Herd Immunity is a Lie, and here is Why! (it's not a lie)
As I’m not a native English speaker, sometimes I have doubts if the meaning of the words is equal to all of us. Particularly the word
Believe
We can have the discussion about believing and we can have different beliefs if we are speaking about sports, girls, cars or food. We can have beliefs and thoughts about the topics that can’t be easily measurable.
If you plug my brain on EEG or fMRI, you could measure my response to blond girls vs brunettes, but the final conclusion would be very, very fuzzy.
But… We can’t have our beliefs about the topics that are exact:
This is a tiger, not a dog, and no matter how much you believe this is a dog, it will be a tiger:
source
5 + 7 = 12
No matter what opinion you have about this, the result will be the same.
You can’t have your own opinion about this unless you want to be wrong.
The problem with scientific topics is the fact that those topics are difficult to understand, even by another scientist.
Just like different sports. NBA star could understand the basics of Handball or Volleyball and play them reasonably well, but he couldn’t understand the Dakar Rally.
I don’t believe in herd immunity!
Well, let’s do the math! I’m promising, no formulas, lot of play, even a kid will understand
How it works?
Simple… This is known as the “game of life” and it goes like this:
- There is a matrix (Excel worksheet) with simulated people, one cell – one man.
- And they all start with the value 0. Zero means – healthy.
- But there is a guy who caught the disease and he has the value 1 – ill.
- Now, random numbers are generated around him (from 0 to 1).
- If the neighboring cell is vaccinated, it will become ill if its random value is > 0.9.
- If it’s not vaccinated, it will become ill of the random value is > 0.1.
Now, let’s play!
Open this website: http://www.software3d.com/Home/Vax/Immunity.php
We will simulate the disease that is spreading among the people in close contact.
The efficiency of the vaccine will be 90 % when the subject is in the contact with the disease.
Among those who are not vaccinated 9 of 10 will catch the disease.
Why 90 % every time the contact happens? Well, let's call it the mutation in disease and some of the immunity is lost.
Vaccinated are more ill than non-vaccinated!
Ok… Let’s set the value of vaccinated to 0.97 (just perfect, 97 %).
Now left-click some green dots, far away from the red dots (not vaccinated).
Your plot will look a bit different from mine, but it’s normal, as it works randomly.
After a lot of clicking, I managed to infect 8.5 % of vaccinated and 0.0 % of non-vaccinated.
So vaccines don’t work! Here is the proof!
There is a threshold, fragile boundary…
Set the value to 0.95 (95 %), click randomly 10 times.
I got this, 5 % infected, 4.8 % from vaccinated and 11.1 % from non-vaccinated.
That small difference in percentage, from 95 % to 97 % is the key to save those who can’t get the vaccines. Those ill people, with weak immunity, with cancer we are protecting them.
See the difference, from 0.97 to 0.95.
Now switch to 0.8 and do 10 clicks.
Wow! Now we have 50 % of infected! From 11 to 50, just like that.
How deep the disease spreads?
Let’s play again, now un-check Same as left.
We will put the raging disease on the left by typing 0 and well-prepared population on the right with 0.95.
Click on any red dot on the left side and watch.
Try 10 times, the disease will never strike far-right side
Now, change the value to 0.8
It’s a bit worse, but not devastating.
With the value set to 0.6 and especially 0.5 – it spreads like a wildfire
You vaccinate, I will not! Why are you afraid of, the vaccine will protect you with 90 % efficiency?
Let’s play…
0.1 (10 %) vaccinated, and the result is:
In this case, the vaccine protects me with the 90% efficiency under normal circumstances, but the result is only 50% because I came in contact with so many patients during a long period of time that my 90 % got seriously compromised.
this is what I love about anti-vaxxers on steemit. They annoy us enough that we scientists are finally motivated to hit back and nail the fcking point.
It will do no good with the extreme representatives of their cult as those are stubborn and brain-washed, but maybe we'll save some moderate, doubtful skeptics on the way.
Else, it's still fun.^^
Edit: I finished my first answer post.^^
Vote before reading, and now I'll read it.
https://vactruth.com/2012/04/25/change-names-of-diseases/
This is one of many that I've come across. Then I see flu vaccine was said to be less than 10% effective this year.
then we have the 'swine flu' epidemic that seemed like this exact fear extortion your promoting here.
The accusation of cult-mentality can be applied to vaxxers too.
do you understand that the medical community claims only a drug can cure a disease? yet scurvy is cured with vitamin c... what if we aren't looking in the right places for cures, because when we look only for drugs instead of natural remedies (why? because PROFIT)
why did the person that made the Medical Doctor (M.D.) use an Doctor of Osteopathy (O.D.) ?
why was the M.D. even created?
Great post. It might be a simplified simulation, but it demonstrates herd immunity in an easy to understand way. Hopefully this convinces a few anti-vaxxers to think critically.
If we teach even one single person how to apply critical thinking it will be the victory. That will be my No.1 priority in the national section.
Good article, thank you for doing the maths for us!
I think most people who don't believe in the efficacy of vaccines (or think they are harmful) are mostly motivated by conspiracy theories, at that point "believing" in herd immunity or not doesn't make a difference.
I know that the percentage of "converted" will be very low, but still, those on the "borderline" could adopt the reason and science
True, i didn't mean that trying to educate them was useless, on the contrary. It's just very frustrating to be confronted to emotional counter-arguments when trying to develop a scientific reasoning. Curious to read your next articles :)
i cant believe you calculate immunity with mathematics.. Nice post brother @alexs1320 Hope to see more of the research from you. XOXO
Thanks. Whole my life I loved math and physics and decided to study biology - strange combination, but it ended-up well :)
Friend 60% immunisation stop polio in a population ,it is due to only and only herd immunity ,I agree with u that efficiency of vaccine much matter
Of course, for every single disease parameters will be a bit different as well as the percentage of vaccinated required, but I'm sure that the kids in 3018 will learn about the great progress in XX century and mention: space exploration, nuclear energy and the win against all sorts of plague (disease) thanks to vaccines.
Thanks for sharing the website, this is really cool!
First I wanted to make it in Matlab, but how many people are using Matlab...?
Excel, it needs VBA, only a few will check the code.
And then I found this simulation.
It is really awesome! I wish I had known about it sooner, plus it is fun to play around with (I like messing around with simulators)
This one is very good, simulating the ecosystem with the "plants" and "herbivores":
https://fr.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/8506-survival
And this one has a special place in my heart because that was the first serious Matlab file I heavily modified (to function in 3D)
https://fr.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/9732-taxi-movement-of-bacteria-to-the-food
B-but, I still have to believe that the guys, who programmed this simulation, knew the maths, right?
And your primary assumption was that vaccines work with 90% efficiency. But they don't! Herd immunity is a hoax spread by the CDC. We need a vaccination against this hoax and not against the measles.
irony off
How I managed to spend 2 months here and not notice your posts :(
Like for Unpublished results
I am not posting that frequently or consistently :D
What is hard to believe is that 1 data set could correspond to reality in anyway.
What is even harder to believe is that all the neighbors have the same interaction patterns :)
This is just a fun simplification nothing more!
I did these simulations back in school from scratch in matlab, fun and easy way to learn programming and algebra!
This is quite nice, interactive and entertaining and educational.
And, I think, there's an even deeper issue here: I think lots of things are like that, not just vaccines. For instance, I often say that I will personally die because other people believe in God. When they ask me how come, I mention Carl Sagan's quote, that without religion we might now be cruising the galaxy, that science would be much more advanced. I mention that if religious people didn't believe in an afterlife, they would sponsor scientific immorality.
Modern PC culture wants to give everyone the right to believe whatever they want, but actually the consequences of other people's beliefs on ourselves can be devastating, can literally be deadly, and vaccines and climate change are just a couple examples that are easier to comprehend (but they don't even understand those, good luck convincing them about the harder stuff).
I absolutely agree with you. Waiting for the afterlife reward, justice and second chance is the biggest brake ever invented.
And yes, it's deadly.
Fun fact. In Serbia, the average salary is 400 $ per month.
Scientist/ MD some solid engineer: 500-800 $.
Priests: well, all of them drive Audi A6 or better. And their service costs 50-100 $.
And that is the reason why the average salary is 400 $ per month or 15 $ per day.
Or 2-3 Steem per day.
I don't know how rewards work for old posts, thus you got upvotes on your fresh posts
You're from Serbia, I gather?
I understood from very early on how interconnected everything is, so that 'live and let live' bullshit doesn't fly with me! If people choose to pay priests (or for cigarettes, or football tickets), something else will suffer, like teachers' or scientists' salaries.
Yeah rewards don't get counted for old posts, but the vote itself gets counted, so it's like a fb 'like'.
Good to discover yet another steemSTEMian!
Exactly! There is a price to pay.
People in West/ USA are not aware how dangerous it can be to go with the populistic instead of reasonable.
These days we have 3 cases of death from measles (first after 20 years)
about 200 hospitalized
and about 1500 infected.
Scaling up with the population of USA: 100-150 death, about 8.000 in the hospitals and 60.000 infected.
Still, there are numerous comments in mainstream media and FB that it's great, at least we will not get autism!? And we have anti-vax political party in the Parlament!?
Freedom of the speech given to the fools...
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STOPexcellent post friend, as always, already voted and I made reesteem, I thank you friend if you can make me reesteem my last post
Thanks @joseferrer. For those of you who not follow joseferrer, he is writing educational posts about math and related topics, so you can add him to your list.