UK Court Orders Two Sisters Must Receive MMR Vaccine

rnws writes "The BBC reports that an English High Court judge has ruled that sisters aged 15 and 11 must have the MMR vaccine even though they and their mother do not want it. The High Court decision, made last month, came after the girls' father brought a case seeking vaccination. When outlining her decision in the latest case, Mrs Justice Theis emphasized it was a specific case 'only concerned with the welfare needs of these children', but lawyers say as one of a series it confirms there is no longer any debate about the benefits of the vaccine."

Comments

Good.

[bmo]

"The BBC reports that an English High Court judge has ruled that sisters aged 15 and 11 must have the MMR vaccine even though they and their mother do not want it. "

No, the kids don't know any better, and the mother is practicing child abuse, especially against the 11 year old.

Brainwashing your kids against vaccination is particularly evil.

--
BMO

Re:Good.

[Mitchell314]

Find me a kid that wants to get shots. Of course they're going to be against it. But yeah, it's sad this very dangerous idea is still floating around, all because somebody wanted to get money from an alternative vaccine and thus fabricated a lie.

Re:Good.

[ATMAvatar]

You are more than welcome to publish a paper in a medical journal disproving the health benefits of vaccination and herd immunity. Until such revolutionary change comes about in medicine, choosing not to vaccinate a child *is* particularly evil, as it endangers not only the child but everyone around him or her. Teaching the child not to vaccinate only exacerbates the problem.

Re:Good.

[besalope]

Pregnancy isn't an illness.

Exactly. It's just a parasitic relationship.

Re:Good.

[ColdWetDog]

Well statistically you would expect the deaths to go way down, as modern hospitals have far higher rates of child and mother mortality than non hospital deliveries.

Apples and oranges.

With a few unfortunate exceptions, home births are low risk births which are really pretty safe with routine medical care (that can be delivered at home). So you don't expect any deaths / bad outcomes (but they happen).

Hospital births include low risk and high risk deliveries. Some of the latter don't do well even with the best medical care. So, no you cannot statistically compare the two unless you are very careful to tell us just what exactly you are comparing.

Re:Good.

[unitron]

i hated needles as a kid, and STILL hate needles. i almost never get anything with a needle unless i absolutely have to. ill generally take the flu over a vaccine.

Then you've probably never really had the flu.

Oh, and before you wound up completely out of action for a week except to grab the trash can near the bed when your stomach tries to turn itself inside out and escape your body via your throat, and you have spasms in abodmen muscles you never knew you had, you've probably helped spread the disease to who knows how many others.

Do like I do, look the other way and accept that there's going to be some momentary pain.

Re:Good.

[Guppy06]

Find me a kid that wants to get measles, mumps and/or rubella.

Re: Good.

[Anonymous Coward]

That sort of tyranny exists so that idiots like yourself DON'T start killing people.

Seriously, if you don't like having diseases controlled using the most efficient means (vaccine instead of quarantine) the you get to fuck off and live in your own vaccine free society. The only reason you haven't died yet is because everyone else around you vaccinating has shielded you.

It should not be a choice sometimes. Because everyone fucking dying because some shithead like you shouted FREEEEEEDDDDUUUUMB is the stupidest idea I have ever heard.

Re:Good.

[viperidaenz]

You should try giving blood. The needle looks more like a tube, around 2mm diameter. You also get to see your blood flowing down the tube, into the bag that slowly fills up.

I've given more blood than I currently have in my body.

Re:Good.

[YukariHirai]

This is about your right to decide what goes into your own body, to keep the government away from it.

That's all well and good, but what goes into your body does have an effect on other people, not just you. For a wild hypothetical, if there's a choice between getting an injection and 100 people around you dying, you're just plain being an arsehole for refusing the injection, and a good case can be made for it being for the good to force you to get it. If it's a choice between you getting a shot that will kill you and 100 people around you dying, it's rather less clear cut... a generous enough person might accept and be the sacrifice, but while it is rather selfish it's not entirely unreasonable to refuse, and being forced to get the shot would be wrong.

Vaccines come somewhere between those two extremes. Negative effects of getting vaccines are pretty rare and tend to be relatively minor, but negative effects of not getting them can be devastating for far more people. And even if it is just you that dies if you don't get a shot, that's still a pretty negative effect for the family and friends that care about you and perhaps depend on you.

As such, I cannot in good conscience oppose certain vaccinations being mandated.

Re:Good.

[samkass]

Yes and no. You do not have to include the high risk patients, and we do have a good reason to rule them out of that data.
Just compare the patents that a competent midwife would of warned away from a home-birth.

"A competent midwife" is a loaded statement. In the UK most midwives have at least a 3-year degree or an additional set of courses on top of a nursing degree. In the US, many midwives are "self-taught" or taught by apprenticeship by others and there is little oversight. And, of course, the US does not have universal health care so many more pregnancies are higher risk with reduced prenatal care of the mother or child. I'm not sure where the study the parent poster was quoting was done, but it should certainly control for health care systems as well.

Re:Good.

[whoever57]

The flip side of that is, of course, that 1 out of every 100 births will require extraordinary measures. So let's just go ahead and say that we're 99% accurate in spotting the high risk OB pts (which is quite generous, believe me.), that means that 1 out of every 10,000 "normal" births will require resuscitation.

Your calculations assume that there are no risks that are associated with hospital births (and not present with home births). I don't know the numbers, but it must be more than zero.

Re:Good.

[sl149q]

The difference is that there is little societal benefit to NOT having your chicken pox vaccine but there is a huge benefit to people being able to eat.

We put up with 30,000 + deaths a year so that people can easily get around using cars. Simply lowering the maximum speed on highways to 30 mph and in the city to 10 mph would be a huge win WRT to deaths. But the tremendous cost to society mitigates against that.

When there is a small cost against a small but incremental benefit it is still a good idea to do it. If you can conclusively demonstrate that the cost to society from 100% use of any vaccination is higher than the cost of not vaccination we can (and should) have a discussion. Be prepared however to defend against the "but one child saved" groups.

Re:Good.

[Luckyo]

This isn't about flu. This is about MMR vaccine. Example: if pregnant woman manages to catch rubella, if she's lucky, child will be stillborn. Unlucky, and it will be born severely disabled.

These infectious diseases are not a joke. These are diseases that wiped out a good 10-20% of people before they reached adulthood before vaccination was invented and left many survivors with some degree of disability for life.

The reason why we don't have to worry about having ten kids so that around four make it to adulthood is because we have vaccination against the nastier diseases, and because vaccination and resultant herd immunity effectively wiped many of the most dangerous diseases out of our everyday lives.

Re:Good.

[Solandri]

No, OP is correct. Most people who think they've had the flu have actually only had a cold. They're different types of viruses which just share some similar symptoms.

The flu tends to be much worse. One key difference is that whereas a cold will just stuff up your nose and make your head feel miserable, the flu will make you feel like you just ran a marathon and then a truck ran over you. It also tends to last a lot longer. I was bedridden for 10 days, and it was 3 weeks before I felt normal again. It was so bad that even though I wanted to go back to work, I was afraid to because I didn't want to pass it on to a coworker and make them go through the same misery I had just been through. Totally the opposite of the guy who's only had a cold and thinks you should just tough it out and come to work.

I get my flu shot every year now.

Re:Good.

[DrXym]

I really don't understand this reasoning. Driving at night with headlights doesn't offer a 100% guarantee of avoiding an accident but it certainly lowers the chances of having one. Wearing a seat belt doesn't offer a 100% guarantee you'll survive an accident but it certainly increases the chances of survivability . So I would hope most people would exercise common sense and do both things. Not everything has to be an all or nothing to have a benefit.

So just because a vaccine is not 100% effective doesn't mean that the alternative of having no protection at all is in any way sane or rational. Hundreds of thousands of people die from flu or complications from flu related illnesses every single year. Many more suffer a really shitty week and continue to infect others while they do so. I wonder how many of those deaths would be avoidable if the person had received a vaccine (providing they were capable of receiving it), or if the people in their vicinity had received theirs.

Re:Finally killed that autism theory?

[felixrising]

That is because rumours only spread when they are in the affirmation, not a negation, ie.. "someone said 'x' is related to 'y'" will spread word of mouth, whilst "someone said 'x' is NOT related to 'y'" will not spread.

Re:Finally killed that autism theory?

[I'm New Around Here]

One side of the story has a spokesidiot who is blond with big tits. Apparently that supersedes scientific study.

.
PS. Firefox underlined 'spokesidiot' with a red squiggly line. So I added the word to the dictionary.

Sensible decision

[mynamestolen]

You don't drive through red traffic lights. You don't spread your stupid diseases to innocent Children who for GOOD reasons can't be vaccinated. And you don't waste my taxes trying to treat your sick kids because you're too stupid to understand some basic science.

Re:my wife works as a medical technician

[jfdavis668]

I think you will find that more people die from the preventable disease than die from the vaccine.

Actually sensable....

[MasseKid]

Dad and mom do not agree, kids are minors and thus unable to decide for themselves in the eyes of the law, and thus medical evidence breaks the tie. I really don't see the problem here...

IF mom and dad and kids didn't want it and courts were ordering something, then that would be a different story.

It's unfortunate.

[BitterOak]

It's unfortunate they made the issue out to be the efficacy of the vaccine and not the moral implications about forcing medication on people against their will. I, like most, believe the autism-MMR link is pure nonsense, but I do believe it must be every person's right to refuse medical treatment, including vaccines. (In the case of children, parents sometimes need to make decisions on their behalf, of course, but it shouldn't be the government making those decisions.) Of course, an exception to that rule can be made if people want the privilege of traveling to certain foreign countries which are known to harbor specific diseases, but otherwise, it should be up to parents, or adults to make these decisions, wrong though they may be.

Re:It's unfortunate.

[bunratty]

You may want to read about herd immunity. We need a certain percentage of the population to be vaccinated to protect everyone against the disease, including those who cannot have the vaccination. Leaving it up to everyone to decide for themselves what they want to do won't work. We don't let people decide what side of the road to drive on, now do we?

Re:It's unfortunate.

[jhealy1024]

What about the case of public health? Vaccines rely on "herd immunity" to be effective, so letting everyone pick and choose leads to a situation where not enough people are vaccinated to protect the population as a whole (as seen by outbreaks of measles in pockets of the country over the last year). There was an article written on this (which I can't find now) that was a great overview of the tension between one's individual rights to liberty and one's societal obligations not to kill people by willfully refusing something that has been demonstrated to work.

What if, for example, we found the "typhoid mary" for measles (someone who was asymptomatic, but carried the disease and spread it to others). They could be cured with the vaccine, but refuse to take it. Should the interest of the public health outweigh the individual right to refuse treatment in this case? If not, why should others perish? If so, then why not force vaccines on everyone? Where should the line be drawn?

Here in the US, we typically coerce vaccination by making it a prerequisite for public school (some states allow "personal" or "religious" exemptions, though). That way, people aren't "forced" to do it; life is just more unpleasant if they insist on skipping vaccines. Not sure if the UK has a similar system to encourage vaccination.

Re:It's unfortunate.

[AK Marc]

Herd immunity still doesn't trump individual control of their body (at least IMHO).

The Father wanted his children immunized. The Mother didn't. The government mediated the dispute with the goal of finding in the girl's best interests.

I didn't see anything about personal rights in this, unless you are arguing that the age of consent should be under 11 so that the children would be making their own decision independent of their parent's wishes.

Re:It's unfortunate.

[Belial6]

Herd immunity gets thrown out like a mantra. While it is great, we are now starting to vaccinate against diseases where herd immunity will save fewer lives than the vaccine harms. Herd immunity is not the end all be all answer. To think it is, is to be just as scientifically inclined as Jenny McCarthy.

OK, to be fair, I only know of one vaccine that poses a real threat, and that is only because it is misused. That would be the chicken pox vaccine. It should not be used on children. The data supplied by virtually every source shows this, even when the sources conclusion recommends the vaccine. The problem is that those who support vaccination rarely if every draw a distinction between a vaccine like the chicken pox vaccine and the polio vaccine. Then the Anti-"Anti-Vaxers" come out and start screaming about how all vaccines are good, and anyone who would question the righteousness of the all mighty vaccine is a murderer who should have their children removed from them.

When we were fighting polio, there was no question that A vaccine was a good thing. The big killers and maimers are largely gone now. We have had effective vaccines for a long time. Now we are trying to add vaccines that prevent diseases that are less likely to kill or maim than a home cooked meal. That's right. If the chicken pox vaccine were never developed, you would still have a greater chance of being killed or maimed by a home cooked meal than by chicken pox.

Even worse is that the vaccine is known not to offer life long immunity, so we are very likely just pushing the disease off for a decade or so. This is particularly unfortunate because chicken pox is 10x more deadly for an adult than a child.

Kids don't like vaccination?!

[Arancaytar]

even though they and their mother do not want it

Well duh. I didn't want shots either, but luckily for me my parents were sane people and didn't let a ten-year-old make medical decisions.

Re:Finally killed that autism theory?

[bunratty]

The rumor X is not related to Y will spread if there is people get emotional gratification out of it. If people believe they need to change their lifestyle to prevent global warming, then they are very eager to believe that "the warming is not related to burning fossil fuels."

Ironically, changing our lifestyle is one of the least effective ways to reduce use of fossil fuels. We just need to get our energy from other sources and we can keep our comfy lifestyle.