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RE: Smallpox, Vaccination, and Oscillatory Epidemic Dynamics
I'm confused. Why are vaccines necessary if Smallpox has been 'eradicated'?
I'm confused. Why are vaccines necessary if Smallpox has been 'eradicated'?
Good Q. The meme I posted was totally a joke. World Health Organization (WHO) recommended that countries stop vaccinating for smallpox in 1980 when they declared the disease eradicated. Since we are using "eradicated" in quotes, and because so many intelligent folks have written on the subject, it is super important to consider the time and monetary cost of creating new supplies of vaccination in case of a future smallpox breakout . If smallpox was ever to be reintroduced to the population, the effects would be undoubtedly devastating, even considering improved quarantine strategies. Quite simply, it has been nearly 40 years since natural selection has been weeding out potential smallpox victims. When smallpox interacted without interference from modern medicine, it took lives of approximately 25% of the folks it infected. This % stayed constant when vaccines were administered, but the number of susceptible folks dramatically decreased. If the disease were to be released accidentally or by means of bioterrorism, the world would be woefully ill-prepared and the initial ratios of cases to deaths would be much higher than 4:1.
If I were a risk analyst, I assume that my calculations would agree with WHO recommendation: it is not worth vaccinating for an eradicated disease in order to prevent possibilities of a future epidemic. For diseases that are still cry much not eradicated (all of the rest!) it is super important that everyone vaccinate the way their doctor recommends. Vaccines only work if the whole population is using them correctly. One person's child getting sick because they didn't have the vaccination will cause many others who did vaccinate to also get sick. This is colloquially known as "Herd Immunity"
Thanks for the question. Hope this long-winded tangential answer was helpful.
"One person's child getting sick because they didn't have the vaccination will cause many others who did vaccinate to also get sick."
What's the purpose of getting vaccinated if the vaccine literally only "works" if no one has the disease? Why would someone who is vaccinated contract the disease in the first place since..ya know..they're vaccinated and all? Doesn't this mean the vaccine doesn't actually work? Herd immunity is totally bogus by the way. Although I certainly admire the notion that human beings should have their health managed from top-down exactly like livestock. That alone should signal that those..concerned..with such things place a high value on human life...
I think I totally agree with you on one thing: that individual's health should not be diagnosed generically. You're totally right, every person has different health needs and webmd does not have the correct answer for why both of our chests may be hurting, for instance. While I think there is a lot that could be improved in the process of vetting for medical school applicants, I fully believe that trained DOs, MDs, NPs, and PAs have the best insight on how each individual person should deal with most common ailments.
I do not profess to be vaccinologist. What I do know about vaccines, in essence has already been highlighted in this post. To go a little deeper, I will say that the theory behind vaccination is that your body will develop immunity to diseases that it encounters. Vaccination uses a damaged, or in the case of smallpox (at least originally), a similar virus to "trick" the body into creating a natural defense against disease.
Why might this not work? Try this terrible metaphor out for size: Imagine a large group of people as a wall into a country. If part of there is a hole in the wall, invaders can get in. Once those invaders get in, they can change their mechanism of attack in the future and then get in though weaker parts of the wall as well as holes. The more places that invaders get in, the better their strategy becomes in the future. This is a very simplified way of explaining how bacterial and viral diseases can adapt to "natural" defenses in larger organisms.
Its amazing how much I think you and I (on paper, or maybe in theory) see eye-to-eye. I once wrote a paper called "Medicated Reality" on how we choose to live a prescribed, cookie-cutter life. Of course, that being said, we could pick our favorite medications of which we would err on the side. I would stand up for vaccines, which fundamentally fail unless administered to a population. I'm not sure what you imbibe or otherwise ingest but the Russell quote works on that level as well, I'm sure. While mathematicians and philosophers provide us with interesting thinking points, I believe there logic only offers a starting point from where the scientific process can begin.
it decreases the chance of you getting sick by a huge amount..... it is unable to completely stop the spread of it
This isn't correct. Maybe you meant this:
Models behind the threshold at which herd immunity is acquired are bogus: they don't take into account the social structure of the contacts and treat us exactly like a herd put altogether into the same space — which is of course false. This means simply that the threshold to herd immunity is in fact lower. Nonetheless there's a lot of buzz about it and the “fake” threshold is used as reference to set the standard for vax-campaigns — and of course to say that if it isn't sufficiently high, the culprits are the antivaxers.
As I see it now, the problem is as usual that the number of people who don't accept impositions they have the right to doubt about, oscillates… There are periods with more flocks and periods with more wolves. The human kind won't be eradicated by none of those — virii and bacteria included! Sometimes I believe that the solution to a problem (epidemics) is damaging the human kind. Biological evolution doesn't count victims: it happens in the right direction, or it doesn't happen at all. 25% could have been the price for natural selection and biological evolution. Nowadays humans trust technological and scientific evolution more.