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In Australia, Immunize Or Lose Benefits
An anonymous reader writes with news of a plan from the Australian government to cut down on the number of kids who aren't vaccinated. The new scheme will deny family tax benefits to parents whose children don't pass immunization checks. Quoting:
"The FTB supplement, worth $726 per child each year, will now only be paid once a child is fully immunized at these checks. Families are already required to have their child fully immunized to receive Child Care Benefit and the Child Care Rebate. Children will also be required for the first time to be vaccinated against meningococcal C, pneumococcal and chicken pox. Children will also be immunized against measles, mumps and rubella earlier, at 18 months instead of the current four years of age."
Rational social interest trumps irrational "self" interest, for once. The USA could learn a thing or two from Australia.
...considering that they have socialized medicine. To libertarians this probably looks like a communist nightmare, I'll admit that to me it only seems OK because I don't believe in the Right to Put Everyone In Danger By Being a Total Moron.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I don't think you understand how immunization is supposed to work.
Do you realize intersection between the 'hygiene hypothesis' (exposure to many different infectious vectors helps prime the immune system in useful ways) and immunizations (attempting to decrease the incidence of a few, serious infections) is very, very, very small?
Basically it's a non sequitor.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Actually, it's you who doesn't understand how evolution works... While it's currently antibiotics that are producing the most problems from superbugs, ultimately, anything we do to try to kill off diseases will only cause evolution to produce better bugs.
We are actively changing the fitness function for diseases to include "must be resistant to antibiotics, must be resistant to antivirals, must be able to infect even immunised people, etc", this will inevitably lead to bugs that fulfil these criteria... eventually.
What "government"? Are you even Australian?
At least here in Scandinavia, the government is not the enemy, it represents us and our shared interests. Many Americans seem to think their negative view is the "universal" truth. It is most certainly not.
On the other hand we allow individuals to choose what immunizations they want their children to get. It just happens that most people actually trust our government, universal health care system and science; the majority of people choose to get all immunizations offered.
which doesn't necessarily make them all that important. A virus/bacteria/etc that is resistant to all of those things but only gives you a runny nose for 2 days isn't really a big problem.
And of course we know that doing nothing killed people. A lot of them. For centuries. Or have we all forgotten that infant mortality rates used to be over 10%, and deaths by what are now preventable diseases killed millions at a young age?
Ok, so maybe we create diseases that are immune to whatever we're doing, that's why we keep doing drug research. It might be a cat and mouse game, but I prefer being on the side of people who have very fortunately lived through all of these things. And I'm sure so do you, even if you don't realize it.
that which puts me and my children in danger- not getting vaccinated, is not a natural freedom.
The problem with the definition of freedom, as defined by teenagers (not chronological teenagers, but psychological teenagers) is that it does not take into account how some "freedoms" naturally and automatically impinge on the freedoms of others.
For example: your freedom to play your music as loud as you want, my freedom to get a good night's sleep. Your freedom to consume nicotine, my freedom to breathe clean air when I walk down the sidewalk. You freedom to talk on your cellphone, my freedom to enjoy a movie. Etc.
If you claim as a right or freedom that which impinges on someone else's rights or freedoms, without even considering the possibility, you aren't selfish. You're just stupid: you don't know what freedom really is. To you, it is "let me do whatever I want without consideration of effects or consequences." That is "freedom" as defined by an ignorant teenager (again, not a chronological teenager, a psychological one, who could be of any age), and has absolutely nothing to do with the real fight for freedom in this world by real freedom fighters, who are often quoted by people who don't even know what freedom really is.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Bachmann certainly isn't poor.
But she's definitely very willing to lie; and possible dumber than a box of rocks as well.
Actually, there is only one rational outcome here. And the basis for that is in your previous statement.
Which means that in order for child A to avoid the vaccination "safely", someone must guarantee that children B - Z are vaccinated.
While it may be a correct mathematical statement reflecting the spread of infection, it is not a "rational" approach to immunization. If everyone followed that, then none of the children would be immunized. If 50% of the population followed that then the diseases would still be a problem. And so forth.
1. No vaccine is 100% effective. You can be immunized and still get sick. Less likely, and it's likely to be milder, but it could still be fatal.
2. Not being immunized raises the chance you will get sick, and expose those around you to the disease.
For many of these major diseases, if less than a certain percentage of the population gets immunized, the disease still runs fairly rampant through the population - including the immunized population. You need basically everybody to be immunized so that when the disease strikes one person, it doesn't have any convenient vectors to other people, and stays contained.
Besides, we have a certain hesitancy to allow survival of the fittest to take it's course where humans are concerned. Partly out of fellow-feeling, and partly because we've found that 'fittest' can have multiple meanings, and that someone who can barely talk and can't get out of their wheelchair can still give humanity as a whole great value in understanding the how the universe works. (Through their own work.)
'Sensible' is a curse word.
Immunization doesn't take for everyone. Immunizations can't be used on everyone due to things like allergies. Immunization can wear off and become ineffective over time, or in between booster shots. When everyone is vaccinated according to schedule, you only have a small percentage of the population that is at risk to those diseases. Since there are only a couple percent that will become infected when exposed, the likelihood of the virus being passed between two of these people is very low. It is a condition called "herd immunity" that makes unchecked spread of the virus unlikely.
When people are willingly forgoing vaccinations, you aren't just putting yourself at risk, you are dropping the total percent of the population that is at risk. As that number drops further and further, the easier it is for the virus to spread into an outbreak. The more a virus spreads, the higher likelihood it will have a chance to mutate into a form the existing vaccine does not protect against. In other words, when they chose not to get vaccinated, they are putting all the rest of us at risk out of their own stupidity.
Fish are being influenced by selective pressure from fishing... it's pushing them to spawn younger, grow faster and die sooner. Not much can be done evolutionwise to become net-resistant, so they are evolving to breed faster.
Things aren't looking good for you, sir...
"Libertarians, who, let's face it, are either morons or sociopaths"
Right, because the government's will trumps any sort of idea that you can make choices for you or your children.
Seriously fuck you just because you claim anybody who disagrees with your viewpoint is a moron or a sociopath.
I won't call you names, but you're exactly the kind of person who should never be in charge of anything for any reason.
First: You are mixing up bacteria and viruses. Bacteria evolve resistance to antibiotics. Viruses do not, because they do not react to antibiotics in the first place.
Second: Evolution in biology does not work like in poorly researched science fiction. While you can throw any factor you want into a fitness function, there are limits on what can be replicated in a cell. The viral capsid has to consist of protein and be of a certain shape, and the immune system can be trained to recognize it.
Third: Even if it worked, you're running the small risk of the spontaneous appearance of a disease that could overcome vaccinations and infect everyone, as opposed to not vaccinating and definitely allowing ordinary diseases to infect everyone. Unlike the antibiotic, the vaccine is preventive, long-term and specific to a disease. The danger of antibiotic abuse (ie. irregular or uncompleted treatments, or regular small doses) is that it exposes bacteria just enough to allow resistance to evolve, rather than killing off the infection completely. Vaccination doesn't do that because the immune system will kill the infection before it can take hold.
The poor who don't want to immunize will be forced to due to financial considerations.
The rich who don't want to immunize simply won't.
This doesn't target those who already believe immunization is a smart move, because obviously they will already immunize. This only affects those who don't want to, and among them, it will only affect the poor.
The rich get to do what they want, the poor have to do what they're told.
When you want society to care for you, you have to let society care for you. If you reject society's care, expect to get none. Could it be any simpler?
Having read most of these comments, I am frankly appalled. The arguments being given for government-mandated vaccinations are as bad or worse than the ones being given for any number of things we can all agree are bad (surveillance, secret databases, security checks). Either people do not realize, or do not care, that they are in fact trampling on personal rights just as badly as those they criticize.
That leads me to wonder what the difference is. Is it because vaccination is "science"? Science that every once in a while comes under attack by the extreme right? If that's the only reason these "social good" arguments are now valid, when they are in truth just as valid now as in every other case (ie, valid arguments, but do not outweigh personal liberty), it's frightening.
I'm not anti-vaccination, but I am getting there, if only because of the lengths people seem willing to go to advocate further government control regarding them and silence anyone who even seems to disagree. The posts in this discussion make me feel we really do not have many "free thinkers" here and that on the whole, they're just as susceptible to the same scare tactics and small-mindedness as the right.
Great Intellect...
You do realize that first the taxes are taken from the family, the only question is how much of THIER OWN MONEY the government decides to hand back...
I'm not sure what your point is?
Those same taxes are also taken from families with no children, and with grown up children, and whose children have died due to not being immunized too....
Everyone pays taxes, that's how government is paid for. Deal with it. Your point is at most a distraction from any rational discussion.
You don't get it. Society believes, based on evidence, that the few dipshits that don't immunize are putting others at risk. They incentivise the smart choice, in a way of saying "those who will take measures to keep us all safer get a tax break". This is to drive all people to make the smart choice....
I bet you would be even more upset if the incentive was percentage of income based, which *would* equally motivate the rich to immunize... and because they would have breaks in the hundreds of thousands while the poor only get hundreds.
So should the break be percentage based? It would be proportional, and equally incentivising....
One of the known mechanisms by which pathogenic bacteria get resistance to antibiotics is by horizontal gene transfer from our own gut flora. Gut flora becomes resistant to antibiotics because the levels in our gastrointestinal tract is lower than in our bloodstream. Viruses and bacteriophages (which infect bacteria) then transfer plasmids between different species.
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Not a failure of vaccines, but a failure due to ignorance and superstition.
Citation needed.
Evidence o STFU.
The anti-vaccine people whom you seem to be mirroring have never, ever, ever shown any of this crap to be true. Scientifically it's on a par with creationism.