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Posted by EA-3167 3 hours ago

Louisiana Took Months to Sound Alarm Amid Whooping Cough Outbreak(undark.org)
69 points | 33 comments
orwin 3 hours ago|
Already told this story, but basically my mother overreacted to a vaccine in the 80s, became an early antivax, had me, only did the bare minimum, I got pertussis at 4-5yo (lucky it wasn't earlier), and since no doctor in the area ever saw pertussis (everyone being vaccinated at the time, and everybody thought I was too, through my mother antibodies), I spent 4 month coughing (I was told), until a retired doctor diagnosed me, and then a few months again, but it was manageable. I have three memories of that time, the first three memories of my life: once coughing so hard I cried on the playground, one lying on my grandmother couch, coughing while she helps me drink, and one after getting treatment (probably for the first time?).

My siblings all got vaccinated after that, and my mother stopped being antivax (still taking 'alternative' medecine, but also still taking conventional one). I guess seeing your child in so much pain and develop arythmia because of your 'beliefs' can make you change. Hopefully things like this will be less and less common.

ambicapter 1 hour ago|
> I guess seeing your child in so much pain and develop arythmia because of your 'beliefs' can make you change.

keyword being "can" there.

intermerda 27 minutes ago||
Example:

> Parents of Texas child who died of measles remain opposed to vaccine

https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/health/parents-of-texas-ch...

EasyMark 3 hours ago||
This is what happens when you ignore basic science and say vaccines that have worked for decades don't work, and then convince 25% of the USA into believing that it's the politically correct stance to take on the topic.
dboreham 1 hour ago||
Remember: everything you see that seems odd is in service of someone's business model.
vacct 3 hours ago||
[flagged]
add-sub-mul-div 3 hours ago||
Just because you hadn't heard of it before 2020 doesn't mean it was brand new.

I'll never understand how the party that's famously against government red tape got away with manipulating its base to be against a reasonable streamlining of said red tape, once it was appropriate to do so.

vacct 2 hours ago||
[flagged]
lawlessone 2 hours ago|||
The covid one.

Why cant you use your real account, not one you made half an hour ago, to ask these things?

jojobas 2 hours ago|||
Well it's the point isn't it? It wasn't new, but unlike classic vaccines there wasn't a decades safety data. Manufacturers knew it and demanded to be exempt from normal vaccine injury schemes, governments agreed and introduced mandates.

My wife and I got the shots as soon as we could, she got a kidney complication, like quite a few people. Too bad, says govt.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000296292...

estearum 2 hours ago|||
There were decades of safety data when previous vaccines came out?

Anyway:

1. All vaccines have liability protection.

2. You could know of literally 10 people who had significant adverse effects (which you don't) and, given the scale of vaccine rollout, it would still be mathematically safer than pretty much every drug on the market.

Sorry, but you've been successfully lied to on this topic.

jojobas 40 minutes ago||
The protection terms were more comprehensive for Covid vaccines, with shorter compensation claim terms. The vendors themselves didn't trust the new vaccines the same as old one, why should anyone else.

With previous vaccines, while they were new, there were no mandates.

"Pretty much any drug of the market" is a big stretch, and there is no mandate attached to those drugs.

estearum 7 minutes ago||
Not sure where you're commenting from, but there were no mandates in the US.

> The vendors themselves didn't trust the new vaccines the same as old one, why should anyone else.

Not sure what "didn't trust the new vaccines the same as the old one" is supposed to mean. It's a totally different drug with a totally different body of evidence. The pharma companies trusted them in that their high-quality, gigantic clinical trials came back with some of the best safety and efficacy data we've ever seen in any drug trial ever.

> "Pretty much any drug of the market" is a big stretch

No, it's actually not. Even the most "common" serious adverse effects are so rare that the clinical trials would've needed to be orders of magnitude larger than the largest clinical trials ever conducted in order to detect them.

This has held true even scaled to billions of doses.

Izkata 1 minute ago||
> Not sure where you're commenting from, but there were no mandates in the US.

Oh yeah there were: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_vaccination_mandates_...

In particular:

> In September 2021, the employees of all federally-funded Medicaid and Medicare-certified health care facilities, and Head Start program facilities, were required to be vaccinated, as ordered through the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).[33][34][31] Companies with more than 100 employees could either require vaccination for all (and give their workers four hours' paid time off for their vaccination appointments); or require any unvaccinated employees to wear masks and be tested weekly for COVID-19, according to an Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) Emergency Temporary Standard.[35][36] These two policies together —federally-funded healthcare facilities and large companies— would apply to 100 million workers and were scheduled to take effect on January 4, 2022.[32]

The healthcare one happened, while the OSHA one went through multiple appeals before they abandoned it (details on the page). Biden even went on record telling companies to start implementing in preparation for when they got through the appeal.

etchalon 1 hour ago|||
We only have decades of safety data because those vaccines have existed for decades.

This is one of the stranger complaints of the anti-vax movement.

jojobas 39 minutes ago||
Well that's the point, these old vaccines were not forced on anyone while they were new.
renewiltord 2 hours ago|||
> Why cant you use your real account, not one you made half an hour ago, to ask these things?

https://imgur.com/a/WCAdMLV

What an interesting example of a symbiotic species! One draws out the prey and the other strikes. Jumped the gun this time though.

protocolture 2 hours ago|||
[flagged]
kingkawn 2 hours ago||
Too far.
protocolture 1 hour ago|||
They earnestly want you and your children to die.
renewiltord 2 hours ago|||
One thing I really liked about old Amazon reviews is that the fake ones were always obvious. "In exchange for an honest and unbiased review, I received..." blah blah. Keeping obviously shitty reviews visible was actually a signal. In that respect, it is much better for everyone if the guys with the opinion "I want to kill you" say so rather than saying "Why are you posting anonymously? What's your real name?" because someone might respond to the latter earnestly.
CGamesPlay 3 hours ago|
Hot take: delaying without completely suppressing this alerting is the best way to change people's minds about the benefits of preventive measures like vaccination without massive loss of life.
nyc_data_geek1 1 hour ago||
Get in loser, we're making Polio Great Again
Esophagus4 3 hours ago||
Meaning, let the outbreak get bad enough to remind people that vaccines are helpful?
pinkmuffinere 2 hours ago|||
I think that is what they meant. It is crazy, but there's some reasoning behind the crazy. And they did say it was a hot take.
Esophagus4 2 hours ago||
That’s true, it was a hot take indeed.

Hot as in, I’m feeling kind of feverish because I’m now sick because we let whooping cough spread to prove a point to people who get their medical information from Facebook.

TheOtherHobbes 1 hour ago||
Think of it as vaccination, but cultural.

Of course it's horrific. But it's a predictable outcome of antivax culture.

When nothing else works, what are you supposed to do?

msandford 48 minutes ago||
I mean you could listen to the reasons that people who have lost trust in the institutions say they lost trust, and then try and rectify those reasons. But to do that is to admit that MAYBE the US govt didn't handle COVID perfectly. And that's a conversation many folks are unwilling to have. So this is the alternative we're left with.

It's uglier this way for sure and will cause more suffering. Sucks.

vkou 15 minutes ago||
> and then try and rectify those reasons.

Those reasons are simple. People they trust are lying to them for monetary and political gain about a subject they personally know nothing about.

That's it. That's all there is to it.

---

> But to do that is to admit that MAYBE the US govt didn't handle COVID perfectly.

My friend, antivax bullshit has been swelling long before COVID. Turns out there's way more money and power in peddling these people snake oil than something that will help their health.

And secondly, whatever complaints you have about handling COVID, the vaccines for it were and are safe and effective, but no amount of evidence will ever convince them.

3eb7988a1663 2 minutes ago||
Current estimate is that some 5.6 billion people took at least one dose of a COVID vaccine[0]. You would think that if there severe complications, we would have seen them in, I don't know, hundreds of millions of people by now. Any day now, I am sure those people will all get super cancer and/or turn into zombies.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/people-vaccinated-covid?c...

jojobas 2 hours ago|||
It could be that the only way to remind people is to get them to see some deaths or near-deaths first-hand.
AlotOfReading 29 minutes ago|||
I'm reminded of the M.A.D.D. campaigns to reduce drunk driving with faked crash scenes in front of schools. They would set up a crashed car with dummy "bodies" strewn (and even scattered blood/glass) across walkways where everyone could see them.

I don't think it was a particularly effective tactic.

zdragnar 22 minutes ago||||
The least vaccinated communities also tend to be the least visible. I suspect it wouldn't be terribly effective in the large.
Esophagus4 2 hours ago|||
Ah, I was thinking that’s what the argument was.

To which I’d say… maybe?

I was able to dig up this paper that showed 66% of the COVID unvaccinated regretted their decision after hospitalization. The rest were undeterred, even after hospitalization, mostly due to ideology and conspiracies.

But the problem is that I wouldn’t be comfortable risking public health to prove 2/3 of a point to vaccine skeptics who should’ve known better anyway. The Hippocratic oath is to do no harm, and I wouldn’t want a loved one with a suppressed immune system or lung problems to get seriously sick because we let the disease spread by choice.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8950102/

TheOtherHobbes 1 hour ago||
The real vectors of disinformation are social media, and antivax deaths are downstream of that.

But we don't have any kind of cultural immunity to the kind of propagandised and designed messaging that drives these campaigns.

In the absence of that, learning through consequences - and coming in with the messaging after they happen - is the only thing that can make a difference.

Esophagus4 1 hour ago||
> But we don't have any kind of cultural immunity to the kind of propagandised and designed messaging that drives these campaigns

It seem like if we can find a vaccine for propaganda, we would get a lot of mileage out of it.