Vaccinations good or government 'spiracy? Lessons from San Diego

[ScumRag]

So the story goes in SD that the reluctance to get vaccinated was blamed on (basically what they're saying) "paranoid homeless people".

Not necessarily quality journalism but i digress.

I take the vaccinations when shit get serious

https://www.apnews.com/cc40b8c476ef469ebdc2228772176b03

San Diego hepatitis A outbreak ends after 2 years
October 30, 2018


SAN DIEGO (AP) — San Diego County health authorities have declared an end to an outbreak of hepatitis A that began two years ago, killed 20 people and sickened nearly 600.
Public health officer Dr. Wilma Wooten said that Oct. 25 marked 100 days since the most recent case, the threshold for no longer meeting the definition of an outbreak, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported Tuesday.
San Diego has had only 15 new cases in 2018.

Local health authorities detected the infectious disease in February 2017. Investigators determined the first likely case occurred during the week of Nov. 22, 2016.
The outbreak led to a focus on unsanitary living conditions among San Diego’s homeless population.
City and county governments promoted vaccination, washed streets, installed portable toilets and hand-washing stations, and put up temporary shelters capable of housing 700 people at a time.
The cost of fighting the outbreak was estimated at more than $12 million, the Union-Tribune reported.
The expense was what was needed to address years of deferred attention to the homelessness problem, said Bob McElroy, chief executive of Alpha Project, one of several organizations operating new shelters.
“The reality is, if you’ve got a place for people to be safe and have access to health care, you’re just not going to have the kinds of sanitation issues you have with tent cities lining the streets,” McElroy said.
Dr. Jonathan Fielding, distinguished professor of the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, applauded San Diego’s willingness to spend the necessary money.
“Hepatitis A is very contagious,” Fielding said. “Getting something like this under control, it takes money, it takes an enlightened bureaucracy and it takes a heck of a lot of coordination. It’s clear that you have that in San Diego.”
The need for resources and cleanliness does not end just because the outbreak is over, he said.
Wooten, the public health officer, said the mobile vaccination “foot teams” of public health nurses accompanied by law enforcement officers that the county started sending into homeless encampments are now a standard tool for use when needed.
A key lesson from the outbreak was that it often took months to convince at-risk homeless people to accept vaccination that they viewed as a government conspiracy, Wooten said.

“But we knew it would take time for this population to trust us, and we had to just keep going back and engaging in order to build that trust,” she said.
Hepatitis A outbreaks continue elsewhere in the nation, including Michigan, where it dates to in 2016.

 

[Coywolf]

And this is what you get for not providing sanitation services to the ENTIRE population.

People are always going to blame those pesky "homeless" for all of society's problems. I just confronted a patron I'm a bar I was at after hearing him say that "Most of the homeless are out there by choice! They are either addicts or lazy bums! You should see the sanitation crisis they create!"

After a spirited conversation with many other patrons of the bar getting involved, we may have actually educated the man enough to get him to change his mind a bit.

Vaccinations are not a "conspiracy". They are the result of hundreds of years in scientific research and development. Anti-vaxers are moronic because their argument is basically:

"I dont want to vax my kid because I know ONE person, a friend-of a-friend-of a-friend's kid who had a negative reaction that *MIGHT* be related to the the vaccine....annnnnd I read a bunch of right wing bullshit online, soooooo"

Meanwhile they are exposing the rest of the educated population to diseases like measles, polio, rubella, and untold other archaic diseases.

My point: if you are an anti-vaxer you are fucking ignorant and a sheep.

 

[Dameon]

A lot of people on the streets honestly are paranoid and inclined toward conspiracy theories, at the very least because mental illness is definitely a big player in homebummery, and the encounters you have with authority while you're homeless definitely give you a view that people in charge will generally lie and take advantage of you.

I don't see anything really wrong with the article; the real problem is that most people have a very twisted view of homeless people as a bunch of lazy addicts. If you think you're a good person, admitting that homeless people are an inevitable result of how your society works causes too much cognitive dissonance. It has to be their own fault they're there, even though it's a proven mathematical fact that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, and if money's constantly flowing upward, then people at the bottom aren't going to have enough, which means a steadily increasing population of poor people. Even if the person writing the article had an objective view of homeless people, they're not going to try to go into all that.

@Coywolf It's way too easy to just dismiss people that're anti-vaxx and other similar stuff as ignorant or a sheep, but the problem is that that's the exact same arguments they're using to dismiss you.

 

[mylon]

"I dont want to vax my kid because ... I read a bunch of right wing bullshit online"

This comment got me curious so I looked it up. The Pew Research Center and several other institutions have found that antivaxxers are pretty evenly distributed across political parties. Also, amusingly, both sides thinks the other side is more likely to be anti-vax:

When these results were broken down according to respondents’ own ideological orientation, they revealed that conservatives assumed that liberals were more dubious about vaccination than conservatives, whereas liberals assumed that conservatives were more dubious than liberals

Anyway yes vaccines are important.

 

[blank]

Seems like the best example in the world of horseshoe theory, mostly Jesus freaks and weird bougie hippies. People just believe what they want based on what narratives their personality fits into well, autism has a pretty hard to miss genetic component you can observe with identical twins and shit. Dunno how to bring those people back to Earth. Which they may think is flat.

 

[Older Than Dirt]

My hippie aunt had polio as a kid in the '50s. She has had her leg in a metal brace, and used crutches, ever since. She still hikes and kayaks in her 80s, and is tougher than i will ever be, but having polio 70 years ago has fucked up her life ever since.

Most of you are young enough that you probably never even saw anyone with their leg in a brace from polio. It was common when i was a kid in the '60s-'70s, as other old-timers can testify.

Vaccines wiped out polio, along with a lot of other infectious diseases, until morons started not vaccinating their kids in the '90s, over a thoroughly discredited claim that some vaccines caused autism.

We know a) that was never true in the first place, and b) even if it were ever true, the ingredient in some vaccines that was falsely blamed for causing autism hasn't been used in more than a decade.

Vaccines save lives, and prevent a lot of diseases that used to routinely fuck up a lot of people. Anyone living this lifestyle might want to get the hepatitis A/B vaccination, which won't protect you from the kind of hep you get by sharing syringes (hep C), but will protect you from a lot of nasty shit homeless and traveling folks are likely to be exposed to due to poor sanitary conditions (see OP).

 

[roughdraft]

i wonder if some younger folks I've seen in modern times with the metal brace and all had polio, and weren't vaccined because they were from a very, very backwoods place in Appalachia, for example. not to generalize but it could be.

I got my Hep A vaccine for 160 and the booster later for something like 105, in Maryland. It's criminal these days to be charging in the States for this. I was never aware of this outbreak in SD but I recall reading the same in SE Michigan and a couple other spots in the south..and what with all the fuckery afoot, it doesn't seem to be unlikely that it will continue.

I was on a project with one anti-vaxxer, who i really never fucked with, kid was a dick and ironically very unhealthy. His justification was that the vaccines are created from the diseases themselves and so they are a massive conspiracy to make people ill...but aren't they made under some intensive controls, and don't they come from dead cells of the bacteria (or whatever) that causes the illnesses?

+ Slightly off topic, but anyone reading about vaxs should know - I got a Yellow Fever vaccine in lovely Huaraz, Peru for a one time payment of nada - only cost was 3 hours waiting for all of the local infants to recieve theirs first, to insure prioritization, should so many show up on that day. I was thrilled, as it goes for 300 or so in the USA... some say it lasts for ten years, others say it's good for life. As long as yr not going straight into the Amazon or so, it should be worth it kicking around a less tropical zone and inspecting what's offered.

 

[Coywolf]

@Coywolf It's way too easy to just dismiss people that're anti-vaxx and other similar stuff as ignorant or a sheep, but the problem is that that's the exact same arguments they're using to dismiss you.

My justification for dismissing these people as such, is because if there are people who blatantly refuse to listen to science that has been proven time and time again, outside of government entities, even; the only thing that will protect the rest of the population is to isolate them. The best way to isolate a dangerous group of people is to dismiss their ideas as moronic and unfounded.

Do I sound like an asshole? You bet. But I would way rather sound like an asshole than end up with cholera, or my children end up with shingles at 50 years old. Sorry, I have no time for these people. They are endangering the population. And if you want to go down the "I'm such a holistic parent that I will do literally everything against the mainstream to be a "neo-parent" its kinda your fault. Sometimes "neo" ideas fail.

This comment got me curious so I looked it up. The Pew Research Center and several other institutions have found that antivaxxers are pretty evenly distributed across political parties. Also, amusingly, both sides thinks the other side is more likely to be anti-vax:

You are very right, as many "neo-liberal" parents follow these dumb-ass ideas too. My bad for making it partisan.

I was on a project with one anti-vaxxer, who i really never fucked with, kid was a dick and ironically very unhealthy. His justification was that the vaccines are created from the diseases themselves and so they are a massive conspiracy to make people ill...but aren't they made under some intensive controls, and don't they come from dead cells of the bacteria (or whatever) that causes the illnesses?

*Facepalm* Ya. THIS. If the kid knew anything about how vaccines were created, and didnt buy into some BS conspiracy theory, he would have known the possiblity from actually contracting a disease form a vaccine is virtually nil.

 

[Dameon]

My justification for dismissing these people as such, is because if there are people who blatantly refuse to listen to science that has been proven time and time again, outside of government entities, even; the only thing that will protect the rest of the population is to isolate them. The best way to isolate a dangerous group of people is to dismiss their ideas as moronic and unfounded.

I think that the real problem is that you don't have any chance of convincing them their beliefs are wrong if you just dismiss the complexities that lead somebody to become and stay anti-vaxx. Insulting them hasn't worked as a tactic, clearly, the movement keeps growing.

 

[Coywolf]

They only thing left to do is insult them. We have tried science. When they claimed it was "government funded science", we used privately funded studies that concluded the same thing. When that didnt work we asked doctors to explain to them why vaccines were needed. That didnt work, so now the only thing left to do is discredit their ideas through public education, one source of which is making their ideas seem ridiculous though a general consensus that vaccines are needed for the general health of the public, which far outnumbers the anti-vaxers.

 

[Coywolf]

Also, WHAT complexities? The fact they listen to fringe news sources, or that they somehow know one child that had an adverse effect to a vaccine? That is like saying "I dont want to take my kid to the hospital for pneumonia because I know a kid that got MRSA there once"

 

[Older Than Dirt]

There are no complexities, as Coywolf said, and there is no reasoning with someone stupid enough to not vaccinate their kids. Being a flat-earth moron just makes you an idiot, but being an anti-vaxxer can kill or cripple people too young to make their own decisions.

Compared to vaccines, cars and airplanes are some radical new technology. Vaccination is a technology that is more than 200 years old, and has ended so many infectious diseases- when was the last time you met someone with smallpox?

The real issue with anti-vaxxers is what's called "herd immunity"- by not vaccinating their kids, they are putting not just their kids, but every other kid at risk, and reviving diseases modern medecine had eliminated in the rich countries.

 

[Dameon]

There are complexities...if it was as simple as ignorance versus knowledge, then there wouldn't be a problem in the first place; you could just give them the knowledge, and they'd look into it, see its validity, and accept it. There's situations and ways of thinking that make people vulnerable to these kinds of beliefs, and intelligent people can be just as vulnerable as stupid people. For example, when you're pregnant, and haven't ever encountered these diseases in your lifetime, the appeal to your fear for your child can be pretty significant when paired with a 2 hour Youtube video that floods you with contradictory information and sources that look scientific, even if the actual science is poor. A number of sources of mental manipulation, like churches, can set up the smartest person to believe in anecdotal evidence and adopt beliefs that don't necessarily have the best internal cohesion. Peer validation helps reinforce the beliefs; you develop blind spots, believe that you have more understanding of the subject than you actually do.

I'm not arguing in favor of these beliefs, mind you, I'm just arguing that we need to understand the complexity of why people have them to even begin to fight anti-science beliefs.

 

[Coywolf]

you could just give them the knowledge, and they'd look into it, see its validity, and accept it.

Ok, here is the issue with that. We have given these people ample scientific evidence, clinical studies, doctors opinion's with with a Masters degree in the field. There is nothing left to do but isolate these people to the point they are laughed at by modern society.

I think 9/11 was a damned conspiracy for many reasons. I have had people come at me with half-assed evidence, but I have yet to see hard facts that support their "facts". If I saw that, I would probably change my mind. The problem with that, is that I am a reasonable person, as many of these anti-vaxers are not. Sorry, only explaining what I have observed.

If you can give me an example of a hardcore anti-vaxer that was swayed by hard fact and scientific evidence, I would love to see it, perhaps that person could help convince the rest of the nay-sayers.

Until then, I will keep spreading their shame.

 

[Dameon]

If you can give me an example of a hardcore anti-vaxer that was swayed by hard fact and scientific evidence, I would love to see it, perhaps that person could help convince the rest of the nay-sayers.

I'm saying that facts and science are exactly what won't convince them, because you have to address the entire complexity of their beliefs, rather than just dismissing them as morons. Isolating them would work if everybody did it, but it doesn't work that way, and ignoring them means that they keep growing.

In an ideal world, intellectual appeals would be all we have to make, and people would fall into line when it's a clear-cut case, but unfortunately peoples' brains mostly just don't work that way.