H5N1 bird flu and how we're risking another global pandemic

[NiHaoMike]

You keep repeating this but again fail to see that people are living in similar crowded conditions. Think about schools, public transport, offices, sport clubs, shopping malls, airports, airplanes, etc, etc. At least factory farmed animals stay mostly in one place.

Nowhere as crowded and dirty as the factory farms. And a large number who show symptoms isolate themselves, something that simply doesn't happen in factory farms. Not to mention a substantial number who take measures to avoid catching the disease or spreading it. (Indeed, the most problematic during the COVID pandemic were the ones who refused to take measures.)

[watchmaker]

In the fall of 2019, when Covid was starting to appear, my wife and I read Pale Rider.  This was published  BEFORE the outbreak and was an analysis of the 1918 pandemic which was incorrectly termed "Spanish Flu" because the warring powers kept it secret and only Spain acknowledged it.

Anyway, it recorded almost everything we saw and continue to see.  Long Covid, impacts on the young that impacted the draft in WWII, social reactions, etc.  It was all there and.

The author (UK Based science writer Laura Spiney) concluded we never really heard about the 1919 pandemic because people were too embarrassed by their own behavior.  That is how bad it was.  Today bad behavior is seen as a sign of personal courage.  That is basically the only difference.

Here is a construct that has proven useful.  When a person takes a hard position and is proven wrong by the outcomes, they tend to not admit their mistake.  Instead they double down.

Here is my "creation story".  When the world was created, (By whatever deity; but here I think of  Adam and Eve), everything that was to be was provided.  Including common sense.  That has been getting divided into smaller and smaller bits ever since.

The annoying part to me is that all this was known, but not one policy maker looked at the historical record as a guide to their response.  Instead, they acted like kids who think they discovered sex.

This is why old people get cranky, BTW. (that and the loss of libido).

[Wallace Gasiewicz]

I have read about the 1918 Flu for many years. It is something that epidemiologists have focused on since then.  There have been countless papers written.   

Most of the response in 1918 was the same as the response in 2020.  It was just as ineffective.   
Only the death rates were far worse during the 1918 Flu.   
As I recall, there were a few isolated small communities in the US that did not become infected. They closed off all contact with the world early on.  Masks and "social distancing" did not work and were discarded by the populace. People ceased to listen to the authorities.  Also WW1 was raging and took all the media bandwidth (except in neutral Spain, where they reported on the Flu.)   
This Flu took many more lives than the war, however. There are all sorts of death data that can be inaccurate , but the death toll was horrendous. Probably 4% of the world died.

The COVID virus is a different virus than the H1N1 1918 virus.  Different Genome.   
1918 virus targeted healthy young people, unlike yearly flu. COVID targets older people, like yearly flu.       


There are all sorts of Hypotheses about why 1918 targeted young healthy adults. One Hypothesis is that the older population had some immunity due to previous Flu epidemics.   
 Another one states that the younger population had altered (bad) immunity due to previous infection but not good immunity because they were not old enough to have had an older previous Flu that offered at least some partial immunity.   

These are just rational "guesses" and please do not hold me to these Hypotheses. I do not believe anyone knows for sure.   
Also, I am purposefully not commenting on the various "vaccines".

[NiHaoMike]

https://www.statnews.com/2024/05/02/bird-flu-in-cows-h5n1-virus-changes-missing-data/
USDA handling of data less than stellar.
https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2024/05/avian-flu-time-to-rethink-on-farm-surveillance/

Recent investigations in which the animal livestock industry refused to cooperate with federal requests for microbiological sampling include a Salmonella outbreak linked to pork, and an outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 infections linked to romaine lettuce suspected to be contaminated with manure from an adjacent feedlot that hosted over 100,000 cattle. Whole genome sequencing of samples from the hog and cattle operations implicated in these outbreaks, and countless others, may have yielded important clues about the outbreaks’ origins, and how to avoid similar food safety breakdowns. But under the current oversight regime, livestock producers simply do not have an incentive to submit to sampling requests.

Really need to tighten regulations on factory farming, with the goal of getting it replaced with sustainable farming.

[watchmaker]

I have read about the 1918 Flu for many years. It is something that epidemiologists have focused on since then.  There have been countless papers written.   

Most of the response in 1918 was the same as the response in 2020.  It was just as ineffective.   
Only the death rates were far worse during the 1918 Flu.   
As I recall, there were a few isolated small communities in the US that did not become infected. They closed off all contact with the world early on.  Masks and "social distancing" did not work and were discarded by the populace. People ceased to listen to the authorities.  Also WW1 was raging and took all the media bandwidth (except in neutral Spain, where they reported on the Flu.)   
This Flu took many more lives than the war, however. There are all sorts of death data that can be inaccurate , but the death toll was horrendous. Probably 4% of the world died.

The COVID virus is a different virus than the H1N1 1918 virus.  Different Genome.   
1918 virus targeted healthy young people, unlike yearly flu. COVID targets older people, like yearly flu.       


There are all sorts of Hypotheses about why 1918 targeted young healthy adults. One Hypothesis is that the older population had some immunity due to previous Flu epidemics.   
 Another one states that the younger population had altered (bad) immunity due to previous infection but not good immunity because they were not old enough to have had an older previous Flu that offered at least some partial immunity.   

These are just rational "guesses" and please do not hold me to these Hypotheses. I do not believe anyone knows for sure.   
Also, I am purposefully not commenting on the various "vaccines".

I understand they were different viruses.  My point was pandemics.  And I agree, the response was ineffective; it was uninformed by any of the lessons learned from 1918.

But, my wife and I read and were prepared for the three year mess.  Not much we could do, but at least we were mentally prepared and could sort out the wheat from the chaff.  We were prepared for how people would behave.

Policy makers had the tools to do a better job.  But in 1918 quarantine was a social responsibility, not a political liability.  People understood their responsibility to others and were used to the idea due to tuberculosis and such.  And we should've been better prepared and concerned about the (potential, now established) long term impacts of infection.

The major aspect I excuse is that all of the USA's emergency response was based on a REGIONAL disaster.  It was expected that medical supplies and such would be available from unaffected areas to support the region that was impacted.  Hard to deal with that one.

Early travel restrictions WOULD have helped.  If we could stop airlines in 2001, we could have done it in 2019.  BUt, "My rights" have overtaken "my responsibility to others".

This was a total lack of leadership.  Instead we were stuck with follow-ship.

I used to follow the FEMA simulations that gamed out disaster responses.  Nuclear accidents, anthrax, etc.  It comes down to that whether you are a bus driver assigned to evacuation, or you are a community leader in an infected area (or in Congress, staff or spouse), you will take care of yourself at the expense of your assigned responsibility.  Citizens in the impacted area are low on the food chain (at least when I looked at the regs related to anthrax vaccine distribution back in 2002).

I am not a prepper, but I do not expect anyone to ever "save" me.

[nctnico]

According to the WHO there is no direct threat from H5N1 to turn into a pandemic because there is no spread from human to human.

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/influenza-(avian-and-other-zoonotic)

It looks like H5N1 has been around since 1997. That is almost 30 years already. You can't rule out anything for 100% but it is more likely a different influenza strain which affects humans is going to cause the next pandemic.

[NiHaoMike]

According to the WHO there is no direct threat from H5N1 to turn into a pandemic because there is no spread from human to human.

Not yet, at least. But it spreading to factory farms is especially problematic as it gives the virus a nearly ideal place to grow and a lot more tries to spread to humans. And the fact that it made the (according to scientists) unlikely move to spread to cows indicates it already mutated in a way we don't really understand yet.

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/influenza-(avian-and-other-zoonotic)

It looks like H5N1 has been around since 1997. That is almost 30 years already. You can't rule out anything for 100% but it is more likely a different influenza strain which affects humans is going to cause the next pandemic.

Evidence suggests it's already spreading to humans, just not very well at it yet. To assume it will stay like that forever is tempting fate.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/05/02/1248538298/the-u-s-may-be-missing-human-cases-of-bird-flu-scientists-say

"We know that some of the workers sought medical care for influenza-like illness and conjunctivitis at the same time the H5N1 was ravaging the dairy farms," says Gray, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.

"I don't have a way to measure that, but it seems biologically quite plausible that they too, are suffering from the virus," he says.

Gray has spent decades studying respiratory infections in people who work with animals, including dairy cattle. He points out that "clustering of flu-like illness and conjunctivitis" has been documented with previous outbreaks involving bird flu strains that are lethal for poultry like this current one.

...

What concerns him most is the possibility the outbreak could wind up at another kind of farm.

"We know when it hits the poultry farms because the birds die, but the pigs may or may not manifest severe illness," he says, "The virus can just churn, make many copies of itself and the probability of spilling over to those workers is much greater."

The lax regulation of factory farms is the biggest issue, that they could easily be already brewing disease with no obvious signs until it's too late.

[Halcyon]

We were told to get vaccinated to protect others which was a lie. Our government even mandated it for care home workers and they were going to also mandate it for all frontline NHS staff. Fortunately they realised it didn't prevent transmission and cancelled mandates. The authorities have pushed far more misinformation, than crackpots on the internet.

I prefer to stick to the hard evidence. I'll believe it when I see proper, randomised data to show it works.

What a load of crap. Whilst the vaccines might not have prevented all transmission, it certainly had a significant impact on transmission rates and for those that still ended up catching COVID, it significantly reduced the symptoms in most vaccinated people. There's plenty of evidence that supports this. The fact is, the vaccination programs saved a lot of lives and made the lives of millions of others far less miserable.

I continue to get vaccinated against COVID every 6-12 months based on Australian government and doctors advice, and I'm yet to catch it. I spend quite a lot time on public transport and around people as well.

[nctnico]

According to the WHO there is no direct threat from H5N1 to turn into a pandemic because there is no spread from human to human.

Not yet, at least. But it spreading to factory farms is especially problematic as it gives the virus a nearly ideal place to grow and a lot more tries to spread to humans. And the fact that it made the (according to scientists) unlikely move to spread to cows indicates it already mutated in a way we don't really understand yet.

No, because factory farms don't have a wide variety of humans in them. So the virus has no information on how to mutate / adapt to spread amongst humans IF that is even possible. The fact that H5N1 has been around and spreading for almost 30 years without jumping from one human to the other shows that.

BTW: it is better to go with what organisations like WHO advise rather than following stories (anecdotal evidence). The information WHO provides has at least been screened / verified across a broader panel with scientists.

[Wallace Gasiewicz]

The problem is that we cannot prove the efficacy of any "immunization" program for COVID at this time.   

Someone could just as honestly say that they have had no shots and have taken no or minimal precautions and have not became ill at all.  There are lots of people who could say that.   

To evaluate the efficacy we need proper studies, not just personal observations of ONE subject.  At this point, it will be very difficult or impossible to get anything close to randomized studies.   
How do we know it reduced symptoms in "vaccinated" people? I have seen no believable proof of this. Maybe someone could post some studied proving this.
Zero has a point, People who have had the shots were deemed to be infected by the testing done (for what that is worth) and told to isolate.  Authorities thought that these people were prone to communicate the virus in spite of their "immunization" status.  And, Yes, we were told that getting the shots would protect others.   Which one is it?
This sort of "logic" is why many people have no confidence in the authorities as far as their handling of the COVID pandemic.   


Quote>Quote from: Halcyon on Today at 02:45:05 am>Quote from: Zero999 on April 29, 2024, 08:51:34 pm

We were told to get vaccinated to protect others which was a lie. Our government even mandated it for care home workers and they were going to also mandate it for all frontline NHS staff. Fortunately they realised it didn't prevent transmission and cancelled mandates. The authorities have pushed far more misinformation, than crackpots on the internet.

I prefer to stick to the hard evidence. I'll believe it when I see proper, randomised data to show it works.

What a load of crap. Whilst the vaccines might not have prevented all transmission, it certainly had a significant impact on transmission rates and for those that still ended up catching COVID, it significantly reduced the symptoms in most vaccinated people. There's plenty of evidence that supports this. The fact is, the vaccination programs saved a lot of lives and made the lives of millions of others far less miserable.

I continue to get vaccinated against COVID every 6-12 months based on Australian government and doctors advice, and I'm yet to catch it. I spend quite a lot time on public transport and around people as well.

[Gyro]

Vaccines... and lock-downs, were put in place in attempt to prevent health systems, and more specifically hospital ICUs becoming totally overwhelmed by a massive peak of emergency cases and try to spread the load over a longer period. People dying in the streets, families going to desperate lengths to get oxygen cylinders etc. were a common sight in countries that didn't have the benefit (or buying power) of comprehensive vaccination programs for their huge populations. Even in affluent places like New York, they had corpses piling up in refrigerated truck containers behind hospitals.

There was zero time to fully quantify the efficacy of each vaccine, as long as they were better than nothing - in practice the developers managed much better than that in the time they had.

Sadly there were many, many, individuals in (the lucky parts of) this world who were simply unable to comprehend the need for restrictions of their own personal 'freedoms' and a few little needle jabs (which populations in poorer countries were literally crying out for). I feel deeply for their wounded sense of injustice.

I know there are many more nuanced arguments, but I think this was the fundamental situation.

[NiHaoMike]

No, because factory farms don't have a wide variety of humans in them. So the virus has no information on how to mutate / adapt to spread amongst humans IF that is even possible. The fact that H5N1 has been around and spreading for almost 30 years without jumping from one human to the other shows that.

BTW: it is better to go with what organisations like WHO advise rather than following stories (anecdotal evidence). The information WHO provides has at least been screened / verified across a broader panel with scientists.

The 2009 swine flu pandemic started from factory farming. So there is precedent for a pandemic from factory farms. The saving grace was that one was a rather mild flu. The next time, we might not be so lucky.

It would be interesting to do a proper study on the health of individuals who do not consume products from factory farms as compared to the general population. There are many other health impacts of factory farming not related to infectious diseases, such as bioaccumulation of pesticides.

[coppice]

We were told to get vaccinated to protect others which was a lie. Our government even mandated it for care home workers and they were going to also mandate it for all frontline NHS staff. Fortunately they realised it didn't prevent transmission and cancelled mandates. The authorities have pushed far more misinformation, than crackpots on the internet.

I prefer to stick to the hard evidence. I'll believe it when I see proper, randomised data to show it works.

What a load of crap. Whilst the vaccines might not have prevented all transmission, it certainly had a significant impact on transmission rates and for those that still ended up catching COVID, it significantly reduced the symptoms in most vaccinated people. There's plenty of evidence that supports this. The fact is, the vaccination programs saved a lot of lives and made the lives of millions of others far less miserable.

I continue to get vaccinated against COVID every 6-12 months based on Australian government and doctors advice, and I'm yet to catch it. I spend quite a lot time on public transport and around people as well.

What a load of crap. There was not even the slightest suspicion that the vaccines would reduce COVID transmission when they were introduced, and there is no evidence they did. What saved us was the amazing effectiveness of more transmissible, but less nasty, mutant strains to crowd out the prior ones. Infections like COVID spread from the nasal cavity, outside the bodies protection barriers. An active immune response within the body will not result in an immune response in the nasal cavity, where the spreading occurs. Natural immunity causes a separate immune system training outside the barrier, which an injected vaccine does not replicate. This is a key reason why all previous attempts to create a useful vaccine against corona viruses have been a failure. Nasal sprays have been tried, but I'm not sure an effective one has been produced.

In most pandemics a substantial portion of the population do not ever get the disease. A result which is well documented, but poorly understood. You may be one of the lucky ones. Do you realise that if you keep taking a vaccine you loose immunity to the disease it is for? This is one of the body's regulatory mechanisms, which limits auto-immune diseases from wiping us out. Look up IgG4. What are being called mRNA vaccines are not vaccines at all. They are a gene therapy that turns your own body into a vaccine factory, and a very uncontrolled one. Problems with that lack of control is one of the factors which kept mRNA approaches from hitting the market much earlier, and were still giving serious trouble in trials only a couple of years before COVID hit.

[Zero999]

Then there's all the other misinformation exaggerating the efficacy of masks, keeping 2m apart etc. which lacked rigorous evidence to support and the authoritarian policies copied from Communist China. It appears as though the public health authorities did their level best to destroy their reputation.

And what proof is there that distancing does not work?

It isn't. I didn't say that it's proof that masks and keeping 2m apart don't work, just that there's no strong evidence they do. The Cochrane review into masking found it to be inconclusive and as far as I'm aware no studies have been conducted into whether keeping 2m apart does anything to reduce the spread or not. And why 2m? Perhaps 1m would have done? Or maybe we needed to keep 3m or 5m apart? Where's the evidence?

It would be different if we were just advised to wear masks and keep 2m apart. That wouldn't have been ideal, given the lack of evidence, but the fact we were forced to, under pain of a fine, is disgusting. If the authorities are going to punish people for breaking rules, then there needs to be extremely strong evidence to support them in the first place.

We all got covid in the office one after the other until we were all working from home as best we could. The we returned. But one colleague was clearly not well. I don't know if it was covid or something else. We sat on the same stretch of desk but with another smaller desk in the middle that we used for electronics prototyping we were at least 3m apart. And for a couple of weeks I was fine while he coughed and spluttered. Until that once that I went over to his desk to help him and he was coughing all over the place. Then I too was unwell in a similar way. Hey it's not a scientific study but I'll pitch it against anyone just saying that distancing does not work. I mean it was a 2-3 week study....

Anecdotal.

As for masks as I have tried to explain over and over they will catch and slow down stuff being ejected from your mouth so that is does not travel as far. It's called physics, take a pipe with fluid flowing through it, now put an obstruction over it, does the fluid slow down? Last time I checked physics, it does.

That's good in theory but there's lack of conclusive data which shows it works in real life.

This is the difference between engineering and medicine. In engineering, we can normally predict whether something will work or not, yet in medicine most things which show promise, whether it be from what we think will happen or in the laboratory, turn out to be useless. 

What a silly analogy. Most people can understand the difference between getting a cold and pneumonia.

really? like everyone that called covid just another flu even after it had killed many? Like everyone messed up, top to bottom. People just did not want to accept the massive change that was coming. Remember I said in January that we should stop inter country travel? nope, people were still going on holiday in April after the UK had it's first cases due a person who only fell mildly ill after infecting others that fared worse. And still we travelled abroad. I am afraid that human stupidity is unlimited, and that is what truly scare the fucking shit out of me.

In way it was similar to influenza, just more deadly as it was a novel virus. As soon as it was detected outside of China, it was game over. We should have known that it's impossible to stop the spread of an easily transmissible respiratory virus, especially now we know it can be transmitted to animals, forming a reservoir for the disease, which can jump back to humans again.

According to the WHO there is no direct threat from H5N1 to turn into a pandemic because there is no spread from human to human.

Not yet, at least. But it spreading to factory farms is especially problematic as it gives the virus a nearly ideal place to grow and a lot more tries to spread to humans. And the fact that it made the (according to scientists) unlikely move to spread to cows indicates it already mutated in a way we don't really understand yet.

No, because factory farms don't have a wide variety of humans in them. So the virus has no information on how to mutate / adapt to spread amongst humans IF that is even possible. The fact that H5N1 has been around and spreading for almost 30 years without jumping from one human to the other shows that.

BTW: it is better to go with what organisations like WHO advise rather than following stories (anecdotal evidence). The information WHO provides has at least been screened / verified across a broader panel with scientists.

I don't trust the WHO. They took ages to declare a pandemic, then pushed lies about masks. They haven't properly held China to account. They're a joke.

[Wallace Gasiewicz]

I am not disagreeing with Coppice.However IMHO his use of mRNA is not entirely correct.   
The mRNA in vaccines is not normal RNA but MODIFIED RNA.   This is made with a base m1Ψ, pseudouridine, methoxyurormal     
mRNA is made with bases     adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G), or uracil (U) as bases, then these bases make nucleoside or nucleotide. In this case synthetic Modified RNA the nucleoside corresponding to "U" is substituted with m1Ψ.  This is not a natural mRNA.You can search for it and decide if this is good or bad.   

This Quote is from:   https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8299225/
Cytidines can also be replaced with numerous chemical modifications, including 5-methylcytidine (m5C); uridines can be converted into 5-methyluridine (m5U), 2-thiouridine (s2U), 5-methoxyuridine (5moU), pseudouridine (ψ) and N1-methylpseudouridine (m1ψ), while adenosines can be replaced by N1-methyladenosine (m1A) and N6-methyladenosine (m6A)
Some other really complicated articles:   
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10968337/   
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acscentsci.1c00197
Not too complicated:    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA
The comment about IgG4 (Blocking Antibody) is well taken, If we really knew how to make the body make the different IgGs, we could solve a lot of allergic and immune problems,  We do not have this capability yet. I do not know how much IgG4 is made in response to the COVID Vaccines, if anyone has a good source for this info, please let me know. Last century, I worked in an immunology research lab, just finding IgG4 was quite the big deal back then. It is in very low concentrations.

[Wallace Gasiewicz]

About the sick coughing guy at work....
Yea he probably did have something and transmitted it to everyone. I believe you.  Very Likely.
He should have stayed HOME.   
We don't know if it was COVID or something else like Flu.   Irrelevant.

However, even though we do  all these things to avoid transmission of a virus, while they might make sense and might work for a while   
do not ultimately prevent the spread of the virus.  I guess the virus is more dedicated or smarter than us.

[Gyro]

 May the saints preserve us from armchair Virologists! 

[nctnico]

Do you realise that if you keep taking a vaccine you loose immunity to the disease it is for?

FFS It is exactly the other way around! Vaccines train your immune system against virusses. For mutating virusses, you'll need regular updates to stay current. It is like airplane pilots taking courses in a simulator to learn what to do in an emergency situation for a different airplane.

[coppice]

Do you realise that if you keep taking a vaccine you loose immunity to the disease it is for?

FFS It is exactly the other way around! Vaccines train your immune system against virusses. For mutating virusses, you'll need regular updates to stay current. It is like airplane pilots taking courses in a simulator to learn what to do in an emergency situation for a different airplane.

You might want to look this up before making a random post. Try to find something about how the body mitigates its tendency towards auto-immune problems. Its fascinating.

[SiliconWizard]

It's funny to notice that AI bots are carefully avoiding this thread while polluting others. Come here bots, let's have some fun at least.

[Halcyon]

Do you realise that if you keep taking a vaccine you loose immunity to the disease it is for? This is one of the body's regulatory mechanisms, which limits auto-immune diseases from wiping us out.

Coppice, come on! I expected better from you. This isn't the case at all.

The entire purpose of on-going vaccination (particularly in people with auto-immune disorders) is for continued protection against serious illness. Firstly, immunity to COVID wanes fairly quickly over several months. Secondly, each subsequent vaccination I'm receiving protects against newer strains of the virus. The latest available vaccine which I'm about to get this month is for XBB.1.5 variant (something my immune system probably hasn't seen before).

In any case, I'd rather receive a free jab once every 6-12 months to provide some protection, over no protection at all. All it costs me is 20 minutes of my time. If that means that one day I do catch COVID, it's likely to be mild and short-lived, which means I'm less likely to pass it onto others. 20 minutes well spent in my opinion.

[Wallace Gasiewicz]

There arge instances of immunization not working as intended and causing untoward reactions when the patient gets infected.  Past RSV immunizations are an example. 

[RJSV]

   Yeah, uh, NO.   The (non-doctors) here with self declared correctness, dismissing some other non-doctors here.
   Wallace G. just made important point.   I had just been thinking;   If we assume, as an exercise, that there IS a complicating or side-effect factor, let's say at really low trouble level.
Now, if we figured out a low rate, such as 0.002 percent of those vaccinated get side-effects, on a SINGLE DOSE event, and somebody is comfortable obtaining re-updated versions, like say 6 times, in three years, then that 'small' risk has potentially grown by 6X, right ?
   At what point does the harmful side effect get acknowledged, (vs dismissal as some bogus paranoid 'rumor')?

[CatalinaWOW]

   Yeah, uh, NO.   The (non-doctors) here with self declared correctness, dismissing some other non-doctors here.
   Wallace G. just made important point.   I had just been thinking;   If we assume, as an exercise, that there IS a complicating or side-effect factor, let's say at really low trouble level.
Now, if we figured out a low rate, such as 0.002 percent of those vaccinated get side-effects, on a SINGLE DOSE event, and somebody is comfortable obtaining re-updated versions, like say 6 times, in three years, then that 'small' risk has potentially grown by 6X, right ?
   At what point does the harmful side effect get acknowledged, (vs dismissal as some bogus paranoid 'rumor')?

It doesn't necessarily work that way either.  Some will get side effects with every exposure, some never will and just about every other possibility.

This whole thing is an argument about a very complex subject on which no one has all of the facts, or even knows what all the unknowns are.  Made more complex by a wide range of opinions about the relative merit of public vs individual safety.

I have elsewhere pointed out a simple, very well defined thought experiment which will result in wide disagreement..

Imagine that a pill is developed that with the property that a single dose will provide perfect lifelong immunity to all communicable diseases.  But has the rare side effect that(say one in a thousand)  people will die instantly and painlessly.

Would you take such a pill?  Would you make it mandatory to take it?  Would those answers change if the side effect was more or less rare?  If so, what is the inflection point?  Would the answers change if the death was weeks long and very painful?

Answers to these questions will vary both from culture to culture and individual to individual

[Halcyon]

There arge instances of immunization not working as intended and causing untoward reactions when the patient gets infected.  Past RSV immunizations are an example.

No one is disputing that a small number of people will have adverse reactions. It does happen. But rather, for the vast majority of the population (i.e.: almost everyone), it has a positive impact overall.