Forty states saw rises in parents citing religious or other personal concerns for not vaccinating their young children.
The number of kids whose caregivers are opting them out of routine childhood vaccines has reached an all-time high, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Thursday, potentially leaving hundreds of thousands of children unprotected against preventable diseases like measles and whooping cough.
The report did not dive into the reasons for the increase, but experts said the findings clearly reflect Americans’ growing unease about medicine in general.
“There is a rising distrust in the health care system,” said Dr. Amna Husain, a pediatrician in private practice in North Carolina, as well as a spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics. Vaccine exemptions “have unfortunately trended upward with it.”
I don’t see how he says that because he specifically mentions how every vaccine is different, which is true. The first mRNA vaccines are way more effective than prior flu vaccines, for example. That intuitively seems important for defining the ratio needed to achieve herd immunity.
The only statement that I could consider false is that not meeting the “herd immunity ratio” is “useless.” This obviously isn’t true on a personal level, but on a community level in the context of herd immunity, it seems to be true based on my limited knowledge. Every source I’ve looked at says that the US as a whole has not reached herd immunity, especially since the newer COVID variants are spread more easily and thus require a higher proportion of people vaccinated.
I don’t think this person is spreading misinformation or right-wing talking points. It seems that they have knowledge but can’t effectively express it in a way that isn’t misleading to a lay person. This (personally) seems like a widespread issue within STEM and not some comment made out of malice. There seems to be a huge disconnect between medical or scientific goals as well as public messaging that supports said goals
EDIT: I wanted to mention his comment about vaccines still allowing the spread of disease. He isn’t saying that the vaccines aren’t effective, but it does mean that you can carry a pathogen to someone else who isn’t vaccinated. Vaccines aren’t a silver bullet, even if they’re really good.
Sure, if you ignore everything and anything about the viruses themselves. Like incubation time, ability to survive outside of hosts and so on and so forth.
Everything you’re talking about is absolute garbage.
Which isn’t relevant to what numbnuts said.
But he’s implying it. He’s spreading right-wing anti-science propaganda verbatim. This is the same copypasta they’ve been spreading for years. It has the thinnest varnish of plausibility, but really, it’s complete bullshit.
They absolutely are, but that doesn’t make them the magical forcefield that those maga lovers insist they be.
A vaccine just has to make us be able to reduce the ability of a virus to spread to below a certain point, and we win. It just takes longer. But Mr. Needs-Ritalin-Cocain-and-Caffeine-in-the-morning can’t wait that long, so it fails. I mean, the least effective vaccines we came up with at the start were far more than enough to “win”.
Oh, and by the by, it’s these assholes who are why we have freaking whooping cough and measles back. We almost wiped them out, but no, the little death worshippers want to bring us back to the dark ages.