Buzz Aldrin says "we didn't go there" to a kid asking about moon travel

[Qualm]

Originally Posted by uh-oh

if you vaccinate your kids, aren't they in the clear? like lets say i have a kid (shudders) and don't get him vaccinated. he gets measles. your kid was vaxed tho. is your kid endangered now?

or is it more about just eradicating these diseases entirely, starving them of hosts altogether? which makes sense but don't they just pop back up and shit

i dunno how any of that works. someone put me on

the issue is that viruses mutate, and eradicating the disease entirely is the only way to prevent that. If people don't get vaccinations, the virus over time can change into a different form of the same virus, but a new vaccine would need to be engineered in order for it to work. So essentially it has the potential to endanger everyone, including the people who are vaccinated

it's similar to the way bugs can develop immunity to certain pesticides over time. Thing that used to work, will no longer work. If you kill them altogether so that they can't evolve to the point where they develop an immunity, then there's no issue

also, an example of this was the 2009 H1N1 swine flu pandemic in which the vaccines we had at the time were ineffective, there was a huge panic, and the vaccine had to be reformulated. That period of time doesn't come without casualties (it's estimated over 200,000 people died. Of course these things always affect impoverished countries the most) and there's always a chance that it will take longer than ideal to create a new vaccine.