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New Jersey Gov. Christie: Parents Should Have Choice In Vaccinations
kwyjibo87 writes: New Jersey Governor and self-appointed public health expert Chris Christie weighed in on the public debate over whether or not parents should have a choice in vaccinating their children, telling reporters in the U.K., "I also understand that parents need to have some measure of choice in things as well, so that's the balance that the government has to decide." He added, "Not every vaccine is created equal and not every disease type is as great a public health threat as others." These statements from Gov. Christie follow President Obama commenting in an interview with NBC: "There is every reason to get vaccinated — there aren't reasons to not."
Gov. Christie quickly backpedaled on his "vaccine choice" comments, with the Governor's office stating, "The Governor believes vaccines are an important public health protection and with a disease like measles there is no question kids should be vaccinated," but amending: "At the same time different states require different degrees of vaccination, which is why he was calling for balance in which ones government should mandate."
Gov. Christie quickly backpedaled on his "vaccine choice" comments, with the Governor's office stating, "The Governor believes vaccines are an important public health protection and with a disease like measles there is no question kids should be vaccinated," but amending: "At the same time different states require different degrees of vaccination, which is why he was calling for balance in which ones government should mandate."
Rand Paul says vaccines cause mental illnesses! I guess that explains libertarianism.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics... I searched your italicized quote there. First result.
How can an unvaccinated kid infect and kill your child if your child was vaccinated?
No vaccine is 100% effective. So "herd immunity" still marginally benefits the vaccinated.
Vaccination rates are highest in red states. Vaccination exemptions are highest in the west coast, New England, MI, and WI. If he's courting the evangelical vote, he's doing it wrong. But then, Christie has been pretty vocal in his disdain for conservatives.
In that exceedingly rare circumstance, there is the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.
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Vaccinations do not prevent you from being infected; They significantly reduce the likelihood of you being infected from any given exposure to the disease. If everyone is vaccinated this results in the disease dying back due to the infection rate being too low to sustain the disease, meaning everyone is less likely to be exposed. However, if there are many who are not vaccinated the dieback doesn't happen because there are enough easily-infected people around to keep the disease alive. Even though you might be vaccinated and more resistant to infection than if you weren't, if you come into contact with infected people over and over you stand a chance of being infected yourself.
Uhhh, HPV is the cause of huge numbers of deaths each year. A quick google reveals that cervical cancer rates are 2.3 per 100,000 women per year, aka 3500 deaths a year in the US alone. HPV is the root cause of over 90% of those cancers.
I searched your italicized quote there. First result.
Thank you.
It looks like he's talking about Reye's Syndrome, a pathology that can cause substantial brain damage (and/or other things: Liver damage, death, ...) in children - adults generally recover fully after a couple weeks. (I wanted to be sure he hadn't signed on to the immunization/autism claims, which have been thoroughly discredited.)
Reye/Reye's is a reasonably rare side effect of several viral illnesses, including immunizations for them. Risk of it seems to be multiplied by a factor of something like five if aspirin is taken, but aspirin (or other salicylates) is not necessary for its occurrence. It seems also to be associated with pre-existing metabolic disorders, so some families might be at very high risk while others effectively immune.
It's clear from even the soundbite posted: Rand's claim is that the decision to risk a child's health is properly the parents', and the government should not be able to force the child's exposure to a series of these risks over the parents' objections - informed or otherwise.
Immunizations are partly about population immunity - reducing the density of people susceptible to a disease to the point that it peters out in a declining exponential rather than blowing up in an expanding exponential, thus also protecting those not (yet) immunized, for whom the immunization was ineffective, or who were at risk despite the availability of immunization (e.g. AIDS sufferers). So risk/benefit calculations are for populations as well. Accepting the risk of the immunization helps others as well as the immunized person, so being immunized is partly an altruistic act.
Rand's point is that he believes the government shouldn't have the power to FORCE people to risk their lives for the benefit of others, that these life-critical decisions are personal and should be left up to the people in question (or their guardians if they're too young to make the choice themselves).
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Don't vaccinate your kids, and they are not allowed in a school, daycare, public park or anywhere else where they may come into contact with other children who cannot be vaccinated due to medical reasons and rely on herd immunity for their safety, or infants who are to young to be vaccinated..
Fixed it a little bit for you, but I agree with you so much. Choose not to vaccinate your kids and face the consequences: I don't want unvaccinated kids in my child's daycare, preschool or school. The government mandates that I take my child to school, and I have every right to expect that her safety is taken care of. That includes the threat of unvaccinated children.
No vaccine is 100% effective. Even vaccinated kids can contract a disease they've been vaccinated against. The risk is much lower (vaccines are over 99.9% effective) but its still a risk. In the recent measles outbreak at Disney that had 95 confirmed cases, at least 6 were confirmed to be vaccinated against measles.
This is one reason I'm glad that in my country, Australia, an MMR vaccination (Measles, Mumps and Rubella) is mandatory unless you have a damn good reason not to get one (and being an idiot isn't good enough).
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
In addition to the other responses - every non-vaccinated person who contracts the disease increases the chance that said disease mutates into a form the vaccine can no longer protect against.
And one more: Not everyone who is vaccinated actually becomes immune. Vaccines are highly effective, but they're not 100%.
There are lots of reasons that herd immunity is really important.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
The libertarian answer is pretty clear: nobody has a right to force you to inject stuff into your body. However, people of course have the right to exclude you from their private property (including schools, private roads, private developments, etc.) if you aren't vaccinated. That approach gets the government out of deciding which vaccines you should take and which you shouldn't.
I'm used to finding hidden biases in summaries (and articles they are quoted verbatim from), but this one is pretty obvious.
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm all about vaccinations and feel that anti-vaxers are idiots, but I'm a little leery of government making health decisions for my kids.
You are also making health decisions for the kids around your kids.
If the government can tell your kids what vaccinations they must receive, what's next?
The things you mention are just unrealistic. Any government who tried any of thet would be out of office next election. The thing is that if a small percentage of the kids who can be vaccinated do not it increases the danger to those who can not be vaccinated. Most people understand that and no government would be voted out of office for requiring vaccines in schools. The government can mandate what is required for your kids to go to school. If you don't vaccinate you need to school your kids elsewhere. You have that choice.
Where do you draw the line?
The line is easy to draw. It is where your health choices effect other children who do not have that choice. Those children being the ones who can not be vaccinated. It is similar to the peanut ban in most schools. It is a choice whether or not to bring peanuts but it is not a choice to be allergic to peanuts.
Once you draw that line, why can't it be crossed or moved?
It can be moved by more information. If crossed the consequences are not being allowed in schools, daycares, etc.
A couple of studies presented last year at the annual meeting of the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology suggest that the vast majority (361 out of 384 in one study, and 38 out of 38 in a second) of people who think they're allergic to penicillin aren't actually allergic to it.
Granted, both are small samples and it's hardly a look at allergies in general, but it does raise questions about the actual incidence of allergies.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
"I'm a little leery of government making health decisions for my kids"
The point is that vaccination is as much an individual health issue as an epidemiologic one. And government _is_ the entity we citizenship use for that kind of global decisions.
People conflate "side effect" with allergy. Urticaria (hives) is an allergy to penicillin. Nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting is a side effect
While there are some legitimate reasons for homeschooling, the homeschool movement in the US is composed mostly of religious nutters who are afraid public school will make their children realise a man cannot survive inside a fish's stomach for three days.
Olivia, my eldest daughter, caught measles when she was seven years old. As the illness took its usual course I can remember reading to her often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it. Then one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn't do anything.
"Are you feeling all right?" I asked her.
"I feel all sleepy," she said.
In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead.
Read the rest on https://roalddahl.com/roald-da...
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The quotes posted above show that this can plausibly account for up to 99% reduction in diagnosed measles cases.
That's not good enough. You need to explain three orders of magnitude reduction in measles cases not two. Introduction of the measles vaccine explains the actual reduction of cases seen.
a blinded RCT is missing
In other words, let's deliberately infect a lot of unimmunized children with measles just so we can get another significant digit on our knowledge of how effective the measles vaccine is.
We ran through this argument before (caution this thread is infinitely deep, it just keeps going and going). The only difference is that now your collection of imaginary reasons why the vaccine doesn't work now stretches to cover two orders of magnitude rather than one order of magnitude. It however needs to cover more than three orders of magnitude.