Who is Ron Swanson, Ye Ask?

Ron Swanson, the silver duke of saxophony & hand of The Tammy: first of his name, slaughterer of snowflakes, breaker of hipsters, builder of pyramids, master of chairs & high lord of lumber - long may he reign.

The Anti-Vax Bandwagon is STILL Going!?

 "Harvard Immunologist to Legislators: Unvaccinated Children Pose ZERO Risk to Anyone"

Errm, no. Yiiiikes.

That article is swimming in fallacies of rhetoric and context. There's a huge difference between longstanding herd-safety vaccinations and those specific edge-case vaccines which are (or were) on the forefront of vaccine research (i.e. very much works in progress) - yet this article only discusses the latter despite making sweeping assertions about the former.

I've read a lot of Obukhanych's research, and—her more infamous public appearances notwithstanding—the actual science underlying most of her "outreach" amounts to a couple of distinct points which are almost universally, if not always deliberately, misinterpreted and/or misrepresented. Most notably, none of them actually support or otherwise provide evidence for the anti-vax rhetoric stirred up by/in the (often for-profit) media in which she is often cited. Those points being:

— First, synthetic vaccination, in general, is an imperfect substitute for naturally-acquired immunity. This is factual common knowledge and generally uncontested in medical science.

— Second, because any given infectious disease evolves parallel to its hosts' immunity over time (but almost always evolves more efficiently than its hosts'), iterative, short-term vaccination is likely to lead to more severe long-term problems as disease evolution steadily outpaces the cutting edge of human disease science. This is also factual common knowledge.

Note, too, that with the exception of the now well-known flaws in the aP vaccine (which, despite that, is still better than nothing), the vaccines cited in this article are conspicuously absent their corresponding real-world data and context, such as: why a vaccine for a disease exists in the first place (referring to once-fatal and relatively commonplace diseases which, thanks to vaccines for them, now are not); why non-mandatory vaccines (particularly for cancer-comorbid viruses) might still be wise in populations demonstrating an above 50% rate of early-life infection; etc. There's a reason that those largely edge-case vaccines in particular are cited here, while the rest are not:

If one takes the aforementioned points completely out of context, it's easy to distort them into alleged or perceived "evidence" against vaccination - but that critical qualification obfuscates the real meat and potatoes of the issue (as is generally the intention). Here's the bulk of the important context, then, that's again-conspicuously absent from media employing that strategy to prop up that sort of rhetoric: when vaccinated individuals are exposed to a dangerous disease, they are demonstrably much, much, MUCH more likely to survive it, much more likely to avoid ever contracting it in the first place, and, if they do, their symptoms are almost always much less compromising to their short- and long-term health. Additionally, if infected, the body is able to fight off the disease much more quickly - which means everyone else in proximity is also much safer as a function of reduced exposure. Of course no solution is 100% consistent - but when the median rate of desirable outcomes within the expected range of possible outcomes is in the very high 90th percentile, that's clearly a success in big-picture terms.

Furthermore, when the alternative to even the most imperfect and inelegant solution is... a very high (or even simply non-negligible) risk of death... one can argue that there's not really much of a choice. Sure, human immunity as a whole might be better served in the long run if we were to simply allow ourselves to become infected with as many full-blown deadly diseases as possible - but in that case, "humanity as a whole" will only include the survivors, and the difference between that result and what we have now is far from negligible. Understandably and, in my opinion, justifiably, giving that up is not a price that most are willing to pay - and that pragmatism is the compromise that is vaccines.