It was the worst-ever outbreak of the hemorrhagic fever, eventually claiming more than 10,000 lives.


RT’s gallery of alleged criminals once again included the U.S. Army. The network profiled an accusation by Cyril Broderick, a former plant pathologist, who claimed in a Liberian newspaper article that the outbreak was an American plot to turn Africans into bioweapon guinea pigs, and cited the AIDS accusation as supporting evidence.

...

The trolls in St. Petersburg amplified the claim on Twitter. The deadly virus “is government made,” one tweet declared. Another series of tweets called the microorganism “just a regular bio weapon.” The idea found an audience. The hip-hop artist Chris Brown echoed it in 2014, telling his 13 million Twitter followers, “I think this Ebola epidemic is a form of population control.”

...

The next target was the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the United States’ flagship public health agency. In late 2014, a rash of fake news reports falsely claimed that an Ebola victim in Liberia had been flown to Atlanta, starting a local outbreak. A YouTube video showed what it described as C.D.C. personnel, in hazmat suits, receiving and moving the patient in secret. The deceptive video included a truck bearing the logo of the Atlanta airport.


A rush of tweets turned up the volume. “Panic here in ATL!!” one stated. Another exclaimed, “OMG! Ebola is everywhere!”

...

Six researchers centered at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that, over decades, the false narratives around AIDS had fostered a “lack of trust” among African-Americans that kept many from seeking medical care. Their 2018 study, of hundreds of black men in Los Angeles who have sex with men, reported that nearly half the interviewees thought the virus responsible for AIDS had been manufactured. And more than one-fifth viewed people who take new protective drugs as “human guinea pigs for the government.”

...

Within Russia, Mr. Putin has been a staunch proponent of vaccines.

...

At the same time, Mr. Putin has worked hard to encourage Americans to see vaccinations as dangerous and federal health officials as malevolent. The threat of autism is a regular theme of this anti-vaccine campaign. The C.D.C. has repeatedly ruled out the possibility that vaccinations lead to autism, as have many scientists and top journals. Nonetheless the false narrative has proliferated, spread by Russian trolls and media.

...

The new brand of disinformation is subtler than the old. Dr. Linvill and his colleague Patrick L. Warren have argued that Mr. Putin’s new methodology seeks less to create than to curate — to retweet and amplify the existing American cacophony, raising the level of confusion and partisan discord.


Much of the disinformation, like the Russophile site, lies hidden in plain sight. But other elements embody a new sophistication that makes it increasingly hard for tech companies to ferret out the interference of Russia, or any other country. Experts say that Russian trolls may even be paying Americans to post disinformation on their behalf, to better hide their digital fingerprints.

...

The new brand of disinformation is subtler than the old. Dr. Linvill and his colleague Patrick L. Warren have argued that Mr. Putin’s new methodology seeks less to create than to curate — to retweet and amplify the existing American cacophony, raising the level of confusion and partisan discord.


Much of the disinformation, like the Russophile site, lies hidden in plain sight. But other elements embody a new sophistication that makes it increasingly hard for tech companies to ferret out the interference of Russia, or any other country. Experts say that Russian trolls may even be paying Americans to post disinformation on their behalf, to better hide their digital fingerprints.

 

I don't atm think we need any mandatory vaccine for covid. Make it accessible and most people will get it, probably enough for herd immunity. For the population that doesn't (because of health issues or because they don't believe in it), some portion may get sick and the great majority of those will survive and gain the immunization that way. I don't think anti-vaxxers create a public health problem in this case.

If this is a virus that's going to mutate all the time, requiring a new shot every year like the flu, participation in vaccinations is going to go down. I still haven't managed a year in which all 6 in my family all got the shot for the flu in the same year. Probably we need to improve ease of access for both the flu shot and whatever covid shot may come.

 

Please go post in the hangout thread about Conspiracy Theories...it'll make it easier for me to keep all of the nutjobs in one place.