Posted: May 27, 2013 8:09 am
tolman wrote:GrahamH wrote:
Ignoring the conspiracy Bullocks, isn't it the case that 100% vaccination would likely reduce the chance of getting the target disease to less than the risks from side effects? Obviously this is no reason to stop vaccinations.
Do vaccination programs seek to balance these risks?
It's also clearly a completely different point to the supposed original one.
Someone being a leech in some modern societies, failing to get vaccinated for no real medical reason, while relying on the lack of disease due to other people being vaccinated, could potentially in some circumstances be in the best position, having no risk of any possible negative vaccine side-effects while being unlikely to catch the relevant diseases, though in reality such circumstances might be rarer than some leeches would like.
And, of course, they are relying not merely on vaccines actually working, but on there not being too many other leeches or miseducated anti-vaxxers around, since if there are too many of them, the disease might kick off and put them at risk of infection again.
My point relates to the orginal post in that when there is low risk of infections, due to effective vaccination, low-incidence side effects may become more common than the disease. Of course vaccination must be maintained to keep infection risk so low. Comparison of risks at that stage could be misleading, and is used by anti-vaxers.
In relative terms the side effects become more significant as vaccination rise past "herd immunity" levels. Somewhere in the last 10% there will be a cross-over where diminishing returns on immunity are exceeded by linearly increasing risk of side effects.
100% vaccination may not be the greatest good. Maybe the ideal is 97%
Any epidemiologists here?