I think this deserves it’s own thread now. It was only a matter of time before this highly contagious disease started circulating in the US again given our insane anti-vaccination movement.
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Wondering how long before adults start being offered vaccines. Just insane that we’re letting this happen.
To be fair, we let it happen about 10 years ago. This is just reality catching up with us.
But we could also have stopped this and monkeypox in their tracks with a strong, coherent response. We still could stop this. Offer adult boosters in the region, then neighborhing regions. As long as uptake is decent, it won’t get out - and any adult who catches it is either extremely unlucky or has themselves to blame.
I just fucking can’t.
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I think he problem with polio specifically is that it’s going to present as a relatively mild illness in most (especially adults), and nobody will realize they got it until months later when suddenly you start finding people inexplicably waking up paralyzed (which is what happened in the one case they did catch). I also have no idea how it presents in fully vaccinated people whose last dose was 30 years ago.
It looks like there actually isn’t good research on duration of protection for the vaccine:
I guess because everyone got fucking vaccinated after the 60’s so there was no way to do an ethical study since that ended community transmission. I guess we’ll be able to do one now!
Remember seeing an SVU episode about five years ago where some kids get polio and thought that was dumb. It’s 2016.
Whelp.
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Article on vaccine deniers and polio. From 2014 lol.
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A thing that kills me is that a lot of the Fox News Boomers lived through the last polio epidemic, they remember how horrible polio is and how we stopped it but they still go anti-vax. My mom’s childhood best friend died of polio, this isn’t ancient history.
Anyway, this podcast is obligatory. Polio is fucking horrible.
https://thispodcastwillkillyou.com/2018/02/10/episode-7-hit-me-with-your-best-polio-shot/
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My dad got polio twice and the second time the muscles didn’t grow back. The next year the vaccine came out, he walked with a limp his whole life.
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Fuck it’s getting hard not to root for these fucking viruses. This whole fucking country has reverted to 9th grade math class where the people who did well got made fun of.
The idiots have reigned supreme.
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The upside i guess is it shouldn’t fuck over kids, because they’re all recently vaccinated (well the ones whose parents aren’t imbeciles). It might fuck over olds depending on dimunition of vaccine efficacy, which we have no real handle on right now.
Apparently IPV doesn’t stop transmission (it protects the vaccinated individual ony), only OPV does, and zero chance we’re going back to OPV here in USA#1, so…
OPV is administered orally and can be given by volunteers. OPV protects both the individual and the community, it is essential to stop wild poliovirus (WPV) transmission.
IPV is given by injection and needs to be administered by a trained health worker. IPV is extremely effective in protecting children from polio, but cannot stop the spread of virus in a community.
Source: https://www.cdc.gov/polio/what-is-polio/faq/index.htm
This isnt the end of it. The climate crisis is going to keep producing progressively worse diseases, until we eventually hit one that cant be stopped and cant be contained.
Its not the heat death or the flooding or an asteroid or any such shit as that that is going to end our species, its going to be climate change but its going to be the diseases brought on by it.
It’s The Happening.
This one has virtually nothing to do with climate change and everything to do with stupidity.
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I know that, it was a non sequiter
Ah ok, I tend to agree with your point but I don’t think it’s hopeless.
This seems less likely to flare into something broad and more likely to just have pockets show up in undervaxxed communities. Seems like maybe we should consider boosting adults like we do with tetanus though.
Do agree with the take that we have shown we will fail the test for either a worse pandemic than COVID or for defending against a bio weapon.