I am glad they’re screening for it. I was born to someone who had the virus, but didn’t know I had Hep C myself until I submitted myself to an exceptionally thorough STI testing panel. I say exceptional, because the standard ones I’d done throughout college and early adulthood do not happen to include that particular test. So I feel a bit lucky to have been able to get diagnosed and treated in my mid-20s, before the disease could do much damage.
You had me curious about what I was tested for, also in the northeastern USA in the 2010s. It looks like they included Hep C when my PCP ordered STD tests in 2015, along with most of the tests the other commenter mentioned. I'm glad they caught yours in time to treat it well!
Hep C screening at least once for adults >= 18 is recommended and considered standard of care in the United States. I checked my medical records and I have a negative Hep C result in an old checkup when I was younger, and another one from a new provider who insisted on a big panel of standard testing for new patients (despite me having no risk factors).
It’s unfortunate that your early providers dropped the ball. I wonder if they assumed you had already been tested for some reason?
Crazy how different healthcare is in different countries.
In the UK once you've had your childhood vaccinations it's entirely possible you'd simply never see a doctor again in your life until you're ready for your prostate exam in older life.
There are no regular checkups or preventative care on the NHS for mid life adults unless you're proactive
I presume you're not a woman, because there's cervical screening for women aged 25-64 every five years. Also depends on what you mean by "mid life", but there's breast screening offered to women aged 50-70 and bowel cancer screening offered to people from 50 to 74 every two years.
There are real trade-offs with screening, and screening too much has harms as well as too little, although I'm not qualified to make a judgement on where that line sits relative to where it is in the UK.
The HPV vaccination eliminates most forms of cervical cancer. Australia reports a 95% drop in cervical cancer in the cohorts that got mandatory widespread HPV vaccinations. I didn't look into how that changed pap smears.
Well that's interesting. Mine always say it is covered, I've never had an insurer (in the US) say its required. I could see it for certain types of life insurance, maybe?
I have never seen or heard of this requirement before. I don’t even see how it could be enforced. What would even be the point, the insurer (even if employer funded) is not allowed to deny or price coverage based on health risks of the insured.
That's not quite true - there's a 5 yearly Health Check which is offered to those over 40 with no other known health issues (in England, but Scotland/Wales/NI have similar schemes).
Local councils are responsible for arranging invitations for those not currently registered with GPs, so it ought to be more or less universal - though there are inevitably a few people who'll slip through the net.
It's pretty basic, but the evidence suggests it's been reasonably effective at dealing with the "he didn't see a doctor for 40 years and then just dropped dead from a heart attack" stereotype.
> In the UK once you've had your childhood vaccinations it's entirely possible you'd simply never see a doctor again in your life until you're ready for your prostate exam in older life.
It's entirely possible to do this in the US, too, but it's not the default path. I know some people who think it's a point of pride to brag that they haven't been to a doctor in 20 years. I know other people who never miss their annual checkup and are frustrated that their doctors won't order every test they hear about from their podcasts. The US approach to healthcare is varied and confusing to outsiders, even if you remove all of the unreasonably complex insurance stuff from the equation.
> There are no regular checkups or preventative care on the NHS for mid life adults unless you're proactive
If you wanted to request an annual checkup, could you ask for one and get it without problem? Or would they require a specific reason to visit?
I'm not a big proponent of restricting speech but "Ask your doctor about..." advertising should be banned in the USA. If you don't have medical training you're in no position to decide what medical conditions you may have or what treatments might be appropriate. If you want to be a doctor, go to medical school.
The idea of advertising prescription drugs is absolutely bonkers in and of itself. If I recall correctly, the only reason they say "Ask your doctor about..." was a regulatory compromise that allowed such advertising. Telling the general public to simply "take Procrapin for their constipation" was deemed too extreme: The general public doesn't have the medical training to diagnose themselves or recommend treatment, but instead the manufacturer was allowed to urge the general public to nag their doctor about a medicine--that was seen as fine.
The last insurance carrier I had, through an ACA Marketplace plan, has an incentives program for members. If you go see the PCP for an annual checkup, you get about $50. If you "go paperless" 100%, you get another $50.
There are about four incentives altogether, and the money is loaded on a Prepaid Visa card that is branded by the insurance carrier. The funds are not restricted, and you can spend them on anything where Visa is accepted. The cards are sometimes cycled out and replaced, but I do not know if the funds had an expiration date. There were no fees to hold the funds, and no fees to spend them.
To be fair, almost nobody is going from childhood vaccinations > late-middle age without seeing a doctor. And when you do go with an ailment general blood tests seem pretty standard these days at GP's along with standard vitals checks. They also do preventive care where necessary. Every woman is invited for cervical screening once they turn 25 and then every few years until they're in their 60's. Regular mammograms are also a thing after a certain age/depending on risk factors. Bowel cancer screening too. STI testing is free and, depending on where you live, done by post. Also depending on your definition of 'childhood' there are a few vaccines given when you're a teenager (HPV for example). And if you ever travel you'll be visiting the doctor for vaccines then too.
I don't think I've been to a doctor in close to 40 years, except for treatment of a few acute injuries. I've had a few vaccine boosters, but I get those at a pharmacy.
In Europe I don't think it's commonly done. For example, the standard Dutch MSM STI test [1] covers HIV, Syphilis, Chlamydia, and Gonorrhoea only while Trichomoniasis, HPV 2 and Herpes are rather common. That being said, it's freely available at most hospitals.
Herpes screening is discouraged in the US unless symptoms are present as the widely available IgG tests have terrible specificity. While the false negative rate is practically 0, they have a false positive rate of around 20%. The only high-accuracy confirmatory test (at least in the US) is the Western Blot but there's only a handful of labs in the country that offer it.
The current tests would result in a substantial fraction of the population running around thinking they have a highly stigmatized STI that they in fact do not have with little to zero ways of getting a more accurate test.
Hep C isn't commonly sexually transmitted so it's odd they would test for it. It's more of a concern in certain occupations, like healthcare, where you may come into contact with blood.
i think during that time / place it was risk based - if you didn't know your parent had it (or didn't tell your dr), and weren't an intravenous drug user, etc. its likely no one would have screened for it.
I mean this is liberal/left heavy, it's to be expected, you can't just rummage in and expect people to be like hm good points you're right! when most of the audience is against you
it's expected
if you could delve into what supports your arguments that'd help more than "trust me instead"
I personally am skeptical of many things, including pharma, but I'm not going to claim that vaccines don't work when historically they have, and I'd have to do a bunch of research to prove an internet argument wrong.
do I think that covid vaccines were/are 100% safe and totally not rushed due to the pandemic? no.
It didn't start out as liberal/left, so a lot of the people that have been here since 2010 want to keep most politics out it entirely. After all the name of the group is "Hackers". Most of the people in compsci/engineering were libertarian prior to 2007 anyway. It's really undergone a shift which is fine, but it actually adds absolutely nothing, from an intellectual point of view imho.
It would be nice to at least send a warning note, to any accounts that solely post political stuff here - or give them their own subgroup.
For God's sake if you are going to talk about Hepatis-C then talk about here, rather than using it to bring up issues with an administration you don't like.
Anyways, if you're serious about engaging I guess the place to start would be adjuvants. Injecting just an antigen doesn't result in a significant immune response. An adjuvant is selected to force an immune reaction.
My concerns are in regards to everything found in the vaccine and in the blood stream along with the antigen. All vaccines have contaminants -- byproducts of the manufacturing process. What is the consequence of mixing an adjuvant, those contaminants, and whatever else is in the blood at the time of vaccination? Given that adjuvants are used to cause autoimmune disease in mice, what is the risk of a given vaccine causing an autoimmune disease? This risk can't be zero. I'd like this to better studied.
Secondly, how long do adjuvants stay in the body? Is there risk that the adjuvant finds it's way into areas of the body where it can't be easily removed? What are the consequences of adjuvant finding it's way into tissue and remaining there?
So I'm not an expert, but I did take immunology last semester... You're definitely right that we'd benefit from more study of the long term downstream effects of adjuvants. When you put the immune system on high alert, it sometimes remembers the wrong thing from the experience and continues to target it later.
But you've got to weigh those risks against the risk of dragging our feet on rolling out new vaccines. It's likely that many autoimmune diseases are caused by pathogens which are either undiscovered, or which are known, but whose link to the autoimmune disease is undiscovered. This is because there is evolutionary pressure encouraging pathogens to resemble self-antigens. If a pathogen has markers that cause it to resemble the human liver, the human adaptive immune system won't typically attack it because it wants to avoid attacking its own liver. So the pathogen is safe. This is called molecular mimicry. But the mimicry isn't perfect, so sometimes the immune system does become sensitized to the pathogen, attacks it, clears it, and starts slowly attacking the liver (or whichever tissue bears the same epitope as the mimic). It shows up years later as an autoimmune disease, but the data just isn't there to isolate its cause to that pathogen.
So the best strategy, if we can pull it off, is to vaccinate against the original pathogen (or prevent it via other means... clean food and water, etc), but to target epitopes which do not resemble any human tissues, and with adjuvants that do not sensitize the immune system against any human tissues.
As for how long adjuvants stay in the body, it's definitely worth studying more, but their whole function is to sound the alarm, so I'd expect that they're cleared rather quickly. Anything that fails to do that is by definition not an adjuvant. But assuming that an inappropriate response was triggered in the first place, you'd see the same effects whether or not the adjuvant was still around: If the initial exposure has triggered clonal replication of whichever B and T cells attack the antigen, self or otherwise, they'll stick around in your lymph nodes for years and years, and they'll re-up their numbers with each subsequent exposure.
I have exactly the same concerns about you with respect to adjuvants, however I believe that more studies need to be done around adjuvants and food allergies. The explosion of peanut allergies and other food allergies exploded when vaccine policy changed in the US.
Think about it: adjuvants create a very strong immune response and the body is looking for something to fight. Sure, there are antigens and dead virii in the vaccine but what if the body also targets the wrong molecules and creates an immune response against something like peanuts, or pine nuts, or eggs, etc? Has there been any studies done on that? How do we know that the body will only target what it's "supposed" to, ie. the dead virus and not something else random?
It's well documented that vaccines can cause allergic reactions and there are studies that show that some adjuvants can cause allergies to environmental allergens.
So the question is, is it so unreasonable to do more studies to see if adjuvants are the underlying cause for food allergies? And if so, are there adjuvants that we could use in vaccines that don't cause the same level of food allergies?
I donp't think this is unreasonable to investigate and doesn't put me into the "anti-vax" camp like so many on HN will jump to do.
One thing to note is that kids with autism have a 3X probability of having food allergies. Could autism be related to vaccines via adjuvants if the food allergy hypothesis holds up? Maybe this is the link that needs to be studied and if adjuvants are changed maybe autism rates plummet?
Unclear, but it's something we need to study, not just bury our heads in the sand and say "Trust the science" like parrots.
It's kind of funny. The "liberal" side of American politics projects an air of intellectual superiority. They then use this self proclaimed status to censor anyone they disagree with and ad hominem them once the side they disagree with is unable to respond. Very intellectual.
Regarding vaccines working - you'll need to be much more specific. Which vaccines are you referring to? Does "working" mean they prevent infection? Or do they just prevent symptoms? Are there negative consequences to priming the immune system to only a few antigen epitopes? Are there negative consequences to only training the active immune system while ignoring the innate? Why do live virus vaccines have better health outcomes than inactivated virus vaccines?
HN pretends there's nothing to discuss here. They're safe and effective, shut up. We are the liberal party and therefore better.
Every vaccine licensed for use in the USA has a clinical review memo that list the adverse events that you claim are dismissed. You live in an imaginary fantasy world.
Ah, there's that dismissive attitude and air of superiority from the liberals. What makes you think I'm not aware of the vaccine inserts? Why are the risks rarely acknowledged by the pro-forced-vaccination crowd? There's probably a good chance you live in California since you're on HN. California makes it incredibly difficult to opt-out of vaccination. Is your position that the risks aren't worth considering? Do you think the risks are properly identified given that many of the health consequences take years to materialize and wouldn't be captured by clinical trials? There's too many different vaccines to talk about specific risks, but if there's one you'd like to focus on I'm happy to continue.
There are two kinds of vaccine skeptics: a much larger group of people who will in fact have conversations about costs and benefits, and a small group of cranks like yourself that should be treated like the drooling imbeciles that they are.
- Don't live in California
- Risks are considered, but you will never be satisfied
- Long-term risks have been studied with very good methodology.
Not that anyone who needs this will read it, but "skeptic" does not mean "already made up your mind and will never change it".
People were "skeptical" of vaccines. Then they did science. Now they aren't. Then, yes, people like the guy trying starting this thread who will never be convinced and cannot change his mind.
Have you read the discussions on vaccine stories? See, for example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26629234 – chosen arbitrarily using the search box at the bottom of the page. I've not read anyone pretending this.
> shut up
People are being dismissive of you, but nobody has told you to shut up in this thread. (The closest thing is flagging the comments which started with broad-spectrum insults, but this only occurred after you wrote this.) Despite its tone, I'm going to have to second GP's assessment that you're responding to imagined slights.
Plus, they're trying to jail someone who, apparently, was focused on making the correct scientific choices for the covid vaccine during the peak of the pandemic.
The lead Fox News "article" plainly stated that the COVID shots cause an 87% miscarriage rate.
This has nothing to do with reality -- and they absolutely do not care about fighting "fair."
They are very overconfident, to the point of losing their own money. There was the case of the rootclaim debate where Peter Miller successfully convinced two paid unbiased experts that COVID was not created in a lab and won $100,000
> We included data from 21 studies (5 randomized trials and 16 observational studies) reporting on 149 685 women. The pooled rate of miscarriage among women who received a COVID-19 vaccine was 9% (n = 14 749/123 185, 95% CI 0.05–0.14). Compared to those who received a placebo or no vaccination, women who received a COVID-19 vaccine did not have a higher risk of miscarriage (risk ratio (RR) 1.07, 95% CI 0.89–1.28, I2 35.8%) and had comparable rates for ongoing pregnancy or live birth (RR 1.00, 95% CI 0.97–1.03, I2 10.72%).
He stated that the FDA had found "no red flags" regarding pregnant women
A "Red Flag" (or Safety Signal) is an actual, observed increase in adverse events in real-world data.
What he was discussing in the text was a theoretical risk.
A "Theoretical Risk" is a hypothetical concern based on known biological mechanisms (e.g., "high fevers can cause miscarriages, so a vaccine-induced fever might do the same").
I'm not a trump fan, but the antivax train has nothing to do with him. (Evidence: Canada is doing even worse then us when it comes to measles). If we want to fix this problem (we do), the first step is to recognize the actual problem, not to play the blame game on whichever politician you currently don't like!
The reason there are measles cases is because a decent percentage of people aren't getting vaccinated anymore. If all of the cases were 2 year olds or younger (when RFK was put in charge) then possibly. But not only are they older (https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html), this is also happening in Canada. I don't see how it could possibly be RFK's fault.
True, but RFK (and other politicians and celebrities) have been active in pushing some form of anti-vax ideology for a decade plus, in some cases back to the 1970s.
It's been a growing movement, not something that kicked off when RFK assumed the HHS role.
Pre-Trump, anti-vaxxers were notorious left-wing granola types. Lots of anti-vaxxers were white liberals living in Marin and NorCal and sending their children to private schools like Waldorf.
Only after Trump did people start lumping them in with right wing.
While It’s fair to point out that RFK is hopping on a train that’s already got momentum, your first comment reads as if it’s not caused by falling vaccination rates (your second comment clarified further).
Also why not blame politicians doing the wrong thing?
Perhaps I should've been clearer. And yes they aren't helping.
And yes, we should blame them for the things they do. T
But the comment I was responding to was acting as if MAGA was the reason for measles outbreaks, which is false. I'm an incredibly strong believer in the truth. An example of why I think this is an important separation: imagine you tried to fix the measles outbreak and miraculously got every single American to hate Trump and got Trump out of office. The problem would still not be fixed! People would still be dying of measles! The effort would have been almost completely wasted!
A major campaign by RFK's replacement could absolutely make a significant difference stopping the spread of measles. That's the whole point of the (proven extremely effective!) vaccine.
Do you believe this? I think it might help a little, but so we're on the same page RFK has only been in charge for 2 years. Why wasn't the previous secretary of health doing this? The measles outbreaks may be relatively new but we've had the vaccination data to see it coming for over a decade.
My personal belief is that there a lot of people who believe stupid things out there (and it's all only amplified by the news and social media), and for anti vaxxers especially I don't think an authority figure saying 'You have to get the measles vaccine!' is going to help much, unfortunate as it is. :(
Inaction (and really, let's be clear - making it worse) is RFK's choice.
We managed to cut the smoking rate pretty dramatically, including in about half over the last decade. Public policy is not ineffective, we just need competent people to wield it.
I don't think it would be logistically that hard to criminalize the parents or take away their kids in those cases. It would have a lot of other downsides but it would probably reduce the rate pretty directly.
I'll bet it would be enough just to make sure that the vaccine waiver signature box is positioned directly below some glossy full color pictures of emaciated, rash covered dead children.
Unlike a lot of pathogenic diseases, measles requires an extraordinarily high amount of herd immunity (upwards of 95%), so this isn't a particularly telling data point on its own.
RFK Jr has been pushing anti-vaccine bullshit for decades. He was already taking defensive stances on his activism (Oh, I'm not anti-vaccine, I'm just providing nonsense arguments and clout for anti-vaccine stances) back in 2015.
Kennedy was already pushing bullshit during the UK Measles vaccine fraud/scare, back in 2005. He was doing this along with a few other celebrities.
Most of his criticisms have been about the timing of certain vaccines administrations.
He's not anti vax.
If nobody can challenge science, then it's not science.
Vaccines continues to help us, but that doesn't mean they are perfect and don't cause side effects on certain individuals. Hopefuly the future brings us highly personalized medicine instead of a 1 size fits all.
He knows he can't push his base too hard on certain things. He probably knows this about vaccines, he lauds Operation Warp Speed but as a win of his not a vaccine that could have saved millions more with his cooperation. He chooses his power over what's best for all of us. He's the leader of the antivax train by choice.
They have 10% our population and had twice the cases last year (admittedly, we're starting to catch up). But the truth is that there are huge lag times when it comes to measles / antivax. This is a symptom of a problem that started 10-20 years ago.
"The order recommends that all shots be given at separate medical visits, a frequent point Trump has made despite the safety, ease and lower costs of giving vaccines together."
'“Together, there could be a possibility they’re quite lethal,” Trump said of the MMR vaccine at the signing of the order on Monday.'
'Asked if he had evidence that the combined MMR vaccine was “lethal”, Trump said: “No. What I’ve heard is that there are some people who say it is that way.”'
Antivax fundamentally has its contemporary roots in Andrew Wakefield's fraudulent anti-MMR campaign.
So directing by executive order and by his own admission without evidence that the MMR vaccine be split up into separate shots is, very clearly, an antivax action. This is the first victory that Wakefield (a man who had a patent on a single measles vaccine!) wanted, and RFK Jr was pursuing.
But this is Trump saying this and signing it. So as of yesterday, it now has everything to do with Trump, sorry. He has handed the anti-MMR movement its ultimate victory and in so doing validated the entire antivax worldview.
See my other responses. Obviously this is bad. But the current measles outbreak is a symptom of a problem that's been happening over the last 1 or 2 decades. It literally CANNOT be caused by this, neither in the US or Canada.
It's still not too late for anyone who is unvaccinated to get the vaccine! Hopefully the next administration undoes this change, but the really important part is managing to shrink the anti-vax movement (which, if you look at the data in my other comments, you can see has been a problem since before Trump).
FWIW I think Trump #1 (45) wasn't an anti-vax presidency; it might have been suspicious of healthcare professionals (for the good reason that so many people know opioid epidemic victims) and he was always a bit equivocal around hydroxychloroquine and bleach and "powerful light inside the body" but Trump didn't start to lean antivax until not long after Biden took over.
(And let's be clear: Operation Warp Speed was an enormous success even if Trump is an ignoramus)
Some of that might have been expediency — Biden was catching shit from the antivax and healthcare-skeptical movement and moving in on that would be easy — but Trump has always been vulnerable to being influenced by people and RFK Jr appears to be generally so much more persuasive than bears thinking about, so he was a factor later on.
Trump #2 (47) is fully an anti-vax presidency; even Hegseth backed away from flu vaccine mandates, only to have an outbreak in an Army (IIRC?) facility.
"has nothing to do with it" is not the same as "is not the cause of". Trump and antivax definitely are related as both are symptoms of the same public strategy that spreads misinformation, polarizes discourse and weaponizes stupidity.
It has a lot to do with him. He doesn't actually have an opinion on any policy issue. For various political reasons, Trump decided to let RFK dictate public health policy according to his extremely delusional ideas. Yes, there was an antivax movement in this country for many years, just as there has been misogyny, racism, and transphobia. Trump has normalized and supercharged all of these moronic and dangerous ideas.
I have not been following measles in Canada, so I can't address that.
See my other comments; it is not possible for RFK to have had any effect on this outbreak. If everyone getting measles was 2 or under, it could be possible; they aren't.
The reason I bring up Canada is as counterevidence; if it was Trump or RFK'S fault, Canada should be doing just fine. They had twice the cases last year in 1/10 the population. The truth is this is a problem with people believing stupid things, and it's going to take a lot more than Trump going out of office to fix.
RFK and his anti-vax ideas are popular only within a small fringe of the American population. Enough to drop herd immunity to the point where we now have to worry about measles again, but it's far from the majority.
See my other responses. Do you really think RFK could possibly have had an effect on vaccinations over the last 2 decades in the US OR Canada?
Since you seem very emotionally opposed to Trump and his administration: I also don't like Trump or RFK! However, to solve a problem, you have to find the root cause of the problem, and pointing at the most recent politician you hate will never help anyone.
He is amplifying the issue, but you're right, Trump is a symptom of the underlying problem. The problem is that internet gave these idiots a platform to mislead people.
Back in the early 90s this wasn't much of a problem. Childhood vaccine requirements weren't some hot-button topic then. Most people would just get them when faced with the requirement. Most opposition was isolated to people who were otherwise contrarians already.
The difference now is that the internet is full of these isolated contrarians who are now influencing gullible people who don't know who to trust.
I'm blaming the current social media landscape, which amplifies ideas based on the engagement they create, which has an unintended consequence of amplifying exciting controversial falsehoods over long-held boring truths. We have given the largest megaphones to the biggest village idiots.
Neither phones, nor email, not even usenet had this impact. Social media did.
The problem is not with the technology but those that control it. (Some would probably say, the fact that any one actor controls it in the first place.)
Our only means of communication in modern society are a few advertising platforms in hands of even fewer owners, and the engineers hired to run it are busy engagementmaxxing.
Completely agree! I will add though: this is a symptom of a problem that started 10-20 years ago. There's a lot of lag time between parents not giving their babies vaccines and outbreaks actually happening. You can see ages here.(https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html) 5 and under are only 20% of cases.
More like 25+ years ago. In the early 2000s you saw a lot of celebrities pushing vaccine fear because they read some book version of "doctors don't want you to know this one wierd fact" that made the best-seller list or another. I remember people arguing about it in college classes, and I graduated in 2003.
>> Canada is doing even worse then us when it comes to measles
Not in Canada but unfortunately US nonsense spreads globally pretty quickly these days. The amount of Trump support in the UK is both bizarre and surprising. When someone with the worlds largest megaphone lies about vaccines, unfortunately people everywhere listen.
Right, because tapping one of the world's biggest vaccine truthers to run the Department of HHS and then proceed to link autism with vaccines and change the recommended MMR vaccine scheduling for children has absolutely no impact on anyone.
>I'm not a trump fan, but the antivax train has nothing to do with him.
Well not nothing. But it predates him and he adopted the movement early in his political career. When I was in high school (2004-8) antivax sentiment was generally associated with liberal Democrats in places like Marin County. This was a favorite retort of conservatives when confronted with their own backwardness on scientific understanding of evolution and climate change. In 2015 Trump began courting the anti-vaccine crowd and the political valence of that flavor of woo-woo nonsense flipped seemingly overnight. It was surreal to see it happen in real time. By 2020 he had lost control of the monster he helped create and the crowd booed him when he said they should get the Covid vaccine.
He was literally spreading FUD about vaccines today. And the measles stuff has got so bad RFK had to mildy backtrack on his previous antivax statements in recent interviews.
From today:
Both Trump and Kennedy made repeated mentions of autism throughout the order signing, emphasizing a scientifically unproven link between vaccines and the condition. Dozens of studies show no link between the two.
“Today we’re proud to officially announce the United States of America’s gold standard childhood vaccination recommendations. That has to do with many subjects including autism in particular,” Trump said at the beginning of the order signing.
“I’ve seen proof of it, where they have a vaccination where it looks like the size of a bottle of soda, poured into a little child’s body and bad things happen in too many cases,” Trump later said on breaking up each shot into an individual medical visit, before adding: “This is an explosion, it’s an epidemic,” in an apparent reference to autism.
Trump is trying to hang Fauci. That goes in the completely opposite direction of promoting the trust of medical institutions in general society, and it's trust that will get people back to vaccinating themselves and their children.
Currently we have a measles outbreak in Brazil brought from the US, so everybody is getting vaccinated (even those who already were, like me) to try to stop the spreading and protect those who can’t get vaccinated.
Really would love for US social and media networks to get their shit together and stop spreading misinformation in the name of profit…
Strangely, anti-vax sentiment is surging in a lot of countries. Canada has higher rates of vaccine rejection than the United States in some categories, as one example.
It’s a strange global phenomenon and I don’t think there is one single root cause. MAGA/MAHA definitely jumped on to the anti-vax train as it became popular, but many forget that Trump presided over the rushing of the COVID vaccine into availability and production. He hasn’t done vaccination any favors in recent years, but I’m skeptical that the widespread rise of vaccine skepticism can be attributable to this administration alone.
I think there’s a bigger story about the cyclical nature of how the dangers of threats that previous generations faced is slowly lost over time, combined with the rise of contrarianism and conspiratorial thinking on social media.
Given the amount of cultural influence the USA has and the universal nature of the internet it seems likely to me that global anti-vax sentiment could have started with the USA.
I don't think the general public were as influenced by a paper in the Lancet as they were by other members of the public (and media) talking about that study.
The US is a global media and culture juggernaut, so by that token the US can be blamed for most trends. I don't think it's a worthwhile distinction.
Anti-vax culture was prominent in the UK, Australia, Canada, and many other countries at the same time. I'm not seeing any strong reason to blame the US as the root or solo cause.
That paper was followed by a sustained and purposeful PR campaign, by the author, who had an investment in a new vaccine type that only covered one disease, as he was trying to cast doubt on vaccinating multiple things at the same time as "too stressful on the body" or other bullshit.
This also involved, whether he pushed it or it was organic, the tabloid press of the UK.
Eventually this filtered back to the US, despite already being largely debunked and retracted, but that didn't matter to the early 2000s celebrities looking for whatever confirmation bias sources they could.
The histeria started in the UK, slowly crept over the atlantic to the US, and now has filtered back, all while it was based on absolute fraud and lies, the exact criticism all these morons insist applies to real scientists.
The modern anti-vaccine movement was nearly entirely started by a doctor fraudulently publishing fake science to make money. The supporters of course refuse to see that, because it would burst their bubble, so only their enemies can possibly be guilty of it.
Even the 12 or so parents involved in that fraudulent "study" cried foul, as he literally put words in their mouths and made up testimony from them to support his scheme. Actual autistic children continue to suffer from his bullshit, entirely made up illness.
The fraudulent Lancet paper gave "credibility" to the grifters and conspiracy theorists world wide.
But the King of Graft installing the halfwit RFK to run HHS is next level and I assume fellow grifters are making serious bank off this shit.
Reminder, the vengeful Orange also installed a climate change denier to run NOAA after he lost the election, who posted bogus claims on the official NOAA website which grifters used to give legitimacy to their bullshit.
There is some evidence that anti-vac activism was one of the key topics pushed by foreign influence campaigns at several points. I think the simple explanation is that they pushed any topic which could be used for political divisiveness and unrest, but fomenting anti-vac sentiment is especially damaging due to the physical harms it causes.
> There followed a 100-year battle between the authorities and an often sceptical, sometimes aggressive, public. In Britain, a succession of laws made vaccinations free, then compulsory - backed by fines and even imprisonment. While riots flared in some towns, there was also more restrained opposition in the form of anti-vaccination leagues. For an increasingly literate population, pamphlets were produced with titles like "Vaccination: its fallacies and evils", "Vaccination, a Curse" and the suitably Gothic "Horrors of Vaccination".
I am very prepared to get downvoted for bringing this up - but I'm not convinced that the "anti-vax movement" most people think of is truly to blame (that is, crazy people who think it gives you autism or whatever).
At least in my area, there are pockets of (relatively) new immigrants that have MMR vaccination rates at around 30% (that's very low, much lower than the anti-vaxxer population could account for imo), and the reasons for that have nothing to do with MAGA/MAHA as far as I can tell.
It's an entirely different problem (that needs solving), and pretending that this is simply the by-product of uneducated crazies on the internet feels like it's over indexing on a loud and flashy but ultimately small part of the problem.
Before MAGA I'd heard of granola moms, the same people who think that amber helps their kid with teething, were very against vaccinating their kids as well. So it's a wide swath of people who are just oblivious to the benefits of vaccination. It's a reason that they have vaccine schedules to begin with.
I don't think it was the roll-out or anything along those lines, so much as the lying. Saying people won't get sick or won't catch COVID if they get the vaccines [1] was just false and very myopic. Obviously the intent was to try to get people to take the shots, but they completely destroyed trust in the process. Broader skepticism predictably follows from there.
They are not the progenitors of the skepticism, but they gave the skeptics significantly more authority than they previously had. Over surveillance networks, vaccine scheduling, public health comms, etc. MAGA sees them as useful idiots for the coalition, rather than threats to the US.
Here [1] is a montage of some of the public messaging around the COVID vaccines. [1] It was quite simply dishonest. That, paired alongside the effort to force people to take the shots, completely destroyed public trust on a level that will take many decades to repair. Generalized vaccine skepticism follows naturally from that.
I'm certainly a part of that group. For instance I ended up doing extensive research on e.g. MMR before deciding to vaccinate my kids for it. If this were a decade ago, I almost certainly would have done it without a second thought, just as I took all recommended vaccines before traveling without a second thought. So I'm obviously not anti-vaccine in the least, but I no longer trust public messaging on the topic.
It was just another (of the increasingly endless) examples of governments/companies pursuing short-term interests while ignoring long-term consequences. When it comes to what people put in their bodies, trust is more important than literally anything else.
Why is it bad for a public health communicator to say that vaccines stop spread by lowering the effective reproduction number of a pathogen? Its correct. Your extensive research didn't seem to work.
But this has been building for years ahead of COVID. COVID just gave people something to latch on to. And in spite of COVID vaccine issues, the latest numbers i saw suggest around 80% of people still support standard childhood vaccinations.
The media has been referencing this for years now, but the data don't show that there was any meaningful effect on a national level. Here [1] are CDC data on various childhood vaccines. Childhood DTP/MMR vaccination rates varied very little over the past 15 years and never fell below 94%. They actually hit a record high in 2019 right before COVID - of about 95% each. Now they're both at record lows (around 92%) and continuing to trend lower.
Contemporary pharmaceutical companies, as well as contemporary government and private health institutions are my enemy. I would rather die than live using their products and services.
When more ethical entities take over their business I will gladly start using them once again, as I did back in the day before they turned evil.
I'm not that extremist. My dentist is cool, my childrens' pediatrician as well. I trust them entirely and I know they would never compromise their credibility or my health for financial gain. I always take medicine they prescribe (mostly generic stuff whose patents expired a century or so ago). They always steer me to healthy habits such as excercise and eating fruits instead of taking supplements etc.
Unfortunately, they are the only ones like that I know. Most other I encountered just peddle products for their financial gain. Snake oil salesmen.
I am aware I live in a dictatorship which drove a lot of smart and good people away from the country, skilled doctors and nurses were among the first to go. Hopefully it'll get better once we overthrow the dictator.
Not sure why the parent was downvoted, because I think it nails the current sentiment.
For some people the COVID vaccine(s) were rushed to market, with limited clinical trials, intended to vaccinate the entire adult population, with limited data as to their immediate effectiveness and with no data about long term effects. You can debate whether the above points are valid or not, but for some people they certainly raised a safety flag.
I completely agree that the vaccine scepticism around the COVID vaccines is now carrying over into other, well tested, well understood and very, very beneficial vaccines.
Yeah. People are lumping all vaccines together in an attempt to boost the credibility of the COVID vaccine. Unfortunately what it is actually doing is ruining the credibility of all the other vaccines that have been around for years and are well understood.
Were all the other vaccines "well understood" when they were initially rolled out en masse? Not a rhetorical question, I genuinely don't know the history.
I don't really understand what people's expectations were for a new vaccine intended to combat an ongoing global pandemic.
Yeah, it's definitely not the dissolution of multiple infectious disease monitoring programs within the CDC, the effective dismemberment of disease mitigation procedures within the American food supply, or the inhumane working conditions of prison labor within the farming and food industry. /s
Interesting that it's just England (and not Scotland, Wales, or NI). I realize they all have independent NHSs, but still would assume a program like this would rolled out across all the constituent countries.
Each nation has different social and health issues, each nation makes its own plan.
All four nations NHSes work with a single charity, the Hep C Trust.
They're all following the WHO targets for elimination -- you're hearing about this now soon after World Hepatitis Day (July 28th, as conceived of by the WHO).
I wouldn't have assumed this really because really the whole point of devolution is that they get to choose what to prioritise, so perhaps the other nations choose to do something they consider to be more pressing for their populations.
Sure but there's no real need for it in this case, or in the NHS in general I would say. It's probably just devolved because Scotland and Wales want everything to be devolved even if it makes no sense.
I don't know if borders matter much in this case. It's approximately just as easy to travel to England from many other countries as it is to travel to England from the rest of the UK.
It is a lot harder to travel into England from outside of the United Kingdom than it is to travel from England to Scotland or Wales. For one, I do not need a passport to get on a train to Scotland. Nor do I need a visa.
But you most likely have a passport, and most (western/european) countries have "automatic" visas to the UK, so for the most part, training from London to Edinburgh isn't much easier than Paris to London. Sure there is no passport control, but UK passport control is typically just scan your passport's chip and look at a camera.
I work with people who actively chose to go to conference in Berlin instead of the UK due to visa issues. The passport control is a real issue one cannot just handwave away.
It's quicker to travel to London from Paris and Calais than it is from parts of Scotland. Even though much of the UK's infrastructure acts as a feeder into London. No, we don't need passports but some people in London seem to have the idea that it's just down the road from us, which it isn't.
If you want to get to Glasgow from Campbelltown it can take you as long as three hours for example, and that's before you hit the motorway. Trying to get from west Sutherland to London is worse. Trying to get there from the Hebrides or Northen Isles even more so.
The borders between Scotland, England, and Wales are effectively like state borders in the US. Unless you see a street sign, you wouldn't know you crossed it.
NI is physically on a different island, so requires a boat or plane ride.
And all of the UK (ignoring the territories and ex-colonies) is on islands. And require a valid passport, passing through customs/immigration checks, and either a plane, boat, or train ride.
Most of the Scottish border is fairly physically obvious, unlike Wales (although the Severn bridge is).
Tens of thousands of people live on islands other than Britain and Ireland. Much of Scotland is not even considered UK mainland by delivery firms, even major places such as Perth.
What? Perth isn't considered part of the mainland? How is that possible? My family is from Perthshire (Blairgowrie) and I've visited a bunch. It's definitely part of the island!!!
I can understand Lewis and Harris or the Shetlands (they're separate islands without bridge links), but Perth doesn't make much sense. And I would have assumed Skye was considered "mainland" as well, at least now that there's a bridge.
Given that Great Britain is an island, it is still much easier to drive down the M6/A74(M) or take a hike around the Welsh borders than say, take a flight or swim.
It can be quicker to reach southern England from continental Europe than from Northern Ireland or many parts of Scotland. Or the Isle of Man (which I'm well aware is a Crown Dependency.)
The UK consists of a number of islands. We have hundreds in Scotland with tens of thousands of people living on the other ones. England and Wales have significant ones such as the Isle of Wight, Ynys Môn and Lindisfarne. The IOW has at least 100,000 on it.
Splitting hairs, but the public health bodies are separate from the National Health Services (so there exists Public Health England _and_ NHS England). Public health is slightly different to healthcare, but of course they work together.
Oddly, Public Health Scotland is part of NHS Scotland; but Public Health England is not part of NHS England, it's a parallel department.
Nah we are good - We have our problems (including our own version of your guy but he hasn't won yet and is currently running against a man with a bin on his head) but on the whole, nah we are good.
Well, then, we can offer you measles, instead. How's that? We're also working on bringing back polio and smallpox. Think of it as our contribution to FREEDOM!
Farage isn't quite the same and of course the situation is rather different.
The three jobs are divided up differently, though still between too few people. You have a Figurehead, the Head of State, which here is King Charles and in the US is Donald Trump. That's the part Trump most likes, you get free gold stuff, you're allowed to do whatever you please, everybody is supposed to suck up to you, hooray. Farage would not get that job.
Next you've got Executive leader. Trump doesn't enjoy this as much. People keep trying to blame him for the fact he's bad at it. He appointed people he saw on TV to run things, how is it his fault they're not brilliant? This would be half of Farage's job as Prime Minister and he likes being asked to account for his incompetence even less than Trump.
Finally Head of the Legislature, in the US this isn't Trump's job, Mike Johnson is in the House and John Thune in the Senate. Farage would get this job in full as the Prime Minister. Even before he resigned he was rarely actually in Westminster, it's boring and you need to be good at actual politics, so of course he's not there, he gets paid more to be somewhere else.
I also don't think Nigel can put together the numbers. Trump has Mike and John to try to make the numbers work, and Farage wouldn't have that. "My way or the highway" is what Farage would say, and that doesn't make the numbers work. That's how you lose a Confidence motion and you're back on your arse in six weeks.
[Edited to correct the Senate leader, mistake pointed out by ragnese below]
Good explanation. Just one correction: John Thune is the Senate majority leader (so, the "head" of the Senate). Steve Scalise is in the House and he's the head of the Republican party in the House, whereas Mike Johnson (who is also a Republican) is the House majority leader (so the head of the whole House, not just his party).
So, it's Mike Johnson for the House and John Thune for the Senate.
I guess someone complained about memory safety and they intend to rewrite hepatitis in Rust.
Not everything has to be rewritten in Rust! Hepatitis is a virus, C is much better suited for that kind of project, Rust is for fungal diseases, not viruses.
> The target of treating 80% of all known cases has already been met, and deaths from the virus have fallen by 36% in the last decade, just short of what is needed by 2030.
What is needed by 2030? There is no mention prior to this statement.
Later:
> NHS England says that since 2015, more than 100,000 people have been diagnosed and treated for hepatitis C, meaning the country is already meeting that target.
Again, what target are we talking about??
Much later:
> Prof Frankie Swords, NHS national medical director, added: "England is now leading the world in the mission to eliminate this disease and on course to beat the WHO's 2030 target, but we are determined to keep up the momentum and finish the job.
It's not AI the BBC is just that bad at news. Serious read anything by them at it's like they hate real information and just want random ass quotes from people.
I think you are partially correct. They trained AI on their articles to produce the same style articles. I am not a large consumer of BBC articles. This style of snippet after snippet is annoying. Perhaps that is why I am not a large consumer of BBC articles.
> Style Assist helps BBC journalists quickly adapt trusted content into BBC News house style, speeding up the publication of high-quality local stories. It uses a BBC-trained AI model to generate a draft, which is always reviewed and edited by journalists before publication. This helps save time while maintaining accuracy, tone and editorial standards. Find out more in an article from Rhodri Talfan Davies.
Style Assist is mainly for articles written by journalists that are employed by third-party news organisations (who own the UK's local news outlets) but are subsidised by the BBC - these people are "local democracy reporters".
LDRS articles are made free to everyone in the scheme (including the BBC), but because the content is written primarily for their home news org the articles that end up being published by the BBC need to be modified to comply with the BBC's editorial guidelines and for style reasons.
And I'll add that whether the style guide or the journalists, BBC articles tend to be like this: constantly saying sentences without giving the full context needed to understand them. This is why as a right wing person I tend to read The Guardian (famously left wing) instead of the BBC, because their articles just read better.
My reading of the article was aggressive response by single payer healthcare (i.e. NHS) is responsible so that would be almost impossible politically in USA as long as senate exists on top of non scientific medical authorities.
Also politically impossible is that Congress made it illegal for state/federal health plans (Medicaid for poor folks and Medicaid for old folks) to negotiate prices with drug companies. Which is why it can cost $95k for a Hep C treatment in the US. It is my understanding that NHS negotiated a price around £3k for the same treatment.
That's true, I was recollecting when we had somewhat ordinary politics in USA and Affordable Care Act passed when Democrats had majority in Senate but making it single payer was stopped by purported Democrat Joe Leiberman.
I have zero idea about who RFK Jr is or what it does, aside from him being the US Secretary of Health, a country of which I am neither a citizen or resident.
Trump just issued an order reducing childhood vaccines, plus there is a Hep C vaccine which is being ignored by the CDC. Never mind the resurgence of many childhood diseases thanks to RFK jr and Trump.
I do not know why some people think the current US regime will follow England with all evidence pointing to doing the exact opposite.
Honestly, Mehmet Oz deserves more of the blame here. He and the other people who are fighting to make healthcare expensive and inaccessible create situations where people aren't being diagnosed and cured of Hep C, which leaves them passing the infection to others through sexual contact, sharing needles, etc.
RFK Jr. is an anti-vax crackpot, but Hep C isn't vaccine-preventable. On the other hand, we can absolutely blame RFK Jr. for our rising Hep A, B, and D rates.
> "Treatment involves a free course of antiviral tablets lasting 8 to 12 weeks, which cures more than 95% of cases."
must be nice to have a government that actually cares about its citizens health, we're still waiting DECADES for that Republican health care plan (other than "just die quietly")
There are vaccines for Hep A and Hep B. None for Hep C yet. Nor Hep V for the True Blood fans. Twinrix is the name of a combined Hep A & B vaccine (2 doses) - your health insurance most likely pays for it.
Hep A outbreaks are relatively frequent at restaurants (in my state).
Every state in the US has an immunization registry (they're all hosted by WebIZ) so they all look the same and produce the same sort of document. Checking states I've lived in, some of the records go back to 2008. My insurance pays for all vaccines except for "travel vaccines".
You take antivirals orally. There is no vaccine that I'm aware of. I got Hep C from a blood transfusion in the 80s and waited decades without symptoms for modern antivirals before finally getting treated.
> I got Hep C from a blood transfusion in the 80s...
Same here! I had one symptom -intermittent somewhat abnormal liver enzyme results- that was very easy to explain away with the fact that I'm nearly always somewhat dehydrated because I have trouble forcing myself to drink enough water. I had to run into a doc who was in the habit of running the test "just in case" because she had seen a ton of Hep C cases before the culprit was discovered.
Honestly, I'm really glad I didn't get diagnosed much earlier than I did... it's my understanding that interferon treatment is really awful to go through and has like a 50% success rate for Hep C infections. When I got diagnosed Harvoni was quite new, but it worked on the strain I had, and there were absolutely no side effects that I noticed. Its list price was shockingly expensive (something like 150k USD) but that's way cheaper than a new liver and -as is often the case with these sorts of things- financial "wizardry" meant that I paid like 5 USD.
Literally nothing in the article points to it being eliminated, only reaching a target of diagnosing 90% of the cases, which doesn't do anything to eliminate it when a large number of cases comes from drug users which are unlikely to care very much about it.
> The target of treating 80% of all known cases has already been met, and deaths from the virus have fallen by 36% in the last decade, just short of what is needed by 2030. Taking antiviral tablets for 8 to 12 weeks can cure more than 95% of cases.
So indeed diagnosing the cases is leading directly to deaths prevented.
> So indeed diagnosing the cases is leading directly to deaths prevented.
This is not what the title claims. The title claims that hepatitis C is to be eliminated, aka 0%. This is not possible; anyone with a basic 101 virology knows why. BBC lies here via the title.
Elimination doesn't mean there are no incidences of it, it means no new cases diagnosed in England. This is a result of reducing the cases so much that the chance of catching it drops to virtually zero. Drug users have a range of cleaner alternatives today than 10 years ago so is less of an issue but also if very few people have it, the chance of a drug user sharing a needle with someone who has becomes very small indeed.
Not in this context, no. It means the same thing as being cured of Hep C means... there's a little bit still lingering around, but the systems that keep it under control mean that it doesn't cause any problems. The world and one's body are environments that are way too large to get rid of 100% of something without utterly obliterating them.
> That virus existed way before drug users did.
I'm skeptical. Living things have been drug users for approximately forever.
Anyway, a fun fact that I learned when I was getting my Hep C diagnosis and treatment is that the three most common ways to get it are
1) Be an IV drug user who's not extremely careful about their needles
2) Share your toothbrush with someone else
3) Have had a blood transfusion prior to ~1992, when they started screening the blood supply for Hep C
It turns out that -for the sex-havers that aren't into blood play- sex is one of the least effective methods of Hepatitis transmission.
What do you mean by this? The article quotes an NHS director backing up the statement in the title.
> England is now leading the world in the mission to eliminate this disease and on course to beat the WHO's 2030 target, but we are determined to keep up the momentum and finish the job.
Just to understand this: When someone says "country England", do they mean "country" like in "nation", considering England a separate nation, or is it a lapse and they mean UK? Is England usually referred to as a country, or just part of a country?
I usually think of a country as equal to a nation, and as far as I know, Wales and Scotland have not split off yet? Is the term "country" not actually that sharply defined?
EDIT: Thanks people, I just asked a question to better understand the terminology, you know ...
In this case it's health related and each of the countries in the UK have their own National Health Services (or Health and Social Care in NI). It's not a lapse here.
I don't understand. It's an article about England. They only have information to hand about England, from the authority tasked with dealing with health in England.
If I read an article from them about crime in London, quoting the Metropolitan Police, I don't immediately think that they don't care about, say, the West Midlands.
The BBC do use a consistent naming scheme, you're just not understanding the scheme. Scotland has their own devolved NHS, and track their own health statistics. Scotland not being mentioned is because the Hepatitis C Trust were talking about England's Hep C numbers, it wasn't an intentional slight on Scotland.
Confusingly the proper term for England, Scotland, Wales, and NI is country individually, the UK is a country of countries. They should probably be called states but they never have been, I'd pretty much always assume when someone says England to become the first country... that they mean England exclusively.
The bit that gets me is that people often refer to the UK but actually mean GB or vice versa.
When I've heard the distinction (often in a historical context), 'nation' is usually meant to mean a set of people in a place with some sense of collective identity or origin, while 'state' is the governing body which has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence within well defined borders. When these overlap the result is a nation-state, but they don't always line up so nearly. Using those definitions England, Wales, and Scotland are nations. Ireland (including northern Ireland) could also be called a nation (though, of course, as should be obvious by the fact that this does not line up with the borders of the state, this is a contentious topic). The United Kingdom is the state (and of course Ireland-minus-northern-ireland is also a state). 'Country' as a term generally doesn't imply either of these (it's just a name for some chunk of land, notionally), though it's often synonymous with the nation-state when the borders all actually line up neatly, as opposed to in the UK.
England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland are constituent countries in a larger country called the United Kingdom. When dealing with international affairs, you typically want to be talking about the UK (unless the subject is sport), as that is the sovereign state. But for domestic affairs, it’s often split in ways that are confusing if you don’t understand various bits of history stretching back about a thousand years.
For instance, England and Wales share a legal system, but Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own. There’s bunch of special things about Northern Ireland and its relation to Ireland. And all of the constituent countries have their own parliament / assembly except for England (the parliament in London is for the whole of the UK where MPs for all constituent countries can vote).
In this particular case, the constituent countries have their own health systems, so it’s normally England we would be talking about, not the UK.
OK, so now we have the following terms: State, nation, country, sovereign country.
For example in Germany one would say there are 16 states, but one wouldn't say that there are 16 countries. Never heard anyone claim that. So state seems to be different from country, at least here. Would people in the UK say that Scotland or Wales are "nations"? Or is at least that term very clearly only for units that could participate under a flag in lets say the olympics? (I assume here, that Scotland and Wales are not separately competing, but are under UK flag.)
The "Länder" in Bundesländer is plural of Land, which is the same land as in "land of the free" and would be translated to "nation", "land", "country" or "state" depending on context.
So in modern English they may be states, but there sure is a lot of overlap between "country" and "state".
"And by 'country' we mean a sovereign state that is a member of the UN in its own right" to quote the famous UK Quiz Show "Pointless".
Team GB enters the Olympics but as you may have noticed it was England who came Third in the World Cup recently, and likewise England play international rugby, including against Wales and Scotland.
"State" has lots of meanings depending on context, as it can also refer to the highest level of governments for example: State actors or "head of state". In the U.S., the head of state refers to the President, not to governors in individual states, typically.
The UK, crown dependencies and overseas territories compete as Great Britain in the Olympics rather than the UK. Northern Irish folks can compete for Ireland or GB.
As an English person I would say that Scotland and Wales are nations and countries; constituent countries of the country that is the UK.
Until today I didn't consider, that countries can be compound/consist of countries. That countries can be recursive. I always thought, that any lower level would be called differently. TIL.
Yeah England is a country. Like what else do we have the name “England” for? We talk a lot more about England than some non-country geography like Anatolia (Asian Turkey). For example there was no UK in the World Cup, but England made it quite far.
If that’s a bit eccentric, well this is the same place that refers to Europe as a different place even though France borders the UK by automobile road.
People in the UK would refer to England as a country and most people would actually be confused if you referred to the UK as a country, even though it technically is. People in England don’t really think of the UK as anything other than “the UK”. People from Scotland, Wales, and Ireland have more nuanced takes.
I'm English and I don't think England or Scotland or Wales are countries. People get confused because of football and rugby. They're nations. The country is the United Kingdom.
England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are constituent countries of the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom is also a country. You can disagree, but you're disagreeing with the government and the international community.
Scotland, Wales, and NI have their own parliaments at least, so from a constitutional perspective one could argue England is not a country but a state, but that is only one narrow definition.
The UK seems fairly relaxed about constituent parts leaving (Scotland was given a referendum, NI has option to leave if they want) - which I don't believe applies to US states?
- Syphilis
- Hep B
- Hep C
- HIV 1 and 2 and P24
- Chlamydia
- Gonorrhoea
It’s unfortunate that your early providers dropped the ball. I wonder if they assumed you had already been tested for some reason?
In the UK once you've had your childhood vaccinations it's entirely possible you'd simply never see a doctor again in your life until you're ready for your prostate exam in older life.
There are no regular checkups or preventative care on the NHS for mid life adults unless you're proactive
But it's not true. We get regular bowel cancer screening - you get it every 2 years once you hit 50 - https://www.nhs.uk/tests-and-treatments/bowel-cancer-screeni...
And there are also regular health checks available once you hit 40 - https://www.nhs.uk/tests-and-treatments/nhs-health-check/
There are real trade-offs with screening, and screening too much has harms as well as too little, although I'm not qualified to make a judgement on where that line sits relative to where it is in the UK.
Fixing hole in tooth is far cheaper than replacing a full tooth, for example.
Local councils are responsible for arranging invitations for those not currently registered with GPs, so it ought to be more or less universal - though there are inevitably a few people who'll slip through the net.
It's pretty basic, but the evidence suggests it's been reasonably effective at dealing with the "he didn't see a doctor for 40 years and then just dropped dead from a heart attack" stereotype.
https://www.nhs.uk/tests-and-treatments/nhs-health-check/
It's entirely possible to do this in the US, too, but it's not the default path. I know some people who think it's a point of pride to brag that they haven't been to a doctor in 20 years. I know other people who never miss their annual checkup and are frustrated that their doctors won't order every test they hear about from their podcasts. The US approach to healthcare is varied and confusing to outsiders, even if you remove all of the unreasonably complex insurance stuff from the equation.
> There are no regular checkups or preventative care on the NHS for mid life adults unless you're proactive
If you wanted to request an annual checkup, could you ask for one and get it without problem? Or would they require a specific reason to visit?
That advertising is illegal in almost all other first world countries.
There are about four incentives altogether, and the money is loaded on a Prepaid Visa card that is branded by the insurance carrier. The funds are not restricted, and you can spend them on anything where Visa is accepted. The cards are sometimes cycled out and replaced, but I do not know if the funds had an expiration date. There were no fees to hold the funds, and no fees to spend them.
[1] https://www.mantotman.nl/
The current tests would result in a substantial fraction of the population running around thinking they have a highly stigmatized STI that they in fact do not have with little to zero ways of getting a more accurate test.
It wasn't until the trump administration that I started to suspect that they're actively tampering with human politics.
it's expected
if you could delve into what supports your arguments that'd help more than "trust me instead"
I personally am skeptical of many things, including pharma, but I'm not going to claim that vaccines don't work when historically they have, and I'd have to do a bunch of research to prove an internet argument wrong.
do I think that covid vaccines were/are 100% safe and totally not rushed due to the pandemic? no.
My concerns are in regards to everything found in the vaccine and in the blood stream along with the antigen. All vaccines have contaminants -- byproducts of the manufacturing process. What is the consequence of mixing an adjuvant, those contaminants, and whatever else is in the blood at the time of vaccination? Given that adjuvants are used to cause autoimmune disease in mice, what is the risk of a given vaccine causing an autoimmune disease? This risk can't be zero. I'd like this to better studied.
Secondly, how long do adjuvants stay in the body? Is there risk that the adjuvant finds it's way into areas of the body where it can't be easily removed? What are the consequences of adjuvant finding it's way into tissue and remaining there?
But you've got to weigh those risks against the risk of dragging our feet on rolling out new vaccines. It's likely that many autoimmune diseases are caused by pathogens which are either undiscovered, or which are known, but whose link to the autoimmune disease is undiscovered. This is because there is evolutionary pressure encouraging pathogens to resemble self-antigens. If a pathogen has markers that cause it to resemble the human liver, the human adaptive immune system won't typically attack it because it wants to avoid attacking its own liver. So the pathogen is safe. This is called molecular mimicry. But the mimicry isn't perfect, so sometimes the immune system does become sensitized to the pathogen, attacks it, clears it, and starts slowly attacking the liver (or whichever tissue bears the same epitope as the mimic). It shows up years later as an autoimmune disease, but the data just isn't there to isolate its cause to that pathogen.
So the best strategy, if we can pull it off, is to vaccinate against the original pathogen (or prevent it via other means... clean food and water, etc), but to target epitopes which do not resemble any human tissues, and with adjuvants that do not sensitize the immune system against any human tissues.
As for how long adjuvants stay in the body, it's definitely worth studying more, but their whole function is to sound the alarm, so I'd expect that they're cleared rather quickly. Anything that fails to do that is by definition not an adjuvant. But assuming that an inappropriate response was triggered in the first place, you'd see the same effects whether or not the adjuvant was still around: If the initial exposure has triggered clonal replication of whichever B and T cells attack the antigen, self or otherwise, they'll stick around in your lymph nodes for years and years, and they'll re-up their numbers with each subsequent exposure.
Think about it: adjuvants create a very strong immune response and the body is looking for something to fight. Sure, there are antigens and dead virii in the vaccine but what if the body also targets the wrong molecules and creates an immune response against something like peanuts, or pine nuts, or eggs, etc? Has there been any studies done on that? How do we know that the body will only target what it's "supposed" to, ie. the dead virus and not something else random?
It's well documented that vaccines can cause allergic reactions and there are studies that show that some adjuvants can cause allergies to environmental allergens.
https://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-6749(17)31437-9/ful...
So the question is, is it so unreasonable to do more studies to see if adjuvants are the underlying cause for food allergies? And if so, are there adjuvants that we could use in vaccines that don't cause the same level of food allergies?
I donp't think this is unreasonable to investigate and doesn't put me into the "anti-vax" camp like so many on HN will jump to do.
One thing to note is that kids with autism have a 3X probability of having food allergies. Could autism be related to vaccines via adjuvants if the food allergy hypothesis holds up? Maybe this is the link that needs to be studied and if adjuvants are changed maybe autism rates plummet?
Unclear, but it's something we need to study, not just bury our heads in the sand and say "Trust the science" like parrots.
Regarding vaccines working - you'll need to be much more specific. Which vaccines are you referring to? Does "working" mean they prevent infection? Or do they just prevent symptoms? Are there negative consequences to priming the immune system to only a few antigen epitopes? Are there negative consequences to only training the active immune system while ignoring the innate? Why do live virus vaccines have better health outcomes than inactivated virus vaccines?
HN pretends there's nothing to discuss here. They're safe and effective, shut up. We are the liberal party and therefore better.
- Don't live in California
- Risks are considered, but you will never be satisfied
- Long-term risks have been studied with very good methodology.
People were "skeptical" of vaccines. Then they did science. Now they aren't. Then, yes, people like the guy trying starting this thread who will never be convinced and cannot change his mind.
Then they hyperventilate about irrelevant details (like California) and other readers of the thread see what the whining is really about.
Have you read the discussions on vaccine stories? See, for example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26629234 – chosen arbitrarily using the search box at the bottom of the page. I've not read anyone pretending this.
> shut up
People are being dismissive of you, but nobody has told you to shut up in this thread. (The closest thing is flagging the comments which started with broad-spectrum insults, but this only occurred after you wrote this.) Despite its tone, I'm going to have to second GP's assessment that you're responding to imagined slights.
The lead Fox News "article" plainly stated that the COVID shots cause an 87% miscarriage rate.
This has nothing to do with reality -- and they absolutely do not care about fighting "fair."
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-r...
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10152171/
A "Red Flag" (or Safety Signal) is an actual, observed increase in adverse events in real-world data.
What he was discussing in the text was a theoretical risk.
A "Theoretical Risk" is a hypothetical concern based on known biological mechanisms (e.g., "high fevers can cause miscarriages, so a vaccine-induced fever might do the same").
…unlike the risk from catching Covid itself
It's been a growing movement, not something that kicked off when RFK assumed the HHS role.
Only after Trump did people start lumping them in with right wing.
The left wing libs types are far more recent, and i would lump them more in with the wellness brigade.
so, exactly RFK's type :)
Also why not blame politicians doing the wrong thing?
And yes, we should blame them for the things they do. T But the comment I was responding to was acting as if MAGA was the reason for measles outbreaks, which is false. I'm an incredibly strong believer in the truth. An example of why I think this is an important separation: imagine you tried to fix the measles outbreak and miraculously got every single American to hate Trump and got Trump out of office. The problem would still not be fixed! People would still be dying of measles! The effort would have been almost completely wasted!
My personal belief is that there a lot of people who believe stupid things out there (and it's all only amplified by the news and social media), and for anti vaxxers especially I don't think an authority figure saying 'You have to get the measles vaccine!' is going to help much, unfortunate as it is. :(
We managed to cut the smoking rate pretty dramatically, including in about half over the last decade. Public policy is not ineffective, we just need competent people to wield it.
Kennedy was already pushing bullshit during the UK Measles vaccine fraud/scare, back in 2005. He was doing this along with a few other celebrities.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/article/rfk-jr-says-pare...
He's not anti vax. If nobody can challenge science, then it's not science.
Vaccines continues to help us, but that doesn't mean they are perfect and don't cause side effects on certain individuals. Hopefuly the future brings us highly personalized medicine instead of a 1 size fits all.
Canada: https://health-infobase.canada.ca/measles-rubella/archive/20...
They have 10% our population and had twice the cases last year (admittedly, we're starting to catch up). But the truth is that there are huge lag times when it comes to measles / antivax. This is a symptom of a problem that started 10-20 years ago.
"The order recommends that all shots be given at separate medical visits, a frequent point Trump has made despite the safety, ease and lower costs of giving vaccines together."
'“Together, there could be a possibility they’re quite lethal,” Trump said of the MMR vaccine at the signing of the order on Monday.'
'Asked if he had evidence that the combined MMR vaccine was “lethal”, Trump said: “No. What I’ve heard is that there are some people who say it is that way.”'
Antivax fundamentally has its contemporary roots in Andrew Wakefield's fraudulent anti-MMR campaign.
So directing by executive order and by his own admission without evidence that the MMR vaccine be split up into separate shots is, very clearly, an antivax action. This is the first victory that Wakefield (a man who had a patent on a single measles vaccine!) wanted, and RFK Jr was pursuing.
But this is Trump saying this and signing it. So as of yesterday, it now has everything to do with Trump, sorry. He has handed the anti-MMR movement its ultimate victory and in so doing validated the entire antivax worldview.
It's still not too late for anyone who is unvaccinated to get the vaccine! Hopefully the next administration undoes this change, but the really important part is managing to shrink the anti-vax movement (which, if you look at the data in my other comments, you can see has been a problem since before Trump).
Also, trump, as a representative, represents a large group of people. It's colloquial to refer to political parties by their leaders.
(And let's be clear: Operation Warp Speed was an enormous success even if Trump is an ignoramus)
Some of that might have been expediency — Biden was catching shit from the antivax and healthcare-skeptical movement and moving in on that would be easy — but Trump has always been vulnerable to being influenced by people and RFK Jr appears to be generally so much more persuasive than bears thinking about, so he was a factor later on.
Trump #2 (47) is fully an anti-vax presidency; even Hegseth backed away from flu vaccine mandates, only to have an outbreak in an Army (IIRC?) facility.
I have not been following measles in Canada, so I can't address that.
The reason I bring up Canada is as counterevidence; if it was Trump or RFK'S fault, Canada should be doing just fine. They had twice the cases last year in 1/10 the population. The truth is this is a problem with people believing stupid things, and it's going to take a lot more than Trump going out of office to fix.
Probably true, but it's nevertheless a necessary condition.
Since you seem very emotionally opposed to Trump and his administration: I also don't like Trump or RFK! However, to solve a problem, you have to find the root cause of the problem, and pointing at the most recent politician you hate will never help anyone.
Do you really think RFK appeared out of the ether? What do you think he's spent the last 2 decades doing?
Back in the early 90s this wasn't much of a problem. Childhood vaccine requirements weren't some hot-button topic then. Most people would just get them when faced with the requirement. Most opposition was isolated to people who were otherwise contrarians already.
The difference now is that the internet is full of these isolated contrarians who are now influencing gullible people who don't know who to trust.
The problem is not with the technology but those that control it. (Some would probably say, the fact that any one actor controls it in the first place.)
Our only means of communication in modern society are a few advertising platforms in hands of even fewer owners, and the engineers hired to run it are busy engagementmaxxing.
... and that's right when social media gained majority adoption among US adults.
Not in Canada but unfortunately US nonsense spreads globally pretty quickly these days. The amount of Trump support in the UK is both bizarre and surprising. When someone with the worlds largest megaphone lies about vaccines, unfortunately people everywhere listen.
I can't help but feel this is ragebait or a bot.
Well not nothing. But it predates him and he adopted the movement early in his political career. When I was in high school (2004-8) antivax sentiment was generally associated with liberal Democrats in places like Marin County. This was a favorite retort of conservatives when confronted with their own backwardness on scientific understanding of evolution and climate change. In 2015 Trump began courting the anti-vaccine crowd and the political valence of that flavor of woo-woo nonsense flipped seemingly overnight. It was surreal to see it happen in real time. By 2020 he had lost control of the monster he helped create and the crowd booed him when he said they should get the Covid vaccine.
From today:
Both Trump and Kennedy made repeated mentions of autism throughout the order signing, emphasizing a scientifically unproven link between vaccines and the condition. Dozens of studies show no link between the two.
“Today we’re proud to officially announce the United States of America’s gold standard childhood vaccination recommendations. That has to do with many subjects including autism in particular,” Trump said at the beginning of the order signing.
“I’ve seen proof of it, where they have a vaccination where it looks like the size of a bottle of soda, poured into a little child’s body and bad things happen in too many cases,” Trump later said on breaking up each shot into an individual medical visit, before adding: “This is an explosion, it’s an epidemic,” in an apparent reference to autism.
Currently we have a measles outbreak in Brazil brought from the US, so everybody is getting vaccinated (even those who already were, like me) to try to stop the spreading and protect those who can’t get vaccinated.
Really would love for US social and media networks to get their shit together and stop spreading misinformation in the name of profit…
It’s a strange global phenomenon and I don’t think there is one single root cause. MAGA/MAHA definitely jumped on to the anti-vax train as it became popular, but many forget that Trump presided over the rushing of the COVID vaccine into availability and production. He hasn’t done vaccination any favors in recent years, but I’m skeptical that the widespread rise of vaccine skepticism can be attributable to this administration alone.
I think there’s a bigger story about the cyclical nature of how the dangers of threats that previous generations faced is slowly lost over time, combined with the rise of contrarianism and conspiratorial thinking on social media.
Assuming that the US was the root of the current surge of anti-vax idealism is not supported by the facts.
Anti-vax culture was prominent in the UK, Australia, Canada, and many other countries at the same time. I'm not seeing any strong reason to blame the US as the root or solo cause.
This also involved, whether he pushed it or it was organic, the tabloid press of the UK.
Eventually this filtered back to the US, despite already being largely debunked and retracted, but that didn't matter to the early 2000s celebrities looking for whatever confirmation bias sources they could.
The histeria started in the UK, slowly crept over the atlantic to the US, and now has filtered back, all while it was based on absolute fraud and lies, the exact criticism all these morons insist applies to real scientists.
The modern anti-vaccine movement was nearly entirely started by a doctor fraudulently publishing fake science to make money. The supporters of course refuse to see that, because it would burst their bubble, so only their enemies can possibly be guilty of it.
Even the 12 or so parents involved in that fraudulent "study" cried foul, as he literally put words in their mouths and made up testimony from them to support his scheme. Actual autistic children continue to suffer from his bullshit, entirely made up illness.
But the King of Graft installing the halfwit RFK to run HHS is next level and I assume fellow grifters are making serious bank off this shit.
Reminder, the vengeful Orange also installed a climate change denier to run NOAA after he lost the election, who posted bogus claims on the official NOAA website which grifters used to give legitimacy to their bullshit.
America made one of his adherents the Secretary of Health and Human Services.
... and the USA did it too, trying to discredit China’s Sinovac: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covi...
Now that we have the blame let's talk about the punishment.
They managed to get plenty of visibility long before computers.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leicestershire-50713991
> There followed a 100-year battle between the authorities and an often sceptical, sometimes aggressive, public. In Britain, a succession of laws made vaccinations free, then compulsory - backed by fines and even imprisonment. While riots flared in some towns, there was also more restrained opposition in the form of anti-vaccination leagues. For an increasingly literate population, pamphlets were produced with titles like "Vaccination: its fallacies and evils", "Vaccination, a Curse" and the suitably Gothic "Horrors of Vaccination".
At least in my area, there are pockets of (relatively) new immigrants that have MMR vaccination rates at around 30% (that's very low, much lower than the anti-vaxxer population could account for imo), and the reasons for that have nothing to do with MAGA/MAHA as far as I can tell.
It's an entirely different problem (that needs solving), and pretending that this is simply the by-product of uneducated crazies on the internet feels like it's over indexing on a loud and flashy but ultimately small part of the problem.
the whole rollout and lockdowns, Fauci, etc. were a perfect storm to cause skepticism towards vaccines
[1] - https://xcancel.com/ITGuy1959/status/1581034815700488192
I'm certainly a part of that group. For instance I ended up doing extensive research on e.g. MMR before deciding to vaccinate my kids for it. If this were a decade ago, I almost certainly would have done it without a second thought, just as I took all recommended vaccines before traveling without a second thought. So I'm obviously not anti-vaccine in the least, but I no longer trust public messaging on the topic.
It was just another (of the increasingly endless) examples of governments/companies pursuing short-term interests while ignoring long-term consequences. When it comes to what people put in their bodies, trust is more important than literally anything else.
[1] - https://xcancel.com/ITGuy1959/status/1581034815700488192
[1] - https://www.cdc.gov/schoolvaxview/data/index.html
When more ethical entities take over their business I will gladly start using them once again, as I did back in the day before they turned evil.
Unfortunately, they are the only ones like that I know. Most other I encountered just peddle products for their financial gain. Snake oil salesmen.
I am aware I live in a dictatorship which drove a lot of smart and good people away from the country, skilled doctors and nurses were among the first to go. Hopefully it'll get better once we overthrow the dictator.
For some people the COVID vaccine(s) were rushed to market, with limited clinical trials, intended to vaccinate the entire adult population, with limited data as to their immediate effectiveness and with no data about long term effects. You can debate whether the above points are valid or not, but for some people they certainly raised a safety flag.
I completely agree that the vaccine scepticism around the COVID vaccines is now carrying over into other, well tested, well understood and very, very beneficial vaccines.
I don't really understand what people's expectations were for a new vaccine intended to combat an ongoing global pandemic.
This has been fed policy for decades.
Should surprise no one.
https://crukcancerintelligence.shinyapps.io/CancerStatsDataH...
All four nations NHSes work with a single charity, the Hep C Trust.
They're all following the WHO targets for elimination -- you're hearing about this now soon after World Hepatitis Day (July 28th, as conceived of by the WHO).
https://www.hepctrust.org.uk/blog/2026/07/four-nations-on-th...
As for progress:
- July 2026: Wales doesn't have percentage-of-population counts but here's its latest report: https://phw.nhs.wales/reports/trends-in-the-prevention-diagn...
- November 2025: Scotland believes it has identified and is treating 85% of chronic sufferers: https://publichealthscotland.scot/publications/surveillance-...
- January 2021: Northern Ireland doesn't publish stats, but has a 2021-2025 plan (there's no 2026- plan issued as far as I know) https://www.health-ni.gov.uk/publications/northern-ireland-h...
If they emigrated to the EU and want to travel to the UK then I could see that.
If you want to get to Glasgow from Campbelltown it can take you as long as three hours for example, and that's before you hit the motorway. Trying to get from west Sutherland to London is worse. Trying to get there from the Hebrides or Northen Isles even more so.
The borders between Scotland, England, and Wales are effectively like state borders in the US. Unless you see a street sign, you wouldn't know you crossed it.
NI is physically on a different island, so requires a boat or plane ride.
And all of the UK (ignoring the territories and ex-colonies) is on islands. And require a valid passport, passing through customs/immigration checks, and either a plane, boat, or train ride.
Tens of thousands of people live on islands other than Britain and Ireland. Much of Scotland is not even considered UK mainland by delivery firms, even major places such as Perth.
I can understand Lewis and Harris or the Shetlands (they're separate islands without bridge links), but Perth doesn't make much sense. And I would have assumed Skye was considered "mainland" as well, at least now that there's a bridge.
The UK consists of a number of islands. We have hundreds in Scotland with tens of thousands of people living on the other ones. England and Wales have significant ones such as the Isle of Wight, Ynys Môn and Lindisfarne. The IOW has at least 100,000 on it.
Oddly, Public Health Scotland is part of NHS Scotland; but Public Health England is not part of NHS England, it's a parallel department.
I'm British by birth (well, UAE, but they don't do jus soli), but been in the US since kindergarten and naturalized since college.
The three jobs are divided up differently, though still between too few people. You have a Figurehead, the Head of State, which here is King Charles and in the US is Donald Trump. That's the part Trump most likes, you get free gold stuff, you're allowed to do whatever you please, everybody is supposed to suck up to you, hooray. Farage would not get that job.
Next you've got Executive leader. Trump doesn't enjoy this as much. People keep trying to blame him for the fact he's bad at it. He appointed people he saw on TV to run things, how is it his fault they're not brilliant? This would be half of Farage's job as Prime Minister and he likes being asked to account for his incompetence even less than Trump.
Finally Head of the Legislature, in the US this isn't Trump's job, Mike Johnson is in the House and John Thune in the Senate. Farage would get this job in full as the Prime Minister. Even before he resigned he was rarely actually in Westminster, it's boring and you need to be good at actual politics, so of course he's not there, he gets paid more to be somewhere else.
I also don't think Nigel can put together the numbers. Trump has Mike and John to try to make the numbers work, and Farage wouldn't have that. "My way or the highway" is what Farage would say, and that doesn't make the numbers work. That's how you lose a Confidence motion and you're back on your arse in six weeks.
[Edited to correct the Senate leader, mistake pointed out by ragnese below]
So, it's Mike Johnson for the House and John Thune for the Senate.
Not everything has to be rewritten in Rust! Hepatitis is a virus, C is much better suited for that kind of project, Rust is for fungal diseases, not viruses.
Trigger me, thought you meant Tony Blair for a minute!
> The target of treating 80% of all known cases has already been met, and deaths from the virus have fallen by 36% in the last decade, just short of what is needed by 2030.
What is needed by 2030? There is no mention prior to this statement.
Later:
> NHS England says that since 2015, more than 100,000 people have been diagnosed and treated for hepatitis C, meaning the country is already meeting that target.
Again, what target are we talking about??
Much later:
> Prof Frankie Swords, NHS national medical director, added: "England is now leading the world in the mission to eliminate this disease and on course to beat the WHO's 2030 target, but we are determined to keep up the momentum and finish the job.
Finally a target!
FUCK AI
> Style Assist helps BBC journalists quickly adapt trusted content into BBC News house style, speeding up the publication of high-quality local stories. It uses a BBC-trained AI model to generate a draft, which is always reviewed and edited by journalists before publication. This helps save time while maintaining accuracy, tone and editorial standards. Find out more in an article from Rhodri Talfan Davies.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/reports/policies/what-were...
LDRS articles are made free to everyone in the scheme (including the BBC), but because the content is written primarily for their home news org the articles that end up being published by the BBC need to be modified to comply with the BBC's editorial guidelines and for style reasons.
Hence, Style Assist.
(Seriously you couldn't google that?)
Thanks to RFKjr and friends, we know what country will be one of the last to do so. Or even worse, the US could end up being a reservoir for HepC.
What has RFK Jr specifically said for/against HepC?
https://youtu.be/G4vP4GdHhoA?t=293
> Trump said "vats" of vaccines are pumped into children's bodies.
https://www.npr.org/2026/08/10/nx-s1-5927313/trump-rfk-jr-va...
This makes all children turn purple and explode just like Violet Beauregarde.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Yqw_f26SvM
I do not know why some people think the current US regime will follow England with all evidence pointing to doing the exact opposite.
RFK Jr. is an anti-vax crackpot, but Hep C isn't vaccine-preventable. On the other hand, we can absolutely blame RFK Jr. for our rising Hep A, B, and D rates.
If it requires a vaccine you can be sure HEP C will be kept alive and well via MAHA in the US
okay here is a much better article
* https://www.england.nhs.uk/2026/08/100000-people-receive-tre...
> "Treatment involves a free course of antiviral tablets lasting 8 to 12 weeks, which cures more than 95% of cases."
must be nice to have a government that actually cares about its citizens health, we're still waiting DECADES for that Republican health care plan (other than "just die quietly")
Hep A outbreaks are relatively frequent at restaurants (in my state).
Every state in the US has an immunization registry (they're all hosted by WebIZ) so they all look the same and produce the same sort of document. Checking states I've lived in, some of the records go back to 2008. My insurance pays for all vaccines except for "travel vaccines".
Shopping list:
https://www.fda.gov/vaccines-blood-biologics/vaccines/vaccin...
“Taking antiviral tablets for 8 to 12 weeks can cure more than 95% of cases.”
Same here! I had one symptom -intermittent somewhat abnormal liver enzyme results- that was very easy to explain away with the fact that I'm nearly always somewhat dehydrated because I have trouble forcing myself to drink enough water. I had to run into a doc who was in the habit of running the test "just in case" because she had seen a ton of Hep C cases before the culprit was discovered.
Honestly, I'm really glad I didn't get diagnosed much earlier than I did... it's my understanding that interferon treatment is really awful to go through and has like a 50% success rate for Hep C infections. When I got diagnosed Harvoni was quite new, but it worked on the strain I had, and there were absolutely no side effects that I noticed. Its list price was shockingly expensive (something like 150k USD) but that's way cheaper than a new liver and -as is often the case with these sorts of things- financial "wizardry" meant that I paid like 5 USD.
So indeed diagnosing the cases is leading directly to deaths prevented.
This is not what the title claims. The title claims that hepatitis C is to be eliminated, aka 0%. This is not possible; anyone with a basic 101 virology knows why. BBC lies here via the title.
> Drug users have a range of
The title does not even mention drug users.
The title refers to the hepatitis C virus. That virus existed way before drug users did.
Not in this context, no. It means the same thing as being cured of Hep C means... there's a little bit still lingering around, but the systems that keep it under control mean that it doesn't cause any problems. The world and one's body are environments that are way too large to get rid of 100% of something without utterly obliterating them.
> That virus existed way before drug users did.
I'm skeptical. Living things have been drug users for approximately forever.
Anyway, a fun fact that I learned when I was getting my Hep C diagnosis and treatment is that the three most common ways to get it are
1) Be an IV drug user who's not extremely careful about their needles
2) Share your toothbrush with someone else
3) Have had a blood transfusion prior to ~1992, when they started screening the blood supply for Hep C
It turns out that -for the sex-havers that aren't into blood play- sex is one of the least effective methods of Hepatitis transmission.
> England is now leading the world in the mission to eliminate this disease and on course to beat the WHO's 2030 target, but we are determined to keep up the momentum and finish the job.
Seems fairly unambiguous to me
There is a difference between elimination and eradication.
As usual you fail to understand nuance.
I usually think of a country as equal to a nation, and as far as I know, Wales and Scotland have not split off yet? Is the term "country" not actually that sharply defined?
EDIT: Thanks people, I just asked a question to better understand the terminology, you know ...
Guess only England was meant. That would insinuate they don't care about scotland though.
If I read an article from them about crime in London, quoting the Metropolitan Police, I don't immediately think that they don't care about, say, the West Midlands.
The bit that gets me is that people often refer to the UK but actually mean GB or vice versa.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:British_Isles_Venn_D...
The green circles are each a single island. The yellow circle are a bunch of islands.
James VI/I (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_VI_and_I) was king of _both_ England and Scotland and only later did the Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Union combine the two. You might notice I've neglected Wales which was (considered?) part of England.
In any case, England is a country, yes. Also the UK is a country.
For instance, England and Wales share a legal system, but Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own. There’s bunch of special things about Northern Ireland and its relation to Ireland. And all of the constituent countries have their own parliament / assembly except for England (the parliament in London is for the whole of the UK where MPs for all constituent countries can vote).
In this particular case, the constituent countries have their own health systems, so it’s normally England we would be talking about, not the UK.
It is not a sovereign country, but instead is a part of the constituents comprising the UK state.
For example in Germany one would say there are 16 states, but one wouldn't say that there are 16 countries. Never heard anyone claim that. So state seems to be different from country, at least here. Would people in the UK say that Scotland or Wales are "nations"? Or is at least that term very clearly only for units that could participate under a flag in lets say the olympics? (I assume here, that Scotland and Wales are not separately competing, but are under UK flag.)
So in modern English they may be states, but there sure is a lot of overlap between "country" and "state".
Team GB enters the Olympics but as you may have noticed it was England who came Third in the World Cup recently, and likewise England play international rugby, including against Wales and Scotland.
Except when they play as part of the British & Irish Lions!
As an English person I would say that Scotland and Wales are nations and countries; constituent countries of the country that is the UK.
If that’s a bit eccentric, well this is the same place that refers to Europe as a different place even though France borders the UK by automobile road.
People in the UK would refer to England as a country and most people would actually be confused if you referred to the UK as a country, even though it technically is. People in England don’t really think of the UK as anything other than “the UK”. People from Scotland, Wales, and Ireland have more nuanced takes.
You might get a tedious person saying something like "actually, Wales is a principality".
It's like if you put four boxes in a box, it's not too confusing that the outer box is still a box.
The NI thing is different, involving a peace treaty between the UK and Ireland.