Slashdot Mirror

You can look at the data. This graph is really clear.

Check the history to get an idea.

https://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/graph-us-measles-cases

Before vaccination, measles used to infect 700,000 people per year, just in the United States. Combined, diseases that are now preventable by vaccination used to infect millions, and cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands worldwide.

This type of information doesn't seem to survive from generation to generation. My grandparents knew people who died from diseases like measles, rubella, small pox, polio, etc. I don't, because widespread vaccinations have all but eliminated these diseases. People no longer come face-to-face with the horror of their young children dying regularly, so they forget.

The math is so small exactly because people were forcibly injected with a foreign substance in the past. Or, faced with the horrors of preventable deaths, gladly lined up.

In the US, vaccination programs kill a few persons per decade, mostly by allergic reaction to eggs, the medium used to grow the vaccine. Each year tens of persons are permanently injured. As a result of legal suits resulting from such deaths and injuries, makers and administrators of vaccines were abandoning the business so in 1986 Congress created the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. You cannot sue anybody at all alleging an adverse outcome from vaccination. Instead you must file a claim that is judged by the Board. The delay is years, about 3/5 of the claims are denied, there is no appeal, the average successful claim pays about 3/4 * $1M.

I promote vaccines as by far the best choice for anyone (except in case of known immunosuppression.) My children received all the recommended doses. I myself got the measles as a young child, just like almost everyone born before 1957. I remember the epidemics in a suburb of a large city: thousands of children with the rash. Tens of them died each year. Then the vaccine came, and the measles vanished.

Nevertheless, I can understand why someone who is informed may decide that the risk to their child from the vaccine is unacceptable, especially if enforced by government edict. In 1976 the US Center for Disease Control [that was the name then] deliberately lied to the public about their scientific and medical errors connected to the swine flu vaccination program. As long as I live, I will never trust what CDC says without independent verification.

Climate prediction is based on mathematical models which are trained on historical data and then carried forward to predict the future.
This process has never worked in any other human endeavour.
For example, the same process is used by many people in an attempt to predict the stock market. Does that ever work out?
The same process is used to predict the effect of changes in the economy, such as raising the interest rates. Has that ever gone horribly wrong(*)?

You do realize what you're doing is comparing the global climate, an actual physical planetary wide system that's been here for millenia before any man was ever born, to man made social constructs and saying that because we cannot predict the latter we surely can't predict the former.

This is not sound logic. The climate and the stock market are both extremely chaotic systems meaning that small changes in some values can have huge impacts on the stability of the whole system. However what you and others making this argument always conveniently forget is that underlying the study of climate and the mathematical models themselves are actual natural sciences like chemistry. We don't have to 'guess' how the greenhouse effect works, or how much heat is absorbed/reflected by different gasses, these are all things that can be measured and tested in a lab.

Obviously because the amount of metrics that needs to be factored in to model something as vast as the global climate is so high that the models cannot be 100 % certain, and obviously there are human components in the equation that increase this uncertainty but the core of your argument is still not correct. The stock market can crash at any given time due to any number of actions and the prices plummet. For you to be able to argue that the climate is the same way, you'd have to argue that at any given moment way may spontaneously enter into an ice age, which is clearly not true.

There is no instance where a mathematical model with the complexity of Earth's climate has made reliable predictions in any way.

There's also never been a time in the history of the species when we've had access to as much computing power, machine learning and actual hard data about the state of the climate.

This is one of the real problems with the climate science debate: no model of that complexity has ever been accurate, therefore it's incorrect to be making decisions based on their results.

No. You see, the thing with the climate is: we have to make predictions because the future state of the climate has a direct impact on the survival of the species. The models that we do have reflect our current, best understanding of the climate, and they're getting better as more data come in and machine learning steps in.
If you ignore the models there's essentially nothing to base our decisions on and you could argue that it's just fine for us to start burning up all the remaining oil and gas because 'who knows what's going to happen'. But that's just BS. We obviously don't know the future of the climate with certainty, but we do know enough to know that certain actions are going to make things a lot worse.

You also mentioned disease outbreak models, so think about it in this light: should we throw out our current understanding of epidemiology because the outbreak models are not (yet) all that precise? Should the doctors stop wearing gloves, should we stop vaccinations, sanitation and all these things which have a demonstrable and proven effect on lowering the rates of outbreak and infection because we're not 100 % omniscient about the time and place of future outbreaks? Huh?

So either you can listen to the people with the most information and understanding about the climate and its current state, or you can keep telling yourself that corporations and atmospheric gasses are equally unp

The first measles vaccine (according to http://www.historyofvaccines.o...) came in 1960, followed by the mumps and rubella vaccines later in the sixties, and then the first combination MMR vaccine in 1971....

I'm not sure where this page gets its information from, but I know for a fact (from my immunization records) that I was given three separate shots (administered the same day, mind you, but not a single shot containing a combination of the three vaccines) as a child, both for my initial vaccination (1973) and the subsequent boosters (1982). My son (now 8) got the combination MMR vaccine since they no longer manufacture the separate ones.

No vaccine is close to 100% effective.

Demonstrably untrue. Many vaccines are well over 99% effective.

The protection is provides is on the herd level and NOT the individual.

Wrong again. If vaccines did not work on an individual level then there would be no herd immunity. Vaccines don't have to be 100% effective to create herd immunity but they do have to be effective on an individual level in a substantial portion of the population. Herd immunity protects those who cannot (or will not) get vaccinated for whatever reason.

Look up herd immunity to understand how this works.

You first since you clearly have no idea how herd immunity works.

Perhaps you are not familiar with the "evidence-based medicine" movement which calls blinded RCTs the "gold-standard" of evidence when testing a treatment.

Again, absence of a blind RCT study doesn't mean the observation is wrong.

A more than three orders of magnitude change doesn't require blinded RCTs to be observed. The "gold standard" is sufficient, but it is not necessary, to confirm observations that are orders of magnitude in strength. Finally, a blind RCT requires that some people get exposed to measles without the protection of the vaccine (the "controls"). That creates significant suffering and risk of death or major injury in order to confirm a strong signal. What is there to gain scientifically that justifies that price in suffering? I see no justification for it.

How can you get infected if YOU have been inoculated??? So how are they a public risk to you?

Because no vaccine is 100% effective, even if you're immunized, you can still catch the disease.

http://www.historyofvaccines.o...

Why aren’t all vaccines 100% effective?

Vaccines are designed to generate an immune response that will protect the vaccinated individual during future exposures to the disease. Individual immune systems, however, are different enough that in some cases, a person’s immune system will not generate an adequate response. As a result, he or she will not be effectively protected after immunization.

That said, the effectiveness of most vaccines is high. After receiving the second dose of the MMR vaccine (measles, mumps and rubella) or the standalone measles vaccine, 99.7% of vaccinated individuals are immune to measles. The inactivated polio vaccine offers 99% effectiveness after three doses. The varicella (chickenpox) vaccine is between 85% and 90% effective in preventing all varicella infections, but 100% effective in preventing moderate and severe chicken pox.

Further, some individuals are unable to be vaccinated due to underlying medical conditions (allergies, compromised immune system, etc).

http://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/timelines/smallpox

Actually, the effort spanned three centuries.