Diversion

New York is ending the religious exception for vaccinations.
Do we really believe Orthodox Jews in New York are the ones bringing back once-eradicated diseases?  There’s no connection between illegal immigrants from sh**hole countries and rising cases of measles and tuberculosis?
This is the same logic as taking guns away from law-abiding citizens, or looking for your lost car keys under the street light.  It’s easier to find them.  But it doesn’t do any good.
Joe Doakes

Everything that isn’t banned is mandatory

9 thoughts on “Diversion

  1. TB and other diseases can be spread increasingly by immigrant populations. TB also made a larger comeback within the last decade or so because of homeless populations getting the disease, getting initial treatment, but not complying with the full dose. They would stop taking the medication and then would not be completely treated. This risks creating drug resistant strains.

    The anti-vaxxers are a mixed bunch. There are the religious exceptions. The “holistic hippie” types. The misinformed/low information types. The state with the highest percentage of unvaccinated children is California, most in the Bay Area. And if you look at the elementary schools- most are in Berkeley and Marin County areas. The state with the lowest number of unvaccinated tis Alabama.

    Who spreads disease? It probably depends on if there are opportunities for being in crowds of other susceptible hosts. TB can easily be spread in homeless shelters, on public transportation, planes/airports. Measles is contagious also, but if you’re vaccinated, you’re less susceptible. So, it is most easily spread within the communities that are unvaccinated. Of course, recently, the CDC recommended certain adults be revaccinated for measles, mumps and rubella, so more of us may be at risk than we thought, especially if we are in crowded areas with unvaccinated people.

  2. Do we really believe Orthodox Jews in New York are the ones bringing back once-eradicated diseases?

    Yes and no.

    No, they’re not introducing the diseases in general, although there have been cases of measles transported back from Israel by folks who have visited there.

    Yes, they are facilitating the spread of the diseases by providing a reservoir of folks susceptible to the disease who can amplify its reach after the infection has been introduced.

  3. What nerdbert says. I would believe that the “U.S. reserves” of certain diseases are low, but when they are introduced and find their way to unvaccinated populations, they do tend to spread quickly. I used to live in Boulder, and unvaccinated hippies were the bane of many hospital nurses and staff, because they’d be bringing in diseases that you just didn’t find among those with herd immunity.

    So yes, enforce immigration law–I get to discuss tropical diseases from Latin America every time I give blood because we don’t–but let’s also do a better job of explaining the basic concept behind herd immunity; vaccines don’t work primarily by preventing you from getting the disease. They work primarily by preventing you from passing it on to others. If unvaccinated people transmit the disease to an average of four people, and the vaccine is 80% effective at preventing transmission of the disease, the epidemic dies out. It’s that simple.

  4. vaccines don’t work primarily by preventing you from getting the disease. They work primarily by preventing you from passing it on to others.

    Really? I didn’t know that.

  5. bb is pretty much spot on and did a better job detailing what I said, although the herd immunity has to be well north of 80% for something as infectious as measles (for some reason the number 92% *effective* vaccination sticks in my mind for most diseases).

    Part of the problem is that for many diseases the vaccines are grown in media that a pretty fair fraction of the population is allergic to, and when you add that to the fraction where immunity has lessened over time, and the fraction that isn’t well enough to take vaccination, you aren’t left with a whole lot of other folks who can voluntarily abjure vaccination before you go below the percentage required to stop outbreaks.

    I know the last time I went into certain areas of the Caribbean I got a boatload of shots to bolster my immunity from shots I had last gotten as a wee lad, as well as a host of other shots that nobody would usually get here. There are a quite a few not commonly given here that you get when you travel foreign that only last for a relatively short time and cost quite a bit — usually *not* covered by your work insurance.

  6. Curious…

    If we must inject Jews with porcine products in the name of public health, can we hold AIDS infected Brokeback cowboys in isolation for the same reason?

    We’ve spend billions creating meds to keep them in the saddle, but they are still carriers and still responsible for >70% of new cases.

    Redecioulious!

  7. Nerd, several years ago a friend was planning a trip to India and Pakistan. As part of his inoculations, he had to get one for the Plague.

    Yes, I asked him the obvious question.

  8. This seems like the first 10 minutes of a movie about a Pandemic that kills 500 million to 1 billion people worldwide.

  9. jdm, yes. It’s why you see posters like “Bob didn’t get his flu shot, got the flu, but was better a week later. His grandmother Lois wasn’t so lucky.

    Let’s take a classic epidemic model. You have your original “Typhoid Mary”, who infects 10 people, each of whom infect an average of 10 people, etc.. OK, with that math, pretty soon you’ve got pandemic status, a classic result of the geometric series a^n with a>1 going to “infinity”–or here, the whole population.

    Now let’s assume that vaccinate 95% of people with a 99% effective vaccine (like measles is). Now each person is going to infect only ~0.6 people until the whole population has been exposed–now it’s a hassle, but not an epidemic.

    Notice here as well that the # of people to whom one might pass the disease helps a lot–if you only see four people while sick, your a goes down and the epidemic slows. That’s why quarantines work. (and subdivisions instead of tenements)

    See what I’m getting at? It’s nice that my MMR/polio/smallpox/whatever vaccine tends to prevent me from getting those diseases. It’s even better that, because my body kills the pathogens, I don’t pass them on to others.

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