Good to know. But far from clear to me that this passes the risk/benefit analysis. You might need a booster as often as every 2 years to maintain immunity. There are many other infectious diseases we don’t routinely vaccinate for, but for which vaccines exist. Rabies, for example, is almost universally fatal, and you can get it from an infected bat bite in your sleep that’s too small to notice. Why not get them all?
Well, they have costs. Getting them all would literally be expensive in money, time, and they have side effects, some worse than others. The recommended set is recommended for reasons. Beyond that, it’s probably only worth it to get additional vaccines if you’re going to be at risk for something in particular.
According to the CDC, vaccination lasts 3-5 years, with protection waning after that. How fast the protection decreases is not entirely clear, especially on the scale of decades, but I did find this Scientific American article claiming that mortality rates were reduced from 52% among the unvaccinated to 1.5% for those vaccinated within ten years and to 11.5% for those vaccinated between 10 and 20 years prior in a study. This article suggests that vaccination during infancy reduced the mortality rate to under 5% for 30 years, and the mortality rate for vaccinated individuals was never above half that for unvaccinated individuals of the same age range. Similarly, mild cases of smallpox are far more common among infected vaccinated individuals than unvaccinated individuals. All this is to suggest that vaccination confers some kind of lifelong protection, at least statistically.
As for the difficulty, I would like to emphasize that this was very easy for me to do. Getting the appointment and vaccine took about 2 hours, and they were completely free. The swelling was a tad annoying but not too bad.
Good to know. But far from clear to me that this passes the risk/benefit analysis. You might need a booster as often as every 2 years to maintain immunity. There are many other infectious diseases we don’t routinely vaccinate for, but for which vaccines exist. Rabies, for example, is almost universally fatal, and you can get it from an infected bat bite in your sleep that’s too small to notice. Why not get them all?
Well, they have costs. Getting them all would literally be expensive in money, time, and they have side effects, some worse than others. The recommended set is recommended for reasons. Beyond that, it’s probably only worth it to get additional vaccines if you’re going to be at risk for something in particular.
According to the CDC, vaccination lasts 3-5 years, with protection waning after that. How fast the protection decreases is not entirely clear, especially on the scale of decades, but I did find this Scientific American article claiming that mortality rates were reduced from 52% among the unvaccinated to 1.5% for those vaccinated within ten years and to 11.5% for those vaccinated between 10 and 20 years prior in a study. This article suggests that vaccination during infancy reduced the mortality rate to under 5% for 30 years, and the mortality rate for vaccinated individuals was never above half that for unvaccinated individuals of the same age range. Similarly, mild cases of smallpox are far more common among infected vaccinated individuals than unvaccinated individuals. All this is to suggest that vaccination confers some kind of lifelong protection, at least statistically.
As for the difficulty, I would like to emphasize that this was very easy for me to do. Getting the appointment and vaccine took about 2 hours, and they were completely free. The swelling was a tad annoying but not too bad.