[extropy-chat] Are vaccinations useless?

[Alejandro Dubrovsky]

On Mon, 2006-03-13 at 21:50 +0000, Russell Wallace wrote:
> On 3/13/06, "Hal Finney" <hal at finney.org> wrote:



>         And there is an associated "meta" issue.  How best to update
>         our personal 
>         beliefs about the matter?  Should we accept the scholarly
>         consensus at
>         face value, or should we attempt to become experts on public
>         health,
>         epidemiology, the history of medicine, and the many other
>         factors
>         necessary to achieve a good understanding of the issues?
> 
> Read a bit about the history.
> 

You are going to argue against numbers with stories?  You sound like
newspaper titles that claim "Countless die every year in drink driving
accidents".

eg
> In Ireland in my parents' day, survival was in large part a matter of
> not dying of TB (which killed rich and poor alike, contrary to the
> "it's because we got richer" theory - effects of wealth per se on
> disease presumably exist, but are marginal second-order effects, far
> too small to explain the eradiation of disease). Polio was even more
> terrible, because it didn't quite kill.
> 

Do you have numbers of the death rate attributed to TB in Ireland in the
period mentioned?  Do you have numbers of death rate in affluent
families compared to the poor families?  Or is this, as I assume, pure
emotional baggage granted extra credence because it was handed down
through the family?