The government also makes cars have seatbelts and airbags; is this because seatbelt and airbag manufacturers lobbied the government? How dare they make you pay for features you don’t want! If you think you’re never going to need that airbag, why should you pay for it?
I was going to knee-jerk reply to this and say I’ll gladly pay for that because all advanced nations agree that seatbelts and airbags should be standard, but I thought I’d look it up first. Apparently air bags aren’t required by the European Commission!
Thanks for opening my eyes to the air bag conspiracy!!!!1
As a reader of this site, I feel like you should understand that humans are ery bad at evaluating small percentages. Under this lens, look at the risk of harm that the vaccination poses to your child, then look at the risk of harm that getting the disease may pose to your child.
As a reader of this site I expect you would pick up on the fact that I was outsourcing this to national health care systems because humans are bad at researching literature on a scientific field of study without coming to conclusions that support their preconceived notions. Even when they know they’re susceptible to this kind of bias.
Thanks for opening my eyes to the air bag conspiracy!!!!1
Haha, right? I definitely did a double take when I first learned that.
As a reader of this site I expect you would pick up on the fact that I was outsourcing this to national health care systems because humans are bad at researching literature on a scientific field of study without coming to conclusions that support their preconceived notions. Even when they know they’re susceptible to this kind of bias.
But you’re outsourcing without having had asked the right question or acknowledging the subtlety in your outputs.
Your question in particular isn’t “what are the only vaccines I should get”, it is “how do I best protect the health of my child”. If you wanted to ask “which vaccines are absolutely, without a question important to the human race?”, then your approach arguably has validity.
I reject the assertion that you are truly outsourcing this to national healthcare systems in good faith, because you admitted to having “fear that a doctor is about to stick my kid with a needle because there was a meeting in a shady room between a pharma rep and a CDC official”. Do you have any evidence that that kind of “pharma collusion” isn’t happening in any other countries? If you can’t believe what some of the experts say because of an unbased/unquantified fear, then what value does any of the evidence have to you at all? If you put arbitrary weights on certain pieces of evidence, then you’re weighting it in favor of coming to a conclusion that supports your preconceived notions.
If you’re truly outsourcing this information to national health agencies, you would come up with a vaccine list that is the union and not the intersection. After all, they are experts who should know best, so we should defer to them, right? The intersection is merely the list that is your absolute top priority, and the union is the list of vaccines that experts believe are also important.
Like many of the other people in this thread have stated, there’s a difference in disease risk and incidence based on where you are living. If you were outsourcing this to national health agencies in order to answer the question of “what do I get to protect the health of my child”, then you would weight more highly the guidances of the agencies that are most relevant to you. Instead, you’re looking at countries with population sizes that are like, 2% of that of the country you’re living in, located in a entirely different geography, with different population dynamics and concentrations, and trying to say that they are ‘equal’.
More on the point of looking at the importance of prevalence when making vaccination decisions:
One of the things about infectious diseases is that the more you have of it in a population, the more you tend to get. If prevalence of a disease is really low, even without vaccination, you’re not likely to get this disease. This has huge impacts on why some places would recommend it and some other places wouldn’t. For example, Denmark doesn’t recommend hep B vaccine, but most of the EU does, and so does the US. Denmark’s hep B virus prevalence is 0.03%, the EU as a whole guesses around 1%, and the US is at 0.4% (though this number is believed to be an underestimate). You’re over 10 times less likely to get hep B if you’re living in Denmark vs living in the rest of the EU or the US. Given this information, would you choose to believe Denmark’s guideline’s or the US’ guidelines when making a decision about your US-born child?
I appreciate your reply.
I was going to knee-jerk reply to this and say I’ll gladly pay for that because all advanced nations agree that seatbelts and airbags should be standard, but I thought I’d look it up first. Apparently air bags aren’t required by the European Commission!
https://ec.europa.eu/transport/road_safety/specialist/knowledge/vehicle/safety_design_needs/cars_en
Thanks for opening my eyes to the air bag conspiracy!!!!1
As a reader of this site I expect you would pick up on the fact that I was outsourcing this to national health care systems because humans are bad at researching literature on a scientific field of study without coming to conclusions that support their preconceived notions. Even when they know they’re susceptible to this kind of bias.
Haha, right? I definitely did a double take when I first learned that.
But you’re outsourcing without having had asked the right question or acknowledging the subtlety in your outputs.
Your question in particular isn’t “what are the only vaccines I should get”, it is “how do I best protect the health of my child”. If you wanted to ask “which vaccines are absolutely, without a question important to the human race?”, then your approach arguably has validity.
I reject the assertion that you are truly outsourcing this to national healthcare systems in good faith, because you admitted to having “fear that a doctor is about to stick my kid with a needle because there was a meeting in a shady room between a pharma rep and a CDC official”. Do you have any evidence that that kind of “pharma collusion” isn’t happening in any other countries? If you can’t believe what some of the experts say because of an unbased/unquantified fear, then what value does any of the evidence have to you at all? If you put arbitrary weights on certain pieces of evidence, then you’re weighting it in favor of coming to a conclusion that supports your preconceived notions.
If you’re truly outsourcing this information to national health agencies, you would come up with a vaccine list that is the union and not the intersection. After all, they are experts who should know best, so we should defer to them, right? The intersection is merely the list that is your absolute top priority, and the union is the list of vaccines that experts believe are also important.
Like many of the other people in this thread have stated, there’s a difference in disease risk and incidence based on where you are living. If you were outsourcing this to national health agencies in order to answer the question of “what do I get to protect the health of my child”, then you would weight more highly the guidances of the agencies that are most relevant to you. Instead, you’re looking at countries with population sizes that are like, 2% of that of the country you’re living in, located in a entirely different geography, with different population dynamics and concentrations, and trying to say that they are ‘equal’.
More on the point of looking at the importance of prevalence when making vaccination decisions:
One of the things about infectious diseases is that the more you have of it in a population, the more you tend to get. If prevalence of a disease is really low, even without vaccination, you’re not likely to get this disease. This has huge impacts on why some places would recommend it and some other places wouldn’t. For example, Denmark doesn’t recommend hep B vaccine, but most of the EU does, and so does the US. Denmark’s hep B virus prevalence is 0.03%, the EU as a whole guesses around 1%, and the US is at 0.4% (though this number is believed to be an underestimate). You’re over 10 times less likely to get hep B if you’re living in Denmark vs living in the rest of the EU or the US. Given this information, would you choose to believe Denmark’s guideline’s or the US’ guidelines when making a decision about your US-born child?