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- cross-posted to:
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Amidst shifting political winds, we consider seven once common, now preventable diseases.
There’s a concerning trend emerging in Canada and the United States when it comes to vaccine hesitancy.
In the United States, a key legal adviser to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the man tapped to be the next U.S. health secretary, is working to get rid of polio and hepatitis B vaccines in America, according to the New York Times. Kennedy himself has vocally opposed vaccines for years.
On Canada’s East Coast, where vaccinations are readily available, three out of every 10 kids are not vaccinated against measles.
It’s not too different on the West Coast. Wong said that last year only around 69 per cent of two-year-olds in B.C. were up to date on all recommended vaccines, down from 74 per cent in 2017. By seven years old, that percentage falls to 66 per cent, which is down from 73 per cent in 2021, Wong added.
Here’s the fundamental misunderstanding about vaccines; they’re not perfect, and that’s OK.
Vaccines do not 100% protect against diseases. But when enough people in a group are vaccinated, you achieve something called “herd immunity”. This is because your susceptibility to a disease actually depends on how much of it gets into your system. Because vaccines help people kill off the diseases that they’re exposed to, they spread less of it to each other, so the disease can never truly get a foothold in any one person. It’s constantly fighting to survive, hunted and on the run, instead of setting up a base of operations and spreading out.
So, unfortunately the notion that antivaxxers are only putting their own lives at risk is a fantasy. It’s not even just immunocompromised people they threaten. It’s everyone. Everyone is more susceptible to infection because of these selfish idiots bringing down our herd immunity levels.
yeah we are basically the food source and if one in a hunred people can’t get vaccinated and being vaccinated means that 99% of the time you won’t get infected or not enough to become infectious anyway. Then its very hard for it to survive and it goes extinct same way we do if we don’t have the food to keep us alive. But if 10% are unvaccinated. ugh.
That’s a really good way to put it, yeah. Basically vaccination doesn’t make you immune to a disease, but it makes your body a much, much harsher environment for it to try to live in.
Regardless, if a vaccinated person and an unvaccinated person get the disease, the chance of survival for the unvaccinated person is much lower.
Oh, absolutely. The idea that not protecting perfectly somehow means that vaccines are useless has always been unbelievably stupid, for a great many reasons.