Italy makes 12 vaccinations compulsory for children

[CharonY]

In short just let natural selection and the evolutionary process work. Accept the very short term hits in favor of long term saves. What MAY be happening in Italy and many other places nowadays is counter to the natural scheme of things? A natural scheme that appears to work very well over very long periods of time?

 

However ... that being said ... it is very difficult today as parents and adults for us to accept this. We choose to avoid the preventable deaths. Letting half of your family die when prevention, (immunizations) is available is unheard of today. Italy is making such prevention mandatory. Short term gain? Long term loss.

 

When so much of our modern civilization places so many valuable eggs into just one extremely fragile basket is it possible we are setting ourselves up for a catastrophic crash? So many different aspects of our society appear to be more and more dependent upon so many invisible hairs. Just me. Respectfully.

 

retired RN. Agnostic. Libertarian. Minimalist. Homesteader. Dinosaur. Old. 43N, 123W. Kinda.

That is silly, as extinction is also a natural process. It is a weird argument that doing things a certain way will lead to better results. If humans or other animals stop use means to improve their survival that is actually the more likely case as there are no guarantees that there are genetic factors that can deal with challenges...

[Lord Antares]

My hometown just forbade 95 children from joining kindergarden until their parents vaccinate them. Good to hear.

[StringJunky]

Another thing, not often mentioned, is that the higher the numbers of people vaccinated, the more it insulates those who can't be vaccinated, like:

 

- People without a fully-working immune system, including those without a working spleen

- People on chemotherapy treatment whose immune system is weakened

- People with HIV

- Newborn babies who are too young to be vaccinated

- Elderly people

- Many of those who are very ill in hospital

http://vk.ovg.ox.ac.uk/herd-immunity

[dimreepr]

It would appear we do not fully understand how naturally acquired immunity works. So another way of asking would be to inquire why the human species did so well for many years and generations with no artificially acquired disease immunity at all? Before ANY inoculations at all which only go back a couple hundred years?

 

This might be more of a philosophical question. Are we better off as a species relying only on the course of human events including the disease process or are we better off relying completely on a technological artificial shot process that might for any number of reasons fail? Imagined short term benefits vs long term harm?

 

Respectfully. ex RN

 

 

Call yourself a nurse! you should be ashamed...

 

I'm a complete layman (medically) and even I know the process is the same for both, there is nothing artificial about the process of acquiring the antibodies needed for immunity; the ONLY difference is a vaccine isn't strong enough to do us any harm.

Edited May 26, 2017 by dimreepr

[Delta1212]

Well, imagine the logical extreme. Imagine you counteract everything that ends lives prior to the opportunity to reproduce. In other words, you pass forward every genome your population ever produces. Just to make sure we're really at the logical extreme, let's say we do so in equal proportions. Now you've "switched off" natural selection completely. Are you arguing that the species will wind up fitter in that case than in the one where natural selection does operate?

The primary thing to take into consideration is that natural selection does not make a species more fit in general. It makes them better adapted to dealing with the specific thing that is applying the selection pressure.

 

So allowing people to die of a particular illness will select for people with an immunity or resistance to thag illness and will make humanity more fit for an environment where that disease is a killer. It will not make humanity more fit for any other condition, and will probably make it less fit for some other potential environments since fitness for one environment pretty much always comes at the expense of being somewhat less fit for some other environment.

 

General fitness comes from being able to adapt to a changing environment, and the best defense against future changes to the environment is vareity. The more diverse the population, the more likely that some individuals in the population will be well suited to a new selection pressure. The less diverse a population, the more likely that an environmental change will occur that none of the population is suited to survive.

 

Selection pressures inherently cut down on diversity in a population by herding the gene pool towards specific traits and eliminating less successful traits.

 

By easing the effect of certain pressures, you give more room for the population to diversify and guard against unpredictable future changes to the environment. By applying a pressure unnecessarily, you are decreasing population diversity in order to make it better at surviving an environment that has that specific selection pressure. An environment that only exists because we are choosing to create it by not removing that pressure.

[HB of CJ]

Ashamed to be a retired RN? Hardly. I don't think so. Again, killing the messenger of needful or non desirable news is ... not new. People get sick. People die. A point most here fail to understand and grok is that we are setting ourselves up for a big die back as a species and most of us here do NOT understand why? Or how? Italy will do what it will do. I think they are making a mistake. I have presented why. Understanding it or not, it is the point of this Excellent Forum to present such alternate views.

 

Repeating myself, Immunizations have only been around for a couple hundred years. Barely 8 generations. There is no data base showing immunizations have been a benefit to mankind. It would require a thousand years world wide to indicate any kind of species benefit. Are we running towards a steep die back cliff? Are we plowing ahead full speed into uncharted waters? Shoals and rocks abound. Please try to understand a long term point of view. Immunizations have NOT been proven helpful.

 

Respectfully.

[StringJunky]

Repeating myself, Immunizations have only been around for a couple hundred years. Barely 8 generations. There is no data base showing immunizations have been a benefit to mankind. It would require a thousand years world wide to indicate any kind of species benefit. Are we running towards a steep die back cliff? Are we plowing ahead full speed into uncharted waters? Shoals and rocks abound. Please try to understand a long term point of view. Immunizations have NOT been proven helpful.

 

Respectfully.

If the diversity of people surviving to a reproductive age increases then the fitness of the human species increases by virtue of the fact that, at any given time in the future, the gene pool is more diverse relative to the non-vaccinating eras. It's quite simple.

[HB of CJ]

Diversity does not prove fitness? Numbers do not indicate evolutionary superiority? It will be interesting how this Italian solution plays out.

 

Respectfully.

Edited May 27, 2017 by HB of CJ

[KipIngram]

Diversity provides the suite of options selected amongst by natural selection. Fitness(more diversity) >= fitness(less diversity).

 

The natural selection process might keep none of the additional options provided by higher diversity, in which case you'd get the equality. Or it might make use of the additional diversity, in which you get the >.

Edited May 27, 2017 by KipIngram

[Delta1212]

Diversity provides the suite of options selected amongst by natural selection. Fitness(more diversity) >= fitness(less diversity).

 

The natural selection process might keep none of the additional options provided by higher diversity, in which case you'd get the equality. Or it might make use of the additional diversity, in which you get the >.

Basically, yeah. The larger more diverse population will contain the smaller "fitter" population as a subset. If a challenge arises that would kill of the people that aren't part of that population, then you're essentially back where you would have been anyway. If a challenge arises that a different subset is more capable of surviving, then the "pre-fit" population will have a significantly smaller or non-existent number of indivisible able to survive it as compared with the larger more diverse population.

[KipIngram]

Yes. Diversity is like the "trump card" - you don't have to predict in advance what's going to turn out better.

[MigL]

Yup.

Just like the stock market.

[dimreepr]

A point most here fail to understand and grok is that we are setting ourselves up for a big die back as a species and most of us here do NOT understand why?

 

 

Ahhh... I see the misunderstanding here, we're ALL talking about virus' and your talking about bacteria; and yes, I think you should be ashamed, you don't seem to understand the basics.

[John Cuthber]

...A point most here fail to understand and grok is that we are setting ourselves up for a big die back as a species and most of us here do NOT understand why? ...

 

Repeating myself, Immunizations have only been around for a couple hundred years. Barely 8 generations. There is no data base showing immunizations have been a benefit to mankind.

You have spectacularly failed to supply any reason why that die-back would happen. Unless you can explain it, you can't rely on it as a reason to do, or not do, anything.

 

Immunisation has been around since before we were a species, it has been shown to be very effective and beneficial.

The fact that humans have only done it deliberately for a couple of hundred years doesn't materially affect the process.

The immune system does its job very well- we just help it along slightly.

[CharonY]

Well, it is like getting rid of seat belts and hope that because of that people will become better drivers.

[KipIngram]

Well, it is like getting rid of seat belts and hope that because of that people will become better drivers.

 

Yes, or opposing a proven vaccine for a sexually transmitted disease in hopes that people will "behave better" sexually.

[Delta1212]

Well, it is like getting rid of seat belts and hope that because of that people will become better drivers.

Or saying that having seatbelts disproportionately saves the lives of bad drivers, keeping them from being bred out of the population and weakening humanity's natural driving ability over time.

[CharonY]

Sadly, there are updates to this story. 

Quote

Italy’s upper house of parliament has voted through legislation from the ruling anti-establishment government to remove the legal obligation to vaccinate schoolchildren.

A law compelling children to have 10 vaccinations in order to enrol at state schools came into effect in March, after a surge in the number of measles cases. But the Five Star Movement and the League, which formed a ruling coalition two months ago, pledged to scrap the vaccination obligation during the run-up to elections in March, courting the so-called “anti-vax” vote.
[...]

 Last year Italy had 5,000 cases of measles, up from 870 in 2016. It had 29 per cent of all cases in the EU or European Economic Area in the year to June 2018.
 

Related to that 2018 is a record year for measles in Europe. Altogether there have been 41,000 cases in the first six month of 2018 (up from 23,900 for the whole of 2017). Confirmed deaths are 37. The highest rates in European countries include Serbia, Greece, Romania and Italy.

The original plan of the WHO was to eradicate measles in Europe by 2007. Luckily for the virus, there are quite a few advocates who want it to stay.

[StringJunky]

19 minutes ago, CharonY said:

Sadly, there are updates to this story. 

Related to that 2018 is a record year for measles in Europe. Altogether there have been 41,000 cases in the first six month of 2018 (up from 23,900 for the whole of 2017). Confirmed deaths are 37. The highest rates in European countries include Serbia, Greece, Romania and Italy.

The original plan of the WHO was to eradicate measles in Europe by 2007. Luckily for the virus, there are quite a few advocates who want it to stay.

Thick is as thick does. I read this earlier and mentally facepalmed.

Your link is subscriber only. Here's a BBC link but without the Italian bit: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-45246049

Looks society is going to have to learn the hard way.

Edited August 21, 2018 by StringJunky