Canada is below the required immunity threshold to sustain elimination. How did we get here?

  • Skyline969@lemmy.ca
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    5 months ago

    If only there was a way to prevent a person from getting measles. Hell, mumps and rubella too!

  • ArugulaZ@kbin.social
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    5 months ago

    Anti-vaxxers, of course. Everyone thank the anti-vaxxers with both middle fingers!

    • SanguinePar@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Agreed, but not just them, it is also about making sure vaccines are properly available and accessible, the clinics are open when parents are able to get to them (or out of work hours) and that their availability is properly advertised and promoted. It needs to be made as easy as possible for people to get their kids jabbed with as little impact on their daily schedules as possible.

    • FriendBesto@lemmy.ml
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      5 months ago

      How? There has always been X number of people who do not take vaccines, the largest group are the Amish and other smaller religious groups? The crazies you speak of are a tiny minority.

      If there is more measles but the same group of people are taking the shots then measles would not increase by much. You think that people who took shots before are not taking them anymore?

      • otp@sh.itjust.works
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        5 months ago

        In the last 20 to 30ish years, there’s been a rise in anti-vax rhetoric, including massive campaigns specifically against the MMR vaccine.

      • NotJustForMe@lemmy.ml
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        5 months ago

        What do you mean, the same group of people? You take the vaccine once, usually when you are a child. So if you got it for your kid, and they decided you are an archaic, brainwashed fool and didn’t get it for theirs, there you go.

      • d-RLY?
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        5 months ago

        The Amish and groups like them aren’t themselves the main issue. As they by default tend to stay amongst themselves in their communities. Which limits a lot of exposure both with stuff going in and coming out of their living spaces/communities. The main cause of this shit are the folks that are either too “woo woo” and think that basically all diseases are actually “curable” with shit like crystals and the energies of “mother Gaia.” Along with their more conservative counterparts in the “God, Jesus, and prayer” side of things. In addition to the overlapping groups that think that all vaccinations are “government mind and body control” shit.

        So if more and more people are joining the anti-science side of things and refuse to see how we literally haven’t had to deal with these terrible diseases because of vaccinations. Then it means said diseases are going to start actually spreading more and more again. Kind of like how people that didn’t live through hard times that lead to aid programs and protections tend to see those things as “not needed at all.”

        Of course it doesn’t help matters that the sins of the past have made very real reasons for different minority groups to absolutely distrust vaccines due to shit like the Tuskegee and Nazi “experiments.” Once trust is lost and very real shit like those things are proven, then I am not sure at what point it is even possible to start over. Unfortunately these groups get lumped in with the medical versions of flat earthers that are completely anti-science and proud of it.

        And that is all just the human sides of things. The actual diseases themselves evolve the more they are able to spread. Which literally means that shit we had dealt with dramatically now has more and more places and people to spread into. Which at a point also means that people that did take the shots and were good to go are now being punished by these new versions that are taking hold in the anti-science fucks (that also tend to be the same fucks that won’t wear fucking masks and try to avoid close contact while fucking sick). If the anti-science assholes that are refusing to take shots over both real and really dumb reasons (muh freedumbs). Then they shouldn’t removed about taking basic fucking actions like wearing masks and not claiming that they are somehow the same as the stars and triangles the Nazis forced people to wear. They are selfish and anti-respecting the lives of everyone around them. They just want everyone to yield to their main character-ass whining about “liberty” while oppressing everyone.

    • BossDj@lemm.ee
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      5 months ago

      At this point, he was a symptom. He was pushing a narrative those people already wanted to hear. They’d likely still be the way they are. They’d have found their excuse somewhere. And by now, anyone not immediately, loudly, aggressively pushing back on the bullshit narrative are bad actors with ill intentions

      • otp@sh.itjust.works
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        5 months ago

        He was doing it to make money. I don’t think it’s sufficient to call him a symptom. I’d argue he was one step away from bringing it to the mainstream. (That celebrity was responsible for making it mainstream imo)

        • BossDj@lemm.ee
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          5 months ago

          What I mean is that whether he existed or not, something was bound to mainstream the antivax movement

          • otp@sh.itjust.works
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            4 months ago

            I think I disagree that we would’ve had mainstream anti-vax even without Andrew Wakefield (and Jenny McCarthy).

            That’s like saying we’d have Microsoft without Bill Gates. Sure, we don’t need Gates now to have Microsoft, and it feels like an inevitability in hindsight. But he was such a major player that moved MS forward that things would be very different without him.

            • BossDj@lemm.ee
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              4 months ago

              He’s all of one half of one sentence in the main wiki article on the centuries-old antivax movement, shared with a 1980’s similar scare.

              https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_hesitancy

              I think we have age bias – it was the story of our time so we as more weight to it. There are so many true and false stories of vaccines for centuries.

              I think a better analogy is you’re trying to say without Bill Gates, personal computing wouldn’t exist, when it was already moving in that direction, and Hell, I’m pretty sure apple and Microsoft build their idea on an operating system that was created by xerox first.

              • otp@sh.itjust.works
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                4 months ago

                Great points.

                Didn’t Jenny McCarthy leverage Andrew Wakefield’s research for her position, though? Because I feel like that’s when it started becoming “mainstream”.

                I’d say it was during the pandemic that it went crazy though. Actually mainstream, where parents stopped asking each other “Where do you take your baby for their boosters?”, and started asking “So are you choosing to vaccine your baby?”…

                • BossDj@lemm.ee
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                  4 months ago

                  She absolutely did, but she isn’t even a footnote. People having kids today might not even know who she is.

                  If you look at data, vaccination support was lower in 2008 than it got in 2014 when it dipped again due to Wakefield. He is blamed for specific incidences, like measles outbreaks at the time. But a bigger dip happened in 2019 with the bullshit nationalism messaging (don’t let the government tell you what to do)

                  https://data.unicef.org/topic/child-health/immunization/

  • Krudler@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Idiots like my sister.

    She once sternly advised me “I won’t have any chemicals in my home”

      • Krudler@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        I asked her how she felt about nitrogen on her lawn

        She exploded. I WON’T ALLOW IT!

        I said what do you think most of the breathable atmosphere is made of and what do you think comes down with rain that makes your grass grow?

        You know how well that went.

  • Shdwdrgn@mander.xyz
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    5 months ago

    Well SOME of us are prepared, since we had parents who actually cared about our lives rather than virtue-signalling to their Facebook groups.

    • flooppoolf@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      That’s not how herd immunity works, once the population reaches a certain threshold it all goes to the toilet because not everybody can sustain the same immunity over long periods of time.

      Herd immunity makes it hard for the virus to jump from person to person because the statistics dictate how likely it is for transmission to occur.

      When a large amount of people are immunized it is less likely for it to jump from a newly vaccinated child to an adult that got vaccinated years ago because of the buffers that might exist in between those people.

      When a less than useful amount of people are vaccinated it is more likely that it will just jump to all of the adults with weaker immunity.

      So even if you’re immunized, sometimes that immunity goes away quickly as it did with the COVID vaccine.

      Humanity is reaping what they sowed.

    • floofloof@lemmy.ca
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      5 months ago

      The problem is that the voluntarily unvaccinated give the disease the chance to circulate. Once in circulation it will harm some people who are vaccinated and some people who can’t be vaccinated. Vaccination is in part an altruistic act that helps protect others. But antivaxers don’t seem to understand this notion of doing something to protect other people.

  • derf82@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Well, I’m fully prepared. And I’m also prepared to watch Darwinism in action.