Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by XorNot 3835 days ago
Vaccine induced polio is not nearly as bad as wild-type polio. And this would also be the reason we phased out giving the polio vaccine.
1 comments

So the probability of a health issue attributed to vaccine is higher than probability of a health issue attributed to the original disease.

Isn't that the core of the anti-vaxxers arguments?

No, the probability of getting a health issue due to the vaccine has now become much higher then the probability of getting polio. Your comment rather suggests you don't know much about polio: I suggest looking it up.

But that only applies to diseases which lack a natural harbor like polio does, where eradication is practical. Stop vaccinating for measles and oh surprise there is now an outbreak of measles. We haven't needed to seriously vaccinate for polio for over a decade.

But that itself is all sorts of iffy because there are two quite different polio vaccines of different effectiveness.

Imagine a member of general public not knowing much about polio. Imagine them reading the fact that medical establishment knowingly injected people with problematic substances, and then apologetically backed down from its position later on and reverted its recommendations. Scanning the health news seems to imply similar retractions in other areas of medical research (saturated fats were bad, and now they're not; coffee was dangerous, and now it's good for you). There's also the news that flu vaccines are basically useless as they fight last year's flu.

Now try to convince the aforementioned member of general public to treat the current corpus of medical research as a gospel.

I dont't defend those decisions, but I can see how a rational person might develop somewhat of a sceptical view.