Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised [LWN.net]

Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

Posted Mar 1, 2016 1:14 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised by BlueLightning
Parent article: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

> The thing is, there shouldn't *be* sides to be on. This is scientific research we're talking about - either the published research was supported by the evidence it presented, or it was not.

The reverse is also true - the evidence should be credible and reliable.

If you read what I said, I have personal proof that the evidence is not credible :-(

There is a "yellow card" system for reporting drug reactions etc. If you have proof that yellow cards *are being suppressed*, then you have no alternative but to conclude that the evidence vaccines are safe is not credible :-(

The worst case I've heard of is official statements that "there is no evidence that this vaccine is dangerous". It only took a few weeks ferreting by journalists to find the following case:

A lad went to the doctors for the vaccine. After the vaccine, he went home and went to bed. Four weeks later, he died, having never left his bed. His death was not officially linked to the vaccine, because of a directive issued to doctors, that said any events after three weeks could not be related.

Hang on? Of course you have no evidence that the vaccine has actually caused fatalities, because you've banned the recording of the evidence!!!

Or the girl that walked into the doctors for a (I believe rubella) vaccination, and left in a wheelchair. I don't believe she ever walked again, but it took a massive fight by her parents to force the doctors to report it.

As I said before, don't get me wrong, I do believe the benefits of vaccination massively outweigh the risks. But by refusing to accept that there ARE risks, we are actually doing ourselves a massive dis-service.

My wife is chronically ill. I'm exposed to health issues constantly. And I wanted to be doctor (never made it into medical school) so I'm personally very interested in this stuff...

Cheers,
Wol

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Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

Posted Mar 1, 2016 2:01 UTC (Tue) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (4 responses)

Of course there are risks associated with vaccination. No reasonable person disputes that. There are risks associated with everything. Crossing the street is risky. However, as you correctly state, the risks associated with vaccination are very, very low and the benefits are huge, which makes vaccination worth doing on the whole.

Even if you are right and adverse effects from vaccinations are underreported by, say, a factor of 10 (i.e., only 1 out of 10 cases is actually reported and 9 cases are suppressed through negligence or malice), you're still statistically way more likely to become severely disabled or even die from some disease like measles than to become severely disabled or die from the vaccination. For measles, the fatality rate in Western countries is something like 0.3%, or 3 cases out of 1000, while the fatality rate from measles vaccinations is considerably less than 3 cases out of 1,000,000. That's more than three orders of magnitude right there, so even if – hypothetically – only 1 out of 100 adverse reactions was being reported and the other 99 suppressed, measles vaccination would still end up being a good idea by a comfortable margin. Widespread vaccination programmes have brought world-wide measles fatalities down from an estimated 2.6 million deaths per year in 1980 to around 100,000 in 2015.

Measles are very, very contagious. You can of course rely on “herd immunity” (i.e., the fact that almost everyone around you is vaccinated) and hope that you'll get away with not being vaccinated yourself because the measles virus will never get near you, but if enough people around you think the same thing, herd immunity will break down, measles outbreaks can happen – thanks to anti-vaxers this occurs a lot more often than it used to –, and eventually people will die. Herd immunity is important because there are people who cannot be vaccinated even if they wanted to, and it is up to the rest of us to protect them.

Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

Posted Mar 2, 2016 0:49 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (3 responses)

detail, you are ignoring one factor. how many people catch measles vs how many you are vaccinating.

if there is a vaccination for a disease that has a low activity rate in the general public, then a vaccination for that disease could very well be more dangerous than the disease is overall.

If you have something that one in 10,000 people catch, and the vaccination has a problem 1 in 1000 times, it is a net loss, even if the disease is 100% fatal if someone gets it without the vaccination.

Now, there aren't that many diseases that fall in this category, but if you are going to be arguing the risk statistics, you need to include this or you are in the statistics end of "lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics'

Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

Posted Mar 2, 2016 2:09 UTC (Wed) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

That's… really not how infectious diseases work.

Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

Posted Mar 2, 2016 2:11 UTC (Wed) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

>if there is a vaccination for a disease that has a low activity rate in the general public, then a vaccination for that disease could very well be more dangerous than the disease is overall.

This maybe a misunderstanding of the relevant statistics or of cause and effect, firstly a vaccine which causes more problems than it solves is not useful and so is not done in the legitimate medical field, but specifically to this case the reason that common diseases we vaccinate for are rare is _because_ we vaccinate for them, to the point of taking many diseases out of common circulation because there is not a critical mass of infectable hosts to sustain the disease organism population. Your hypothetical doesn't model anything in reality and is not useful.

Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

Posted Mar 2, 2016 7:46 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

you are ignoring one factor. how many people catch measles vs how many you are vaccinating.

Measles have a contagiousness index of 0.98, which means that if you're unvaccinated and exposed to the virus you're virtually certain to be infected. (The highest possible value would be 1, which means that everybody who is exposed is infected.) Not everybody who is infected with something actually shows symptoms – the “manifestation index” specifies how many people who are infected do exhibit the symptoms, and in the case of measles this is around 0.95.

So obviously the thing to do is to avoid being exposed to the measles virus in the first place, which is why vaccination against measles is so important. If most people in a community are vaccinated against measles, the resulting “herd immunity” means that the measles virus can't obtain a foothold, and this protects even those people who can't be vaccinated because they are too young (you have to be 1 year old or so to be vaccinated) or their immune system doesn't work as it should. Anti-vaxers can often get away with not vaccinating by hitching a free ride on herd immunity, and that creates the illusion that “I don't need to vaccinate because in reality nobody actually ever gets measles, it's all a scam by Big Pharma”. This goes wrong when there are too many anti-vaxers bunched together. For example, here in Germany measles outbreaks, if they occur, often occur in and around Steiner schools, where anti-vax is a big thing and there is no herd immunity.

The reason we don't see many measles cases in the Western world these days is that widespread vaccination has pushed the disease way back compared to, say, 50 years ago. The measles virus has no non-human host so in theory it would be possible to eradicate it completely like the smallpox virus or (almost) the polio virus, but we're not quite there yet; the fact that it is so contagious doesn't make things easier, either.

If you have something that one in 10,000 people catch, and the vaccination has a problem 1 in 1000 times, it is a net loss, even if the disease is 100% fatal if someone gets it without the vaccination.

One disease which is almost similar to what you're describing is rabies, which is why we don't vaccinate everybody against rabies on the off-chance. Rabies is pretty rare in most places, but there is no cure – if you do catch it you're practically certain to die from it. The rabies vaccination isn't problematic in the way you describe, but it is a very unpleasant experience (though way less unpleasant than the disease itself, and it does have the considerable advantage that in the vast majority of cases it won't kill you like rabies does). Fortunately you can still get vaccinated against rabies after you're exposed to the virus but before you start exhibiting symptoms, so that is the usual approach.