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KrisC comments on Rationality Quotes: January 2011 - Less Wrong
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I used this quote to help convince a friend to vaccinate her child this past year. It worked.
I assume you first looked at the statistics of specific modern vaccines, then reached a conclusion, then used the quote to persuade your friend about a specific vaccine.
So far as I'm aware, there are currently no publicly available vaccines that lack overwhelming evidence in support of their use. Researching every issue one has even the slightest doubts about is also a failure mode.
For example, the necessity of chickenpox vaccines is not quite clear-cut because an infection in childhood - that is usually mild - confers greater immunity benefits than a vaccine. See also flu shots.
Chicken pox vaccination seems to offer small but clear advantages. I wasn't thinking about flu shots earlier, but agree that they are of little value; they don't seem like "real" vaccines to my brain because they're relatively temporary.
I loathe the anti-vaccination movement and am probably over-sensitive on this issue.
For what it's worth, I don't think there is such a thing as over-sensitivity on this issue. Here in Australia, there is an organisation called the Australian Vaccination Network, who attempt to convince parents not to vaccinate their children (due to unfounded fears of autism, mercury poisoning, and even wilder 'Big Pharma' conspiracies).
Children who are too young to be immunised against pertussis (whooping cough) rely on all transmission vectors (ie people they come into contact with) being immune: herd immunity is the term, I think. Pertussis isn't dangerous for a more developed human being, but babies can die of it. One did - warning, sad. So yeah, that justifies loathing.
(Thankfully, the AVN has been all but disbanded thanks to the efforts of skeptic groups)
Yeah, the U.S. situation is similar. Worse, actually, since our idiot antivaxxers seem to be immune to skepticism. (The most prominent example is probably bat-shit insane Indigo mom Jenny McCarthy, who will soon be hosting a talk show on Oprah's new network.)
I concur, your situation is worse.
When I looked into the infant Hepatitis B vaccine (late 2009) for a girl in an affluent, physically active household in southern Australia, the benefit looked marginal. There are many environments in which the girl could have lived that would have made vaccination clearly beneficial.
It would be surprising if all publicly available vaccines had "overwhelming" evidence in support of their use. That would seem to imply that our public health system hadn't yet approached diminishing returns in searching for things against which to vaccinate, and that large gains were still to be had by vaccinating against more diseases.
(This is a short note on a complicated topic.)
(Vaccines have clearly done much good. Yay Science.)
What makes you think this (your second sentence) is not the case? Plenty of devastating diseases still cannot be prevented by vaccines; that's why people continue to research and create new ones.
Whether all publicly available vaccines (or, more weakly but more relevantly, all recommended vaccines for a particular individual) are worth getting is a separate question, but the recommendations are evidence-based, and I personally believe they represent a guess as good as I can make.
Which doesn't imply overwhelming evidence, though. Just enough evidence.
Agreed; I probably wouldn't have said "overwhelming evidence". But I do think there are still large gains to be made by vaccinating against more diseases, like, say, strep.
Revelation: The point of diminishing returns we would (in an ideal reach) is where health benefits are proportional to research dollars. Once a vaccine is researched, health benefits should be positive. However, variation, like the variation between regions, means that there are cases where an established vaccine has no benefits.