At 12:44 PM 4/9/5, Jed Rothwell wrote: >> This is a competely different thing! What a bogus argument! The 98 >> percent vaccine effectiveness refers to individuals, not to exposures! > >I do not understand your point. People do not get diseases unless they are >exposed to them. In a population of people inoculated against measles, 2% >will get the disease anyway.
If 98 percent of the population is protected from a fatal disease then at most 2 percent will die. When a person has been effectively innoculated he is protected *no matter how many exposures* he experiences. The use of exposure at a time based protection differs from this. In this case there is a probability in each and every exposure of a failure of the protection. There is a powerful cumulative effect from repeated risk, no matter how small the risk. It is a fact that [lim n-> inf] x^n = 0, for any 0<x<1 The cumulative probability of survival drops surprisingly (to some) rapidly at some point. We should know what this risk is. More importantly, in the case of exposure protection, vs individual protection, the full population is at risk of overrun, not just 2 percent. Regards, Horace Heffner
