You don't get vaccinated to help yourself, you get vaccinated to help others.

Similar to "you're not stuck in traffic, you *are* traffic," your vaccinated ass benefits everyone you mee you'd otherwise be infecting.

When the measles vaccine, or polio, or smallpox, etc were mass-distributed, not a single person's life was saved by *their* taking the vaccine.

Those diseases were killed, and massive amounts of lives saved, because everyone around them had been vaccinated.

For measles, 94% of the population or more needs to be vaccinated for the vaccine to actually help.

You taking the measles vaccine doesn't help anybody. Other people, *most* people, also need to take it for it to actually do what it is supposed to.

In the US, where anti-vax sentiment is already high, people do not view vaccines as an altruistic, collective means of ensuring public health and safety.

There is a minimum amount of vaccines to distribute, necessary to do what they are supposed to do.

Distributing less than that amount, can't kill off a disease.

It'll save lives, it'll protect local clusters where enough people in the area have been vaccinated, it'll reduce the spread.

But insufficient vaccination doesn't do anywhere near the effect of ubiquitous vaccination.

It's a bandaid, even if half the population gets it.

And for that ubiquitous distribution to occur, the majority of the population has to understand why ubiquitous vaccination is necessary.

And there needs to be enough vaccine to do it.

What this means is that any vaccine campaign that does not distribute enough, to a population that will not vaccinate enough, is not good enough.

There needs to be enough, and enough people need to actually take it.

https://twitter.com/pookleblinky/status/1334334666300657664?s=19

The CDC estimated that yearly flu vaccination is about a third of what is actually needed.

"not a single person's life was saved by *their* taking the vaccine"

Your measles vaccination didn't keep you from getting measles last year, because everyone else's vaccination kept a measles outbreak from happening last year.

Ubiquitous vaccinations benefit you by *preventing* future outbreaks.

And, in the US, measles is coming back in areas where not enough people believe in vaccines: https://www.cdc.gov/measles/cases-outbreaks.html

There *was* a measles outbreak last year in the US, in places where less than 94% of the population were vaccinated.

Now consider that measles causes immunological amnesia https://twitter.com/pookleblinky/status/1333600219339034625?s=19

Those pockets of measles outbreaks caused by antivaxxers, are future potential pockets of every other disease that people had, before the outbread, had acquired immunity to.

94% of the population being vaccinated against measles, protects you from *every other disease* that erupts in the wake of a measles outbreak.

Yourself being vaccinated against measles doesn't do anywhere near as much to protect you as the fact that everyone else is too. It protects you from outbreaks of other diseases that now will not happen.

And all of that depends on there being enough vaccine, and people willing to be vaccinated.

That benefit lowers quickly below that threshold.

The fact that everyone near you got a measles vaccine, helped prevent the scarlet fever outbreak that would have left you deaf.

In the US, people don't see the benefit of vaccines as being a collective action taken to benefit others.

They'll scramble over vaccines selfishly not realizing that vaccines work like rules for which side to drive on: everyone else needs to be doing the same thing too.

If you drive on the right side of the road, it doesn't do you any damn good unless everyone else is driving on the right side of the road.

If half the population decides to drive on the right, that still doesn't help anyone.

*Everyone* needs to pick the same side of the road.

Your driving on the right side of the road isn't what keeps you from dying in a gory car accident. It's that everyone else on the road is also driving on the right.