Vaccine Efficacy

Vaccines are once again being pressed by the news and the government following the recent California law. Normally speaking, the issue shouldn't be important. Like terrorism, infectious disease kills almost no one. Furthermore, almost the entirety of infectious disease damages are caused by a very limited set of diseases, most importantly, the flu. We have been unable to create a vaccine that has any significant impact on these diseases.

American infectious disease death rate is currently about 40 per 100000. In 1940 it was about 300 per 100000. Nearly half of the current deaths from infectious diseases can be attributed to influenza and pneumonia.

From 2000 to 2015, a little over 3000 Americans were killed by terrorists. This calculates out to about .06 deaths per 100000 per year.

4.7 Americans per 100000 die per year due to intentional homicide.

About 815 per 100000 Americans die every year. In 1940 about 1080 per 100000 died.

Thus, the chance that a particular random American will die in a year is about .8%.

This suggests a half life of 85 years. In turn, mean lifetime would end up at 122 years.

This is unreasonably long. Death rates have been reduced below the plausible range by interfering with the age pyramid. America is unsustainably young. In fact, the entire world is unsustainably young.

Our death rate should be 1262 deaths per 100000.

So, with a little background we can return to the actions of the ruling class- the media and the government. On one side of the vaccine debate, we see Narrative A-

Foolish, half religious, conspiracy nuts fail to vaccinate their children, which in turn allows diseases to use those children as vectors through which diseases spread, eventually reaching vulnerable subgroups and causing deaths. The wisdom of the chosen elite is only hampered by controls on the powers of government, while science has firmly solved the issue at hand.

As for Narrative B-

Vaccines are popular among the ruling elite because they are another pathway by which the common man can be vilified. Vaccination is a fundamentally half religious tool, similar to kosher eating or Islamic fasting, which is used to build an in group and an out group.

In other words, the vaccine debate is actually a debate between the wisdom of the ruling class vs the wisdom of first degree related individuals. So... does the government have a case wherein, in its wisdom, its able to force a stupid and dangerous group to give up its beliefs for the greater good?

Such scenarios should exist. The world is filled with individuals, and over half of them are idiots. People are known to build groups around known fallacies, and in many case larges swarms of idiots can gather together to support almost any variable X. 

Specific examples where governments have come into conflict with such groups, for example, violent religious terrorists and cruel, unreasonable, dictatorial foreign powers, do exist.

That said, the above isn't as clear cut as it would seem- such groups don't exist. Not that they are not physically real, but that they are illusions created from the conniving imagination of the elites. To put that in more simplistic terms- for each person killed by terrorism, the American government spends 500 million dollars. The real threat is insignificant compared to the virtual threat.

In other words, the elites create strawmen to wage war upon. What they say is technically correct, but not in the manner that what they say sounds like.

Here we reach the crux of the vaccination debate-

On one side, we have people who do not support or believe in a certain vaccine or group of vaccines. On the other, we have the government.

The government's arguments are predictable. Vaccines are safe and effective. Science is on our side. Measles and Polio prove how great we are.

For the most part, the facts cited are true- Measles and Polio used to be a big deal, and now they aren't. If a person is vaccinated, and then exposed to a disease, he's less likely to catch the disease than a control.

But this doesn't add up to the original statement. Measles and Polio were never very deadly to begin with. Death rates were in a long term declining trend-line before the vaccines became widespread. There is very little evidence to show that measles and polio were driven out by vaccination.

The issue of clean water needs to be addressed here. The elites blamed the polio breakout on our clean drinking water, which is also directly inferable from the science behind vaccines. But, studies have demonstrated that clean water prevents polio, directly conflicting with the establishment narrative.

The historical data isn't favorable towards vaccine. Deaths rates have declined severely in all diseases, not just the ones with vaccines. Furthermore, cliffs should appear a few years after the implementation of widespread vaccination programs. This does not happen at a rate above expected constellation probability.

Setting aside the historical data, an analysis of relevant studies is called for. Here, we see an annoying problem- very few studies address the efficacy of a vaccine on a population. The tests are all done under laboratory conditions, and cannot be translated to real world application.

The idea that a cure would work for an individual but not a group is not unexpected. It is normal in medicine. Diseases adapt. Asymptomatic carriers are worse infection vectors than normal. Immunities wear off. Pathogens have large numbers of unexpected behaviors, not visible in the laboratory. Pathogens kill other pathogens, steal vectors, and starve competition of nutrients. An infection while young can give a strong immunity once old, that a vaccine cannot replicate.

The studies conducted on vaccine efficacy generally take the form of a couple hundred test subjects that are followed for a few months. Studies wherein similar groups with dissimilar vaccination rates are tracked for a sustained period of time and display life expectancy discrepancy, do not exist.

Almost all of the time, when asked for science supporting vaccines, the pro vaccine side points to a series of studies verifying that vaccines are safe. But this runs into two problems-

A- Homeopathy is, generally, safe. No one cares if vaccines are safe, if they're not effective.

B- The studies do not say that vaccines are perfectly safe. In fact, they say vaccines kill over a hundred Americans every year.

So, we ask, is the government really demonstrating its superior intellect? What would it suggest if it were?

We can start with the global warming debate- it's fundamentally identical. The alarmists repeats the wonders of carbon heat trapping, throws out a couple models saying how awesome he is, then says he's peer reviewed by cool people. Or, to put it another way, it also uses the science card.

Here we've reached a larger problem. Science is just a word. Anyone can call anything science. In the past, science was reliable. This is because people didn't trust science. Science didn't have any positive connotations. It was just a word used by a group with a certain ideology and work style. Nowadays, people have learned that science is where the facts come from, so, of course, the propagandists, the advertisers, the manipulative and corrupt, have come for the title. The difference between a modern scientist and an 1800s scientist is as wide as that between an A.D. 200 christian and an A.D. 400 christian.

And then, we start reaching the absurd stances of the government.

Let's imagine that vaccines are effective and global warming is real. Would it be better to trust the government, or would it be better to be wrong about the above?

The elites have opposed genetic modification at every turn.

Regarding plants, the FDA delays almost every new product for at least ten years, and the major news outlets attack GMOs far more often than they support them. Nutrition is far more important than vaccines. Nearly 15% of Americans are on a highly limited food budget. Raising the price of food, is stealing the vegetables from babies.

And, then there's the other half, which the government has almost entirely destroyed- human genetic manipulation. Imagine a world where everyone has over 120 IQ, blue eyes are as common as brown, anxiety, depression, diabetes, etc. have all been eliminated, parents get along better with their children, and etc.

None of those are particularly difficult. All of them are frustrated by the elite's weird religious demands, their faith that humans are perfect as they are and that meaningfully changing the natural order is evil.

The elites have, quite unsuccessfully, opposed cryptography since the earliest computers. Quite contrary to their rhetoric, if we hadn't disobeyed and overpowered the government, the internet wouldn't exist.

The elites support weird economic theories, which basically say they should control everything. The issue there is larger than can be addressed easily, but, at the least their weird anti-trade beliefs, their continuing mercantilist trade deficit theories, and their illogical belief in the efficacy of sanctions are worth mentioning.

Basically, the vaccine debate isn't really about vaccines at all. It's just one part of the larger debate- should the elites be trusted when they press for counterintuitive, self serving duties? Like usual, every position proves every other position. The government asserts that it is wise, because it handled WW2 and the great depression, because it journeyed to space and freed the blacks. And, because it vaccinated the masses.

In other words, the elites have created a narrative. Each element doesn't look all that important, each element creates a feel good story that only a Nazi, a monster or a bigot could oppose, but together they form an unassailable wall.

Generally speaking, anti-vaccination is met with confusion, the issue draws up a sort of Pascal's wager, since vaccines aren't particularly expensive, and they can't cause too much harm, given that death rates are already unreasonably low. And no matter how much theorycrafting says that vaccines don't work, that isn't much relief to a parent who failed to vaccinate and then watched a child die to measles. On the other hand, if a parent does vaccinate, and the child still dies, at least the relief of having done what was possible exists. Instinctively, vaccines are hard to attack.

The popular version of deaths by preventable cause is 48.2%. However, smoking, drinking alcohol, obesity- government can't prevent these things. The relevant rate is closer to 8.4%. In other words, infectious agents (3.1%)+ toxins (2.3%)+ traffic accidents (1.8%)+ firearms (1.2%).

The elites rely on the typical christian defense- Without their religion people will turn to sin, immorality and decadence, so it's evil to even analyze what they say.

However, these threats cause very little impact on most people's lives. We're already living as long as the human body is capable of. Further extension of lifespan through reduced deaths, is about as credible as further increases in profit due to a company's third round of downsizing.

The main reason why people die is aging. The second biggest reason is that they don't value their life enough (and thus take drugs, to include alcohol and cigarettes, overeat, participate in dangerous sports/other entertainment, etc.)

If vaccines really were safe and effective they wouldn't need a gigantic propaganda apparatus to function. Antibiotics do just fine without blackmailing people into submission, without weekly news stories about how great they are, etc. The same can be said of clean drinking water, toilets, nutritious food, protection from nature, avoiding contaminants, etc.

Vaccines are on the side of health insurance, doctors and organic food. They rely on the elites to force it upon the masses, through law and lies, and are not independently sought out through their own merit.

It's currently impossible to prove the vaccine debate one way or the other. It cannot be proven that vaccines are ineffectual, because that would be proving a counterfactual.

However effective vaccines are, they can't do much, because life expectancy does not vary sufficiently between countries. Infectious disease is complicated enough, that any activity can be accounted for using any number of alternate movers, such as sanitation, pollution, nutrition and evolution.

That said, the pro-vaccine side isn't positing simply that vaccines are beneficial. They claim that vaccines are the end all be all of healthcare, and that only non-compliance prevents the complete elimination of disease.

Vaccine compliance is around 98%. Like racists, terrorists and mass killers, the group in question has nowhere near the power required to achieve all the evil deeds attributed to them. Vaccines cannot fail due to people raising philosophical objections, because almost no one does. This is the Trotsky defense from animal farm.

The programs never reach their supposed potential, and in turn, the proponents call for ever more power with which to suppress their enemies.