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Politics : Piffer Thread on Political Rantings and Ravings -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Alan Smithee who wrote (3992)	11/10/2001 9:31:55 PM
From: Lane3	Respond to of 14610

Questions of vaccination are definitely complicated. What skills I might have had once for quantitative decision making are long in my past. I'm sure that somewhere there is a computer model for just these things. Someone a few posts back calculated the deaths that would occur if we vaccinated everyone. It was a fairly full 747 as I recall, at a minimum. That's a lot of people to kill on the off chance that someone attacks us with smallpox. And what if we killed them all with vaccinations and then the bad guys picked a different bug--plague, maybe. Tough decision to make when the probability of a smallpox attack is what? Less than one percent, for sure. Way, way less, I'd guess. Reminds me of making the decision to shoot down a passenger plane headed for the White House. They wouldn't make that call unless they knew the plane had been hijacked and the hijacker had no demands so it was pretty surely a suicide plane. Vaccinating the whole country for small pox right now would like shooting down, say, the noon flight from Kansas City to Chicago or the red eye from Las Vegas to Seattle the day after tomorrow because it just might have a hijacker on it. No one would ever make that call. Regarding the computer models, I wonder how much they really know about how smallpox might spread. I wonder if the models take into account AIDS, for example, or people who might be naturally immune. I've never seen any estimate of how many might be. I'm aware of this because I'm naturally immune, at least I once was. I had fourteen smallpox vaccinations when I was young with nary a reaction. No one ever recorded that. I doubt there are any estimates, let alone statistics. Definitely a tough decision. Perhaps we could make the vaccinations voluntary and everyone takes his own chances. That would lessen the public health effects without anyone having to make that decision to shoot down a plane. Karen