[AnimalMuppet]

Not yet. What's the US population? 300 million, say, roughly? 1 in 10000 rate of nasty side effects is 30,000 people. The measles outbreak isn't that big... yet. If 75 cases is 9.8%, then the outbreak is about 750 people... so far.

[Edit: The thing is (as most people here probably know), you can (mostly) safely be unvaccinated if everyone else is vaccinated, because you probably won't ever be exposed. But when other people also aren't vaccinated, it's more risky.]

[llukas]

In EU on medical leaflets risk for various side effects of drug is in form 1 in 10^N cases where N varies.

US leaflets contain useless word descriptions.

Hint: After reading EU style leaflet you know 1 in 10000 rate is very high for nasty side effect. Rare is something like 1 in 1000000

[AnimalMuppet]

Hey, I didn't make that number up - Confusion did. I just used his/her number to show that his/her conclusions didn't yet follow.

[Confusion]

For measles, herd immunity requires a 95% vaccination rate. So where there are outbreaks they have apparently dropped below that. Would the entire population drop below that, at least 5% of the entire population would get measles. Since a lot more than 0.2% would suffer nasty side effects from measles, I said 1 in 10k, because even if it were 1 in 10k, the country would be better off with more than 95% getting vaccinations.

I thought I could riff on olliej’s obviously sardonic comment, but as you I seem to have miscalculated how the comment is read.

[hobs]

Before the introduction of measles vaccine in 1963 and widespread vaccination, major epidemics occurred approximately every 2–3 years and measles caused an estimated 2.6 million deaths each year.

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/measles

So, you were saying?

[AnimalMuppet]

Not what you think I was, apparently.

I was pointing out that Confusion's conclusion didn't follow from his/her number, yet, but it could soon, even with Confusion's far-too-high number for major side effects. I guess I said it badly, because everyone seems to think I'm an anti-vaccination apologist or something.

[olliej]

This "safely be unvaccinated" nonsense is part of the problem with anti-vaxxers.

It represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how vaccines work: For highly contagious diseases you need to ensure that the vast majority of the population is vaccinated, in the order of 90+%. Otherwise your "choice" puts immuno-compromised people at people at risk, it puts pre-immunisation infants at risk, and finally it drastically increases the likelihood of the virus mutating such that the vaccine no longer works for everyone.

If you actually read the article you'd see that this is an increase of 75 people beyond the existing 800+ people [1], in the pre-vaccination world 500 thousand cases were reported a year, 48000 requiring hospitalization, 1000 with encephalitis, and 450 deaths[2]. This was with a population of around ~200 million, vs 329 million now[3], so this increases to 750k infections, 72k hospitalization, and 675 deaths (better hospital care may reduce this).

So you're saying 30k adverse events (which is a gross exaggeration, as the events apply only to children <7 years old, and the side effects while bad are still better than death, but based on [4] this is around 3.5k not small but < 6x the number of fatalities)

Note this is assuming a 1 in 10k rate of adverse side effects, a subject of which of debate - antivaxxers claim higher, others saying only about 67% of adverse reactions following vaccination are attributable to the measles component [5]. For measles the rate of encephalitis is 1 in 1000,

Minor additional note, per [5], the most common of the really bad adverse responses is seizures, but the seizures have no long term side effects (as opposed to long term neurological damage from actually getting measles). The minor adverse reactions all last 2-3 days, Thrombocytopenia (whatever that is) is usually benign and transient.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/measles/cases-outbreaks.html

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/measles/downloads/measlesdataandstatssli...

[3] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/us-population...

[4] https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/101-child-popul...

[5] https://www.who.int/vaccine_safety/initiative/tools/MMR_vacc...

[AnimalMuppet]

You seem to be in violent agreement with me.

[olliej]

Multiple people have been confused by what you were saying, so maybe some editing/rephrasing is needed?

[AnimalMuppet]

Apparently so.

If everyone is vaccinated, there are the side effects of vaccinations (if any - I was not endorsing Confusion's 1-in-10000 number). If nobody is vaccinated, there are the consequences of measles, which are far worse.

But Confusion's argument doesn't (currently) work with Confusion's numbers. (Let me be clear: Confusion's larger point is correct, that not vaccinating is much worse than vaccinating.) 800 cases of measles (and climbing) is not worse than the consequences of vaccinating at Confusion's number for the major-side-effect rate. So for an individual making the decision today, with Confusion's stated major side-effect rate, the risk is higher on the vaccination side - at the moment. The way the outbreak is spreading, that may not be true for long, which I tried to emphasize in my original post.

But it wasn't intended to be a major position statement - it was intended to be a minor, technical quibble with Confusion's point. (And confusion seems to have been the result...)

[olliej]

So much confusion :D