All of mlma's Comments + Replies

That's incorrect. I know that my generation was vaccinated against a more limited set of diseases and has survived pretty well.

"There's no need for the smartphones. I know that my generation only had landlines to use, and has survived pretty well."

"Back in the day, smallpox was just a fact of life. Most people lived. What's the big deal about it anyway, afterall, we survived pretty well, and it's not like it was holding our society back"

"Why do we need to wash our hands before surgery? We've survived pretty well so far like this... (read more)

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 su... (read more)

Less anecdotally, I haven't found a lot of evidence that adults are suffering horribly from diseases that children today are routinely vaccinated against. Is the cost-benefit of the added vaccines as good as the cost-benefit of the 80s era vaccines? Some arrows point to the US having a lower threshold for recommending them, given the variance between nations.

A lot of the big childhood vaccines are things that kill kids (MMR, rotavirus, Hib). So you've got survivorship bias there.

As for the other stuff, a lot of the diseases that adults are suffering fr... (read more)

Here's some information about some of the diseases you have mentioned and their associated vaccines.

Hep A is not routinely offered in the UK because it's considered very low risk there. Even in the US, hep A is usually only something that gets introduced after someone visits a high incidence country. Likely, hep A's risk in the US is partly because we share a border with a high incidence country. Hep A is spread through contaminated food and water, and it takes an incredibly low amount of virus to cause disease in a person. When you get it as an adult, it... (read more)