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| Thread: USA, EU, UK refuse to share vaccine formulas. |  This thread is pages long: 1 ... 6 7 8 9 10 ... 20 29 · «PREV / NEXT» |
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blizzardboy
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posted March 20, 2021 12:15 PM |
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I get your point that as a society develops all that stuff needs to go together. You need transportation, nutritious food, education, civil rights and labor laws, equity for women and minorities, etc., otherwise medicine is going to be increasingly inaccessible to the population anyway and everybody is going to be poor except for a few. That stuff is all inseparable for the most part and it all improves together.
But if it weren't for medicine, probably every person on this forum would know families whose children died of various diseases that have now been pretty much eliminated in many parts of the world. Just the fact that a woman can deliver a baby at a hospital and both her and the baby are extremely likely to survive. That's a relatively new thing. Once upon a time, if you were on the surgeon's table with a piece of cannon shrapnel in your back, the surgeon wouldn't have bothered to wash his hands before operating on you. So on top of the pleasure of having metal in your back because an emperor that you've never met wants to expand his territory, you also get to have fingers covered in germs inside your body, assuming they've got time for you and there isn't a higher ranked person to take care of. That's all (mostly) history. But by far the greatest benefits from medicine are things we don't normally think about because they affected us while we were babies or children.
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JollyJoker
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posted March 20, 2021 01:41 PM |
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Ok, something about infant mortality.
Reading the wiki article, it seems pretty clear that non-medical reasons are AT LEAST as frequent as medical ones for infant and child mortality.
The German wiki article says, that in Germany in Mecklenburg-Schwerin infant mortality was constantly between 16.2% and 17.1% between 1886 and 1910. The German pediatrician Hugo Neumann collected statistical data in 1908 with a view on apartment size (for economic status) and infant nutrition. His numbers documented that infant mortality was inversely proportional to the economic status, and that - interestingly enough - no matter the economic status, mortality was multiple times higher with articficial baby food as opped to breastfeeding.
This is also an interesting read.
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My point is that medicine is not as secondary as you make it sound when it comes to longetivity of life
It is secondary to working and living condiditions, because you won't live long, no matter the medicine, when you work too much and too hard and in a dangerous environment, so that you are done with 40. Quote:
and that how it affected public health is an intrinsical part of the social conditions you speak of.
But the social conditions had to be changed first to make medicine even available and affordable for the public. That's what I'm trying to explain the whole time. And when they were, you had still increase standards of living and decrease the work load and the dangers, for the advantages that "modern medicine" offered to become really effective. Again, medicine or not - as you said it yourself, starting to work in a coal mine with 14, longevity isn't something you'll enjoy.
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And btw, whether it is possible or not, if we are to live any longer, this would be even more about medicine than social conditions anyway. Because no matter how optimal the social conditions, you would still die of aging in your 130. Nobody ever makes it pass that. So if that was the basis for your objection, it is a flawed comparison to begin with, even if pulling it up from 40 to 60 was more about conditions, pulling it up from 80 to 150 isnt.
*IF* so, maybe.
But, frankly - I don't see it. If you look at the list of oldest people worldwide, it's easy to see that humans CAN get very old indeed. Say 115 for men and 120 for women. That is, WITHOUT medical progress. We are still very far off of those numbers, and an increase of even 10 years of average lifetime seems highly unlikely at the moment. So the question would be, what leads to people getting that old? Genetics? Or is it in some way possible to influence it (aside of the obvious)?
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artu
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posted March 20, 2021 09:21 PM |
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Since we seem to be getting nowhere, I’ll try a different approach. Scratch the words “modern medicine” and replace them with “germ theory.”
Now, there are mid-19th century workers, they live like cattle, stuck in some 50 m2 household, all families side by side, they have no health insurance etc etc. One of them gets sick, all of them get sick, most of them die.
Today, when you think of health issues, you think of heart disease, cancer, diabetes etc. Things that are related to how individuals treat their body. But back then, “the level boss” are the germs, you have to beat that first to beat cancer in the next level. And fighting germs is about conditions, medicine, hygiene all at the same time, it’s not about which one comes first.
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JollyJoker
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posted March 20, 2021 09:46 PM |
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No. Back then you were pisspoor, had to work 100 hours a week and EVERYTHING was bad for your health, the germs being just one hazard coming with poverty and bad living conditions, no sanitation, no heating, no quality food, no nothing.
Mind you, people are/were just as vulnerable to them because they are/were in a weakened state. Spanish flu? Look at when it happened and look at the people in Europe at the time, how down and out they were.
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artu
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posted March 20, 2021 10:55 PM |
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Hmmm, well, you know, I know this woman, Sukran, who comes to housecleaning for like once a month. She lives in a village near by, for years she’s been cleaning houses in Ayvalik. She has no education but she’s quite smart and sometimes we chat. In her village, nowadays, there’s a bus two times a day, and of course, the village now has electricity, waterpipes and so on. But she told me that back in the 1960’s when she was a kid, none of these existed. Anyway, back in those days, she and her two sisters got the measles, two of the three sisters were handling it kind of okay but the little one was almost dying. So their mother took all of them, carrying the little one on her back, to the nearest town, which had a weekly bus to the city, which had a hospital. They did that by walking like 30 km on foot, they almost missed the bus, the mother screamed and the bus stopped at the last moment. They were all treated in the hospital for measles and all survived.
Would you call them in a “weakened state” with or without the medicine anyway?
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JollyJoker
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posted March 21, 2021 08:49 AM |
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I don't know what to make of that story - I think it's unlikely to have happened that way. Think of the situation - 3 little children, all down with the measles, one seemingly critical. Mum takes the little one onto her back and the two sisters by the hands - who both have the measles as well, mind you, and no matter how good they are handling it, they are sick at this point - and WALKS with them 30 kilometers? How long is that supposed to have lasted? 8 hours? Eating, drinking in that time? If the little one had it bad (high fever, probably), she wasn't dying obviously.
And then they just got the bus, went in and infected every single passenger, because I take it that a Turkish bus in the 60s would have been pretty full. 
So nice story to tell, but hmm.
The "normal" mortality rate of the measles in a developed country is 1-3 per 1000 cases, depending on which source you take. In developing countries it can be as high as 1 per 4 cases (25%), and the main cause of death is pneumonia. However, pneumonia is a complication that happens in just 6% of the cases, not in 25%.
So you can still make the math yourself. Some simply die, whatever their state and whatever medicine does (like with covid). Some die because they would neeed treatment, but don't get it. More die because they are weakened (living conditions), no one had to die at all, because there is a measles vaccination since 1963, but that doesn't seem to happen consequently. Measles are on the rise again, even in the US.
Make the math yourself. Let's say EVERY child would get the measles (in reality it's not ever child, but in earlier times it was 95-98%. With 2 dying of 1000 (US values) we had a mortality rate of 0.2% without vaccination. In 3rd world countries we have a mortality rate of up to 25%, though.
However, it's not 25% of the cases that are actually critical, it's far less. So the additional (immense) numbers of dead children there are the consequence of living conditions on one hand, and no available medical treatment on the other (but as I said, if people live in such misery that they don't have enough to eat or access to clean water and so on, access to medical help is highly unlikely as well).
And even though the vaccine is there, it's obviously not used. In Kongo there was a pandemic in 2019 with 350.000 cases and 6.500 dead.
So again, modern medicine is fine when it comes to vaccinations against virusses - but it needs to be applied as well. If it can't be or isn't applied then it's worth nothing.
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artu
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posted March 21, 2021 09:40 AM |
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Villagers are much more used to walking then city people, they tell you things like “oh, it’s just down the road” for distances that take hours to walk. And public buses on the countryside are never full, actually they are usually almost empty. So, I dont doubt her story. It’s a childhood memory which must be at least a little blur, of course, and maybe it wasnt 30 km, but 20. But that’s just a detail. What you should make of the story, however, is to notice the effort people make for medicine, when it cant be taken for granted. This one I heard in first person, but there are also many similar I read in books and interviews. Contagions were quite common in Turkey, even back in the 1960’s.
Yes, I think we can both agree that for medicine to work, you should be able to attain it first.
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JollyJoker
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posted March 21, 2021 11:17 AM |
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If the situation had been really critical the child had dies, because it simply would have taken too long to get her to a hospital. She might have died anyway, even if in hospital, and she might have survived without help which I think is rather likely.
Yes, people are prepared to do a lot when they are afraid for their life or the life of some beloved one, that's not limited to medical help.
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Drakon-Deus 
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posted March 21, 2021 01:12 PM |
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blizzardboy said:
On the subject of vaccine equity, in case anybody thinks I am not a flexible person, I am willing to accept an alternative for those who are big fans of the nationalist model. Anti-vaxxers that don't want a vaccine can swap places with people in developing countries who do want one and are unable to do so. It will be like a student exchange program, except with vaccine participants. Also, since Hypochondriac Europa has less than 10% of people who have received even a single dose and they want to murder their own population by shutting down vaccination programs because of like a 0.00002% chance of a blot clot or something (I don't remember exactly how many zeros are to the right of the decimal lol), it should just donate all of its vaccines. Yes/no/maybe?
On the subject of vaccines, I'm not an "anti-vaxxer", I think people should get vaccinated if they WANT it and they're willing to deal with side-effects.
But give me a good reason why should I get vaccinated when the said vaccine doesn't change anything. I can still get the disease and pass it so I am still forced to wear facemasks and all that jazz. So why exactly should I take the risk? I am asking this honestly.
Now, if getting the vaccine would mean that I'm free not to wear the rag then I would be the first in line. But sadly that's not the case. The plandemic must go on.
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JollyJoker
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posted March 21, 2021 02:09 PM |
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What about children? (In general, not in the covid case.)
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Corribus
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posted March 21, 2021 10:46 PM |
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Edited by Corribus at 22:47, 21 Mar 2021.
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Drakon-Deus said:
Now, if getting the vaccine would mean that I'm free not to wear the rag then I would be the first in line. But sadly that's not the case. The plandemic must go on.
Think of it this way: Even if you are 100% immune after getting both vaccine shots, there's still a group social pressure aspect to abiding by public health protective measures. Getting people to wear masks has been hard enough. Theory: feeling out of place when everyone else is wearing a mask in public causes some people who don't really want to wear a mask to follow the crowd because of not wanting to stand out and be judged negatively. If the people who are mask-skeptical start seeing more and more people not wearing masks (due to increased vaccination rates), they will feel even less obligated and may ditch the masks even though they can transmit the disease. Even more, people who are not vaccinated may want to avoid wearing masks as they become more and more the minority due to social stigma. From a public health perspective, it is better policy to continue to advise mask wearing until the vaccination rate is high enough that the community has aggregate protection against the minority population of non-mask-wearers and vaccine noncompliants. I.e., you do not want masklessness to become the norm if a significant portion of the population can still become infected. Managing a pandemic and making appropriate choices is not just about YOU. It's about your neighbor as well.
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JollyJoker
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posted March 21, 2021 10:53 PM |
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I'm hoping that wearing a mask will be required in hospitals and doctor's offices even "after covid".
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Corribus
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posted March 21, 2021 11:21 PM |
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Yes it seems like common sense.
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I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask them where they're goin', and hook up with them later. -Mitch Hedberg
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Drakon-Deus
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posted March 22, 2021 05:10 AM |
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Thanks for the reply, Corribus. At least yours is a reasonable argumentation.
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Neraus
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posted March 22, 2021 12:21 PM |
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JollyJoker said:
I'm hoping that wearing a mask will be required in hospitals and doctor's offices even "after covid".
I'm actually baffled this wasn't extensively done in the past, as well as vaccines not being mandatory for health workers.
Then again, they don't even clean hospitals, when they should be the cleanest environments possible.
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blizzardboy
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posted March 22, 2021 12:30 PM |
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That regulation makes sense from a safety standpoint, but I'm even more glad I'm not a nurse or doctor in a hospital because it was already a crappy job and now post-pandemic they're going to live like galley slaves on a Quarrian ship.
I spent a brief time wearing an actual surgical mask (not a generic store mask) and their breathability for the user completely sucks. I wouldn't even feel completely comfortable making a livestock animal wear one of those things long-term. If I was working in a position where I had to wear one for hours every day I would transitions careers, which has already been happening with people in hospitals and clinics during the pandemic but I predict that drop-out and turnover will probably continue post-pandemic to some extent. Hopefully the robotics industry and remote consultation can eventually make-up for the difference enough because that deficit in healthcare workers probably won't be solved otherwise.
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blizzardboy
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posted March 22, 2021 02:16 PM |
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Drakon-Deus said:
Thanks for the reply, Corribus. At least yours is a reasonable argumentation.
I think my vax-swap program has lots of potential. 
Anyway, while people enjoy their "freedom" to not vaccinate, we have the distinct possibility of problematic mutations spreading and eventually affecting those who were already vaccinated. The percentage of Muricans who say they won't vaccinate right now is too high for a safe herd immunity to be achieved. Hopefully those percentages won't be accurate in the long-term. I'm guessing/hoping that some of those responses are just people being bitter and grumpy and ultimately they'll want the shot, but our capacity for being stupid is pretty impressive. Maybe a variant of COVID will spread outward from the US and then re-infect everybody else.
This scenario is also what may happen in developing countries without access to the vaccine. Rich countries vaccinate while poor ex-colony countries with subhuman status wait until 2023/2024. Within these demographics the virus may mutate enough to significantly reduce the efficacy of the vaccines, and then the virus re-infects the rest of the world.
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artu
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posted March 22, 2021 02:34 PM |
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Drakon-Deus said:
On the subject of vaccines, I'm not an "anti-vaxxer", I think people should get vaccinated if they WANT it and they're willing to deal with side-effects.
That’s what being anti-vaccine means. Nobody suggests to ban them completely, they just say they dont have to use them. But since contagions are not a matter of individual choice and people getting sick affects every one else, this is kind of like saying: I’m not anti-traffic lamp, I think people should stop at the red light if they WANT it.
Now, in case of covid, I can understand people holding their horses and thinking the vaccine may have side effects and keeping skeptical YET, because some say the due to the urgency pandemic causes, the vaccines are rushed. Normally, it takes researchers years lasting trial periods before they finally release a vaccine and label it safe. But standard vaccines have no serious side-effects.
Also, if I remember correctly, in case of covid, vaccine doesnt have immediate effects, you’re not risk free of being contagious the day you take the shot, so besides from what Corribus said, that’s another reason.
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Drakon-Deus
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posted March 22, 2021 02:49 PM |
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Then I guess I must be anti-vaccine. Thank you for the label.
And I suppose I'm anti "anything" that's forced down on people's throats,thank you very much. Are you happy now?
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blizzardboy
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posted March 22, 2021 02:55 PM |
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Countries with stricter rules on vaccinations (among other things) will see tangible results in healthspan and lifespan, however to a certain extent they will also be punished as a result of other places' decisions, because viruses can spread and mutate within exposed populations and then re-infect places that achieved herd immunity. Governments could make immunity shots a mandatory part of entry, so if somebody wants to travel they will be unable to do so legally without their shots.
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