Tetanus and polio do horrifying things to the body; measles and mumps are sort of mid-level, right? And something like chicken pox has a vaccine now, but is relatively harmless if you catch it as a child.
Chicken pox may be harmless as a child. That virus also causes shingles and that is NOT harmless as an adult.
edit to add: things like HPV seem harmless, but HPV infection is linked to the vast majority of cervical cancer. Things like epstein-barr are implicated in certain cancers as well.
There are no "good viruses" and just because they have mild initial symptoms does not make them harmless.
Measles is fatal in about .1% of infections (less than Covid), with hospitalization rates of about 25% and causes hearing loss and long term immune system damage in a decent number of infections.
Mumps can occasionally cause fertility issues in males, among other issues, and is quite painful but rarely fatal (approx. .03-.05%).
Shingles is terrible for adults, and you can’t avoid the risk of you got the live virus. If you’re vaccinated before being exposed, I believe the risk is much much lower but I don’t have the numbers handy.
One should never trivialize disease, but the numbers cited here is almost a magnitude too large, both for measles and covid.
The most trustworthy data sources I could find points at about .02% for measles and .03% for covid. Then of course, infection fatality rate is notoriously hard to quantify.
Different numbers of course, but not that far off -
Measles case fatality rate of 1.2% in unvaccinated population (and they tested everyone nearby, so CFR should be very near IFR here) [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8483622/]. The .02% is way too low except in perhaps already vaccinated population.
US deaths by COVID-19 are now just over 1 million. I’ve heard plenty of anecdotal stories of over and under counting, but given current US population of 329 million, and widespread vaccination, the early stage 1%ish fatality rate is about right. It couldn’t be .03% except perhaps in already vaccinated folks, otherwise we’d literally not have had a pandemic. Total fatalities with a 100% infection rate and no vaccination would be less than 100k. More than that die from normal flus and colds every year, and the excess fatality numbers make it clear that isn’t what happened.
> chicken pox has a vaccine now, but is relatively harmless if you catch it as a child.
I think if adults were catching a disease that took them out of action for a week in a fairly miserable way and gave them blisters that frequently ended up leaving permanent scars, we'd be taking it way more seriously. Kids don't make the decisions, and everyone remembers that they suffered through it, so kids these days should too...
Very true. Also, if the kids go to school or daycare (aka 95%+), they’ll get exposed to a cornocopia of disease, both known and yet to be discovered. I don’t know if you have kids, but both of mine were sick with a constant stream of different bugs from 2-3 yrs old.
I didn’t even know what foot and mouth disease even was until I saw the big ‘known exposure’ warning, and based on my youngest (for reasons out of my control) getting COVID 4 different independent times since May 2021, only one of which was a known exposure, I know there have been a lot more.
Vaccinating against the known badness just helps reduce the pain and risks of serious problems. It should be a nobrainer.
Near as I can tell however, a lot of moms and some dads can’t stand the idea of giving their kid a jab (as in, the experience of it), and use the excuse of vaccines bad to justify not doing it. Short sighted and surprising common now.
edit to add: things like HPV seem harmless, but HPV infection is linked to the vast majority of cervical cancer. Things like epstein-barr are implicated in certain cancers as well.
There are no "good viruses" and just because they have mild initial symptoms does not make them harmless.