dr.ricky online

Tag: vaccines

  • A conversation with vaccine hesitancy

    A conversation with vaccine hesitancy

    Excerpted. 

    [VaccineHesitantFriend]: I completely understand that. We are lucky to be here in the US. And I’m doing my part by not getting the vaccine, so those other countries can have it. Sorry I don’t put anything into my body without fully understanding it, and not going to start now. That’s my personal choice, not a privilege. 

    [me] I’ll be glad to help you understand the vaccines. Please feel free to post questions and I’ll do the underlying research. You may have a legitimate concern that we have missed and I’ll be glad to learn something from it. Scientists from the American Society for Virology have volunteered their time to have online town halls to help explain vaccination. 

    [VHF]: I really appreciate that. And a question I ask a lot of people is why can’t we put all this effort into curing cancer? Or getting rid of child slavery? Just seems interesting to me that all these scientist and government officials group together to cure a disease that other scientists created. Would really love to hear your answer on this. The only answer I ever get is… there’s just too much money being made. 

    [Me] Important distinction: a cure deals with people with a disease, and a vaccine is about preventing the disease in the first place. There’s no evidence that COVID19 was engineered or created by scientists – the genetic sequence of the virus available to the public (as is most of the publications), and we can check for tell tale marks of engineering. They aren’t there. But proving a negative is rather difficult, so as more evidence arises, we can follow up. The mRNA vaccines are actually partly developed to prevent cancer, and it just turns out that COVID-19 is the first wide application of the technology. More applications will come in the future. Note that this attached review is from 2018 – the mRNA vaccines have been in development for a while – https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd.2017.243

    [VHF] Well this is where I part ways from the discussion. It was absolutely made in a lab. And your boy Fauci is a big fat liar. Thanks for the info and the responses. 

    There’s more to say about the question of money and the profit motive, but the issue was never really about vaccination, or the nature of the technology. Once a narrative is threatened, the conversation was shut down.

  • Vaccination Exemptions in the USA

    Vaccination Exemptions in the USA

    Vaccination Exemptions in the USA

    The United States Centers for Disease Control (CDC) publishes a Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, and in it they track the vaccination rates in different states for children enrolled in kindergarten, and an interesting table is the report on the rate of exemptions from vaccinations, as well as the reason behind it. Granted, different states have varying laws with regards to vaccination requirements, and some allow separation of the exception reasons between medical, religious and other philosophical reasons, which makes getting consistent data problematic. But we do have good data for the 2015–2016 enrollment, and the 2016–2017 enrollment.

    The reports themselves are straight tables, but data visualization helps in teasing out the meaning there.

    2016_2017_CDC
    Summarizing the CDC reports between 2015-2016 and 2016-2017 school years for the rate of vaccine exemptions among kindergarten students, divided by state. A number of states are excluded. Blue dots are for the earlier year, red dots for the data a year later. Note that for herd immunity, the general consensus is about 95% of the population should be vaccinated. The Y-axis displays the ratio between medical and non medical reasons given for the exemption. Note that with the exception of DC, all states have ratios below 1, which means that more people are seeking exemptions for religious or philosophical reasons than for medical ones. 

    This data is dense, but highlights some problematic states, like Oregon, which has an unusually high rate of vaccine exemptions, and most of them for non medical reasons. Let’s look at the trend from year to year.

    Change year
    The arrows point in the direction which portend better public health trends: a drop in the rate of exemptions, and an increase in ratio of medical to non-medical reasons. California and Vermont seem to be on the right track, but most of the country is actually inching in the wrong direction, with Nevada and Wisconsin leading the way. 

    Sadly, the antivaccinationist movement seems to be permeating the mindshare, just by manipulating doubt and exploiting parental concern. Non medical exemptions are a key to this degradation of our public health system.