What about training data? Aren't AIs trained on vast collections of descriptions of how humans handle a large variety of situations? These descriptions surely include tales of humans achieving goals by cheating. In fact, isn't it likely that the AIs hoovered up many recountings of Kobayashi Maru?
A silly hobby of mine has been to track Apple's use of the word "computer". They don't use it. The only use of the word that I can find, on apple.com, is in legal boilerplate.
They also don't use "appliance." Nor do their computers behave as appliances.
It's just branding - they don't want to sell you a generic "computer" - they want to sell you a Mac. It's really not all that different from a computer. Might look a little nicer[1]. Uses a custom processor. But you can write software for it like a computer. And it can display things on a monitor like a computer.
They do have wrist, pocket, and tablet versions of computers, but those might be considered more like appliances.
Slightly off-topic: I decided to go with a Mac Mini to start playing with AI. My daily driver is a Linux laptop (with a negligible GPU). I also have a few Raspberry Pi machines for backup, and a low-end AWS server.
I was always cobbling together ad hoc network access, to get from one machine to another. Access to my Mac Mini while traveling was a pain. Bringing it with me is ridiculous, and network access was a PITA.
Tailscale is wonderful magic. Free (for my usage), so easy to set up, and now no matter where my various computers are, they are all accessible trivially via a single ssh connection.
So get a beefed up desktop Mac, set up Tailscale, and then use any random laptop, anywhere, to use it headless.
I saw Blade Runner in its first theater run, and I was bored. But it stayed with me, and decided that I had to watch it again. And again and again, and I've now seen in dozens of times over the years. It is one of my favorites, for the completeness of the world, for the visuals, for the music, for the ideas, for the acting, for the little details I keep discovering.
Ridley Scott's idea of the scifi future being as gritty, ugly and dysfunctional as current times led to his creation of his two scifi masterpieces -- Blade Runner and Alien. The sequels have been disappointing, they had to be.
> The sequels have been disappointing, they had to be.
Scott never owned the rights to Blade Runner and wasn't heavily involved in 2049.
It shows. The script. The choice of actors. Clumsy scenes, like the fight scene at the casino with its stiff choreography. The pointless "virtual girlfriend" subplot. The location for the shoots (Hungary IIRC) which really limited the pool of extras - hardly a single Asian person to be seen.
Some of the people who worked on the film tried their best, including the CGI and set designers and the score (by Hans Zimmer) but I could only watch it once from beginning to end in IMAX. The second time at home I had to stop halfway through.
I had modest expectations going in (I mean, how could it possibly compare?). But it was still disappointing. I expected so much better from Denis Villeneuve. Unfortunately, he seems to have veered into big-budget pretentious scifi schlock.
I had to leave the IMAX showing of 2049, it was deafening (and I'm already hard of hearing!) Saw the whole thing in an ordinary non-IMAX theater, which was much more tolerable.
Yeah, I would go so far as to say highlight of his career. Extremely, extremely good, like can't look away good. I suppose it's all just opinion at some level, but this is sticking out like a sore thumb is perhaps the hardest one to defend that I'm seeing in the whole thread.
I remember so many details of his brief appearances in that movie, but what really stands out are his eyes -- intense, fearful, paranoid, menacing. (Suitable, given that scene where Deckard and Leon extract J. F. Sebastian's name.)
He almost always played a thug or heavy, and so I'm not sure what other film of his could have ranked higher than this. His scene sitting across the table from Holden is classic.
I don't remember him playing a heavy in The King is Alive, which is not a classic but a rather dark Dogme 95 film, of all things.
It's self-propagating nonsense. In the immediate post-dotcom crash, I worked for a company that was run by a bunch of young HBS grads, who all had management consulting backgrounds, (and a few minor dotcom successes). They regarded themselves as geniuses. They couldn't make a decision on anything.
Their preferred working style was to not make decisions, and to hire consulting firms to make the decisions for them. So they hired these even younger consultants, who would work for a few weeks, and make their recommendations, and then those recommendations would not be put into action. No. Instead, more consultants were hired to review and then discard the work of the previous consultants. Rinse and repeat for a few cycles.
I cannot resist one story. The initial HBS/management consulting CEO was replaced by a new CEO, someone who had run one of the early search engine companies, and had a similar background. He turned out to be no better. What I found very entertaining about CEO2 was his business past. He was known for two decisions. 1) Declined to buy the very early Google for high six figures, when he had the chance. 2) Decided to buy Blue Mountain -- think Hallmark cards but online -- for $780M. Greeting cards. 3/4 of a billion dollars. 1000x the cost of Google at the time.
Yes, hindsight and all, but still. If I had made both decisions by flipping a coin, my expected value would far exceed what this business genius accomplished.
I have a very long history with language interfaces to databases.
- As a grad student in the 80s, I read a lot about "database programming languages", which aimed to provide persistence and query capabilities to conventional programming languages, in a seamless way.
- The next step to putting those ideas into practice: Participated in a research project on adding database capabilities to a programming language (anyone remember Ada?)
- I designed and developed most of the modeling and query language features of one of the major object-oriented database systems, back in the early 90s.
- I also designed and contributed to a SQL interface to our OODB, as well as an ORM, taking our model and query language, and mapping it to SQL.
- Turned down an offer from a software giant of the late 90s, to add database capabilities to one of their main languages, (basically bringing to their language what I had built at the OODB company).
- Designed and built a Java ORM (late 90s).
And after working on this stuff for something like 20 years, I concluded that it's all misguided. For all of its ugliness and weirdness, SQL was designed to address a certain set of requirements, and has succeeded wildly. New database programming languages face huge problems of acceptance, and needing to solve the exact same problems that SQL handles now. (This was easier 30 years ago since it was still early days for SQL. Now it's basically impossible.) ORMs are a terrible idea, in the "now you have two problems" category. Not only do you need to write high-performance queries, but you have to get your ORM to actually issue those queries. (Yes, ORMs have escapes to raw SQL. The existence of these escapes proves my point.) And schemas change, and the mapping to your language model has to change, and it's a mess.
Just use SQL. It's the right tool for the job it was designed for. Use a database driver to integrate with your language. It's just not that hard.
The thing I’ve never understood is why SQL itself is not the target of attack. There’s already an inherent language abstraction with the planner; Postgres in theory could be the JVM with any number of languages implemented on top. Including a language that lends itself to composition and auto generation of PL functions.
ORMs are fundamentally difficult because of the mapping problem, but SQL code builders should be trivial. Auto-generating and exposing every DB functionality as a type-safe $LANG function should be trivial. Instead, they’re also accidentally difficult because building SQL is difficult.
Outside of SQL, you’ve got datalog… and that’s about it. And I guess whatever horrors the NoSQL crowd keeps coming up with
agreed! I feel like basic ocaml syntax would map very well to a higher level SQL - `let` to define reusable subexpressions, `let ... in` to define inline pieces of a large query, partial application to fill in variable values, and a final function call to execute the query.
Given your experience, what is your opinion on stored procedures?
I love them, think that what can be done in the database should stay in the database, and many of these abstraction on top are all ways to avoid just having to implement them.
And the main reason, DB portability, seldom happens in reality, most product die still using the database they were original created with.
I like the idea behind stored procedures, but the ergonomics of developing and maintaining them are not great. if they could be made to look like a library of code sitting in a directory somewhere, and transparently compiled and imported by the database but still workable with using external tools like git, I think they would feel a lot less strange.
Do these plugins mean you don't get to store them in git? You're just going to open up the developer studio and YOLO a change to the stored procedure, live in production? Because the whole argument is that the way we do version control, code review, bisecting, single-artifact deployment, etc is generally at odds with how stored procedures work. Saying "but my IDE has a good plugin" solves maybe 1/100th of the problem.
Some answers to doing stored procedures in a version control system that I've seen:
- Put everything in a migrations directory, and every time you change the stored procedure, introduce a new migration that completely rewrites it. (Merge conflicts are hell with this, plus all the massive amount of waste it generates in the checked-out tree)
- Put the stored procedures in a directory as normal code and then "sync" them to the database at runtime (with all the massive foot-guns this entails, trying to detect if they've changed versus what's in the database, etc)
- Eschewing stored procedures in favor of using prepared statements and having your ORM figure out when to use them
There may be others but I think they're all going to look like some form of one of the above.
I agree with you on all points. SPs are incredibly useful. DB portability is such a strange goal. Very common for some reason, but rarely actually needed.
I think there are probably two reasons for the hate that SPs get. 1) Come on, I learned SQL, isn't that enough? I have to learn SPs too? 2) Architecture astronauts love them their tiers, and logic belongs in the tier above the database, not the database tier itself. (I expressed this opinion in a job interview -- without disparaging any group of techies -- and I believe this is the reason I was not invited back.)
We have no idea what consciousness is, and cannot reliably detect it in other mammals, or even in other humans. I assume that you, GlenTheMachine, are conscious, but I cannot prove it. I think the most we can state, with a little assurance, is that people under general anesthesia are not conscious.
I mean this is liberal/left heavy, it's to be expected, you can't just rummage in and expect people to be like hm good points you're right! when most of the audience is against you
it's expected
if you could delve into what supports your arguments that'd help more than "trust me instead"
I personally am skeptical of many things, including pharma, but I'm not going to claim that vaccines don't work when historically they have, and I'd have to do a bunch of research to prove an internet argument wrong.
do I think that covid vaccines were/are 100% safe and totally not rushed due to the pandemic? no.
It didn't start out as liberal/left, so a lot of the people that have been here since 2010 want to keep most politics out it entirely. After all the name of the group is "Hackers". Most of the people in compsci/engineering were libertarian prior to 2007 anyway. It's really undergone a shift which is fine, but it actually adds absolutely nothing, from an intellectual point of view imho.
It would be nice to at least send a warning note, to any accounts that solely post political stuff here - or give them their own subgroup.
For God's sake if you are going to talk about Hepatis-C then talk about here, rather than using it to bring up issues with an administration you don't like.
In 2010, vaccines weren’t really a divisive topic that was politically aligned. That’s come later as the right started to take an interest, and then accelerated via COVID and disagreements about the various approaches implemented to manage the epidemic by the government that caused controversy - masks, lockdowns, and vaccines.
Which is to say, it’s not so much the liberal/left causing a problem here - I think they’re just holding the ground they’ve always had - that vaccines are generally safe and generally a good thing.
I think before it was mostly a nonpartisan topic, but after COVID it was kind of a thing where if you're on the left, you'd be on the side of science and thus vehemently defend vaccines while assuming the other side is a bunch of antivaxxers
and then the other side doesn't want to be associated with the other and thus ...
it should've never been politicized in the first place
Have you read the discussions on vaccine stories? See, for example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26629234 – chosen arbitrarily using the search box at the bottom of the page. I've not read anyone pretending this.
> shut up
People are being dismissive of you, but nobody has told you to shut up in this thread. (The closest thing is flagging the comments which started with broad-spectrum insults, but this only occurred after you wrote this.) Despite its tone, I'm going to have to second GP's assessment that you're responding to imagined slights.
Every vaccine licensed for use in the USA has a clinical review memo that list the adverse events that you claim are dismissed. You live in an imaginary fantasy world.
So I'm not an expert, but I did take immunology last semester... You're definitely right that we'd benefit from more study of the long term downstream effects of adjuvants. When you put the immune system on high alert, it sometimes remembers the wrong thing from the experience and continues to target it later.
But you've got to weigh those risks against the risk of dragging our feet on rolling out new vaccines. It's likely that many autoimmune diseases are caused by pathogens which are either undiscovered, or which are known, but whose link to the autoimmune disease is undiscovered. This is because there is evolutionary pressure encouraging pathogens to resemble self-antigens. If a pathogen has markers that cause it to resemble the human liver, the human adaptive immune system won't typically attack it because it wants to avoid attacking its own liver. So the pathogen is safe. This is called molecular mimicry. But the mimicry isn't perfect, so sometimes the immune system does become sensitized to the pathogen, attacks it, clears it, and starts slowly attacking the liver (or whichever tissue bears the same epitope as the mimic). It shows up years later as an autoimmune disease, but the data just isn't there to isolate its cause to that pathogen.
So the best strategy, if we can pull it off, is to vaccinate against the original pathogen (or prevent it via other means... clean food and water, etc), but to target epitopes which do not resemble any human tissues, and with adjuvants that do not sensitize the immune system against any human tissues.
As for how long adjuvants stay in the body, it's definitely worth studying more, but their whole function is to sound the alarm, so I'd expect that they're cleared rather quickly. Anything that fails to do that is by definition not an adjuvant. But assuming that an inappropriate response was triggered in the first place, you'd see the same effects whether or not the adjuvant was still around: If the initial exposure has triggered clonal replication of whichever B and T cells attack the antigen, self or otherwise, they'll stick around in your lymph nodes for years and years, and they'll re-up their numbers with each subsequent exposure.
Currently we have a measles outbreak in Brazil brought from the US, so everybody is getting vaccinated (even those who already were, like me) to try to stop the spreading and protect those who can’t get vaccinated.
Really would love for US social and media networks to get their shit together and stop spreading misinformation in the name of profit…
Strangely, anti-vax sentiment is surging in a lot of countries. Canada has higher rates of vaccine rejection than the United States in some categories, as one example.
It’s a strange global phenomenon and I don’t think there is one single root cause. MAGA/MAHA definitely jumped on to the anti-vax train as it became popular, but many forget that Trump presided over the rushing of the COVID vaccine into availability and production. He hasn’t done vaccination any favors in recent years, but I’m skeptical that the widespread rise of vaccine skepticism can be attributable to this administration alone.
I think there’s a bigger story about the cyclical nature of how the dangers of threats that previous generations faced is slowly lost over time, combined with the rise of contrarianism and conspiratorial thinking on social media.
Given the amount of cultural influence the USA has and the universal nature of the internet it seems likely to me that global anti-vax sentiment could have started with the USA.
I don't think the general public were as influenced by a paper in the Lancet as they were by other members of the public (and media) talking about that study.
The US is a global media and culture juggernaut, so by that token the US can be blamed for most trends. I don't think it's a worthwhile distinction.
Anti-vax culture was prominent in the UK, Australia, Canada, and many other countries at the same time. I'm not seeing any strong reason to blame the US as the root or solo cause.
That paper was followed by a sustained and purposeful PR campaign, by the author, who had an investment in a new vaccine type that only covered one disease, as he was trying to cast doubt on vaccinating multiple things at the same time as "too stressful on the body" or other bullshit.
This also involved, whether he pushed it or it was organic, the tabloid press of the UK.
Eventually this filtered back to the US, despite already being largely debunked and retracted, but that didn't matter to the early 2000s celebrities looking for whatever confirmation bias sources they could.
The histeria started in the UK, slowly crept over the atlantic to the US, and now has filtered back, all while it was based on absolute fraud and lies, the exact criticism all these morons insist applies to real scientists.
The modern anti-vaccine movement was nearly entirely started by a doctor fraudulently publishing fake science to make money. The supporters of course refuse to see that, because it would burst their bubble, so only their enemies can possibly be guilty of it.
Even the 12 or so parents involved in that fraudulent "study" cried foul, as he literally put words in their mouths and made up testimony from them to support his scheme. Actual autistic children continue to suffer from his bullshit, entirely made up illness.
> Andrew Jeremy Wakefield (born 3 September 1956[a]) is an English fraudster and anti-vaccine activist. Formerly a senior surgeon, he was struck off the British medical register in 2010 for "serious professional misconduct" due to his involvement in the fraudulent 1998 Lancet MMR autism report, (wikpedia)
Sadly debunking fraud doesn't seem to stop the misinfo on social media. "Vaccines cause autism!" gets more clicks than the truth and so you get JFK Jr.
Oh, banned him? Don't move too quickly, you might get dizzy.
Wakefield arguably assaulted his patients (most of whom were children, IIRC) when conducting his research. What do you do with people who arguably assaulted someone? You get the Crown to make that argument. Why didn't that happen?
Also worth noting: according to the logic upon which the British system of government is based, no lesser a party than God Himself put a major believer in homeopathy on the throne of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
I'd love to see Wakefield go to jail for fraud, nor am I a fan of Charles even if he's on my passport. But Charles doesn't set UK health policy, or UK policy at all.
> I'd love to see Wakefield go to jail for fraud, nor am I a fan of Charles even if he's on my passport. But Charles doesn't set UK health policy, or UK policy at all.
You're correct. He lives off the civil list and lets his nonce brother crash at a luxury home. But someone else does set UK health policy, and someone else does prosecute crimes, and since that's the case, then why didn't someone else in the UK with the ability to charge him do so?
If that happens, there is no adherent in charge of the DHHS. There are no kids dying of easily-preventable diseases in the UK, US, or anywhere else. Just a quack sitting in a jail cell.
> I've little ability to impact the British criminal justice system, though
Probably more on a per-capita basis than Americans have impact on what DHHS does, though. Especially if it became something focused on by the British public. Which, strangely, it hasn't. Not since 2010 when he was struck off.
> I'll still take "no longer a doctor" over "gets to set American health policy".
You really should aim higher. The man performed colonoscopies and biopsies on autistic children to support a scientific fraud with the hopes of becoming wealthy off of it. In other words, at the very least, he committed battery on disabled kids. That should earn more than getting struck off after twelve years. It should earn prison. It's purely on the British government that it hasn't. And since doing that would have prevented his scientific fraud from reaching the heights it is at now, modern antivax can be pinned on the UK and the lack of action from His Majesty's government.
The fraudulent Lancet paper gave "credibility" to the grifters and conspiracy theorists world wide.
But the King of Graft installing the halfwit RFK to run HHS is next level and I assume fellow grifters are making serious bank off this shit.
Reminder, the vengeful Orange also installed a climate change denier to run NOAA after he lost the election, who posted bogus claims on the official NOAA website which grifters used to give legitimacy to their bullshit.
There is some evidence that anti-vac activism was one of the key topics pushed by foreign influence campaigns at several points. I think the simple explanation is that they pushed any topic which could be used for political divisiveness and unrest, but fomenting anti-vac sentiment is especially damaging due to the physical harms it causes.
Looking at global population stats, you can clearly see where germ theory and vaccines entered human civilization.
All this "natural something" and antivax movement certainly is the other direction. Maybe it's subconscious population control, maybe informational warfare... maybe people just got a little detached from reality by not dying all the time, as you suggested.
I just looked it up and anti-vax arguments predate actual vaccines - they were used for variolation which was similar:
>in a 1722 sermon entitled "The Dangerous and Sinful Practice of Inoculation", the English theologian Reverend Edmund Massey argued that diseases are sent by God to punish sin and that any attempt to prevent smallpox via inoculation is a "diabolical operation"
> There followed a 100-year battle between the authorities and an often sceptical, sometimes aggressive, public. In Britain, a succession of laws made vaccinations free, then compulsory - backed by fines and even imprisonment. While riots flared in some towns, there was also more restrained opposition in the form of anti-vaccination leagues. For an increasingly literate population, pamphlets were produced with titles like "Vaccination: its fallacies and evils", "Vaccination, a Curse" and the suitably Gothic "Horrors of Vaccination".
I am very prepared to get downvoted for bringing this up - but I'm not convinced that the "anti-vax movement" most people think of is truly to blame (that is, crazy people who think it gives you autism or whatever).
At least in my area, there are pockets of (relatively) new immigrants that have MMR vaccination rates at around 30% (that's very low, much lower than the anti-vaxxer population could account for imo), and the reasons for that have nothing to do with MAGA/MAHA as far as I can tell.
It's an entirely different problem (that needs solving), and pretending that this is simply the by-product of uneducated crazies on the internet feels like it's over indexing on a loud and flashy but ultimately small part of the problem.
Before MAGA I'd heard of granola moms, the same people who think that amber helps their kid with teething, were very against vaccinating their kids as well. So it's a wide swath of people who are just oblivious to the benefits of vaccination. It's a reason that they have vaccine schedules to begin with.
the data is quite slow to be released so i haven't updated my charts for a bit but britain saw a decent spike in HIV / AIDS because of the migratory flows under boris johnson. In large part because we don't test on the basis that it's considered racist (I went looking for discourse on testing on entry or not - first article that came up was from the graun, first words "Nigel Farage").
I gotta be honest, I don't really think these immigrant groups see or care what Trump/RFK are saying. If anything they see them as an "enemy" who they should not trust.. This is an incredibly left-leaning city where the majority of public health information (or any other messaging) being disseminated is counter to what the current federal admin is saying (as a rule, it seems).
So to answer your question, I don't personally think it helps or hurts in any significant amount relative to other cultural drivers.
I don't think it was the roll-out or anything along those lines, so much as the lying. Saying people won't get sick or won't catch COVID if they get the vaccines [1] was just false and very myopic. Obviously the intent was to try to get people to take the shots, but they completely destroyed trust in the process. Broader skepticism predictably follows from there.
They are not the progenitors of the skepticism, but they gave the skeptics significantly more authority than they previously had. Over surveillance networks, vaccine scheduling, public health comms, etc. MAGA sees them as useful idiots for the coalition, rather than threats to the US.
Here [1] is a montage of some of the public messaging around the COVID vaccines. [1] It was quite simply dishonest. That, paired alongside the effort to force people to take the shots, completely destroyed public trust on a level that will take many decades to repair. Generalized vaccine skepticism follows naturally from that.
I'm certainly a part of that group. For instance I ended up doing extensive research on e.g. MMR before deciding to vaccinate my kids for it. If this were a decade ago, I almost certainly would have done it without a second thought, just as I took all recommended vaccines before traveling without a second thought. So I'm obviously not anti-vaccine in the least, but I no longer trust public messaging on the topic.
It was just another (of the increasingly endless) examples of governments/companies pursuing short-term interests while ignoring long-term consequences. When it comes to what people put in their bodies, trust is more important than literally anything else.
Why is it bad for a public health communicator to say that vaccines stop spread by lowering the effective reproduction number of a pathogen? Its correct. Your extensive research didn't seem to work.
But this has been building for years ahead of COVID. COVID just gave people something to latch on to. And in spite of COVID vaccine issues, the latest numbers i saw suggest around 80% of people still support standard childhood vaccinations.
The media has been referencing this for years now, but the data don't show that there was any meaningful effect on a national level. Here [1] are CDC data on various childhood vaccines. Childhood DTP/MMR vaccination rates varied very little over the past 15 years and never fell below 94%. They actually hit a record high in 2019 right before COVID - of about 95% each. Now they're both at record lows (around 92%) and continuing to trend lower.
Contemporary pharmaceutical companies, as well as contemporary government and private health institutions are my enemy. I would rather die than live using their products and services.
When more ethical entities take over their business I will gladly start using them once again, as I did back in the day before they turned evil.
I'm not that extremist. My dentist is cool, my childrens' pediatrician as well. I trust them entirely and I know they would never compromise their credibility or my health for financial gain. I always take medicine they prescribe (mostly generic stuff whose patents expired a century or so ago). They always steer me to healthy habits such as excercise and eating fruits instead of taking supplements etc.
Unfortunately, they are the only ones like that I know. Most other I encountered just peddle products for their financial gain. Snake oil salesmen.
I am aware I live in a dictatorship which drove a lot of smart and good people away from the country, skilled doctors and nurses were among the first to go. Hopefully it'll get better once we overthrow the dictator.
I'm afraid to say my last few experiences with antibiotics have been dismal. I got given three different types of antibiotics for one infection, none of which cleared it up much at all. Last time I appeared to have successful antibiotic treatment for something was in the 2010s.
Not sure why the parent was downvoted, because I think it nails the current sentiment.
For some people the COVID vaccine(s) were rushed to market, with limited clinical trials, intended to vaccinate the entire adult population, with limited data as to their immediate effectiveness and with no data about long term effects. You can debate whether the above points are valid or not, but for some people they certainly raised a safety flag.
I completely agree that the vaccine scepticism around the COVID vaccines is now carrying over into other, well tested, well understood and very, very beneficial vaccines.
My belief is that for most of those people, no amount of evidence would have ever been enough.
The entire "I looked at the data and found it insufficient" thing is by and large cover for people that lack the tools to evaluate the data. They play that card so they can pretend that they're actually intelligent skeptical adults and not easily manipulated idiots or malicious grifters.
They're the equivalent of a random person that hasn't done algebra in 20 years emailing a physicist at CERN about how they've discovered a perpetual motion machine.
"It was developed in the last 6 months" and "It was developed 50 years ago and millions of people around the world have used it with no ill effects" doesn't really require a degree in biochemistry to evaluate the possible risks.
Telling that the millions of people that have used the Covid vaccines without issue never come into that conversation.
Instead those supposedly literate people pull out percentages so blatantly incorrect that any attempt to convince them turns into evidence for the validity of "Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience".
You see this all the time on social media, with the most recent version being rabid antivaxxers pretending that 80% of to be mothers that got the vaccine had miscarriages.
Yeah. People are lumping all vaccines together in an attempt to boost the credibility of the COVID vaccine. Unfortunately what it is actually doing is ruining the credibility of all the other vaccines that have been around for years and are well understood.
Were all the other vaccines "well understood" when they were initially rolled out en masse? Not a rhetorical question, I genuinely don't know the history.
I don't really understand what people's expectations were for a new vaccine intended to combat an ongoing global pandemic.
Several labs that manufactured the original polio vaccine shipped the live virus - ie, we just injected kids with polio. Low double digits of people (kids?) died, a few hundred were paralyzed, etc. Later vaccines also had the same problem, but at very low rates (1 in millions maybe).
Yes, but it still ended the polio epidemic resulting in a drastic drop in total polio-related deaths.
You don't get vaccines in use for 50 years without vaccines in use for 1 year, and you don't get that without using them for 6 months, and you can say the same about COVID-19 vaccination. Arguing otherwise is just failing to understand linear time.
There can be understanding, but nothing really beats mass numbers of doses over multiple years to generate it.
The safety factors of a vaccine become better understood over time and use, and you can say the same about COVID-19 vaccination.
You should conclude that COVID-19 vaccination - even the early versions - had net very good outcomes too, unless you're a wilfully ignorant conspiracy theorist.
The bar isn't "perfect vaccine", the bar is "significantly better than no vaccine". And this depends on the urgency of the situation.
The only "debacle" is a political/sentiment one, the mainstreaming of crankery, especially in the USA. It's now a full-fledged systemic public health anti-vax debacle.
But MRNA vaccines are a significant new medical tool, not just for COVID-19, not just for viral diseases.
They are very overconfident, to the point of losing their own money. There was the case of the rootclaim debate where Peter Miller successfully convinced two paid unbiased experts that COVID was not created in a lab and won $100,000
> Lineage A was first found in a Wuhan neighborhood right next to the wet market (closer to the wet market than 97% of Wuhan’s population). Again, it would be a bizarre coincidence if a lab leak pandemic was first detected at a wet market. But it would be an even more bizarre coincidence if a lab leak pandemic separated into two strains, and both were first detected at a wet market!
To the extent that there can ever be a "smoking gun" in this debate, this is it for me. Given the mutation rate of covid, the lab leak requires that two lineages transferred to the same area a week apart by mere accident.
Yeah that and the "You would never choose <certain mutation> if you were designing COVID in a lab" were the kill-shots in the lab leak theory for me. I was pretty open-minded to the idea until a few hours into the debate. Bear in mind though, I don't think it actually matters too much anymore
> We included data from 21 studies (5 randomized trials and 16 observational studies) reporting on 149 685 women. The pooled rate of miscarriage among women who received a COVID-19 vaccine was 9% (n = 14 749/123 185, 95% CI 0.05–0.14). Compared to those who received a placebo or no vaccination, women who received a COVID-19 vaccine did not have a higher risk of miscarriage (risk ratio (RR) 1.07, 95% CI 0.89–1.28, I2 35.8%) and had comparable rates for ongoing pregnancy or live birth (RR 1.00, 95% CI 0.97–1.03, I2 10.72%).
He stated that the FDA had found "no red flags" regarding pregnant women
A "Red Flag" (or Safety Signal) is an actual, observed increase in adverse events in real-world data.
What he was discussing in the text was a theoretical risk.
A "Theoretical Risk" is a hypothetical concern based on known biological mechanisms (e.g., "high fevers can cause miscarriages, so a vaccine-induced fever might do the same").
I'm not a trump fan, but the antivax train has nothing to do with him. (Evidence: Canada is doing even worse then us when it comes to measles). If we want to fix this problem (we do), the first step is to recognize the actual problem, not to play the blame game on whichever politician you currently don't like!
The reason there are measles cases is because a decent percentage of people aren't getting vaccinated anymore. If all of the cases were 2 year olds or younger (when RFK was put in charge) then possibly. But not only are they older (https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html), this is also happening in Canada. I don't see how it could possibly be RFK's fault.
True, but RFK (and other politicians and celebrities) have been active in pushing some form of anti-vax ideology for a decade plus, in some cases back to the 1970s.
It's been a growing movement, not something that kicked off when RFK assumed the HHS role.
I agree. But to be clear the original comment / context is about MAGA / Trump. I think responding 'No, you're wrong! RFK is the reason' to a thread about Trump and then retreating to RFK's activities over the last 20 years is arguing in bad faith.
The entire reason I made my original comment is because it's important to recognize that this is not a Trump thing, and getting rid of Trump / MAGA will not suddenly convince people that vaccines are good.
It's not _solely_ a Trump thing, but he gave RFK an enormous platform and has himself been espousing demonstrably untrue things about vaccines and vaccination schedules. This very week, in fact. [1]
If you don't see this as an enormous amplification, I don't think you're operating in good faith.
Pre-Trump, anti-vaxxers were notorious left-wing granola types. Lots of anti-vaxxers were white liberals living in Marin and NorCal and sending their children to private schools like Waldorf.
Only after Trump did people start lumping them in with right wing.
While It’s fair to point out that RFK is hopping on a train that’s already got momentum, your first comment reads as if it’s not caused by falling vaccination rates (your second comment clarified further).
Also why not blame politicians doing the wrong thing?
Perhaps I should've been clearer. And yes they aren't helping.
And yes, we should blame them for the things they do. T
But the comment I was responding to was acting as if MAGA was the reason for measles outbreaks, which is false. I'm an incredibly strong believer in the truth. An example of why I think this is an important separation: imagine you tried to fix the measles outbreak and miraculously got every single American to hate Trump and got Trump out of office. The problem would still not be fixed! People would still be dying of measles! The effort would have been almost completely wasted!
A major campaign by RFK's replacement could absolutely make a significant difference stopping the spread of measles. That's the whole point of the (proven extremely effective!) vaccine.
Do you believe this? I think it might help a little, but so we're on the same page RFK has only been in charge for 2 years. Why wasn't the previous secretary of health doing this? The measles outbreaks may be relatively new but we've had the vaccination data to see it coming for over a decade.
My personal belief is that there a lot of people who believe stupid things out there (and it's all only amplified by the news and social media), and for anti vaxxers especially I don't think an authority figure saying 'You have to get the measles vaccine!' is going to help much, unfortunate as it is. :(
Inaction (and really, let's be clear - making it worse) is RFK's choice.
We managed to cut the smoking rate pretty dramatically, including in about half over the last decade. Public policy is not ineffective, we just need competent people to wield it.
I think we live in a different age man. Media nowadays is completely different. Example: I have literally never had cable tv in my house. I've probably watched cable TV around 10 times total, all in a hotel room growing up. My media is all online, uncontrolled and (relatively) decentralized. Contrast that with 60 years ago and hopefully you see the difference.
Also smoking smells and has other negative externalities, which doesn't hurt.
I don't think it would be logistically that hard to criminalize the parents or take away their kids in those cases. It would have a lot of other downsides but it would probably reduce the rate pretty directly.
Ok if you want to do this then sure there is an easy solution. I think there are other problems with this though (for example no way this is flying even with the majority of people who are not anti-vax).
I'll bet it would be enough just to make sure that the vaccine waiver signature box is positioned directly below some glossy full color pictures of emaciated, rash covered dead children.
Unlike a lot of pathogenic diseases, measles requires an extraordinarily high amount of herd immunity (upwards of 95%), so this isn't a particularly telling data point on its own.
RFK Jr has been pushing anti-vaccine bullshit for decades. He was already taking defensive stances on his activism (Oh, I'm not anti-vaccine, I'm just providing nonsense arguments and clout for anti-vaccine stances) back in 2015.
Kennedy was already pushing bullshit during the UK Measles vaccine fraud/scare, back in 2005. He was doing this along with a few other celebrities.
I've responded to a few people on this but the comment I was responding to was literally about the last 6 years! The context of this entire thread is about MAGA / Trump! I agree that RFK is hurting and has been for a long time, but that is not what this argument is about!
Most of his criticisms have been about the timing of certain vaccines administrations.
He's not anti vax.
If nobody can challenge science, then it's not science.
Vaccines continues to help us, but that doesn't mean they are perfect and don't cause side effects on certain individuals. Hopefuly the future brings us highly personalized medicine instead of a 1 size fits all.
I mean would you let your non coding coke head brainwormed manager challenge your coding choices? He is not a doctor or scientist, why would we listen to him. And any experts relying on using are horse dewormer grifters or worse.
Claiming RFK is not anti-vax, is like claiming Dario is not anti-open-weights.
(Well, it's way worse that that, but I didn't want to invoke Godwin's law.)
He is not "challenging science" with measured arguments and carefully controlled peer-reviewed research to back his claims. He's deliberately trying to silence science because of a completely unsupported brain fart.
And no, it's not about "timing". It's about spreading baseless FUD to discourage any form of vaccination, because he believes (with no actual evidence, and despite vast amounts of research to the contrary) that vaccination causes autism.
He knows he can't push his base too hard on certain things. He probably knows this about vaccines, he lauds Operation Warp Speed but as a win of his not a vaccine that could have saved millions more with his cooperation. He chooses his power over what's best for all of us. He's the leader of the antivax train by choice.
"The order recommends that all shots be given at separate medical visits, a frequent point Trump has made despite the safety, ease and lower costs of giving vaccines together."
'“Together, there could be a possibility they’re quite lethal,” Trump said of the MMR vaccine at the signing of the order on Monday.'
'Asked if he had evidence that the combined MMR vaccine was “lethal”, Trump said: “No. What I’ve heard is that there are some people who say it is that way.”'
Antivax fundamentally has its contemporary roots in Andrew Wakefield's fraudulent anti-MMR campaign.
So directing by executive order and by his own admission without evidence that the MMR vaccine be split up into separate shots is, very clearly, an antivax action. This is the first victory that Wakefield (a man who had a patent on a single measles vaccine!) wanted, and RFK Jr was pursuing.
But this is Trump saying this and signing it. So as of yesterday, it now has everything to do with Trump, sorry. He has handed the anti-MMR movement its ultimate victory and in so doing validated the entire antivax worldview.
See my other responses. Obviously this is bad. But the current measles outbreak is a symptom of a problem that's been happening over the last 1 or 2 decades. It literally CANNOT be caused by this, neither in the US or Canada.
It's still not too late for anyone who is unvaccinated to get the vaccine! Hopefully the next administration undoes this change, but the really important part is managing to shrink the anti-vax movement (which, if you look at the data in my other comments, you can see has been a problem since before Trump).
FWIW I think Trump #1 (45) wasn't an anti-vax presidency; it might have been suspicious of healthcare professionals (for the good reason that so many people know opioid epidemic victims) and he was always a bit equivocal around hydroxychloroquine and bleach and "powerful light inside the body" but Trump didn't start to lean antivax until not long after Biden took over.
(And let's be clear: Operation Warp Speed was an enormous success even if Trump is an ignoramus)
Some of that might have been expediency — Biden was catching shit from the antivax and healthcare-skeptical movement and moving in on that would be easy — but Trump has always been vulnerable to being influenced by people and RFK Jr appears to be generally so much more persuasive than bears thinking about, so he was a factor later on.
Trump #2 (47) is fully an anti-vax presidency; even Hegseth backed away from flu vaccine mandates, only to have an outbreak in an Army (IIRC?) facility.
They have 10% our population and had twice the cases last year (admittedly, we're starting to catch up). But the truth is that there are huge lag times when it comes to measles / antivax. This is a symptom of a problem that started 10-20 years ago.
RFK and his anti-vax ideas are popular only within a small fringe of the American population. Enough to drop herd immunity to the point where we now have to worry about measles again, but it's far from the majority.
See my other responses. Do you really think RFK could possibly have had an effect on vaccinations over the last 2 decades in the US OR Canada?
Since you seem very emotionally opposed to Trump and his administration: I also don't like Trump or RFK! However, to solve a problem, you have to find the root cause of the problem, and pointing at the most recent politician you hate will never help anyone.
It has a lot to do with him. He doesn't actually have an opinion on any policy issue. For various political reasons, Trump decided to let RFK dictate public health policy according to his extremely delusional ideas. Yes, there was an antivax movement in this country for many years, just as there has been misogyny, racism, and transphobia. Trump has normalized and supercharged all of these moronic and dangerous ideas.
I have not been following measles in Canada, so I can't address that.
See my other comments; it is not possible for RFK to have had any effect on this outbreak. If everyone getting measles was 2 or under, it could be possible; they aren't.
The reason I bring up Canada is as counterevidence; if it was Trump or RFK'S fault, Canada should be doing just fine. They had twice the cases last year in 1/10 the population. The truth is this is a problem with people believing stupid things, and it's going to take a lot more than Trump going out of office to fix.
>> Canada is doing even worse then us when it comes to measles
Not in Canada but unfortunately US nonsense spreads globally pretty quickly these days. The amount of Trump support in the UK is both bizarre and surprising. When someone with the worlds largest megaphone lies about vaccines, unfortunately people everywhere listen.
Trump is trying to hang Fauci. That goes in the completely opposite direction of promoting the trust of medical institutions in general society, and it's trust that will get people back to vaccinating themselves and their children.
Right, because tapping one of the world's biggest vaccine truthers to run the Department of HHS and then proceed to link autism with vaccines and change the recommended MMR vaccine scheduling for children has absolutely no impact on anyone.
He is amplifying the issue, but you're right, Trump is a symptom of the underlying problem. The problem is that internet gave these idiots a platform to mislead people.
Back in the early 90s this wasn't much of a problem. Childhood vaccine requirements weren't some hot-button topic then. Most people would just get them when faced with the requirement. Most opposition was isolated to people who were otherwise contrarians already.
The difference now is that the internet is full of these isolated contrarians who are now influencing gullible people who don't know who to trust.
Neither phones, nor email, not even usenet had this impact. Social media did.
The problem is not with the technology but those that control it. (Some would probably say, the fact that any one actor controls it in the first place.)
Our only means of communication in modern society are a few advertising platforms in hands of even fewer owners, and the engineers hired to run it are busy engagementmaxxing.
I'm blaming the current social media landscape, which amplifies ideas based on the engagement they create, which has an unintended consequence of amplifying exciting controversial falsehoods over long-held boring truths. We have given the largest megaphones to the biggest village idiots.
Completely agree! I will add though: this is a symptom of a problem that started 10-20 years ago. There's a lot of lag time between parents not giving their babies vaccines and outbreaks actually happening. You can see ages here.(https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html) 5 and under are only 20% of cases.
More like 25+ years ago. In the early 2000s you saw a lot of celebrities pushing vaccine fear because they read some book version of "doctors don't want you to know this one wierd fact" that made the best-seller list or another. I remember people arguing about it in college classes, and I graduated in 2003.
He was literally spreading FUD about vaccines today. And the measles stuff has got so bad RFK had to mildy backtrack on his previous antivax statements in recent interviews.
From today:
Both Trump and Kennedy made repeated mentions of autism throughout the order signing, emphasizing a scientifically unproven link between vaccines and the condition. Dozens of studies show no link between the two.
“Today we’re proud to officially announce the United States of America’s gold standard childhood vaccination recommendations. That has to do with many subjects including autism in particular,” Trump said at the beginning of the order signing.
“I’ve seen proof of it, where they have a vaccination where it looks like the size of a bottle of soda, poured into a little child’s body and bad things happen in too many cases,” Trump later said on breaking up each shot into an individual medical visit, before adding: “This is an explosion, it’s an epidemic,” in an apparent reference to autism.
"has nothing to do with it" is not the same as "is not the cause of". Trump and antivax definitely are related as both are symptoms of the same public strategy that spreads misinformation, polarizes discourse and weaponizes stupidity.
>I'm not a trump fan, but the antivax train has nothing to do with him.
Well not nothing. But it predates him and he adopted the movement early in his political career. When I was in high school (2004-8) antivax sentiment was generally associated with liberal Democrats in places like Marin County. This was a favorite retort of conservatives when confronted with their own backwardness on scientific understanding of evolution and climate change. In 2015 Trump began courting the anti-vaccine crowd and the political valence of that flavor of woo-woo nonsense flipped seemingly overnight. It was surreal to see it happen in real time. By 2020 he had lost control of the monster he helped create and the crowd booed him when he said they should get the Covid vaccine.
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