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Time To Remove 'Philosophical' Exemption From Vaccine Requirements?
An anonymous reader writes: Michigan has a problem. Over the past decade, the number of unvaccinated kindergartners has spiked. "Nearly half of the state's population lives in counties with kindergarten vaccination rates below the level needed for "herd immunity," the public health concept that when at least 93 percent of people are vaccinated, their immunity protects the vulnerable and prevents the most contagious diseases from spreading." Surprise, surprise, the state is now in the midst of a whooping cough outbreak. How do these kids get into public schools without being vaccinated? Well, Michigan is among the 19 U.S. states that allow "philosophical" objections to the vaccine requirements for schoolchildren. (And one of the 46 states allowing religious exemption.) A new editorial is now calling for an end to the "philosophical" exemption.
The article says, "Those who choose not to be vaccinated and who choose not to vaccinate their children allow a breeding ground for diseases to grow and spread to others. They put healthy, vaccinated adults at risk because no vaccine is 100 percent effective. They especially put the most vulnerable at risk — infants too young to be vaccinated, the elderly, people with medical conditions that prevent vaccination, and those undergoing cancer treatments or whose immune systems have been weakened." They also encourage tightening the restrictions on religious and medical waivers so that people don't just check a different box on the exemption form to get the same result. "They are free to continue believing vaccines are harmful, even as the entire medical and scientific communities try in vain to tell them otherwise. But they should not be free to endanger the lives of everyone else with their views."
The article says, "Those who choose not to be vaccinated and who choose not to vaccinate their children allow a breeding ground for diseases to grow and spread to others. They put healthy, vaccinated adults at risk because no vaccine is 100 percent effective. They especially put the most vulnerable at risk — infants too young to be vaccinated, the elderly, people with medical conditions that prevent vaccination, and those undergoing cancer treatments or whose immune systems have been weakened." They also encourage tightening the restrictions on religious and medical waivers so that people don't just check a different box on the exemption form to get the same result. "They are free to continue believing vaccines are harmful, even as the entire medical and scientific communities try in vain to tell them otherwise. But they should not be free to endanger the lives of everyone else with their views."
Stupidity and fear.
as a parent myself, i am sympathetic to parents' rights, but if someone refuses to vaccinate their children, schools should refuse to allow them in.
Don't remove the exemption, just exempt the people using the exemption from being able to frequent public areas without protective clothing (protective as in protecting others from them, not protective as in protecting them from everyone else).
Its illegal to be naked in most public places, its illegal to knowingly infect others with dangerous illnesses, so why shouldn't it be illegal to knowingly be in a public place when you are much more open to infection from dangerous illnesses and thus to infect others with them...?
While I think not getting vaccinated is incredibly stupid, I also worry about setting a standard of the government being able to force things in to your body.
We don't have that ability.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
Yeah, I'm totally going to trust a naturalist with no formal training to give me advice on advanced medicine. Especially when they are selling herbal remedies at the same time.
Don't think vaccines are safe? Try polio, rubella, whooping cough, and measles. See how safe you feel when your kid might catch one of those at school.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
A few children? We're talking deaths here. Fuck your illusion of personal freedom.
Mass. Gen Laws ch.76, Â 15:
"In the absence of an emergency or epidemic of disease declared by the department of public health, no child whose parent or guardian states in writing that vaccination or immunization conflicts with his sincere religious beliefs shall be required to present said physicianâ(TM)s certificate in order to be admitted to school."
So there's broad religious exemptions such that anyone willing to claim them can skip the process, but if there is a serious outbreak, then suddenly the exemption goes away. That's not a bad compromise.
I haven't heard of the state ever declaring such an emergency, but I hope they are ready to do so before an outbreak becomes a full epidemic.
If we all got vaccinated, at least we'd have a measure of "nerd immunity".
I cannot hide my incredulity over the fact that Mississippi is one of one only two states that do not permit religious or philosophical exemptions. The other is West Virginia.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
Free country, sure. You're free to be foolish and suffer the consequences. You aren't free to drive on the sidewalk, discharge your firearm at a Walmart for target practice, or take a shit on the president's desk.
Similarly, we should not be free to endanger public health with disease. If you want to remain unvaccinated, do so in your own backwoods shack, away from us. Thanks.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
Here is a rebuttal article http://scienceblogs.com/insole...
I agree. I'm a big supporter of vaccines but one thing I find annoying is that it's almost impossible to find good
numbers for vaccines. Almost everyone knows the numbers for failure rates of birth control as it's pretty easy
to find a chart listing them and their percentages alongside the 85% chance of getting pregnant with no birth
control. Finding a chart like that for vaccines is next to impossible. Why isn't there a chart which shows all
the vaccines, their complication rate, the chance of complication if you catch it, the number of reported cases
in the previous year, what age the vaccine is recommended, etc... Why should we have to instinctively trust the
doctor when I know someone has all these numbers and could easily put them in an easy to read chart?
"I am so glad I didn't get my little Johnny vaccinated. Sure, he died of Measles when he was 3, but at least he didn't catch the autism!"
Everyone else is free to bar you from THEIR offices schools stores transportation businesses hospitals etc
Unless you want to force them, regardless of whether they want it or not.
Let's be clear here. What we're talking about is the extermination of whole species of pathogens.
Won't somebody think of the pathogens?
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Here's my Philosophical objection: if people can be exempt based on religious beliefs I can be exempt because I feel vaccines are bad.
A recent outbreak in Texas (last year, in fact) should have given these folks a heads up! http://www.forbes.com/sites/em...
You do not have a personal freedom to infect others with Yellow Fever, Tuberculosis, Typhoid, or Cholera. Isolation of infectious or potentially infectious individuals has long been the duty of government pubic health programs. The fact that these and others have largely been controlled through vaccination programs and/or improved public sanitation (also a government program) has let people forget the dangers that exist. I am old enough to remember when public places like swimming pools and libraries were closed in the summer due to polio outbreaks (thank you Jonas Salk.) So, while you have a right to risk your children's lives by not vaccinating them, you do not have a right to risk my grandchildren's lives by sending them to public school.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
This is what modern westerners fail to understand. Without childhood immunizations we would be facing hundreds of thousands of childhood deaths each year in the US and Europe from preventable diseases. Our immunization programs have been so successful that modern parents don't know what it was like to loose siblings and classmates to measles or to see friends and relatives crippled by polio and have to be placed in an iron lung.
Yes, vaccines have problems. No, companies should not be sheltered from prosecution for producing dangerous medicines, but lets put everything in perspective. I'll gladly trade a few illnesses or deaths caused by vaccines for the mountain of dead caused by diseases.
http://www.unicef.org/immuniza...
I think the biggest weakness of vaccines is that they were/are so effective. Do you think the anti-vaccine movement would have the strength it has now if polio, whooping cough, measles, etc were as prevalent today as they were pre-vaccines? Of course not. If there was a big threat that your kid could get these diseases at any moment and wind up dead or seriously injured, there would be lines to get vaccinated.
Right now, we're dealing with small outbreaks of disease thanks to the anti-vaccine movement. Sadly, I think it will take a major epidemic before some people accept that vaccines not only prevent disease but that the disease is worse than any imagined "toxins" in the vaccines. I fear that many kids will need to die before the anti-vaccine movement goes away.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Of course it "helped". Its a "theatrical placebo". The more theatrical the placebo, the stronger the effect. Trials have shown that sticking pins in the accepted "acupuncture points" is as effective as sticking them any old place. So all the mumbo-jumbo about "chi" energies is just that.
Surely if it "helped tremendously" you wouldn't be still going after ten years. And TCM was invented by Chairman Mao anyway
How about, if you come down with something, it's your problem for not getting yourself vaccinated.
FFS, the problem isn't the unvaccinated getting sick.
It's the unvaccinated getting those who cannot be vaccinated, have compromised immune systems, or whose vaccination was less than100% effective sick.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Good point.
My wife got quite the little education when she bought some cough "medicine" for our toddler. She complained it didn't help and maybe that was a bad sign. So I get home and see she accidentally got some of that diluted by 10^12 crap, and educated her that she bought $8 of water in a tiny bottle.
The labeling is done to look just like all the real medicines, and unless you are familiar with the whole dilution notation and concept the label appears to indicate it actually has ingredients.
In the end the lesson is that these voodoo whack jobs are a major danger to more than just themselves. As such, they should be better regulated to protect us from their witchcraft.
Government forcing medical procedures on anyone is really not something we want, especially since government won't take responsibility for the (admittedly unlikely) consequences of a bad result.
You mean take responsibility by compensating (the very few) people who are legitimately harmed by a vaccine reaction: National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program
People used to die from smallpox. Now they don't. That's good enough evidence for me.
How many deformed kids did you grow up with due to polio? Zero? Oh, me too. I wonder why that is.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
Logically, if the vaccine really does cure the virus, then the only people affected by an outbreak would be the unvaccinated.
You really need a better understanding of how vaccines work. They do not cure shit. That is called a "cure." A vaccine increases resistance to a virus. This results in either not catching it, or having it pass more quickly. The amount of increase can vary with different people, and in very rare cases it does not increase resistance at all.
But that's clearly not the case.
Well, this statement is correct in it's assessment of your original statement.
So we can't really know that it works as intended.
Yes, we can and we do. On an individual level you can have a titer test to see if you have increased immunity. http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medline... On a global level, we can compare places with high rates of vaccination to low rates and see whooping cough explode in Michigan.
We may have evidence that it sometimes works, but it certainly isn't a slam dunk of a technological advancement (as so many here imply every time it comes up) -- and yet we hear calls to force it on others as if it IS a slam dunk.
It is not digital. It is not "Once in and never again." It causes an increase in immunity in the majority of the population. This results in either immunity or shorter and less sick times. That is known and proven. Also, herd immunity is known and proven, and is a "slam dunk."
What we also don't have is long-term data on the side effects -- only an arrogant display of superiority.
Yes we do. A couple hundred years, actually. The smallpox vaccine was created in 1796. Pertussis in 1927.
You people aren't using logic to support your position.
Methinks the lady doth protest too much.
You're using intimidation.
Well, the facts are intimidating, but it is not us making them facts.
What I see here is hardly a noble call for the betterment of society.
This is probably totally true. Perhaps you should look a little more.
What I see is an arrogant, selfish display of superiority, and an utter disrespect for the basic human right of free choice.
You really do find what you look for. If you try hard enough you can even believe that fury porn is normal.
Instead of demonizing the innocent, why not make an honest donation to the multi-billion dollar businesses that produce and promote these vaccines?
And what does this have to do with the price of tea in China? Or should I just stand on a chair and shout "Strawman! Strawman!"
Put your money where your arrogant mouth is.
I do. I pay for vaccines that are not covered by insurance.
If a rule really is a good idea, then it should apply to everyone. If we can get by with some people not complying, then it doesn't need to be mandatory. Religion has nothing to do with it.
In terms of vaccines, we just need to arrange for consequences. Your kids not vaccinated, and can't demonstrate a medical reason why not? Fine. No public school for them, sorry. Quite probably other benefits are now off-limits, too.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
And certainly not to kill rats! Any level of arsenic in the water supply that would kill rats would kill every PERSON who drinks it in short order!
In fact, the standard for "potable" water, at least in the USA, says that effort should be made to drive the concentration of arsenic in tap water to ZERO.
--PM