[lithocarpus]

This is not a good analogy.

Aircraft manufacturers and airlines have a lot at stake if they let any risks slip through. If anyone dies it will be big news and visible to everyone, with real consequences for the companies responsible.

(I'm in the US so this may only be relevant there)

Childhood vaccines could cause a serious chronic disease in 1% of kids and we would have no way to know because: 1) Many vaccine clinical trials only monitor outcomes for a few days to a couple weeks. 2) Most vaccine clinical trials have no placebo control. If they have do have a control group in most cases the control group gets a different vaccine. 3) Most kids in vaccine clinical trials are also getting 10-30 other vaccine injections during their first two years of life during the period that they're being monitored for the one vaccine in their trial. So the only way this could even produce a signal would be if the one vaccine under trial was the only one that caused harm and all other vaccines did not.

I am not saying that vaccines do cause chronic disease in 1% of kids - just that it seems to me we don't have a good way to know.

Furthermore, even if it was proved that vaccines caused harm, vaccine manufacturers are not liable for harms from vaccines on the childhood vaccine schedule.

It's a very different situation from flying.

[swores]

Your claims about vaccine trials are not true. I’m not an expert and don’t have time to go and find citations to argue each of your points one by one, but I’ve read enough studies to know that vaccine trials aren’t nearly as sloppy / poorly designed as you believe.

For example, even when speed was extremely important and everyone was trying to get Covid vaccines out as fast as possible a few years ago, they still ran large randomised placebo-controlled trials (in places with high infection rates so they could get good comparison data relatively quickly).

So please stop spreading false claims about this stuff / spend time actually learning the facts. Claims like these do real harm by undermining trust in vaccines and helping fuel avoidable outbreaks of diseases like measles.

[duskdozer]

I'd be much more inclined to believe they were holding genuine, consistent opinions of that if they applied the same concern to the other end: unstudied long-term problems from measles infections. But they don't. It's the same for COVID/vaccines. Endless concern over spike protein or long-term risk in the vaccine, but happy to get the spike protein or long-term risk from the viral infection.

[api]

But that’s “natural.” This is the underlying idea, that nature absent human influence is inherently more pure and good.

I used to associate antivax with the loony left and with primitivism, which is the idea that if we abandon technology and civilization we will get to LARP as the Na’vi in Avatar. Then this stuff jumped across the horseshoe gap to the far right.

Or… maybe the new age and certain types of greens always were far right. If you dig into the origins of the new age you run into figures like William Dudley Pelley and Savitri Devi.

Disease, disability, pain, and death are also natural.

[lithocarpus]

That's a good point. I would like to see long term problems from measles infection studied and better understood, but I also understand how they really can't be studied in the US where measles is extremely rare and I wouldn't advocate bringing it back to find out.

It is similar with covid but I wouldn't say it's quite the same. The measles vaccine seems very effective at preventing infection, while the covid vaccine is not. It might reduce harm from the infection, and whether this reduction in harm outweighs potential harm from the vaccine is not well understood. It may have done so early on when covid itself was more dangerous, and it might not with current strains of covid. I would similarly like to see long term studies comparing two similar populations where one took the vaccine and the other didn't. It's complex.

With covid, in the beginning there simply wasn't time to know if the vaccine was safe. And now that we've had some time, it turns out that longer term placebo controlled studies just were never done, so we still don't know. Once it became clear that the vaccine was very ineffective at preventing infection the choice became a lot easier - get the virus, or get the virus and the vaccine, which are categorically different things.

I'm not happy to get either of them, but I'd rather the one than both. The virus itself appears to have been modified and was certainly novel to humans. The vaccines are novel and hard-to-understand in many many more ways than.

There is also a point to be made about the body being a complex system and introducing novelty to a complex system can have consequences that are unpredictable and hard to understand. Still worth studying though.