Comment by yehosef | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yehosef | Hacker News Reader

The misinformation/lies surrounding vaccine safety is nauseating.

>Before the vaccine, measles infected more than 3 million Americans and killed more than 400 of them each year. One in four people who get measles are likely to be hospitalized and one or two in 1,000 are likely to die

Anyone here gots math.. 400/3,000,000 is ~1/10,000. And note that this is the rate given 1950's medical care - I can't fathom the numbers would be like this today.

And the entire concept of proving vaccine safety by showing filing rates for the VICP are low is wrong. Many people are not aware of the VICP or they are told that the reactions are not related to the vaccines - why would they file?

I'm not arguing that you shouldn't vaccinate - but there needs to be more scientific and intellectual integrity in the process. The risks are whitewashed "Vaccines are safe".

Anyone interested in doing a little more research can look and play with the VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System) dataset at https://github.com/yehosef/vaers or the grafana dashboard I built at https://vizvax.com/

You can do a simple adhoc search for DIED=Y to see some interesting results. Remember that the only 1-10% of the events are reported (CDC numbers) so you can estimate the numbers to be 10-100 times greater.

feedback/suggestions appreciated.

two things:

>> Before the vaccine, measles infected more than 3 million Americans and killed more than 400 of them each year. One in four people who get measles are likely to be hospitalized and one or two in 1,000 are likely to die

> Anyone here gots math.. 400/3,000,000 is ~1/10,000. And note that this is the rate given 1950's medical care - I can't fathom the numbers would be like this today.

why'd you divide 400 by 3M? the article says, per your quote, that there were 400 american deaths per year. but 3M infected americans _total_. there is no per year qualifier on that part.

also you forgot to address the part about:

> One in four people who get measles are likely to be hospitalized

i don't know about you, but i'll take a vaccination over a hospitalization in most realistic situations i can imagine.

also, while i can see how adverse events might be grossly underreported, i imagine the ones that _do_ get reported skew the data set towards the worst of the events. it seems to me that a really bad adverse event is much more likely to be reported than one that's mild.

>why'd you divide 400 by 3M? the article says, per your quote, that there were 400 american deaths per year. but 3M infected americans _total_. there is no per year qualifier on that part.

Because it's a hack article. From https://www.cdc.gov/measles/about/history.html the numbers are annual. I remember seeing the 1/1000 number were of the reported case (ie, hospitals) - almost everyone use to get the measles before they were 15 and most cases were not reported.

> also you forgot to address the part about: >> One in four people who get measles are likely to be hospitalized

Sorry - you're right. That's such a complete, outright lie - I guess my brain didn't even register it. As I mentioned - almost 100% of the people use to get measles (see CDC link). Clearly not 1/4 of them were hospitalized.

>i don't know about you, but i'll take a vaccination over a hospitalization in most realistic situations i can imagine.

Then you should learn about some of the stories of people that have been damaged. You can either read some of the reports from VAERS or watch some of the personal story videos from the VAXXED youtube channel.

Note - I'm not saying VAXXED is science.. I'm not saying their conclusions are right.. Yes - the stories are anecdotal - but these are real people with stories about how they had a healthy child and then after one or several vaccines, they didn't. You can listen to some and say.. "well.. that's a stretch to say the vaccines caused this". But you should listen to some of them.

It's a much messier story than the media, CDC or the pharmaceutical companies would have you to believe. My point is not that we should not vaccinate, but that should be informed and take the risks and benefits into consideration (Data-Driven/Led). The current approach overplays the benefits (by exaggerating the danger) and underplaying the risks.

a few things:

* you're trying to focus on being data-driven, but then you posit that i should watch a bunch of anecdotes collected in a non-scientific way to get perspective? would it be valid for me to ask you to talk to everyone who got a flu shot and then didn't catch the flu? because those two things seem about equally scientific to me, and i doubt you'd go for the latter from everything i've seen in this thread.

* if you're making a case for hard data analysis, i think you'll get people to listen more if you address everything systematically instead of falling back on "That's such a complete, outright lie - I guess my brain didn't even register it" for a point you didn't cover.

* under the benefits, have you considered the benefits of herd immunity? because there are some people who really can't vaccinate. and as many people as can should, to protect the ones who can't.

1) There's no contradiction to being data-driven and respecting anecdotal reports. The entire fleet of 747 Max airplanes was grounded because what? Two planes crashed? Big deal - those were flukes, no? How many plane-hours were there that didn't involve crashes. When it comes to safety claims and peoples' lives, even rare instances are significant.

2) Ok - I think I found the reference they are talking about: https://www.cdc.gov/measles/symptoms/complications.html What I was trying to point out is that before vaccinations when everyone got the measles, the hospitalization rate seems not to be 1/4 (1M people would have been hospitalized which would have been massive - I've seen no references to it - but I can't claim it didn't happen.)

Most data I saw to 1/4 were taken from the late 80s outbreaks see https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/189/Supplement_1/S4/823... - it's possible that people hospitalized out of fear of the disease since it had become less common. If you look in the chart in that article, there were many hospitalized, but the number that had the dangerous side-effects (encephalitis, etc ) where much smaller.

But - it's a valid point - I'm for data and truth, not for rhetoric.

3) The question is to what extent do I need to put myself at risk to save someone else from risk. The party line is that "vaccinations are safe" and therefore there is effectively no risk. If you hold there is a risk, then it's something you have to weigh.

Also - it's important to note that I don't know the research, if there is any, behind "herd-immunity". The problem is that measles in particular his highly contagious and fully immune people can be a carrier of the disease for several hours. Our social structures and interactions do not match those of "herds". Many of the outbreaks this year were in places that had the required level for "herd-immunity".

Additionally, the long-term effectiveness of the vaccine is a question to herd-immunity. Just last week I was speaking with someone in his 50s that was fully vaccinated and got the measles.

> if you're making a case for hard data analysis, i think you'll get people to listen more if you address everything systematically instead of falling back on "That's such a complete, outright lie - I guess my brain didn't even register it" for a point you didn't cover.

This is 100% correct - my bad. Thanks for the honesty check.

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