John Berry wrote:
There are a number of things I disagree with (including Spanish flu) but the only one i can be bothered with is your claim that it always helps more than it harms.
I did not say that. On the contrary, I said there are some examples of spectacular failure such as the 1976 swine flu vaccine. Overall and in general, however, vaccines help FAR MORE often than they fail.
You have to be careful with assertions about safety and statistics. This stuff gets complicated. There are situations that are highly binary: nearly perfect safety or zero safety. Air travel safety is almost 100% assured but on rare occasions such as the Air France crash the other day a minor problem such as a plugged up Pitot gauge causes massive failure and 100% fatalities. It is hard to grasp that concept. (A Pitot tube is an example of 18th century technology still at work playing a major role on the most advanced machinery on earth.) Vaccinations are incredibly safe and effective and yet we can be certain that every year they will kill some small number of people.
Tricky statistical concepts like this often interfere with discussions of cold fusion. For example the notion that an effect should be "reproducible" gets all mixed up with the idea that it should work 100% of the time, even in the minds of professional scientists such as Garwin, on 60 Minutes. The two concepts are completely separate. In fact, 0.001 reproducibility would be fine, and totally convincing if you could conveniently repeat the experiment 1,000,000 times in one test, say with an array of 1000 x 1000 microscopic test cells. This is why the BARC titanium chip test is convincing even though only one or two out of thousands of chips became radioactive. It even convinced Morrison, who witnessed the test, which is why he refused to say word about it.
Getting back to the example of vaccines, you can say it is a 100% reproducible effect that we will kill someone with a flu vaccine. It is a sure thing. And yet you don't need to worry about it personally. It is difficult to believe both those concepts at the same time. To give a nod example, even I am willing to buy a lottery ticket knowing full well that it has roughly as much chance of winning as the chance that a vaccine will kill me. It is irrational, but there it is.
On a related thought, consider how many people would be willing to buy a lottery ticket if it came with a binary award (two possible awards), both with typical 1 in 100 million odds: either you win $1 billion or they take you out and shoot you. I'll bet no one would buy a ticket. Even though, of course, we face much worse odds driving a car a few miles on any highway, and the reward for driving on a highway on one trip is much smaller than $1 billion.
In New Zealand there was a tainted polio vaccine and they knew it was but used it anyway, I don't know how many died but my mother had 3 close friends die.
Yes, this sort of thing happens. Just as airplanes sometimes crash despite our best effort to prevent it. No one should imagine that vaccines or any other medical technology is completely reliable or danger free.
And polio had not been a problem for years and never was, there is no reason to believe it would have come back.
Well, actually there is, but there shouldn't be. The problem should have been fixed decades ago, with the complete extinction of the virus as was done with smallpox. It is an incredible failure of world public health. Antibiotic resistant tuberculosis is even worse.
- Jed
