What do you think of Australia's vaccine policy?

[rampy]

I'm born and bred Aussie. We live in WA and kids here can't go to kindy or school
without having been vaccinated. I have a couple of British friends who were so offended that they needed to vaccinate their kids they home schooled because 'well we'll just go back to the uk' but they've stayed and now need to get their kids vaccinated because they have no friends their own age and can't go to school without vaccines.

You can't apply for child related benefits if your kid isn't vaccinated either here.

Having seen NZ have just declared a whooping cough epidemic Id say I agree with WA stance I'm honest!

right, are you the same person that was weirdly aggressive and nasty earlier on this thread?
Are you like this in real life, if so it'd be interesting to know how you go about daily interactions with people.

Not aggressive, just factual.

I don’t really care what someone who doesn’t believe in collective responsibility or evidence-based science thinks of me.

I’m here to counter any bullshit from antivaxxers, not discuss my personality. But as you asked, I am successful in a very competitive field, have a wide circle of friends who I can both party and cry with. I have a strong marriage and well-adjusted kids who are achieving great things at school.

We all have all our vaccinations.

If you want to discuss vaccinations, I’m here for you.

My job didn’t involve sitting and we were shoulder to shoulder all day.

No wfh

It was a ridiculous rule. If you have been in close contact with someone 8-10 hours per day then an extra 20 mins is not going to make any difference.

Yes, I agree 20 mins here or there wouldn’t matter but maybe 3 hours on the lash would?

Also, as before, having very clear boundaries (ie work = ok, socialising = not ok) helps compliance and communication.

I don’t think the government did a good job with their comms and should have been more open about the decisions made around rules.

I also didn’t think I was at an increased risk as it was becoming clear we as a family had already had covid. Dd did get it a 2nd time but showed no symptoms. I sat with her each night and tested each day and didn’t pick anything up from her.

Only reason she tested was because friend group had all gone down with Covid and she thought she would test, not expecting it to be positive. I tested each day and was surprised I didn’t test positive.

but you're ok to call people stupid?
Maybe take your own advise and stick to discussing the topic at hand and not so many people will think you're a twat.
Enjoy the rest of your day

The thing was that the pictures that showed Boris and everyone he was working with having a lunchtime drink in the garden of 10 Downing Street was not that different from our lunchtimes.
Could never get worked up over this

I didn’t call anyone stupid. I made a factual statement that by definition, nearly half the population is less than average intelligence.

Hard to take someone seriously who gets annoyed by that, and goes on to call me a twat.

But I don’t often take antivaxxers seriously, so plus ça change.

gosh you're clever aren't you with your factual statements that aren't insults.

Really? I found it very disturbing that an organisation I hold to a higher standard that the general population were flouting their rules whilst simultaneously handing down draconian edicts that prevented people seeing dying loved ones.

It felt like 2 fingers up - talk about 2 tier systems.

But they’re gone, thank goodness. Let’s hope the new lot do better.

That’s coercion. I’d be very resistant to such governmental overreach.

You might take it as an insult, but I can’t control your feelings.

Like how you intended ‘twat’ to be an insult, but as I don’t have the slightest interest in your opinion of me, it doesn’t land as one.

I had Measles in the 60,s and I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy.

I rarely tested positive when others in my family did. It’s an unusual disease in being both simultaneously something with such a spotlight on it, yet also so little understood.

I hope a lot was learnt and the next epidemic is handled better.

There is no way, no way at all that you are 'medically trained'. 15 minutes' instruction on Resusci-Annie is not medical training.

As i asked a pp who claimed to have done a 'careful risk assessment':

In which journals did you find the relevant statistics? How did differing risk profiles affect your choices for the vaccines that are available? How did you weigh / compare the risks of vaccine-related illness against the likelihood of either contracting or spreading each disease?
A "careful risk assessment" requires a broad approach that covers the above questions. YouTube and Facebook are not scientific publications.

Anecdotes are not data.

Seems fine to me. I’m also in the camp that if you refuse a basic vaccine for a child you should have to pay for any treatment if said child catches the disease.

yes, that was said a lot re. heart problems, menstrual issues and neurological issues of the covid vaccine.

get enough anecdotes and the data will follow

@Notmoog same things said about COVID too

well covid itself right from the beginning was portrayed as a deadly illness for all of us so not quite the same

Cancers and autoimmune conditions aren't more prevalent these days, they are just picked up bdtter and earlier on account of increased knowledge and improved diagnostic tools @Notmoog. Take T1 diabetes as one example - 3 generations ago people with it just died, now they don't so it appears that there are more cases when in fact its just that it is now a survivable condition long term.

Cancers and autoimmune conditions aren't more prevalent these days, they are just picked up better and earlier on account of increased knowledge and improved diagnostic tools. Take T1 diabetes as one example - 3 generations ago people with it just died, now they don't so it appears that there are more cases when in fact its just that it is now a survivable condition long term

That’s correct. Throw in people living a lot longer, of course prevalence rises. Someone may not have had cancer at 69 when they may have died 80 years ago but they will have it by 87 when they die now. Lots of people died from things earlier but, with modern medicine, live a lot longer, so they get more medical conditions as they age. The prevalence has not gone up per se.

Lots of things can be diagnosed now that just couldn’t before. I have a life long condition that was not diagnosed until my 50’s. My older relatives with it would never have been diagnosed at all, it just would have been something odd with no name they lived with. Due to my diagnosis, my kids were assessed and diagnosed in teens. That doesn’t meant more people are getting it, or people are getting it earlier🤣. It’s just more advanced medical knowledge. Autoimmune conditions didn’t ‘exist’ until fairly recently in the scheme of things, most didn’t exist when I was a child. That didn’t mean people didn’t have them, just they were not recognised and there were limited diagnostic tools. Even in the time I’ve been in medicine this area has really boomed in terms of recognition of conditions. It’s definitely not the case that more people now have these conditions.

Look at lots of old death certs and you will see lots of things such as ‘wasting disease’ which is likely cancers, and ‘consumption’ which seems to cover a gamut from resp infection, tb, lung cancer etc.

I never mentioned increases in cancers etc.

There is an increase in cancer not merely in diagnosis. Particularly noticeable in young people. Cancer incidence in 25-49 year olds increased by 24% between 1995-2018. Obesity and metabolic syndrome may be a factor. Obesity is now the second largest cause of cancer after smoking.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20241004-the-puzzle-of-rising-early-onset-breast-and-colorectal-cancer-in-younger-people

Ironically, given antivaxxers’ dislike of vaccination, hpv infection is implicated in the alarming increase in several of the head and neck cancers (due to the normalisation of oral sex) - there’s a vaccination to help protect against that, now. Ultra processed foods are also currently in the firing line (surely more likely to cause problems than additives in vaccines, given that food is ingested daily, whereas vaccinations are given with far less frequency). Then there are microplastics and other types of pollution by products derived from fossil fuels. Far too many antivaxxers hypocritically poison their bodies with all sorts of harmful substances, yet strangely only something proven to save lives on a massive scale is treated by them as particularly untrustworthy.