[gus_massa]

That's strange. My father was a voluntary in the polio vaccination in Argentina in ¿1956?. My mother also remember that epidemic. I guess old people here is one of the more conscious groups about how important are the vaccines.

[saint_fiasco]

A regular person in Argentina around 1956 doesn't have many reasons to distrust the authorities. But if you are an old person in China, would you really believe that this one time the government really does have your best interests in mind?

They lived through the cultural revolution, the famines, the civil war and so on. Maybe they figure they'd rather take their chances with covid.

[DiogenesKynikos]

Old people in China tend to be more trusting of the government than young people, in my experience.

People who have lived from before the revolution to today have seen a complete transformation of society. They don't connect the current government with the Cultural Revolution, because the people who took over after the Cultural Revolution (like Deng Xiaoping) had themselves been persecuted during it. They tend to see the history of China during their lifetimes as one with many struggles and hardships, but ultimately of success.

Vaccine hesitancy has much more to do with traditional medical beliefs, which is why Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore have faced the exact same problems with convincing elderly people to get vaccinated (there's also the fact that all these places did a vastly better job than the US or Europe of protecting their populations throughout most of the pandemic, meaning that old people didn't feel the same urgent fear that they might get CoVID any day).

[StreamBright]

The polio vaccine is different though. First it is not a mrna vaccine, second it is ~100% efficient in case of 3 doses.

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/polio/hcp/effectiveness-dur...

"Two doses of inactivated polio vaccine (IPV) are 90% effective or more against paralytic polio; three doses are 99% to 100% effective."

[gus_massa]

> The polio vaccine is different though.

We used the oral polio vaccine that has attenuated (aka ""live"") virus. A few years ago we switched to use only the injectable polio vaccine that has inactivated (aka "dead") virus.

For Covid-19, we use a mix of vaccines. Inactivated virus, vector virus and mrna. It was somewhat random, and each member of my family got a different mix. (I got AstraZeneca , AstraZeneca, Moderna.)

Reading only the description, a mrna vaccine looks safer than an attenuated virus vaccine. Anyway, all of them have been testen in clinical trials to ensure they are safe and effective. And anyway, the WHO is trying to use the polio attenuated virus vaccine as few as possible because there are some problems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine#Schedule

[lelanthran]

I don't think parent was comparing vaccines, he was comparing attitudes towards vaccinations.

Old people (i.e. those who saw the benefit of polio vaccinations and the horrors of non-vaccination) should be more inclined to vaccinate.

Younger people, many of whom have never seen the value of vaccination in their lifetimes, might be more inclined to distrust vaccinations.