Is Vaccination Necessary in the Age of Digital Singularity?

[lisab]

Unless it's diagnosed though, we can't even say it was the flu.

This year seems to be odd that no one has had a cold, it's all the flu.

But typically with a cold, there's lots of congestion. This (that everyone in my building is getting) is mostly characterized with fever, chills, aches, and incredible fatigue. Sore throat, too, and just a sniffle, maybe, but no congestion at all. No sneezing, either.

But true, it's not confirmed...yet I strongly suspect it's H1N1.

 

[OmCheeto]

But typically with a cold, there's lots of congestion. This (that everyone in my building is getting) is mostly characterized with fever, chills, aches, and incredible fatigue. Sore throat, too, and just a sniffle, maybe, but no congestion at all. No sneezing, either.

But true, it's not confirmed...yet I strongly suspect it's H1N1.

So you still might be contagious? And here I'm going to be in your neighborhhttp://www.fosswaterwayseaport.org/index.php?p=HotNews10.09.09"od tomorrow and was going to stop by and give you a big hug.

If you see someone in a little black truck honking and waving while driving away in the morning, it was me.

 

[GeorginaS]

You know, if I caught swine flu, I'm young and healthy, and while it might be a really lousy experience, the odds of my body being able to fight it off on its own are really good. So, I figure I'm in good shape that way.

Now, a friend of mine, who happens to also be someone I work with, is going through chemotherapy treatments right now. He immune system is badly suppressed. He got the vaccination, but who knows what kind of anti-body response his body is going to be able to muster right now? What if I bring the live virus to him, because I figure I don't have to worry about me. I'll survive. He's already fighting for his life as a result of a very serious colon tumour he acquired and had to have removed. He has a wife, who is also my friend, and children, both young and old.

And he's just one person in my life. His wife, who is my friend, has a brother who is HIV positive. He's living a very normal life on his meds. We socialise at family gatherings on special occasions. His immune system isn't anything to write home about either.

And then I looked at a picture I had taken this past September when my parents were visiting. I took them out to dinner for their 49th anniversary and invited my friends and a couple who are friends of my parents. In that picture is my father, whose immune system is trying to pull itself back together from treatments for prostate cancer last year. There's my mother's friend, A, standing behind them, and she was just diagnosed with her fourth case of cancer and would have surgery and start treatments within two weeks of that picture. My friend who'd had the recent cancer operation was also in that picture. We all look like a perfectly normal group of people. Yet in that shot of seven people were three people in various stages of fighting cancer and whose immune systems are not up to the fight of a flu. It made me wonder how many people I interact with every day, or even simply share space with, in the grocery store, or out shopping. How many people are so much more vulnerable than I am, who appear perfectly fine.

Lastly, I have an adorable neighbour. Her name is Winnie. She's in her early eighties and had a mastectomy for breast cancer ten years ago. She's in a number of high-risk groups. Winnie is the most adorable woman. I want to adopt her as my grandmother. We stop in the hallway and chat fairly regularly. If Winnie's door is open when my cat wanders into the hallway for her promenade, she wanders directly into Winnie's place and makes herself at home. That provokes the best laugh from Winnie who's amazed at how quiet Bean is. She's a delight. Her chances of surviving a flu aren't great.

I have all of these people around me, ones I know about and ones I'd have no idea, and if I'm walking around carrying a specific flu that's traveling fairly quickly and I could have warded it off with a shot, but I only concern myself with me, then what good am I? Seriously? Sure, it's not "that bad" of a flu as compared to some of the others. Granted. And surely I'd have no problem overcoming it. It's targeted. We know specifically that this one flu is making its rounds -- unlike the other seasonal flus. I'd be a pretty lousy member of society if I didn't care about people like my friend, my friend's brother, my father, my mother's friend, and Winnie.

Yes. I got my H1N1 shot.

 

[GeorginaS]

The wait time here is long because they're administering the seasonal flu shots and H1N1 shots in public clinics. Yes, you can call your doctor and make an appointment to go in and get your shots, but most doctors' offices are setting up their own clinics too. The question is manpower.

The biggest clinic near my place (close to both where I live and work) first had a seasonal flu clinic in a mall last week. They opened at 7 in the morning and finished off at 8 at night. Wait time, from going in, filling out the form, just plain waiting, getting the shot, and then waiting an extra 15 minutes afterwards, all told, took about an hour. They had a lot of nurses on hand.

H1N1 came in this week, and wait times skyrocketed. I don't imagine doctors' offices were any better off. People were waiting between 2 and 5 hours to get their shot.

Yes, they're just walk-in clinics. You don't call for an appointment. You just go. And however many people are there ahead of you, you wait behind them. Our building that I work in has generally had clinics in-house for flu shots yearly, but this year there's been such a push by the government to get people inoculated, that health providers short of staff and we don't have the luxury of private clinics in every office building. We aren't short of the vaccine, and we aren't short of space to do it. We're short of people to administer the shots. One clinic I was at had pulled five nurses from a less busy clinic elsewhere in town to handle the load they had. That's just how it is. And people are very willing to patiently wait their turn.

 

[Count Iblis]

http://search.hp.my.aol.fi/aol/redir?src=image&clickedItemURN=http%3A%2F%2Finfo-wars.org%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2009%2F08%2FSwine_Flu_Hysteria_by_Latuff2.jpg&moduleId=image_details.jsp.M&clickedItemDescription=Image Details

 

[jreelawg]

Evolutionally who will survive longest, vaccine takers or non vaccine takers?

For example, if group a gets vaccinated, and most survive, then they pass on their genes untested. Our natural mechanism for long term survival (evolution) will bypass any kind of flu resistant selection. Meanwhile in group b, nobody takes vaccines, and everyone with poor flu resistance die, then their population becomes more flu strong.

But, if 500 years of mass vaccinations pass by, and everyone relies on vaccines to fight flues, and vaccine makers make a bad guess on the vaccine, and the world gets exposed, we have ourselves a plague?

Or I guess you could say that maybe populations who take vaccines will evolve to withstand low dose toxic injections.

Then there is the question of how the immune system naturally adapts to fight viruses. Is there a better resistance built up getting a flu than getting vaccinated. Other wise, people who dodge the flu year by year are more likely to eventually get it and die in the long run, and evolution would go the other way. Then another option would be that a flu wipes everyone out but the vaccine takers.

For the greater good, and for your risk of dying, I just am not sure how that would pan out in the long term, I think by any calculation it's going to be a gamble, and there is a strong component of chance.

Anyways the flu isn't really what kills you, most of the time it's pneumonia. So I guess it's more complicated.

I guess you could say that at some point there may be a nano vaccine so to speak, and we might even have the opportunity to become immortal. I somehow doubt I'll be able to afford it though.

As for the hype, I haven't seen any statistics back it up.

Anyone get a pneumonia vaccine?

 

[NeoDevin]

Evolutionally who will survive longest, vaccine takers or non vaccine takers?

For example, if group a gets vaccinated, and most survive, then they pass on their genes

It works better if you just ignore the rest of what you wrote.

 

[jreelawg]

It works better if you just ignore the rest of what you wrote.

I'm thinking long term, on the evolutionary scale.

You could argue that technology will make adaptation irrelevant.

I still would need to know wether getting the vaccine makes you more likely to pass on genes. There is a possibility that getting vaccines all your life will make you less likely to for all I know.

 

[Count Iblis]

But humans won't exist in biological form for very long:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon/broadband/tx/singularity/


So, what matters for our long term survival is the ability to defend against computer virusses.