Comment by hilbert42
21 days ago
"The problem is science challenges those who derive power from means other than reason."
There's been a fundamental shift away from science in the last fifty years or so. Some is understandable—chemical pollution, etc. which is unreasonably blamed on science instead of industry's bad behavior—but there's another thread running here and it's an anti-establishment one.
The question I can't fully put a measure on is why nowadays so many people automatically reject anything that's mandated by government even when they'll benefit from that mandate. The fluoride debate is somewhat akin to the vaccination one, rather than weighing up the comparatively minor risks versus overwhelmingly beneficial outcomes of those mandates they'll simply reject them outright.
That doesn't make much sense to me.
It's pretty easy actually. Rejecting the mandate gives people political platform. If the issue at hand isnt directly affecting you in the meaningfull way, it works like a charm every single time.
Not to stir the pot even more however when a vaccine does go bad, it goes really bad
The narrative around vaccines has been completely strong armed in different ways by both sides. Which has left legitimate cases of bad reactions to be largely ignored, underreported and/or not believed, and carries a negative stigma.
My wife has had a medically verified bad reaction to vaccine it was extremely severe. It took multiple doctors before it was recognized and by that point she progressed to having permanent disability
"Not to stir the pot even more however when a vaccine does go bad, it goes really bad"
I'm frightfully aware of that. I'm old enough to remember the polio epidemic in the 1950s and the bad batch of polio vaccine that killed kids.
I wasn't in the US and the Salk vaccine wasn't available where I was living and it was another five or so years before we were vaccinated. Before that one kid in my school class died and another ended up in calipers.
Despite everyone knowing about the bad batch and the deaths I cannot tell you how relieved everyone was when the vaccine finally arrived. No one—not one single kid—at my school skipped the vaccine. To not have it would have been unthinkable, it wasn't even a consideration.
Frankly, it horrifies me how risk averse and timid people have become these days. How thinking has changed since that time is frightening.
That's not to say things don't go wrong—they do and all too often as you are aware, and even at this distance I can't help but feel sorry for both you and your wife.
Right, that Salk vaccine killed people but saved millions of others, even now the live attenuated Sabin vaccine occasionally goes rogue mutates and gives people polio but both of those vaccines have almost eradicated that fucking horrible disease from the face of the planet, it's only politics and misinformation that have stopped that from happening.
What are we to do when things are beneficial on a large scale yet are nevertheless responsible for a small number of tragedies? For instance, almost everyone on the planet loves their smartphone yet they kill innocent people—albeit indirectly when irresponsible drivers who are driving and texting at the same time hit and kill pedestrians.
When that happens we don't call for smartphones to be banned, same when a passenger jet clashes. But it's a different story with vaccines, fluoride in water, chemicals in foods. For some illogical reason suddenly all hell breaks loose and people become quite irrational.
BTW, over the years I've had many, many dozen vaccine shots for many different diseases and I've never had a negative reaction. That's not to say it won't happen on my next visit to the doctor or, say, to next person who's next in line in the doctor's surgery.
Unfortunately, life's dangerous and it's eventually fatal. As I see it, these scientific discoveries—whilst imperfect—ameliorate that condition somewhat.
I think there should be such a thing as just compensation when anyone effectively takes one for the team for the rest of humanity. There is one way to help significantly once something bad does happen.
Awareness too, and more testing never hurts. One thing we learned about post incident is that a test of her immune system would have likely shown she shouldn’t be vaccinated at all, due to potential reactions. Why not work on making such tests cheaper and faster so we can prevent needless harm?
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