Where did I say that the situation was binary? Vaccines obviously don’t have to be 100 percent effective and they can kill kids and still be worth it. (A 0.5 percent chance of dying from the vaccine and a 0.5 percent chance of dying from the disease is obviously better than a 10 percent chance of dying from the disease. Numbers for illustrative purposes only.)
Oh, and in the case of, for example, smallpox the situation was actually binary. As late as 1959 two million people were dying from smallpox every year and millions more contracted the disease every year. There have been no deaths from smallpox since 1978, it has been completely eradicated.
The smallpox vaccine saves millions of lives every year.
That would depend on your chances of contracting the disease. If there were 0% chance of you contracting the disease, then there would be a disincentive to take the vaccine- it would actually raise your chances of dying.
Am I really so hard to understand? I’m a bit insulted that you would really think that I’m that stupid.
The 10 percent in my completely hypothetical example were obviously already factoring in the chance of getting the disease in the first place, otherwise the comparison wouldn’t even begin to make sense.
Today one problem is obviously that herd immunity protects individual defectors. The chances of getting measles even without being vaccinated are relatively low when everyone around you is vaccinated. I would have less of a problem with people who freely admit that they don’t want to vaccinate because they are selfish gits. That’s not the argument they are making, though (it also wouldn’t scale), they think that no one should vaccinate and if that were the case massively more people would die from measles and other preventable diseases. (We have already seen that herd immunity can be seriously compromised in places where many parents don’t vaccinate.)
Oh, and in the case of, for example, smallpox the situation was actually binary. As late as 1959 two million people were dying from smallpox every year and millions more contracted the disease every year. There have been no deaths from smallpox since 1978, it has been completely eradicated.
The smallpox vaccine saves millions of lives every year.