Thanks for opening my eyes to the air bag conspiracy!!!!1
Haha, right? I definitely did a double take when I first learned that.
As a reader of this site I expect you would pick up on the fact that I was outsourcing this to national health care systems because humans are bad at researching literature on a scientific field of study without coming to conclusions that support their preconceived notions. Even when they know they're susceptible to this kind of bias.
But you're outsourcing without having had asked the right question or acknowledging the subtlety in your outputs.
Your question in particular isn't "what are the only vaccines I should get", it is "how do I best protect the health of my child". If you wanted to ask "which vaccines are absolutely, without a question important to the human race?", then your approach arguably has validity.
I reject the assertion that you are truly outsourcing this to national healthcare systems in good faith, because you admitted to having "fear that a doctor is about to stick my kid with a needle because there was a meeting in a shady room between a pharma rep and a CDC official". Do you have any evidence that that kind of "pharma collusion" isn't happening in any other countries? If you can't believe what some of the experts say because of an unbased/unquantified fear, then what value does any of the evidence have to you at all? If you put arbitrary weights on certain pieces of evidence, then you're weighting it in favor of coming to a conclusion that supports your preconceived notions.
If you're truly outsourcing this information to national health agencies, you would come up with a vaccine list that is the union and not the intersection. After all, they are experts who should know best, so we should defer to them, right? The intersection is merely the list that is your absolute top priority, and the union is the list of vaccines that experts believe are also important.
Like many of the other people in this thread have stated, there's a difference in disease risk and incidence based on where you are living. If you were outsourcing this to national health agencies in order to answer the question of "what do I get to protect the health of my child", then you would weight more highly the guidances of the agencies that are most relevant to you. Instead, you're looking at countries with population sizes that are like, 2% of that of the country you're living in, located in a entirely different geography, with different population dynamics and concentrations, and trying to say that they are 'equal'.
More on the point of looking at the importance of prevalence when making vaccination decisions:
One of the things about infectious diseases is that the more you have of it in a population, the more you tend to get. If prevalence of a disease is really low, even without vaccination, you're not likely to get this disease. This has huge impacts on why some places would recommend it and some other places wouldn't. For example, Denmark doesn't recommend hep B vaccine, but most of the EU does, and so does the US. Denmark's hep B virus prevalence is 0.03%, the EU as a whole guesses around 1%, and the US is at 0.4% (though this number is believed to be an underestimate). You're over 10 times less likely to get hep B if you're living in Denmark vs living in the rest of the EU or the US. Given this information, would you choose to believe Denmark's guideline's or the US' guidelines when making a decision about your US-born child?
I'm about to have a baby. Any minute now. Well, my partner is. I'm just sitting here not growing a baby wondering what to do with myself.
Maybe I can get a jump on our approach to medical care for the new kiddo.
One thing that sticks out at me is that children in the US get a lot of vaccinations. At my quick count it's something like 37 shots by the time they're 5.
I grew up in the US in the 80s and I don't remember getting nearly this many. Is my memory faulty? I'm pretty sure it was more like 12 back in those days. Is this all really necessary? Nobody likes getting shots, especially not children. What changed, anyway?
Now, I'm not an expert on immunology or epidemiology so I expect diving into the literature isn't going to be fruitful; I won't be able to ante up decades of education and experience fast enough. Presumably this is what we pay people at the US CDC and Department of Health for.
But can you *really* trust them? Aren't all of these vaccinations really convenient for the pharmaceutical industry? Aren't there seemingly constant allegations/lawsuits about the over-prescription of drug interventions in the US?
The health care systems in major world countries have access to all of the same literature, and they're presumably staffed by educated, expert people too so they should all come to the same conclusions as the US system right? Not so!
Here's how many shots each nation's health care system recommends by the time children turn 5.
37 US
25 UK
25 Germany
16 Sweden
16 Denmark
The intersection of vaccines being recommended are TDAP, MMR, Polio, HIB and PCB.
In the US we also recommend: Hep A, Hep B, Rotavirus, Meningococcus, Varicella, and yearly flu shots (for babies and children).
Can we explain the variance? I can think of a few reasons they would vary.
1. Cultural bias. This can be big. A psychiatrist in the UK told me that they're not as pharma heavy as, say, psychiatrists in Germany because of a WW2 era bias: lots of the big pharma companies are German.
2. Cultural and environmental differences. Some diseases are a bigger deal in some countries than others. Japan (not included above) recommends immunization against diseases (TB, Japanese encephalitis) that none of the systems above are too concerned with.
3. Undue industry influence. Run-of-the-mill corruption.
4. Quality of health care systems and social safety nets vary.
When it comes to cultural and environment differences I have a hard time imagining that the orthodoxy varies because Hep A is a much bigger deal in the US. I presume the calculus changes based on your geographic neighbors, but is it a meaningful difference? Or is it a counterproductive cultural bias? For example, in the US we may spend more time thinking about diseases people in central America suffer from than the people in Denmark might, but do the neighbors in this case meaningfully translate to a higher disease risk? Or are we vaccinating against unfounded fears?
Do the other nations vaccinate less than the US because their health care systems are worse? Annoyingly (if you're an American) all of their health care outcomes rank better.
Is the US health care system more corruptible by industry influence?
Is the story a lot simpler and less sinister? That the US vaccinates more than the rest of these countries because the balance of the US's health care system (access to treatment, quality of treatment) is worse? Or is it because having to stay home with a kid that's sick with chicken pox (varicella) is not so big a deal in, say, Denmark, because the social contract is more forgiving of parents who miss work?
Does the poorer quality of health care in the US (going by international rankings) and the lower tolerance for parents missing work combine poorly with the undue influence of industry and therefore lead to more vaccinations?
On the flip side of this argument: so what if we vaccinate kids against more diseases than other countries? Well, they're not free. They cost money to administer, and cost tears because kids hate getting shots. The health risks from vaccines aren't zero, either. Vaccines have side-effects, and sometimes they're serious. Those other nations (presumably) ran cost-benefit analyses too and came to different conclusions. It would be nice if each country showed their work.
When it comes to needles to stick my new kiddo with, I'm not really being persuaded to do more than the intersection of vaccinations between similar nations. The fear that a doctor is about to stick my kid with a needle because there was a meeting in a shady room between a pharma rep and a CDC official is pretty powerful. It doesn't seem like a strictly irrational concern either