> Things like vaccination are tricky because they are not strictly science.
> Science is repeatable, and things that don't work on everyone the same
> don't strictly deserve the label of science. That doesn't mean they should
> never be made mandatory, there merely has to be a very very high bar before
> that is done, and if there are other motives besides the wellness of
> humanity then that dilutes the case. Especially because like the death
> sentence, the effects of it cannot be reversed.
>
As I see it, scientific understanding means that we have greater repeatability
than expected by chance- i.e. the signal to noise ratio is high. In biological
systems, this “noise” is produced by a million things that make each being
unique- their genetic code, the specific environment they're in, to their
specific history (evolutionary and during its development). So if you want to
say that science is 100% repeatable, then no biologist is a scientist because
exceptions are the rule in biology. So I don’t agree that repeatability is a
useful metric in of itself.
In the specific case of vaccination, we have very good understanding of the
mechanisms involved in how and why vaccines work, and the fact that vaccines
fail in 1% (or some such small fraction) of humans does not make this
understanding unscientific. All it means is that there is an as yet unknown (or
perhaps known) source of “noise” that means that our predictions are not 100%
precise. So we can keep trying to figure out the sources of noise, and
hopefully reduce the fraction of unexplained variation. Meanwhile, for
practical purposes, if there are good data showing that a vaccine will “work”
for 90% of the population, sign me up.
