Vaccine Awareness Week

[One Brow]

Only inasmuch as it relates to behavior and risk. This isn’t a moral argument (at least with regard to sexuality), if that’s what you’re alluding to. It’s like asking if you want to be vaccinated against rabies, not being told that it’s not something you need in America but if traveling somewhere like India or Africa. You could argue that people may never know when they could find themselves in Africa, but is it ethical to not paint that picture if doing so reduces vaccination rate?

There are two issues here. One is what’s best for public health. The other is the autonomy of the patient to make their decisions via informed consent. These two get conflated and the latter swallowed up by the former.

Rabies may not be the best choice for comparison, since that vaccine is only effective for a couple of years, but I understand your point, and it's a valid concern. If there were a vaccine against HIV, how strongly should it be pushed? My understanding is that HPV vaccines tend to have mild side effects seem to offer long-lasting protection, but if I'm wrong about either of those points, that does change the risk-reward ratio.

 

[infection]

Rabies may not be the best choice for comparison, since that vaccine is only effective for a couple of years, but I understand your point, and it's a valid concern. If there were a vaccine against HIV, how strongly should it be pushed? My understanding is that HPV vaccines tend to have mild side effects seem to offer long-lasting protection, but if I'm wrong about either of those points, that does change the risk-reward ratio.

I think an (effective and safe) HIV vaccine should be pushed hard, but I don’t believe getting people to do the right thing for the wrong reasons should necessarily fall under the umbrella of “pushing the vaccine.” It’d be like billing an HIV vaccine as not just protecting against HIV, but protecting also against dementia, rare and life-threatening pneumonias, life-threatening fungal infections, and certain lymphomas and sarcomas. Of course that would all be true, but it’d be fairly misleading to allow scant enough information for people to conclude that those benefits are independent of its HIV protection.

The question as to whether or not Gardasil is a good thing doesn’t really pertain to whether or not it’s such a good thing that more complete information should be withheld to increase vaccination rate. The risk/benefit shouldn’t serve to justify compromising informed consent.

 

[MVP]

Evolution doesn't work that way, unfortunately.

I know, I should have said let mother nature take care of it.

 

[One Brow]

The risk/benefit shouldn’t serve to justify compromising informed consent.

Simply providing more information does not necessarily increase the level of informed consent. The real question is how relevant that information is to the decision. Irrelevant information can decrease the level of informed consent.

Again, I'm not saying that you're wrong. It's a complicated issue.

 

[infection]

Simply providing more information does not necessarily increase the level of informed consent. The real question is how relevant that information is to the decision. Irrelevant information can decrease the level of informed consent.

Again, I'm not saying that you're wrong. It's a complicated issue.

You don't need to give every particular for informed consent. But an adequate understanding of exactly what you're treating (or preventing) is the largest variable in that equation, and having a misinformed understanding of what's being treated/prevented is pretty problematic, in my mind. There are plenty of other examples I could give, and the motivations for why we leave things out range from it detracting from the selling point, to it masquerading as a different reason to doing something, to the fact that the medical community is absolutely ignorant what they're treating/doing.