Gallup: Far Fewer in U.S. Regard Childhood Vaccinations as Important

JD Miller,

I am trying to balance a bit of the discussion. My background is in pharmaceutical vaccine development. Yes there is hindsight bias. We are looking at the issues through the lens of information that was not available always in the moments of discussion. And yes it was political. There is a reason why the poll showed huge differences between where Democrats stood on it and where Republicans stood on it. Most of the misinformation on the vaccine was coming from 12 sources, most of those 12 sources had a financial stake in promoting that misinformation around the globe. I never argued for vaccine mandates. Just trying to point out that 1) the vaccine was not mandated by the federal government for the general population and 2) the government does mandate vaccinations for school children of which 97.4% comply.

Do you or others want to take a cautious approach? Fine. My take on this site was to help people balance out the misinformation around things like the mRNA vaccine and things like VAERS (of which I have spent more time in then probably everyone on this site combined). There was misinformation on both side of the fence (left and right), but much more coming from the right and unfortunately a lot of it was junk.

I never pushed the vaccine, but since I understand mRNA vaccine science, I was trying to provide better information. Take it or don't take it, I don't care what anyone does on here personally with it. Just don't come in this site and state that the mRNA vaccine will alter DNA, because some crack news site said it would. I will rebuff it.

"I never argued for vaccine mandates." "Take it or don't take it, I don't care what anyone does on here personally with it."

Sorry, that position makes you an anti-vaxxer by definition:

anti-vaxxer

"a person who opposes the use of some or all vaccines, regulations mandating vaccination [emphasis mine], or usually both"

-https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anti-vaxxer

Welcome to the club

“I can’t see any reason the Covid vaccines should not have been called vaccines.”

It’s really simple, Aaron: Literally everyone I knew and worked with got the vaccinations and boosters (it was a government requirement in my country—you couldn’t even enter a store without scanning an app to prove it—and you couldn’t cross an international border around the world without a vaccine certificate), including me and my family.

And nearly every single person I worked with, including myself and my family, got covid. Some had terrible cases.

I think that’s pretty good reason to not call them “vaccines.”

I got all the vaccines and boosters and never got Covid. … well, never tested positive for it.

My experience proves as much and as little as anyone else’s: pretty much nothing.

A “vaccine” has never been a “shot you get that guarantees you will not get even a little bit sick with the targeted disease.” So, widespread lack of awareness of what a vaccine is does not constitute a good reason to stop calling it a vaccine.

I expected some push back on how mRNA vaccines differ from traditional ones, and wondered if I was remembering right. Did a little refresh. The mRNA vaccines only differ from older approaches in the mechanism used to generate the ‘fake pathogen’ (usually a protein marker) that stimulates the immune response (nice little chart here). So… yeah, still totally a vaccine.

On the pushiness topic, I still can’t see advocacy as pushiness. A case could certainly be made that requiring federal employees to be vaccinated was ‘pushy,’ but it’s also really easy to defend as reasonable precaution.

I think a lot of this debate reveals what sort of assumptions people had in place ahead of time. So when virtually every aspect of it got (unfortunately) politicized, pre-existing biases got intensely magnified.

In general, my bias was that people in power and people doing science are mostly regular human beings, with the motivational mixes you would expect from ‘garden variety sinners.’ So, I expected decision makers to be acting with a mix of desire to help the humans they saw themselves as responsible for, but also a desire for self-preservation, career preservation, greater power and influence and those kinds of things. Toss in various mixes of fear and arrogance.

Politically speaking, my bias was that neither left nor right were likely to handle the situation much better than the other.

Where that landed me is that I thought even a guy like Trump was pushing rapid vaccine development because he thought that was in everybody’s overall best interest (‘everybody’ including Trump himself). No difference with Biden. Biden may have been “pushy” toward the public, but Trump was arguably pushy with FDA and CDC, Congressional funding, etc., before him.

The mRNA breakthroughs were under Trump’s watch. The “yeah, let’s maximize use of these now” was under Biden’s. Like it or not, they were partners in that effort. There’s been a lot of political pressure to revise that narrative, but it’s still true.

The mRNA breakthroughs were under Trump’s watch. The “yeah, let’s maximize use of these now” was under Biden’s. Like it or not, they were partners in that effort. There’s been a lot of political pressure to revise that narrative, but it’s still true.

Well... Remember back a couple of years ago when we were having this debate here on SI and some of us were simply saying that each person should have the right to make a choice about whether or not to get the vaccine and we were accused of being Trumpers for having that position? Remember how I pushed back and pointed out how ridiculous that was because Trump himself was pushing the vaccine? Let us not forget who made this into a political issue!

>>I still can’t see advocacy as pushiness.<<

Sorry, but “We’ve been patient. But our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us.” when coming from the office of the president is not advocacy. That’s a veiled threat.

On “left/right” as having to do with experts in power, that’s irrelevant to honesty. Fauci started all his prevarication under Trump, and continued it under Biden. And plenty of “right-leaning” people have lied to the American people as well. The difference is in the media coverage. One is held to account these days and one not. Presumed experts should be ignoring the political implications and giving the actual facts (not ones that are “massaged” for our “own good.”)

I understand political reality and protecting one’s career as motivations, and I understand that those cannot be discounted. However, I can still make my own judgments as to the reliability of said “experts” when any dishonesty does come out. And no, I don’t have to trust their 50 years of experience in the field because “they were doing the best they could at the time.” Such a sentiment applies only to mistakes, not dishonesty from a figure abusing their position of trust. Fauci destroyed his credibility early on, and he should have been replaced.

The big breakthrough for the mRNA was the lipid shell. The model had been around for quite some time, but RNA degrades so quickly in the body (for good reason). It was the bringing together the mRNA technology with the lipid delivery platform that allowed this path to exist. I am not sure if Republicans want to hear this or not (given the survey results), but really, in all honesty, kuddo's to Trump and his administration for getting this done. I knock Trump a lot, but this was, in my opinion, a huge win for his administration.

I got all the vaccines and boosters and never got Covid. … well, never tested positive for it.

My experience proves as much and as little as anyone else’s: pretty much nothing.

I'm not really interested whether you find my experience sufficient "proof" or not, frankly. It explains my position though, and covers a wide enough sampling to satisfy me.

A “vaccine” has never been a “shot you get that guarantees you will not get even a little bit sick with the targeted disease.”

For some reason you keep ignoring that I never said or argued that. FYI, I and my family were not just "a little bit sick." I suppose we could pull the "good thing we'd been vaccinated or we'd have died!" post hoc justification, but yeah, I've never been impressed with that line of reasoning.

It simply amazes me that I am myself largely pro-vaccine, but am constantly thrown on the other side of this issue simply because I oppose mandates and think the way the whole issue has been communicated and handled has been an utter disaster.

Calling it a "good dress rehearsal for when we have a more dangerous pandemic" or whatever you said--when people around the world were stripped of their rights, imprisoned for weeks though perfectly healthy, kept from lifesaving medications, denied access to education, small businesses shuttered, people losing their livelihood, families broken apart... I find that frankly appalling. All things I saw myself or experienced, but sure, "experience proves nothing," right?

Many have their heads in the sand simply on this and other issues for no other reason that that they're so embarrassed to be associated with Crazy Aunt Carol's "Bill Gaytes is the Anti Christ and The Vaxines Are the Mark Of the Beast!" posts.

Calling it a "good dress rehearsal for when we have a more dangerous pandemic" or whatever you said--when people around the world were stripped of their rights, imprisoned for weeks though perfectly healthy, kept from lifesaving medications, denied access to education, small businesses shuttered, people losing their livelihood, families broken apart... I find that frankly appalling. All things I saw myself or experienced, but sure, "experience proves nothing," right?

To be quite blunt, anyone who thinks this is a good dress rehearsal scares me more than Trump does. The rest of Andrew K's above post was excellent as well.

OK, my family's experience with the vaccines is that everybody but my youngest son got one, and the youngest son abstained because the rest of your life could be a long time to deal with myocarditis. The rest of us took the jab for various reasons--two daughters because they were nurses (and they wanted to reduce their patients' risk), a daughter because it was required to work at Mayo, and a daughter and a son because they wanted to travel internationally.

Apart from the nurses, we all stopped taking the jabs because the virus wasn't as dangerous as before, and because we found the jab's side effects were, for us, about as bad as the disease itself.

But really, the thing that is setting public health back a generation, in my view, is things like what I mentioned before, along with the basic fact that the NIH funded gain of function research in the country that's killed more of their own people (Cultural Revolution, 65 million) than any other, and even now has close to two million Uighurs in concentration camps. OK...we funded research that could be used to make bioweapons with these guys? Really? Didn't Mary Shelley write a little warning about the dangers of medical research untethered to morality? Maybe Fauci and his buddies need to read it?

There are things that do require a lot of expertise to understand, but let's just say this is not one of them.

Apart from the nurses, we all stopped taking the jabs because the virus wasn't as dangerous as before, and because we found the jab's side effects were, for us, about as bad as the disease itself.

And yet a few years ago when we were having this debate here on SI, someone said that there were zero side effects and zero chance of side effects. The narrow minded bias was scary.

And yet a few years ago when we were having this debate here on SI, someone said that there were zero side effects and zero chance of side effects. The narrow minded bias was scary.

If you are talking about the same person and same comments that I am suspecting you are, then I remember their statements differently. I believe that person responded to the question of side effects that would show up months/years after receiving the vaccine, and that they stated there was no chance of late appearing side effects if they didn't first show up soon after receiving the vaccine. And I believe the reasoning was that the vaccine is eliminated from the body very quickly, so if a side effect doesn't show up in the near term, it's not going to show up in the long term many months after the vaccine has been eliminated from the body.

....I would argue that going back as far as I can remember, it's struck me that vaccine advocates have downplayed the side effects, and when you're sore from one, or when your child is whimpering after a series of vaccinations, you're going to think "If they don't acknowledge that one gets sore after this vaccination, I wonder what else they're not telling me.".

Don't get me wrong; I'm all for many vaccines, but the practice of systematically downplaying side effects most likely backfires in a major way, because it's something every parent sees. You can--pardon the pun--inoculate people against vaccines in a hurry.

KenS,

Thanks. That is exactly what I said. Still hold to it. And yes, all vaccines have side effects. The most common being soreness and/or redness around the injection site for a few days. I took 3 Moderna mRNA shots. For me, about 12 hours after the shot, I would get sick for the following 12 hours. Very intense but short lived. Probably similiar to what AndrewK experienced. My wife got the same shot from the same vial at the same time and had absolutely no affects. Pretty similiar to COVID in general, some got really sick and others didn't. Everyone's body reacts to things differently.

Bert and others,

Everything has side effects. Every medicine you have ever taken, has a list of side effects. Tylenol, probably one of the safest over the counter medications, can cause severe liver damage. Does the benefit of relieving your muscle soreness or headache, outweigh the disadvantage that you could actually develop sever liver damage? Many of the side effects listed in the official FDA label insert may not even necessarily be tied to the drug. If they occur during a clinical trial and a subsequent root cause cannot be defined, than by law it needs to be put on the label. One of the most common side effect of any drug is headaches. Why? because during clinical studies people have to stop taking coffee, tea and soda, thereby getting caffeine headaches. There is much nuance in all of this. But the vaccine got so political so fast. Was my goal to get more people to take the vaccine? No. I didn't really care. I was trying to balance truth based on my experience in the field, my families experience working in the field, with every bozo who could download information from VAERS and was trying to drum up claims that they had no idea or competency to speak about.

Each person needs to balance this out. What I stated previously, was that you will not see side effects from a vaccine years later. They either appear early on, or they don't appear at all.

>>Each person needs to balance this out. What I stated previously, was that you will not see side effects from a vaccine years later. They either appear early on, or they don’t appear at all.<<

I was probably the one arguing about long-term effects, but I wasn’t talking about the vaccine itself. I was talking about things like myocarditis and other similar serious health consequences that could maybe show up months or years later. In fact, when I first starting arguing about this, I might not have even known about the myocarditis cases yet.

Medical history is replete with cases like DES and thalidomide, and not understanding the negative side-effects until long afterwards. And yes, I understand that a vaccine is not a medication, but it is in fact trying to get your body to alter itself to fight a virus, so it is making changes (hopefully only to your immune system) that might or might not be permanent. My contention is that on a microscopic level, a lot is happening in biological process in human bodies that is not well understood yet, so permanent or semi-permanent changes might actually not be all good.

For serious diseases that kill even the young and healthy, or permanently maim, we accept these tradeoffs. I already said years ago at the beginning of this that if I were offered an MRNA treatment for a cancer that was giving me a very short life-expectancy, I’d happily sign up for it, even if serious medical consequences could happen 20 years later. I would also take rabies shots if necessary, since that disease is almost a 100% killer. But for a respiratory disease, >90% of whose victims were the infirm or old? After looking at all the factors and statistics, I estimated my chances of dying from covid at about 1 in 1000. To me, that’s not a high-enough risk to risk long term medical issues from an experimental vaccine. Anecdotally (which means nothing, except to me), I have now had covid 3 times (once in early 2020), and I’m still here.

I’ll quote Andrew above, who stated my similar position better than I could have: “It simply amazes me that I am myself largely pro-vaccine, but am constantly thrown on the other side of this issue simply because I oppose mandates and think the way the whole issue has been communicated and handled has been an utter disaster.” It’s no less true today than it was during the height of covid. If the dress rehearsal has taught me anything, it’s that I won’t be able to trust what my own governmental organizations (supposedly looking out for my health, or at least the health of the populace at large) are telling me, and that’s the real tragedy of this.