I’d prefer to not use propaganda at all and instead be honest with people:

• Vaccines reduce your risk of getting serious illnesses, and if you get them anyway they tend to be mild.
• Without vaccines, many people will get ill, many will be hospitalized, and many will die. Some will have permanent medical problems or even disabilities. We have no way of knowing who exactly these things will happen to until after they already get sick.
• Most vaccine-preventable diseases have little to no treatment options after you get ill other than just waiting them out. Antibiotics do not work for most vaccine-preventable illnesses.
• Vaccines have been medically proven to be very safe and very effective.
• You can only catch a virus if someone else gives it to you. By getting vaccinated, you are protecting not only yourself, but all your friends, family, coworkers, and everyone else important in your life.

Its frustrating, because I see too many people read the "Reefer Madness" media machine as this excuse to just smoke their fucking brains out. Like, they go the complete opposite direction and take the D.A.R.E. program as evidence that chronic consumption has no negative side effects.

Now we're extending it to fucking vaccines? Pure insanity.

The reality is that the vast majority of antivax kids will be perfectly fine

To add, this only works if the majority of the population is vaccinated. Herd immunity is a real thing, but for us (and the things we vaccinated against) it isn't achieved through mass infection. It's through majority adoption of vaccination.

Sure, kids who don't get vaccinated have been fine in the very recent past, but only because everyone else has had vaccines. We're starting to see this slipping in lots of "1st world" countries. People see kids not being vaccinated and being ok, because the majority of people are vaccinated. So more people don't vaccinate their kids. Now we're getting mass outbreaks of measles, and people who have legitimate medical reasons preventing them from getting vaccinated are at extreme risk.

I'd love to say let them Darwin themselves out of our hair, but that's not how it works.

Smfh...just so stupid.

Polio is a great example, because:

• 72% of people who get Polio never know they have it.
• 24% develop a mild sore throat and fever
• 1-5% get severe illness
• 0.1-0.5% actually get paralysis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio

Compare to COVID-19:

• 33% of people who get COVID-19 never know they have it
• 81% who get sick (so about 54% of the total) get mild symptoms
• 14% of those who get sick (9% of the total) get severe symptoms
• 5% of those who get sick (3% of the total) get critical symptoms such as respiratory failure, which can lead to death.

All things considered, COVID-19 is actually way worse than polio. But people feared polio more because kids in iron lungs is way more marketable than old people dying (horribly, I may add.) People today will get the polio vaccine but decline the COVID vaccine, despite COVID being the worse virus.

Measles was somewhat similar: about 1 in 4 people were hospitalized, but only 1-2 out of 1000 died. Tetanus is indeed way worse, with 6.4% of cases leading to death, but it’s not an infectious disease and a lot of people will just get vaccinated post-exposure.

I think it’s clear why a meme campaign today that implied most people who refuse the COVID shot will die of COVID is flawed, but memers are using the same logic with the old illnesses and are thinking it’ll sway antivaxxers. The actual discussion needs to be a lot more nuanced.

I typically tell my patients that vaccines are the best way to protect themselves and their families, and that the best way to keep you from being sick in the first place is to stop the virus from circulating so no one can give it to you. And the way we stop viruses from circulating is to vaccinate everyone, so the virus can no longer spread.