Comment by danw1979 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danw1979 | Hacker News Reader

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Kind of related to your point… I remember my maternal Grandmother was looking after me one day and I’d either missed or skipped my earlier vaccination appointment in school (which, I think was a BCG or booster, it was in the early 1990s). She was raised by her maternal Grandmother after her mother died from TB when she was 2 years old. Her father died of… something infectious when she was teenager

(the oral history is obviously a bit sketchy, but she used to tell me her father also caught TB - cholera maybe ? - when he was removing bodies from the flooded Balham tube station in 1940 - https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/75th-anniversary-of-the...)

Well, I got quite the scolding about missing my jabs and a stern lecture about how many awful diseases have been cured because of vaccination. I could never forget how emotional she was about it.

To people born in the early 20th century, seeing the effects first hand of the vaccination programmes of the mid 20th century (not to mention antibiotics) must have seemed miraculous. I think we’ve lived without these diseases for so long that some people (stupid, selfish people) simply think they don’t exist or pose a threat any more.

> I think we’ve lived without these diseases for so long that some people (stupid, selfish people) simply think they don’t exist or pose a threat any more.

This is true beyond just vaccines. All too often hardships are forgotten, history is just old pictures and stories, and people who are too far disconnected from those real events and don't learn from history will just walk the same path, leading to the same hardships.

They all think that the world is better today so they're smarter or better than the old generations, that the world evolved so they're intrinsically prepared, so the pains of the past can't harm them. Ironically they're ignoring all the lessons and the tools that made the world better and are needed to keep it like that, and instead think things are better because they just are.

They'll skip any vaccines or support extremist regimes because they think the modern world is just immune to this, it's intrinsically and permanently "fixed". We have freedoms or don't get sick because we "just" have freedoms and don't get sick.

Having close family spending a lifetime paralyzed by the polio virus before a vaccine was widely available, or spending some of my life in the cold embrace of dictatorship really drove the point home for me about learning the lessons of history.

Tried-and-true vaccines are like plumbing or city infrastructure: Once established, it’s taken for granted and the true value can’t be intuited.

BCG, sadly, is not really in that category.

What's the issue with the BCG? My understanding was that it had been sucessful, is that a bit of a myth?

It’s not very effective, and it’s apparent efficacy is bizarrely variable.

Thanks, I had no idea. It was the standard when I was growing up in the UK.

It looks like it is no longer standard issue here.

I think it was just some small anti-culture (like healing stones or whatever. Same people initially) that got dragged into the with us or against us political landscape of the US.

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