In another thread, someone posted the link https://nationalpost.com/news/canad...-the-least-but-think-they-know-the-most-study and claimed that people he terms "anti-vaxers" (sic should be anti-vaxxers) know very little about science. However, I looked at the link, and the whole story was about GMOs. So let's talk a bit about vaccines, but let's talk not about science but about math, because I sense that the person who posted this link actually doesn't know as much as he thinks he knows. So let's talk about the vaccine most of us hear the most about — the flu shot. According to the CDC, fewer than 2 people out of 5 get the flu shot every year. Rather than raving about anti-vaxxers, let's just get some information and do the math. How effective is the flu shot? According to https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3994812/ we find: "Systematic review of 8 RCTs reported NNT = 67 for flu shot." (RCT = randomized clinical trial) So what does NNT mean? It means the Number Needed to Treat. That means that if 67 people get the flu shot, one person who would have gotten influenza without the shot doesn't get influenza. But again — let's forget about the science for a moment and just do the math. The math tells us that for every 67 people who get the flu shot, 1 person benefits and 66 people do not benefit. So about 98.51% of people who get a flu shot receive no benefit at all. Does that make me an uninformed "anti-vaxxer" if I say that I don't see the benefit to me of getting a flu shot and that I've never gotten one? Basically, if you get the flu shot every year for 46 years, you will have a 50-50 chance of it preventing one case of influenza for you. No thanks — I'll pass.
Hepatitis B vaccine — should you get it? When my eldest son was born, the nurses wanted to vaccinate him against hepatitis B. I told my wife not to have him vaccinated, but she ignored me. I reasoned thus: since the primary methods of contracting hepatitis B is through sexual contact, drug users sharing needles, and getting a tattoo with an infected needle, my son didn’t need the vaccine at that moment. I planned to postpone the decision until later. The other children didn’t get any vaccinations. Should they? Let’s do some math. Approximately 12 million Americans have Hepatitis B. Since the US population is about 328 million, that means that 316 million Americans do not have Hepatitis B. Every year, 100,000 of those people will contract Hepatitis B. At https://www.vaccines.gov/diseases/hepatitis_b/index.html we find that the hepatitis B vaccine gives “more than 90% protection to people who get the vaccine.” We don’t have exact numbers, so I’m just going to assume that the protection is better than 90 percent and round accordingly. Now, let’s imagine that we take a million people and consider whether we should vaccinate them against hepatitis B. If we don’t, approximately 305 of them will get hepatitis B. If we do vaccinate them, that number will be reduced to approximately 30 people. So, basically, the math is that 275 people per year will benefit if all 1 million people are vaccinated. In other words, 99.9725% of the people will reap no benefit. In fact, if you got the vaccine at birth and lived to be 2,520 years old, you would have a 50-50 chance that the vaccine would protect you from contracting hepatitis B. My conclusion? Don’t bother to get vaccinated against hepatitis B. Just don’t have unprotected sex with heavily tattooed heroin addicts. Simple.
yeah that confirms the article, IT HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH GMO's you didn't read it or didn't comprehend it, it was about the Dunning Kruger Effect the article clearly references climate change denial and anti vaccination lunacy...Dunning Kruger effect is so strong you're blinded by arrogance you fit the definition of the article perfectly the entire point of the article sailed waaaay above your head...the study referred to the GMO issue but was extended to another issues, the Dunning Kruger Effect...I know it's a huge complex intellectual leap to make but do try from the article "Fernbach hypothesizes that climate change has become so politically polarized that people subscribe to whatever their ideological group says, regardless of how much they think they know. Humans often suffer from an “illusion of knowledge,” the authors write, “thinking they understand everything from common household objects to complex social policies better than they do.” “So, the obvious thing we should try to do is educate people,” Fernbach said. “But that generally hasn’t been very effective.” Sometimes it backfires, and people double down on their “counter-scientific consensus attitudes,” Fernbach said. “Especially when people feel threatened or if they are being treated as if they are stupid.” He and his colleagues plan to look at how their findings play into other issues, like vaccinations and homeopathy, “to see how prevalent this miscalabration effect is.”
and then there's your anti vax rant....omg you truly have no clue...."can't see the forest for the trees".. is right description here
I couldn't help but notice that nothing in your response had anything to do with the simple mathematical argument that I put together. Let me guess — you know zero about math, so you think you're an expert. Am I right?
That is fine if you pass But you better hope we never have another H1N1 epidemic. We had multiple patients so sick they ended up on ECMO (heart lung bypass for lay people) Yes we are aware that we do not always get the “matching” correct with the predicted strain of influenza and the vaccine and this is some of the reason for vaccination failure BUT it does confer some degree of immunity - and do not forget that having a degree of immunity can lessen your symptoms and shorten the disease process That was an .......... interesting article. It was perhaps one of the poorest conducted systematic reviews I have ever read. Here are some better articles https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S147330991170295X https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1741-7015-11-153 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140673605673394 I do not have time at the moment to continue this discussion but will return later
@Zosimus EACH AND EVERY IMMUNE CHALLENGE WHETHER NATURAL OR VACCINE, HAS THE POTENTIAL TO TRIGGER https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillain–Barré_syndrome GUILLAIN BARRE SYNDROME immune system damaging the peripheral nervous system And Pneumococcus Vaccine, or Hib, are not one immune challenge. They are over 10. Like polio is 3 and this years Flu vaccine was 4. (use to be limited to 3) How many immune challenges go beyond what nature would create? Especially in infants like the Hep B shot on the day of birth. (worthless) More options, less required. Certainly require, Polio and DPT, but that's just 6 immune challenges total. Not over 50 as small children are exposed to today in one office visit required by law! Moi Got FREEDOM? Less and less FREE Meng Wanzhou!
Once again, we have people dazzled by science but who cannot do basic math. I searched all three of your articles for NNT and NNV, but found no hits. So, basically, your articles are junk because you don't know how to interpret the numbers. To show the flaws in your analysis we will take a simple situation: Imagine that a patient is presented with the opportunity to get a vaccination against a serious life threatening disease that kills about 29,400 every year. The vaccine is so good that it cuts your risk of getting the disease by 95 percent after the first injection, and those who get a booster shot get 99.99 percent protection against the disease. Yet, our patient refuses to get the vaccine. Is she crazy? Is she an anti-vaxxer? Not at all — in fact, she has made the right decision because the disease in question is prostate cancer. Since she doesn't have a prostate, it doesn't matter how good the vaccine is, she will never derive any benefit from it. So you see, simply having a very, very good vaccine doesn't automatically mean that you'll benefit from it. A very important point to consider is your pre-vaccine chance of getting the disease. In this case, no one really knows your pre-vaccine chance of getting influenza because the CDC doesn't generally test people for influenza. But a good estimate is 4 percent. Four people out of 100 are likely to get influenza this year. So let's imagine that the vaccine is 75% effective. That means that 3 of those 4 people will be spared the disease whereas the 4th is just SOL. Yet, if we put those numbers into a simple equation, we will see that 97% of people who get the vaccination get no benefit. So you will have to get the vaccine 22-23 years in a row before you have a 50% chance that the vaccine will provide you with any benefit. Yet this simple scenario gives a NNT of 33! We know from previous studies that the real NNT of the influenza vaccine is much higher, partially because influenza vaccines may be mismatched. So really, the number of years you will have to wait to see a positive result is even greater. Math, people! Learn some!!
