[agnostic.com]

@Lizard_of_Ahaz I was responding to the meme you posted, not John Oliver. I watched a little bit of John Oliver's clip, and I agree with him.

@BD66 I agree with him completely and anti-vax kids have a far lower life expectancy than do other children... Which makes the meme true as well...
[cdc.gov]

@Lizard_of_Ahaz It's kind of another "tragedy of the commons" scenario. If 95% of the children are vaccinated and 5% are not, humans will still have herd immunity, and the 5% of unvaccinated children will not have to suffer any side effects from the vaccines. Once to you get to 50% unvaccinated and 50% vaccinated, you lose the herd immunity and the unvaccinated kids will be at high risk.

@BD66 Once you get to 95% immunization 5% are still vulnerable.... This means that 5% are still likely to die from the virus because it is still there waiting for them... This is a historically proven fact... When children go unvaccinated they die. Even when adults go unvaccinated they die. The pneumonic plague is an excellent example it has been with the human race for thousands of years and killed hundred of millions of people. It is easily cured with antibiotics if caught in time but as far as I am aware there is no real vaccination program exists for it in parts of the world so it keeps coming back on us and killing... Same goes for Small pox and Whooping cough. In this case it is the old rule exponentially expressed. An ounce of prevention is worth several metric tonnes of cure...

@Lizard_of_Ahaz Sometimes it is possible to address a whole complex issue with a single very good chart: [vox.com]

Also, the Meme was made well prior to Covid & was a response to anti-vaxxers as a whole. So, bring up the childhood death rate for rubella, whopping cough, polio, smallpox, etc, etc, etc & let us know those numbers. I'll wait.

@phxbillcee I did not research the history of the meme. The meme post was made in the context of Covid-19, and John Oliver is talking about Covid-19 vaccinations, so I'll stand by my original response to the meme:

Not funny and not true.

I will elaborate further on my prior posts. Every disease is different. For diseases like the seasonal flu, a 60% vaccination rate is sufficient to achieve herd immunity, so if 60% of the people get vaccinated, the other 40% will benefit from that and they will experience no side-effects from the vaccine.

For diseases like the measles, it takes ~90% vaccination rate to achieve herd immunity, so if >90% of the people are vaccinated, the <10% of the people who are not vaccinated will benefit from that and experience no side effects from the MMR vaccine.

Whether to vaccinate or not vaccinate is literally a game theory, and the costs and benefits are different for each disease.

Make sense?

@BD66 Sorry, getting to the point I think I'll just stop dealing w/ you anti-vaxxers. Anything else, fine, but I'm tired of cherry picked data, nit picks & misinformation & misrepresentation. So, any other subjects or Memes, fine, but I'm done w/ y'all on this subject. Hope your crystals & homeopathy stand you folks in good stead.

@phxbillcee I'm not an anti-vaxxer. I'm fully vaccinated for Covid-19. My kids are fully vaccinated. I'm just not quoting the pro-vaxxer propaganda verbatim. There are tradeoffs for everything, and kids today get a whole lot more vaccines than they got when I was a kid in the 1970's. There needs to be reasoned discussion about the costs and benefits of each new vaccine that is being introduced to kids.

@BD66 "@phxbillcee I did not research the history of the meme. The meme post was made in the context of Covid-19, and John Oliver is talking about Covid-19 vaccinations, so I'll stand by my original response to the meme:

Not funny and not true."
Actually you used the figure 72 million for children which is far and away untrue in itself... There are according to the latest figures a bit over 74 million children in this country.
[aecf.org]
However we just passed the 10% infected mark for the population today and of the resolved cases 2% of those people have died from the virus. These are the figures being released by the states but we already know Deep red states like Floriduh and Taxass have both been hiding their real dead toll from COVID for financial and political reasons. So far only about 1.2% of children have been diagnosed as infected with COVID and of the 74+ million children .01% of all children in this country have died from COVID. However we also know that these are the reported figures and as before most red states are NOT reporting numbers of child deaths.... But for shits and giggles let us figure out the number of deaths if infections went to 100% of children with no vaccinations for them shall we?... 100 / 1.2 = 83.33333 so we now multiply .01% by 83.33333 to get .833333% which is a bit over 600,000 children right?... Keep in mind that is only for the first infection each child will have and represent almost one out of every hundred children in this country. Too high a price by my standards to pay for no reason other than catering to jackasses...
[aappublications.org]