Wednesday, September 04, 2024

Today's News: Roundup on vaccine denialism


Here is an excellent commentary on vaccine denialism - Timothy Caulfield Politics and Vaccine Misinformation: A Horrifyingly Bad Mix :
...Misinformation about COVID vaccines, and vaccines more generally, has become so entrenched and normalized that it now regularly forms part of political platforms.
Given that vaccines, including COVID vaccines, are widely considered one of the greatest achievements of biomedicine – it has been estimated that over the past 50 years vaccines have saved more than 150 million lives – this is a deeply worrying trend. We need to recognize that the merger of politics and vaccine misinformation is doing grave harm....
given the strong, broad and international scientific consensus on the value of COVID vaccines, how did we get here? Obviously, there are many factors at play, but, alas, the embrace of vaccine misinformation is increasingly about ideology.
Political identity has become one of the most significant – perhaps the most significant – variable predicting vaccine hesitancy, the embrace of vaccine misinformation, distrust of relevant scientific institutions, perceptions of risk surrounding vaccines, and belief in the efficacy of disproven COVID therapies (e.g., ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine). Indeed, numerous studies have shown a strong and growing association between vaccination hesitancy and ideology. In the U.S., political partisanship matters more than race, age, insurance coverage or education in predicting vaccine uptake. Studies have consistently shown that those who identify as Republican are much more likely to not get vaccinated and to hold a dim view of COVID vaccines. A 2024 study found that even the reporting of vaccine adverse events is influenced by political identity, showing that in Republican states, “vaccine recipients or their clinicians” are more likely “to report COVID-19 vaccine AEs” than in Democratic states.
A similar trend can be found around the world, including in Canada. ....
...The harms of increasingly politicized vaccine discourse are not isolated to COVID. The hesitancy created by the spread of misinformation during the pandemic has spilled over to adversely impact the perceptions of other beneficial vaccines. A 2024 study found, in the words of the researchers, that “conservatives in the United States spread their negative attitudes towards the COVID-19 vaccines to unrelated vaccines,” including flu, HPV, MMR and chickenpox. Studies show that politicizing public discourse about vaccines can also heighten equity issues and make it more difficult to counter harmful misinformation....
In The Tyee, Andrew Nikiforuk As COVID surges, the high price of vaccine denial
...As of mid-August, about one in every 19 British Columbians were enduring an infection, with or without symptoms.
Although the media routinely dismisses all COVID infections as an inconsequential nuisance, that’s not what the science says. The virus remains deadlier than the flu and repeated infections can radically change your health.
Repeated studies show in the bluntest terms that the initial acute infection is only the tip of the iceberg. Even a mild bout of COVID can leave a legacy of blood clots, heart failure, diabetes, decreased brain function (see sidebar), long COVID (now affecting 400 million people worldwide) and immune damage that increasingly makes people more vulnerable to a plethora of infectious diseases and possibly cancers.
These problems can erupt three years after an infection and are especially prevalent in patients who’ve been hospitalized by COVID.
Which is why the U.S. immunologist and COVID specialist Dr. David Putrino emphasizes, “There is no such thing as a SARS-CoV-2 infection that does NOT have prolonged consequences.”...
on an annual basis COVID infections still account for 20 times more deaths than influenza.
The data is not complete but this death toll likely made COVID the second or leading cause of death in the country last month.
According to Moriarty’s data, the number of COVID deaths per infection remain highest in Newfoundland, New Brunswick and Saskatchewan because they have older populations often compromised by serious medical conditions. They are also served by shrinking health resources.
...According to an increasing number of researchers, immune deregulation triggered by COVID probably plays a significant role in the dramatic global upticks in infectious diseases. The suspects include RSV, a variety of herpes viruses, whooping cough (now burning up the charts in Canada and England), scarlet fever, dengue fever, fungal infections and tuberculosis. Forty-four countries have now reported a 10-fold increase in the incidence of at least one of 13 infectious diseases compared to trends prior to the pandemic.
Although vaccine hesitancy, climate change and permissive travel have also played a role in this microbial wave, researchers strongly suspect that COVID’s disruption of the immune system has made it harder for many people to fight other infections.
...Here, then, is where we’ve arrived. We’ve entered a vicious cycle where more infections generate more COVID variants. The new variants have become more immune evasive. At the same time society has generally abandoned masks, testing and basic public health messages.
We could slow and suppress the cycle by facing the challenge squarely. For example, by cleaning dirty air the way we once tackled the disease-ridden spectre of cholera-infested water.
But public health officials are afraid to talk about clean air let alone the obvious: avoiding infection.
Beating back COVID requires hard work, communal wisdom and clear policies that markedly reduce the level of infection in society.
To date we have chosen viral denial, dirty air and a triumphant reign for long COVID.
I don't subscribe to the Globe and Mail now, so I can't link to this article, but Picard always writes well: Finally, some good news: Meanwhile, the United States has lost its mind:
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1 comment:

e.a.f. said...

Sometimes I wonder if people do not vaccinate their children nor themselves because they haven't seen a lot of children dying in their life time.
When driving around the O.K. - Koot. and various other rural places, I'd stop to look at old cemetaries. There were a lot of young people in those plots. I would wonder what happened because the other thing I noticed was there were more young women in those graves than young men. Outside of Greenwood you see a small grave yard by the side of a road. I noticed there were mostly young children and babies and young men. Then it dawned on me, this must have been where they buried people who died of the "spanish flu"
When we started grade one in 1955 there were children whose parents had died from polio or were confined to wheelchairs. We were kept in the yard at home, not allowed to play near ditches. Parents didn't know why people got polio but they weren't taking any chances.
Kids could die from diseases they can now be vaccinated against. i.e. I remember a time when kids could and would die of it. Now we have a vaccine.
When AIDS came calling people started dying. There was not much modern medicine could do. People you knew and worked with, family members, they got the disease and died. Then we got a vaccine. The dying stopped.
It is beyond me why people don't vaccinate themselves and their children. They want to believe some one with little to no knowledge about the diseases and vaccines instead of scientists who are very knowledgeable. Now that is not to say some people don't have reactions to some vaccines, but those are far and few between.

If people don't want to have shots, fine but then I don't want them working in health care. If I'm in hospital because I'm sick because of kidney disease or broke a leg I do not want some one who might have COVID coming anywhere near me.
If kids don't have vaccines, fine. that is their parents' choice, although I do believe that to be a form of child abuse, but I don't want them in the community centre, at schools, on sports teams. The government can provide seperate schools for the unvaccinated and they can be staffed by the unvaccinated. People may assert their right to not be vaccinated and I have the right to not die because I caught a disease from them which could have been prevented.
Yes, the U.S.A. does appear to have lost its collective mind or at least a lot of their citizens. Women will die if they can not access care or medication when there are complications from prenancy and birth. of course the people who are dying are women and its mostly men who pass this legislation and they truly dont' care that much about women. In their minds women are replaceable. what is so funny about all of this is many of these people proport to be "christians". Now not being one since I was about 10 yrs old, I do remember the 10 commandments and one of them was "though shalt not kill". withholding lfe saving medications and operations is killing someone if they die because of it. But then some of these bible pounders don't believe women are equal to men, so at some level they don't care.

3:50 pm

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