It explains why vaccines are important, why "taking it slow" with vaccines is a bad approach, and other important stuff.

Please vaccinate yourself and your kids.

Fortunately, general acceptance of vaccines in the DRC is quite high: "Confidence in vaccines in general was high and most respondents believed that vaccines work (899 [90·7%, 95% CI 87·0–93·4) and are safe (852 [88·5%, 85·4–91·0])." [1]

[1]: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3... (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(19)30063-5 )

Out of my own experience, and given the worst cases scenarios you hear from it's difficult not to fear for your loved ones (and I mean you literally feel it in your loins) especially when YOUR decision can have even the slightest chance of ruining their lives. -- Edit: Please don't get me wrong, I have kids, and their vaccines are up to date (like mine). A chat with an hospital pediatrist can help, for me it's when he clearly explained that without vaccines a kid can be gone within 2 hours. And virtually it's as narrow minded as refusing to take antibiotics.

There was a discussion on the "American Cargo Cult" some days ago on HN: https://web.archive.org/web/20030812081806/http://klausler.c...

It’s people being lazy and wanting to subject the world to their ego of “I’m so smart because I believe in something contrary to the mainstream or against the establishment”.

There’s clear proof of fraud by the idiot that started the nonsense rumors of vaccine harm, and not a single person who knows basic math has shown risk of harm. There is no excuse, other than wanting to satisfy your own ego.

GP's post is excellent because it highlights where the irrationality comes from. If you want to convince parents with antivaxx tendencies of anything, don't begin by calling them lazy or having ego issues.

Address their fears, explain how the risk of not vaccinating 1000x higher than any perceived risk vaccination can have.

I'm a parent and my kids go to a hippie school (hippie by Dutch standards, i.e. not very). The school is great but one downside is there's a disproportionate amount of antivaxxers among the parents. They very deeply believe in it, not unlike deeply religious people. I've seen it happen, calling them idiots is only going to light their fire. But reminding people why this entire vaccination thing got started in the first place can truly help sway people who are on the fence. Most young-ish people who grew up in the west have no perception about how terrible these diseases are because nobody around them gets them anymore.

Ask antivaxxers "What if anti-vaccine information is fake news planted by Russia to weaken our country?" (Not sure if the geopolitics play in your locale, salt to taste)

Only half-joking. It's surprisingly effective because it plays with their (a) propensity to believe conspiracies, (b) distrust of traditional media, (c) distrust of governments, (d) desire to feel smarter than everyone else.

I consider myself as educated, though having your own kids and being responsible for their life and well-being is what makes you doubt vaccines, especially when you read about people developing multiple sclerosis or other neurodegenerative symptoms following a vaccination.

The fact that individuals are making decision contrary to available evidence and data may be hard to accept (esp. for the HN community) but it happens all the time.

In order to convince people to change their behavior, appealing to the emotional and pro-social drivers may be more effective than providing better rational arguments.

To be clear: I am not endorsing people making obviously bad decisions, it drives me crazy, and I am 100% pro vaccines.

We have public health care and you always get at least a vaccine against tetanus if you even hit your small toe and go to the doc. Slightly exaggerated but not by much. Nobody questioned it. And it wasn't esoteric moms on youtube that let people be skeptical, it was the pressure to enforce vaccination that did. I have no data, but these are the usual behavior patterns you can currently observe in almost all political debates.

Enforcing vaccinations is mostly a populist policy.

Antibiotics are over prescribed. And due to that we enjoy Multidrug-resistant bacteria. Antibiotics are the opposite of vaccines. By taking them needlessly you fuck up everyone else.

She's just wrong about assessing the risk.

However, it's also the case that "experts" are occasinally completely in left field, and when challenged by non-experts, have exactly the same "You're not equipped to make this decision" attitude. Doctors who prescribe drug after drug to elderly people, until they have functional dementia due to drugs and nothing to do with any underlying health issue.

And the same thing can happen for entire fields, when one strong-minded "expert" manages to make one particular way of doing things or looking at things the "orthodox" way, and the field as a whole rejects any doubters as heretics. (There was recently an article on HN about how most educational researchers think whole-word reading is a terrible way of learning, but how most educators think that's the best way.)

Diversification of decisions is one of the best defenses we have against that.

Or to put it differently: There is a risk if we allow parents to make this sort of decision on behalf of their kids: that a number of parents will be fooled by charlatans into making decisions that harm their kids. But there's also a risk of not allowing parents to make this sort of decision on behalf of their kids: That a single well-placed wrong individual can make a decision which harms untold millions of children.

There is certainly a time and a place for overriding parent's decisions about their children; but it should be made in circumstances where the costs of doing so are crystal clear.

Edit: I think find ways to deal with irrational views (amplified by social media) while treating the people holding the views with a degree of respect and empathy is one of the challenges of our age.

NB "Authorities" who perpetrate these views when they really should know better do deserve contempt.

The benefit is protection against a deadly disease, for the child and for their community, and the risk is not feeling well for a day or so.

Easy answer.

Yes I'm joking and not going to try.

The risks are small, and most definitely worth it from society’s point of view, and likely from a personal point of view - They are, however, harder to assess from a personal point of view.

I am somewhat familiar with a case where a serious underlying autoimmune condition was apparently triggered by vaccination. It would have surely manifested at some point, but for this condition - the later it is triggered for the first time, the better the overall outcome. (The parents in these cases often believe that the condition was caused by the vaccination, rather than revealed by it - the truth is any significant provocation of the immune system might trigger it). There have also been cases where live polio and flu vaccines where not sufficiently weakened and caused the disease.

It is also not helpful that most vaccine proponents discount anyone who considers risks a heretic.

Confronting public idiocy saves lives, literally. I'm intolerant to idiocy, and will shoo away any loonie I come upon, sometimes physically.

It's irrational to not consider the question of whether taking a vaccine is right (for yourself [or dependents], and for the population).

The point is that society already evaluates these hazards/risks very effectively so that individual parents don't need to. Indeed any individual parent's risk analysis about vaccines is likely to put their children at greater risk.

The Tetra Fluenz flu vaccine, according to UK medical authorities, has some negative effects (flu like symptoms, not just a pain in the arm) on ≥1:10 recipients, https://www.medicines.org.uk/emc/medicine/29112.

The problem with the simplistic "just get vaccinated" approach is when it fails you've nothing to fall back on because you weren't honest to start with.

"Take this and you won't get flu, it's _perfectly_ safe", the child gets sick from the vaccine, then gets flu anyway. So, now I should trust you? That would be irrational.

Vaccines are absolutely right for public health, they may not (in rare cases) be right for specific individuals. As vaccination rate increases (close to full vaccination) the mathematical reasoning based on not becoming personally sick sides with _not_ get vaccinated.

Moreover, vaccination advice from medics does change, infant flu vaccinations has been pushed back recently. Presumably you'd have people ignore that advice and vaccinate anyway because 'not getting vaccinated is always "idiocy"'? In your opinion it seems 'just disgusting whether vaccination is right is idiocy'?

tl;dr people lying that vaccines always work for individuals is bad in the same way as those lying that vaccines don't work.

Every single Flu-vaccine has a high probability of showing flu-like symptoms. These are from a medicinal standpoint nothing compared to the seriousness of the real flu.

Even MMR-Vaccines are expected to cause a harmless form of "vaccine-measles", which can show up as mild rash, low fever, etc. Again, no these are not to be concerned about.

These vaccination-associated symptoms are widely harmless and there is no reason to mingle them with ongoing side-effects caused by vaccinations.

People act as if vaccination is perfect and has no risks and that people who try and consider the risks are thus stupid.

>"These vaccination-associated symptoms are widely harmless"

So, mild symptoms are mild, got you.

But you accept that there are people getting life altering illnesses from vaccinations?

Eg https://www.cdc.gov/flu/prevent/guillainbarre.htm says about 1-2 per million vaccinations.

>The data on the association between GBS and seasonal flu vaccination are variable and inconsistent across flu seasons. If there is an increased risk of GBS following flu vaccination it is small, on the order of one to two additional GBS cases per million doses of flu vaccine administered.

They clearly never state your conclusion, they said 'If there is such an increased risk, it is incredibly small'.

Now the question is, why would you do that?

Answer this - does vaccination have any major health risks?

Fully agree with you, pbhjpbhj. The nuance in the discussion is missing(no surprises). To add to the confusion we have both the govt and pharmas involved, and both entities are know for coverups. So who should a person trust? Yes a vaccine can potentially work very well, but it is only to the extent that it has been well designed and tested, no different from any other product or medicine.

Huge part of the needless discussion about the risks of vaccines happening in well educated parts of the population are misattributed effects of vaccines.

Everyone I know apparently knows someone that has a child that has a serious condition because of a vaccination. Yeah, right, if it was so clear cut and widespread, these vaccines would be pulled from the market yesterday.

That argument is empirically false, as there have been multiple medications and vaccinations which did widespread harm.

Granted, nearly all of them occurred 30+ years ago. However I don't think we should ever claim we've advanced to the point where we _know_ that there are _no_ medications or vaccinations that are causing problems we aren't aware of yet, especially given how long it might take for those problems to manifest themselves.

Not an argument against vaccination at all, just an argument for intellectual humility.

Once a vaccine has shown to be just remotely as dangerous as the illness it is trying to prevent, it becomes pointless and is no longer available. The respective regulative bodies in either country are rather strict about which vaccine is allowed to circulate.

Something like 1 in million do have a serious side effect of the vaccine. This is far less than the 6000 dead in Congo because they don't have the vaccine, but it isn't zero. The fact that it is far less is reason to vaccinate anyway - but if doctors can determine that your child is one of that 1 in a million before hand (they normally cannot!) it would be wise to skip vaccination for just those kids.

Some people do not know they are in one of those groups, and ARE likely to experience harm. These groups (unaware immune issues) are statistically insignificant compared to the entire population, of course.

But ignoring them is in fact contributing to the antivax movement; primes are statistically rare but if you told people they don’t exist, you would be working for the antimath movement.

The problem is: Even to well educated parents the summary "Everyone could be affected by life-long effects due to vaccination" has a drastically different meaning compared to an objective bystander that looks at the real numbers, and this leads to (seemingly irrational) decisions. Some even are mislead into feeding crusades against this "well known danger called vaccination".

bipson, Ever read of Vioxx or Thalidomide? Yes it was pulled, a tad late though. What is the point that you are trying to make that somebody doesn't already know?

2. These are not vaccines, but medications. So this has virtually nothing to do with "known vaccine-induced ongoing illnesses"

Then you have not read of Vioxx or Thalidomide in sufficient detail. There were also massive coverups (or being dismissive of reported negative effects) did you notice that when you read it?

> These are not vaccines, but medications.

bipson, what the point that you are trying to make? Is it that the production/administration of vaccines (but not medications) are not prone to incompetence and coverups by govt, pharma? It is not a rhetorical question.

Scarlett fever vaccine (decades ago) made me very ill. Flu vaccine this year seemed (it could be coincidental) to make one of my children ill enough to be off school. These are expected consequences.

It's also expected that some few people will die and others will have life altering conditions. These vaccines should still be used, because vaccines address the needs of a population in the first instance.

Although I can't prove the sentence incorrect as such, it is stated in such a vague and alarmist way, that it could easily taken as an example of fueling the FUD?

You know crossing the road can kill too. You'll probably be fine, but I'm not going to lie and say you'll never be the one who gets hit. If I did lie to you, then you heard about someone getting hit, you should then not trust me and be hesitant about taking advice from me. Now, do you see how this works with something like flu vaccine? "It's perfectly safe" and "≥10%" get minor illness from it are not the same thing - saying the former when the evidence supports the latter means someone won't trust you for health advice even if you're objectively the best source because they can no longer be as objective about it.

We spend considerable amounts of money ensuring that vaccinations are safe and effective, and we only recommend vaccination if they are safe and effective and if the very small risks (and all interventions have risks) make sense against the disease being vaccinated against.

In the case of measles there are considerable risks of death or life long harm, so this balancing question is easy.

Maybe we need better ways of telling people like her about how the risks are weighed up, because at the moment she has multi-millionaires (trying to sell her vitamin pills) telling her things she wants to hear and that make sense to her. Clearly we (the people who want her to vaccinate) are failing to communicate.

You can win people back by lying more (Brexit!), short termist (advertisers, politicians) need not worry about that, but it creates even more harm down the road.

she's absolutely right, that's why she should be begging for the vaccine.

Given the numbers you give [2], as long as the measles rate is above 2500 per 100k in your population the probability of going deaf from measles in a non-vaccinated person is higher than the probability of something really bad happening to that person from vaccination.

For persuading someone in a population where measles is rare due to past eradication efforts and herd immunity it's not so great an argument. In the US, we are way below 2500 per 100k.

To make a persuasive case using that approach you are going to need to pull in all the possible bad outcomes of measles. Deafness, death, and whatever else it can do. That might do it.

The ideal way to deal with a diseases is universal vaccination (except for people who for medical reasons cannot be safely vaccinated) until the disease is completely eradicated, then stop vaccination people.

Near the end of that, though, you reach a stage where the disease has not been completely eradicated but is rare enough that for any given individual skipping vaccination may actually be lower risk for them personally provided that enough other people do get vaccinated.

At that point, you have to switch to arguments based on the good of the group as a whole instead of personal risk to individuals.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6878996

[2] I'm assuming 1:N means odds are 1 to N, meaning a probability of 1/(N+1).

Having said that, when people hear the risk of a bad reaction is 1:40000, I believe that what they think is "my kid's chances of getting this disease are lower than that, so I am making the smart choice by picking the lower risk and avoiding the vaccine risk".

This dichotomy lies at the heart of this issue IMO.

All the numbers I can find put the risk of measles in the US at a couple of orders of magnitude lower than 1/40. About 1000 cases a year in a bad year, 320 million population, 80 year lifespan give about a 1/4000 chance of getting measles sometime over your lifespan.

If it is only one person in isolation asking this question the risk of vaccines is worse than the risk of the disease - but if more than one person asks this questions the risk of measles for everybody is higher.

There is also the risk that some mutation of the virus will evade the current vaccine. I don't know how big that risk is (the flu mutates such that a new vaccine is needed yearly), at which point everybody is vulnerable. If enough people are vaccinated the disease has many less opportunities for this and will die.

In the UK MMR is given to babies around age 1. The reason is that if their mother is vaccinated, they have the antibodies, but "These maternal antibodies decline with age and are almost all gone by the time MMR is normally given – around the age of 1 year." Source: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/vaccinations/mmr-vaccine/

Please, read before you are posting false information.

At the same time complains like the OP is just hypocrisy, since we've spent a lot of money in things we don't need (a simple smartphone) while we can feed a family of the 3rd world for 1/2 year with the same money.

And (not trolling and not personal) I still prefer my pets' lives over yours, as many of the users here would prefer their pets over the life of a random dude on the internet (like mine).

But this doesn't mean that we should stop caring about our pets. I believe that the initial statement (human life > pet life) is wrong since we should all be caring about all living things (maybe?).

You don’t get to make that decision for anyone else.

most people have to work to accumulate money. once they've done so, they are a lot more likely to spend it on people and animals they know and love than some people on the other side of the world they've never met. I don't think this is inherently wrong.

And who are we to say they are wrong? The problem isn't that people care too much about their pets: it's that we don't care enough about human beings we've never met.

And it's a hard problem to solve, because it's like a wetware problem, and we are hard to upgrade.

So do I let them continue as before and be a hypocrite by valuing fake internet points more than human lives?

The awful people in this world are the ones who know vaccines are important but just go on about anti-vaxxers while millions die who couldn't afford access to vaccines.

Any chance we could skip bullying anti-vaxxers, it's not on topic to this article and talk about how you can get vaccines to the people in the DR Congo. And it's not drones..... probably something to do with refrigeration and money. Or hiring remote people.

We have our own monied interests to do that for us

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Infektion

Of course this was in the 80's, and probably stopped now

You could make the exact same argument about the ecological movements opposing nuclear power generation. Not sure if that goes along, or perhaps across, the point you are making.