Slashdot Mirror
Mutant Registration vs. Vaccine Registration
Responding to an editorial endorsing a national vaccine registry in Canada (though the same kind of registry could be and has been proposed in the U.S. with the same logic), an anonymous reader writes "Vaccine Registration makes me think of Mutant and Superhero registration. The reasons are similar. It's based on fear and misinformation. People fear that unvaccinated people will doom us all. Sound familiar? The difference is this is real. (Oh, and they probably won't use sentinels to track down the dangerous unvaccinated folks.) Thoughts?"
From the linked editorial: "A national vaccination registry would identify which Canadians have been fully vaccinated, those who have received less than a full dose of shots, and those who have not been vaccinated at all. Having a vaccine registry in place in the event of an outbreak of measles, whooping cough, and diseases like these would enable public health officials to identify the children and adults who need vaccinations. Getting them the shots they need would reduce the risk of anyone on the list getting sick, and would also reduce the threat of an outbreak in the community in which they live or travel to [and] from."
In the U.S., immunization records — at least, ones which have been put in electronic form at all — are maintained in a mix of databases, including at the state level, or maintained by cities, or by insurance companies and medical providers. Here, some people (like the reader who submitted this story) also see a potential for unwarranted privacy invasion in a national vaccination registry; however, their case isn't helped by often being tied to opposition to vaccination more generally.
Look, if you're a luddite and have chosen to not be vaccinated against infectious diseases, you are a public health risk.
If I or my children get sick due to contact with you, I want legal recourse against you.
If you are un-immunized, you really have no business going into places like hospitals where you will put the lives of others at risk.
If you solely bore the risk of not being immunized, and only you and your family might become ill -- well, good for you, you'll take yourself out of the gene pool and do us all a favor.
But, if you're a moron who hasn't vaccinated your children because you've been listening to Jenny McCarthy, I don't want you or your children anywhere me or my family.
You want to be a plague carrier? Fine, but you can't go into public.
Diseases which had been mostly eradicated which are suddenly making a resurgence are entirely due to idiots who think the vaccine is going to give them another disease. You're entitled to your stupid beliefs, but you are not entitled to spread disease.
If you choose to exercise your right to not be immunized, you give up some of your rights as far as you could infect others.
The reasons are similar. It's based on fear and misinformation
No, it's based on facts. It's the anti-vaxxers who operate based on misinformation.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
A Vancouver father is calling on parents to vaccinate their children for chickenpox after his son nearly died from the disease while his immune system was compromised during chemotherapy.
Jason Lawson's 10-year-old son Beckett has been in and out of hospital for most of his life for cancer treatment, but Lawson says one of the scariest moments came when the boy caught chickenpox from a classmate at school.
Sure, the fundamentals are similar - building a list of people who are threats to the health of the rest of the population.
But, while super/mutant power are generally something innate and unselected, not getting vaccinated is, by and large, a choice.
If you are making a choice to ignore what science has earned human society, and that choice is putting other people at risk, get on the list.
Additionally, if I could not get vaccinated against something for some specific medical reason, I'd want to be on a list to be notified in case of an outbreak, so that I could lock myself away until it passed.
Go for a little walk, breathe some fresh air.
#DeleteChrome
Except when what can make you sick, can make others sick or even kill them.
If you want the ability to walk around un-immunized and risk your life, maybe you should have to accept civil and criminal liability in the event someone else gets sick.
Because if you being un-immunized causes people to die, and you knew that was a possibility, well, sounds like manslaughter to me.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I'm trying to keep track of what kind of registries are acceptable for each (US) political party
No Fly Registry: It's Our Patriotic Duty (D&R)
Gun Owner Registry: Acceptable for (D), Unacceptable for (R)
Legal-to-work-in-US Registry: Acceptable for (R), Unacceptable for (D)
National ID card: Acceptable for (D), Unacceptable for (R)
Vaccination Registry: Acceptable for (D), Unacceptable for (R)
Superhero Registry: It's Our Patriotic Duty
Mutant Registry: Ditto
Windows Registry: Can't run Windows without it, and what else would you run?
The government has NO RIGHT to know what will and won't make me sick.
On the contrary, the government has every right to assure you are vaccinated. Your ignorant and paranoid refusal to be vaccinated threatens the health of others. The threat you pose if you are not vaccinated is not some misguided rant of a paranoid, but a real and present medical danger.
.
If you do not want to get vaccinated, then go live in complete isolation, far, far away from those who want their children to be healthy. The moment you choose to interact with society, then you have a responsibility not to make that society sick.
Reading the comments from the antivax croud on that site makes me think that conspiracy theorists are the biggest danger to society, it's willful anti-scientific, anti-intellectualism.
These people will gleefully sail us into the abyss, blaming everyone else all the way down.
Yes, this is just misplaced paranoia. Vaccinations are legitimate public health information.
Just no. That is to say, yes they are legitimate public health information. But no, it is not paranoia.
Registrations of one kind or another are extremely prone to government abuse. And it isn't valid to say "I know my government representatives and they would never do such a thing." Because you do not know all future government administrations and whether they would do such a thing.
And if you genuinely cannot imagine how government could conceivably abuse this information, then you shouldn't be speaking up at all. Should everybody be vaccinated? What about people with other health conditions who cannot tolerate the vaccine? Pushing the issue might actually be harmful to some peoples' health in exchange for little if any real societal benefit. Beyond a certain critical mass of vaccinations, additional vaccinations are subject to diminishing returns.
I was never a great fan of LBJ, but I will leave you with probably one of the greatest things he ever said:
"You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered." -- Lyndon B. Johnson
This is the most insane, paranoid thing I've ever seen posted on Slashdot. And that's saying a lot.