My perspective on vaccines

 TPP admits that he does not understand the thought processes of anti-vaxxers.  What are they thinking, or maybe no thinking is involved.  But it struck TPP that his attitude may well be the result of life events. As it turns out TPP is a boomer and he remembers very well that in grade school every class would have one or two kids wearing leg or arm braces or were confined to a wheel chair, so prevalent was polio.  So when a polio vaccine was announced no one wasted any time getting inoculated, and then a few years later the polio vaccine was administered orally in a sugar cube soaked with vaccine.  And polio has essentially disappeared such that modern parents have forgotten what a common and scary disease polio was.  Part of the problem seems to be that Covid isn't scary enough.  And people with poor critical thinking skills are not listening to medical advice, but are listening to vaccine nay-sayers.  As a result in certain areas measles has lost its herd immunity, and if unvaccinated people travel to certain places where measles still occur they can bring back a local outbreak.  Unfortunately this is where anti-vaxxers can have a negative impact on other people when a herd-immunity doesn't exist.  The crazy thing is that anti-vaxxers are protected by everyone who gets vaccinated, giving them the freedom to make poor, ill-informed choices.  So this senior citizen will get the covid vaccine as soon as it is available.

Assessing risk and the anti-vax position

TPP grew up when measles and polio were real threats. Kids died of measles too. Every one of my grade school classrooms had at  least one student who had some form of paralysis from polio, so when the Salk vaccine became available parents wasted no time in getting their kids vaccinated. Polio has basically disappeared and the measles was almost eradicated in the USA 15 years ago and hasn't been a serious health problem for at least twice as long. This means that living within a well vaccinated herd the risk of these diseases seems very low, very distant, so avoiding vaccinations does not seem to place you at any risk. The recent measles out break shows how wrong that is in our global community where it is pretty easy to get to places where measles still exists. Then when the vector returns home, and visits some high traffic public place, you get an out-break of measles. In the safety of our herd, other risks are perceived to be greater like the discredited association of vaccinations and autism. This is a case of coincidence - the onset of autism often appears at about the same age as childhood immunizations and people naturally sought to find cause and effect relationships. This is an easy error in judgement to make, the result of only counting hits and not the way more numerous misses. Humans are quite bad at assessing risk; people fearful of flying think nothing of driving their cars although the latter is a far greater risk. In spite of the actual data, people see driving as a lower risk because they are in control. TPP gets parents terrified of letting their college age students take rain forest field trips because of the "dangers", but yours truly is much more worried about them the one night they spend in a city. But now the situation is becoming dire as the herd immunity has fallen below a safe level especially for something as easily vectored as measles. Now the decision to avoid vaccination for your children is no longer personal and no longer low risk; it affects the general public and your kids are at greater risk especially if they travel. This is why states used to require proof of vaccination before you could attend public schools; people make poor decisions that affect others. A good case can be made for not allowing unvaccinated people to leave the country, not because they are at greater risk catching a disease, which they are, but because they become vectors reintroducing an eradicated disease.