Slashdot Mirror
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."
I don't think you understand how immunization is supposed to work.
How can it look communist? They're using money to incentivise desired behavior. What could be more capitalistic than that? :-p
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Things aren't looking good for you sir... their > there
NOOOO!!! I demand to be able to risk my children's lives due to my personal ignorance and FUD over retardation inducing vaccinations!!!
If any country forces parents to vaccinate their children, my personal freedom is violated!!! How can Obama allow this to happen in any country?! Why did we vote for him?!
I need people to know my child's retardation is inherited and not forced by a doctor's vaccines!!!!! AAAAERGGGGG!!! :P
Could also repel child labor laws. That would also be more capitalistic.
Because in modern society, the right-wing fascists have changed the definition of "communist" to "anything we don't like". It's a very effective means by which to control the large segment of the public who were brought up fearing nuclear war with an actual communist country.
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.
By this logic, we should be expecting bullet-proof cattle and thresher-proof wheat any day now, not to mention hook-resistant fish and armored potatoes...
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
How does this have to do with capitalism, which is an economic model? Please don't pretend that Libertarianism and Capitalism are one and the same.
Requiring immunization is fundamentally no different than requiring people not dump their raw sewage on the curb. In both cases, they represent reasonable restrictions on behavior in the interest of public health. About the only people I know that disagree with it are either Libertarians, who, let's face it, are either morons or sociopaths, or anti-vaxxers, who are pretty much at the intellectual level of Creationists and Flat-Earthers.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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
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.
1. Why post anonymously?
2. About 1:1 000 000 people who got the 1976 H1N1 vaccine got Guillain Barre (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=20797646), and influenza itself is more likely to cause Guillain Barre than the vaccine.
3. The flu kills between about 3 000 and 49 000 people each year in the United States (http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/disease/us_flu-related_deaths.htm).
4. Your statements that "everyone who gets them [flu vaccines]" gets sick and "some people die... from said vaccine" each year demonstrates why schools would be better off teaching statistics and critical thinking than trigonometry.
5. I'd happy to have you take your chances if only to allow evolution to exert selective pressure on your ilk, except for the risk you present to those around you at high risk of dying from the flu (kids under 5, adults over 65).
Like the right of my child to be school/raised an as risk free environment as possible? Your kid doesn't get to go to my kids school unless you prove he/she is safe. I will do likewise and will provide certificates of immunization, will you match that?
Nos, you have the right to have your kid immunized, your choice. You DON'T get the privileges and benefits that are bestowed on others that have fulfilled their social obligations.
Additionally, in Australia, one contributes to publicly available health care via a taxation levy. Those on benefits get virtually free health care. Immunization is a way to ensure that the taxpayer isn't forking out extra to treat a kid for some preventable disease. Which means more money for things such as schools, roads, etc.
Q:I was listening to a CD in Grip and it sounded horrible! What's up? A:Perhaps you are listening to country music
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.
Some people (immune compromized) *can't* get vaccinated, so rely on the 'herd immunity'. Infants 'not yet vaccinated' rely on herd immunity. Also some people who do get immunized simply don't 'take', and thus are unknowingly still at risk.
The higher the number of non-immunized people, the higher the risk of collateral damage.
No such thing as vaccine resistant. The vaccine actually attacks the body stimulating it to produce anti-bodies, you might argue that this produces anti-body resistant bacteria but that has always been the case, if a bacteria could attack faster than the body reacted it survived, also if the body could not produce effective anti-bodies the bacteria lived. This has been going on since bacteria attacked other living things, not just since humans were around. If the anti-body to bacteria battle could produce a super-germ we would have seen one by now.
What happens here is antiviral, antibiotic, or vaccination doesn't kill off 100% of the virus. Some cells tend to survive. If some of the cells are resistant to the 'cure', then the survivors tend to be those particular cells that live to continue manufacturing virions that are less susceptible to the vaccine.
You may not have a vaccine-resistant virus today, but vaccination creates selective pressures that tend to make ones that are vaccine-resistant survive and reproduce more.... resulting that in the future newer viruses that occur are more likely to resemble the more vaccine-resistant ones, and eventually, as the trend repeats with enough iterations, the resistance becomes stronger and stronger......
That is not how vaccines work. Vaccines don't kill anything. They train your body to recognize and respond effectively to the infection.
Some very basic info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine
"You want to know how to help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone." -George Carlin
But the good of the many should never be used to outweigh the rights of the few, or the one.
Oh yes it should, and does.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
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.
No, it's not. The text you are referencing, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" is in fact in the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution. The Constitution is supposed to be built around these principles, but the text you describe does not appear anywhere in it.
True enough. I should also point out that we're actually talking about Australia, which made no such claims upon its founding. But my basic point is that ascribing the status of a "right" to a tax deduction is ridiculous.
The rich will immunize because its a smart move. The poor will immunize because its a smart move.
Interestingly, here in Canada, the 'poor' actually have a higher immunization rate for their children than the rich, because the poor trust their doctors and don't have the time/energy/wherewithall to spend their time with 'herbalists' and other rubbish. A note comes from school saying 'we're immunizing against rubella tomorrow' and the poor sign the permission slip because to them it sounds like a good idea. And they're right.
Oh, sure, because Mercola is such a reliable source. Oh wait ...
Yestaerday there was a nurse on the radio who worked in fever hospitals in the 50's where whole bulildings were dedicated to caring for patients that had the diseases that MMR prevents. Literally thousands of children are not in hospital right now beacuse of vaccines. Idiots like you with your lopt theories are endagering a return to that situation. Many chidlren died and many ended up with severe disabilities, far more than any of the rare side effects of vaccine.
Your post is 100% bullshit I promise you.