Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

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.

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