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Routine vaccinations drop among U.S. kindergartners for the third year in a row

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Re: Routine vaccinations drop among U.S. kindergartners for the third year in a row

#201
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This vaccine is only 60% efficient." How do you know? Because you were told by the same system that claimed Comirnaty was 95% effective? For those of us who generalize from public health in the COVID years to public health in general, why is that generalization wrong, in your view?

> How do you know? It's been known for decades, and knowing that is part of my job. I'm in Europe, where this vaccine is part of the basic plan for all children. > For those of us who generalize from public health in the COVID years to public health in general, why is that generalization wrong, in your view? Most public health interventions do not make money for corporations or in fact, for anybody. They mostly spare…

"It's been known for decades, and knowing that is part of my job"

Mmm yeah not surprised, was already thinking your posts sounded just like the sort of things public health people say. But that didn't answer the question. How do you know?

"Most public health interventions do not make money [ - ] so COVID can't be generalized to other interventions at all"

That's a non-sequitur. Nobody mentioned money or corporations in this thread. You're answering an imaginary objection instead of the one we're actually raising, which says a lot. My prior that public health [-adjacent] people are all so left wing that they don't even realize how ideologically biased they are just got incremented again.

The problem here is not corporations or money or some people getting rich. The observation we are generalizing beyond COVID is that people who work in public health seem to lie a lot. Specifically, they lie any time they think a lie will make people act in ways that please them, and what pleases them is anything where everyone is forced to act in exactly the same way all at the same time.

By "public health" we mean here government officials, academics, researchers and the people who speak for them. Hey we don't trust Pfizer either but if it weren't for the public health sector forcing us to buy and consume their products, we could just ignore them, or make case-by-case decisions, so the root problem is not them.

Re: Routine vaccinations drop among U.S. kindergartners for the third year in a row

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lockdowns did help flatten the curve, many countries health systems were overwhelmed regardless, but without lockdowns the fatalities and outcomes for severe cases would have been an order of magnitude worse. There's no evidence to support this assertion, and plenty of evidence to the contrary e.g. Sweden. > It's hard to take your argument in good faith when you offhandedly say stuff like this -> "A lot of that stu…

>There's no evidence to support this assertion Like all your other assertions this one feels self serving for your point of view when a rudimentary google search provides references to the alternative. Consensus on efficacy of lockdowns flattening the curve with relevant bibliography. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02823-4 N of 1 as in what worked in Sweden (ranked 3rd in the global healthcare index and h…

It's arguments like this one in Nature that destroy confidence in public health. You claimed the article reflected a consensus, but it starts by saying that lots of papers show no lockdown effect and there's no agreement!

Also read the citations. They make a lot of uncited assertions (worthless), and then their primary evidence is Flaxman et al, it's a joke paper. Read it, they made a model that predicted 3 million deaths and when it didn't happen said lockdowns were the reason. Their methodology is wack. They had to hide Sweden from some of their graphs because it broke their model, they had to claim that shutting major sport/music events was magically effective in Sweden but nowhere else because their model just assigned all the reduction to whatever the last government decision happened to be. Google for it to find more criticism of their methods. Nature do admit the paper was criticized but don't tell you the type of problems.

Re: Routine vaccinations drop among U.S. kindergartners for the third year in a row

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the parents I feel frustrated with show hesitancy about even testing, despite also being very concerned about their child failing in school. They treat a positive diagnosis and even testing like a conspiracy, and continually argue that it's simply a question of laziness and motivation. I am not sure what age you define as young children. I think ages 13 and above, with the assumption they started puberty at m…

I respect your beliefs and can tell they come from good intentions and a desire to help. That said, my personal inclination is that diagnosis and medication should be a last resort after first trying alternative approaches to education and learning, as well as looking at lifestyle issues like diet, sleep, exercise, screen time, etc. My experience of education in the US is that it was mostly bad, and that most teacher…

My perspective comes from a place where I went to a fantastic school but the ADHD made even that education system feel medicore/poor. Not every parent will have the luxury and freedom required to help kids reach maximum potential. If lifestyle changes are enough to fix the situation, the child doesn't meet the critera for ADHD in the first place.

Homeschooling requires a lot of sacrifice from parents in order to set up the child for success, both socially and career-wise. Covid showed me the value in kids socializing with their peers in their age range, during middle and high shool, and how much they will struggle socially if that piece is missing. The thing about ADHD is that once the child leaves the homeschool environment, they will begin to struggle.

It is a myth that ADHD is possible to outgrow, the current thinking is that kids that seemingly outgrew it were incorrectly diagnosed to begin with. The stigma around medication ends up negatively affecting people that are diagnosed. I know I delayed starting medication longer than I should have from the stigma and from time to time feel guilty for needing it after I come across certain messages or articles. It feels like imposter syndrome. The stigma around the diagnosis has been changing but not around the medication.

I respect your decision regarding medication and in many ways agree with you evaluation of the US school system. I do hope you reconsider your take on a diagnosis, it's not prescriptive in any way. It can only benefit the child, "worst" case scenario is you paid a healthcare professional to talk to your child for an unnecessary few hours. There are a tons of options that open up for kids once there's some sort of documentation like a 504, in the US. Simple things like no restriction on bathroom breaks and just being able to have small snacks like baby carrots in class helped me, but it's open ended. I have heard of accomodations like extra exam time or being able to audio record classes and even alternate testing environments or formats in college.

I don't expect to change your mind, I just wanted to share why I believe differently. I appreciate you hearing me out despite my bad initial impression, in my experience that is a usually a sign of a great parent.

Re: Routine vaccinations drop among U.S. kindergartners for the third year in a row

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's what happens if people lack self-reflection. If they had asked themselves if there is any chance that they could possibly know better than someone who's working on a topic all the time, the answer would have been a resounding no, no matter the topic in question.

Actually yes, sometimes an outsider opinion can be the correct one... that is the very essence of scientific enquiry - to ask questions. Who am I? Some rando on the Internet, but I correctly assessed that the vaccines wouldn't prevent transmission, carried a non-zero risk of side effects - sometimes extremely serious, that natural immunity would provide far greater protection, that vaccination was unnecessary for chi…

The risk from catching sars-cov-2 was/is way higher than the risk from vaccination. This is proven by the fact that some 13 billion doses have been administered with little harm, while some 700 million infections have caused 7 million deaths. You have drawn the wrong conclusions and made incorrect decisions based on your ineptitude. You are Dunning-Kruger instantiated.

Re: Routine vaccinations drop among U.S. kindergartners for the third year in a row

#205
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is almost unperceivable to people who truly have faith, that other might not believe in the same higher authority as them. This is a story as old as time.

Faith has no impact on my decision to prefer not to be the guinea pig for experimental gene therapy, that results in micro clotting and turning your body into a spike protein factory. I have no issue with traditional vaccination, but this is nothing like a vaccination. They wouldn't have needed to change the definition of vaccination if it was. They wouldn't need to push this 24/7 on every possible platform if it wor…

13 billion doses administered. If they were one-thousandth as dangerous as you claim, we’d see a helluva lot more problems than we do. But we don’t. You’re jus plain wrong.

Re: Routine vaccinations drop among U.S. kindergartners for the third year in a row

#206
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conspiracy theories is the weeds that sprawl when common sense is sterilized with dogma.

No, it's the weeds that sprawl when education is constantly underfunded, demonized and people's access to good education is constantly hindered. All while idiocies are given the same amount of platform as rigorous methods out of "need for a debate" when there was going to be none to begin with. It's not "dogma" to "sterilize" some fringe idiocies, just implying that is often pretty much helping that sewer just fester…

tl;dr "I know the truth. All objections are fringe idiocies. There is no need for debate. Just give me the mic, shut up and listen."

I remember reading about how Lenin dealt with opposition. He never argued with them on public, as it could damage his image and undermine his dogma. Instead, he ferociously attacked the opponent himself: demonized him, called him names, and later got rid of him.

Re: Routine vaccinations drop among U.S. kindergartners for the third year in a row

#207
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you know? It's been known for decades, and knowing that is part of my job. I'm in Europe, where this vaccine is part of the basic plan for all children. > For those of us who generalize from public health in the COVID years to public health in general, why is that generalization wrong, in your view? Most public health interventions do not make money for corporations or in fact, for anybody. They mostly spare…

"It's been known for decades, and knowing that is part of my job" Mmm yeah not surprised, was already thinking your posts sounded just like the sort of things public health people say. But that didn't answer the question. How do you know? "Most public health interventions do not make money [ - ] so COVID can't be generalized to other interventions at all" That's a non-sequitur. Nobody mentioned money or corporations…

Well, you already reached your own conclusions, but you see the reason why I focused on corporations is a) Pfizer making money is an extremely common critic regarding the COVID situation, at least around here, and b) the objection you were formulating was up to now unclear to me, so I unconsciously focused on the most common one. I never thought you were making a purely political statement, because in my mind, this problem has nothing political in it.

I'm not that left wing and most docs are not lefties at all. Honestly, I don't think the academic/medical arm of public health has a political agenda. We just don't care who is in charge, but it's frustrating to see people working against their best interest when you're spending 70+ hours a week attempting to improve a catastrophic situation. Regarding the lying, I fear you're attributing to malice what is in fact just ignorance. Academics were asked for recommendations, sent back their best guess about a very uncertain situation, and got backlash about everything they guessed wrong. I have to say that the american way of extremely polarized political opinions spreading to everything feels really alien to me.

Re: Routine vaccinations drop among U.S. kindergartners for the third year in a row

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are saying a lot for just being very anti social, anti human etc. No a public health system is not totaliarism. A gov has the responsibility to take care of all people. This also means that the individual might need to play a game they don't always like. That's how a good stable society works. And just because you are (I guess) in the position to pay for medical, your neighbor might not. What society would that b…

Risk sharing is best done through insurance. The government has no need to be involved in healthcare, beyond subsidizing premiums to some extent for those who are too poor to pay the full cost. There is nothing more anti-social or anti-human than public health. Look at what they did to us. They stopped people visiting their dying parents in hospitals in a failed attempt to stop the spread of an airborne virus. They t…

> Risk sharing is best done through insurance. The government has no need to be involved in healthcare, beyond subsidizing premiums to some extent for those who are too poor to pay the full cost.

I disagree on the basis that insurance skew to not having to pay as much as possible. This conflicts with healthcare because if Insurance companies are able to determine that you are high risk for something, they would either outright deny you coverage or give you a price that outright means denial anyway.

The only entity capable of stopping this is one with the monopoly of power, I.e The Government.

Re: Routine vaccinations drop among U.S. kindergartners for the third year in a row

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a frustrating comment to read. There is plenty of debate in public health about what is and isn’t appropriate. A lot of effort is put into communicating the often confusing and oblique conclusions of biology in such a way that people will understand and also be willing to take actions that will help themselves. Covid was, predictably, a massive defeat for public health. Also, you may have noticed that th…

> This is such a frustrating comment to read. There is plenty of debate in public health about what is and isn’t appropriate. Ordinarily. My dad and most of his friends are in the field, and they’re all smart, thoughtful people who tackle incredibly complex things like how to get third world villagers to use maternal health services when all they’ve ever known is midwives with no formal medical training. But they all…

Yeah I mostly agree with this. I hope we don’t repeat these mistakes but I suspect we will.

Re: Routine vaccinations drop among U.S. kindergartners for the third year in a row

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anyone of any significance said the virus doesn't exist - just that it doesn't pose anything like the level of danger that the hysteria would suggest, which is correct. It wasn't to enslave mankind as such, but there were certainly governmental factions looking to parley the situation to introduce climate change lock downs (see the Oxford 15 minute city project), universal id cards (vax pass mandates),…

>I don't think anyone of any significance said the virus doesn't exist How about someone with a dedicated audience of 15 million mostly older folks, and the recipient of the highest civilian honor in the US, on his highly popular radio show? >Rush Limbaugh: Folks, this coronavirus thing, I want to try to put this in perspective for you. It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring…

I don't listen to Rush Limbaugh or really know anything about him, but it's quite true to say that the establishment power was able to use the pandemic to great advantage against Trump. Mail-in voting has created completely new opportunities for Democrats to collect votes from its various client groups, permanently changing the face of voting in America.

As for the common cold... well its more akin to the common cold than than, say, the Spanish Flu

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