Herd Immunity Demonstration

> What they're really trying to defend is that government has no right dictating what one must or cannot put in their own body

Talking about rights like this is useless. You have to assume some basic moral principles to proscribe who has a right to what. If I disagree with yours, then we'll just be shouting up a tree for hours.

For one, I completely disagree with the idea that the government has no right to tell people what they can or cannot put in their own body. Depending on the moral principles that a government is founded on, it very well may have that right.

> individuals' utility functions

Invoking "utlity functions" is such an appeal to naturalism. All that means is that they don't give a shit about anyone else.

>But they lack the learning to be able to articulate and argue at this philosophical level (for if they had that kind of education, they'd most likely have ended up believing that society should be engineered).

Citation needed. I have "that kind of education" and I surely don't believe that "society should be engineered".

What they're trying to defend is that they like the social contract, except when they don't.

The only thing this seems to leave out is the individual "will not be vaccinated"'s culpability in the spread of the disease to one of the "cannot be vaccinated"s.

Manslaughter charges as part of the utility function then?

Two or more people living within each others influence is an engineered society. The only question is what does the engineering. "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice".

Aren’t people free to decide not to vaccinate?

Calling that a morally reprehensible decision (which it is) is not in any way problematic and has nothing to do with the government at all.

>As its rules are laid out, if you don't want polio, simply get vaccinated.

Yeah you missed the point. I quote:

Herd immunity is important because there are number of people who cannot be vaccinated for health or age reasons - herd immunity effecting an indirect and statistically safe space for them.

From what I read from herd immunity you second to last paragraph is incorrect or it used a definition of herd immunity that I did not encountered yet?

Can you point some material providing this information?

59% may be perfectly adequate to provide herd immunity, passing the phase transition threshold. It depends on a lot more detail than "59%".

Is efficacy binary? A partially protected person could spread less and recover more quickly than someone who isn't protected. I'm not sure enough of the math to know whether 100% of people being 65% protected works the same as 65% of the people being 100% protected, but it might not be.

Can you confirm that? You can run an applet inside your ipad? You mean a Java application?

That's a graph of the death rate from polio, not the number of deaths from polio. Polio drugs existed before the polio vaccine (and still exist today). Similarly, one could graph U.S. mortality rates over the 20th century, observe its generally smooth downward slope, and conclude that nothing done after 1980 had any effect on anything. Or graph world mortality rates over the second millenium and similarly write off the 20th century. Maybe this is just a case for logarithms?

I don't have the data to definitively suggest that the epidemics could have been eradicated by methods other than vaccine. Its entirely possible that they could.

But while we're talking about vaccines and personal freedoms and all that yap, do lets remember that some of those other methods they were using to combat these epidemics back then were forced quarantines on pain of arrest, interstate travel restrictions, and the closing of public buildings like pools, libraries and schools.

That's a graph of the death rate from polio, not of polio incidence. I don't know this for sure, but think it likely that incidence stayed the same while death rates went down.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_poliomyelitis#Iron_l...:

"even with an iron lung the fatality rate for patients with bulbar polio exceeded 90% [...] Positive pressure ventilators reduced mortality in bulbar patients from 90% to 20%. In the Copenhagen epidemic of 1952, large numbers of patients were ventilated by hand"

That 1952 epidemic is better described at http://jap.physiology.org/content/99/2/424.full, about a 1952 epidemic in Copenhagen:

"The bold solution was to manually ventilate the patients by squeezing a rubber bag attached to a tracheostomy tube inserted through an incision just below the larynx. [...] the mortality rate is said to have dropped from ∼90% to ∼25% as a result of this heroic intervention."

What is the source of that graph? Why does it only cover a period of about 16 years?

That's also a death rate chart, it doesn't take into account how many people got infected and then had to deal with the crippling after effects of a polio infection such as permanent muscle paralysis, disability and deformity.

The death rate for soldiers has likewise been lowered due to the great advances in medicine, but many of these survivors are now living (thankfully) and facing a new set of problems like missing limbs and other body parts.

Epidemics are noisy... This graph doesn't reflect that. Consider this. A ton of people get polio. Then we have herd immunity for 25 years until the percentage of the population that hasn't been exposed rises. Then we have a huge epidemic again. Since the vaccine, we haven't seen a large epidemic except in populations without high vaccination rates.

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox

"In the early 1950s an estimated 50 million cases of smallpox occurred in the world each year.[5] To eradicate smallpox, each outbreak had to be stopped from spreading, by isolation of cases and vaccination of everyone who lived close by. This process is known as "ring vaccination". The key to this strategy was monitoring of cases in a community (known as surveillance) and containment."

It's a process where you contain outbreaks by identifying them and vaccinating everyone who might come in contact with an infected person. You create a "ring" of vaccinated people around the infected, which prevents the infection from spreading.

Intentionally creating a pocket of herd immunity around an outbreak.

It doesn't. A dead person is effectively immune, that is "recovered". Popular modifications that do affect the model include temporary immunity and new births.