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Once again, I'm not making any declarative statements or giving anyone advice, I'm simply offering relevant questions to those interested in a comprehensive understanding. Do you understand the difference between questions and statements?

The article did the same thing. It didn't recommend people to not get the vaccine, it doesn't say that the vaccine doesn't work, it simply asks more relevant questions and presents alternative viewpoints from professionals.

Why is it when you ask further relevant questions about something, people assume you are making declarative statements opposed to whatever you're questioning?

I think its because people want to believe they know what they are talking about when in reality there is much uncertainty in everything, and being uncomfortable with uncertainty they set out to attack whoever started asking the relevant questions as if they have an opposing position to defend.

So, I'm not saying the vaccine doesn't work, I'm not saying you shouldn't get it (by all means if you think its going to help you then shoot up!), I'm just saying that the data isn't clear and we cannot be absolutely certain at this time that the vaccine is worth the effort. There's no implied assumptions in those statements, by the way.

No the questions are not relevant. They are asinine.

No, It makes up idiocy based on idiocy.

Because your questions are so retarded, we can't imagining a sane person asking them.

It's because when you throw in factually incorrect or obscuring hogwash you make things that are not at all difficult to understand "uncertain".

Yes it is. The data is very clear. There is a reason this person was laughed at by the scientific community. And worth the effort? You can easily calculate that, based on system modeling and a rudimentary understanding of economics.

Timelord, thank you for explaining my point that it is much more complicated than believing that Colombus discovered America or that matter is solid. We shouldn't be teaching our children this crap. They are more capable of understanding nuance and complex systems then we give them credit for, and a full explanation should not be withheld just because it is ASSUMED they wouldn't understand complexity.



Is this what you are talking about CBD? I should explain what I meant more fully.

First of all I want to make sure that everyone understands what the word MAYBE means. It identifies a possibility, not a certain reality. it is not a declarative statement of any kind. It is an invitation to question. Since some of you are so intent on claiming that I am making declarative statements when I used the word maybe, I will put a disclaimer here that I am not making up facts, I am simply considering possibilities. I don't necessarily believe in this nor does it imply anything else you might assume.

This should probably address about 80% of the posts, so if you are truly interested in questioning this stuff and not trying to score points by insulting people for things they didn't say or mean, then continue reading.

We know that flu constantly changes/adapts to the human immune system (and to medicines) over time. Some of these changes take as little as one flu season. However, we are unable to predict how and when these flu strains will adapt and change. The reason they are advising NOT to use Tamiflu early in the season or without serious cases is because they are afraid this new strain will develop a resistance early on and become more deadly. We also THINK/BELIEVE/SPECULATE that this new strain MIGHT trick immune systems into attacking themselves or the host in which it resides, thus enabling it to kill people who may otherwise have healthy immune systems.

We also know, according to theories of evolution, that our immune system has been adapting to new biological threats over our species lifetime. However, we are unable to predict how and when our bodies will change to be able to defeat these new threats (probably not within a lifetime if that is an assumption you are making, although we can't be absolutely certain.)

My statement quoted above meant this: What if (IF is a conditional, not a declarative statement,) by injecting yourself with a vaccine, you were

1) allowing the flu to adapt/mutate more rapidly thus creating a more dangerous flu strain for yourself and others around you and

2) teaching your body and your immune system that it needs to target a specific/static threat when the threat is really more general/dynamic and

3) teaching your body that it may rely on seasonal flu vaccines to develop specific immunities thus weakening your immune system's ability to identify and defeat potential new dynamic threats?

What we are doing now is taking a natural process that has been working for billions of years and trying to force it to work more quickly for us and in a more convenient and economical way. I am very wary of interfering with the natural process of evolution in this manner, and we don't know how these things will affect us 100, 2000, or 10,000 years in the future because there is no way we can possibly test that. I'm not saying that it won't work or that it will endanger us in any way, but I am saying that we don't know that it will not.

If we had a comprehensive understanding of the immune system and how it adapts to new threats, we would have solved problems like cancer and AIDS long ago.

Uh, that information's complexity is aimed at 4-6 year old kids, so...uh, I don't get your point.

No, you're immunoresponse system essentially has a threat database. The vaccine tosses some minimal threats your way so your system can effectively them to their threat watchlist and keep a lookout for them.

You're wary of taking an active rather than passive role in response to natural processes? Well, sorry, but that's been the basis for society for the past 10,000+ years. Seems we've been wrong ever since animal husbandry, stone tool and fire making.

Timelordwho thinks he can do it with one sentence of broken, nonsensical English. Go ahead and give it a try.

Oh so its like a virus database, huh? LOL. Have you actually reduced our entire immune defense system and its interaction with the environment over billions of years to one sentence without a clear meaning or explanation?

It is impressive how people can so delude themselves into thinking that their common sense way of understanding things is actually the way things are. I'm quiet confident, although not an expert myself, that the immune system is much more complex than what you've described here. And when I mention the immune system, I'm not talking ONLY about building a resistance to viruses. There are many correlations between major organs and the immune system that we still don't understand.

Since you said no, I'm assuming that you think that getting a vaccine will not enable the virus to adapt/change more rapidly if it encounters that vaccine in your body? Is this the case?

This is the problem with our education system that I mentioned earlier. We assume that "freshmen" don't have the capacity to understand multivariate calculus.

If you don't have anything to offer besides "I know better than you so I'm not going to sink to your level to explain it" why bother posting? At least I have offered some reasonable dialog addressing the issue and have attempted to explain myself.

Sometimes this board has nothing more than a bunch of pathetic egoists trying to insult each other so they can rate themselves up and down, regardless of whether the insult fits or whether the person meant what they were accused of.

Grow up and post something meaningful not a bunch of diversionary *********

Wrong, the vast majority don't have the necessary mathematical background to understand it. That was, you know, the entire point. So - just for the record - you were the first one here to make that assumption. Congratulations!



Wrong, the point was that in order to explain just HIV infection I'd either have to write an absurd amount (which I don't have time to do) or spend the next three pages clarifying myself (which I also don't have the time to do). See how that works?



There, there. Maybe someday you'll know what you're talking about before you jump into a conversation, yeah? That way us big ol' meanies won't have to point out that you're making sh*t up as you go. :(

Edited, Oct 23rd 2009 3:20pm by CBD

A beautiful, concise explanation. Thank you for being informative and reasonable, and not insulting. And I do understand the point/purpose of the vaccine and, for the record, I don't believe its a bad thing, or that it doesn't work, or that it will lead to bad things. But I don't dismiss that as an impossibility either. My questions are these:

We see specific cases in which certain viruses behave in certain ways, but would it be fair to say that all viruses behave in the same way? Scientifically speaking, the only way to know for sure how a specific virus will act in an environment is to do exhaustive and comprehensive testing. Another words, could what we assumed about all viruses in the past not NECESSARILY be true about this particular strain? I understand there is no reason to believe that it is different (as far as I know), but is it possible?

The reason I bring this up is because some of the chatter I have been reading/hearing is fear that this new strain will somehow mutate/combine with bird flu which has a much stronger ability to mutate and adapt to its new host much more rapidly.

http://www.birdflumanual.com/articles/influenzaEvolutionAdaptation.asp

Yes, all flu strains (labeled under the umbrella of influenza) infiltrate the same particular somatic cell in the same way and use identical mechanisms for persuading the cell to use their genetic information to produce more viruses. You cannot, however, extrapolate these mechanisms to other, unrelated viruses (polio, HIV, etc)

soulshaver, do you actually know anything at all about medicine or biology? I'm not accusing you here, but I want to know your background.

Asking vague leading questions you happened to pull from some blog without any actual understanding on your part is useless. You shouldn't be surprised when people rightly treat you like an idiot. Come with some information and this won't happen.

As long as we are throwing out obscure hypotheticals, what if your grandfather was saved from a life threatening bacterial infection by penicillin? You may not even be here if it wasn't for medical technology.



It was more that you can't make broad generalizations about illnesses and infections.


If I understand your argument, you are saying that if we had never began relying on antibiotics and vaccines that our immune systems would be strong enough on their own to ward of diseases. I understand where you are coming from, but I feel that you aren't thinking it all the way through.

Think back a couple hundred years, back when medical technology was minimal. Death from infection was rampant, regardless of the fact that the same illnesses and diseases had been killing them for generations. Evolution takes generations and generations to happen. This puts us at a disadvantage since generations/reproduction for humans is approx. every 20 years while bacteria have a replication time of as little as 20 minutes.

Basically what I'm saying is that bacteria will ALWAYS outshine us in the mutation/evolution department. Without modern medicine, bacteria will just trample us. Regardless of how many new defenses our body can come up with, bacteria will find a way around it in a matter of years.