Slashdot Mirror
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."
This is what happens when you get extreme partisanship - the other side's knee-jerk reaction to anything is to oppose it. Kind of like a rabid animal will bite anything.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Yet again, we get a GOP primary debate circus solely around Tardisil and the merits of encephalitis over autism. Fuck this party, I'll go Liberta--what's that, Mr. Paul? Oh. You're one of them, too. Shit.
Rand Paul says vaccines cause mental illnesses! I guess that explains libertarianism.
He was obviously speaking off the cuff. One can't expect a sitting governor to have given any prior thought to controversial public health issues that have been in the news for fricking ever.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics... I searched your italicized quote there. First result.
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).
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
But that is part of the problem... really stupid people who think their ignorant, uneducated opinion is as valid as the accumulation of centuries of medical knowledge. You supposedly have a brain.. use it. Learn. Grow. Become a thinking person.
If your car breaks down, you take it to a mechanic; if you travel by airplane, you have a pilot fly the plane; if you get sick, you go to a doctor... not a mechanic, or pilot.... and certainly not a blonde brain-dead ex Playboy playmate who's biggest claim to fame is taking off her cloths so a bunch of horny guys can jerk off to pictures of her.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
The logic behind it was pretty simple. No company makes money on the vaccinations that are required (for the most part), and a few of those vaccinations are made/provided at a loss. Because there are only a few companies that make them, and because of the vaccines vital importance to society, they developed the program to compensate anyone who did have an adverse reaction in lieu of a handful of lawsuits driving those few companies out of business, thereby depriving society of a critical resource.
I am very much against government shielding corporations from legal actions, or being used as the muscle behind (bought) laws that strong-arm citizens.... but in this case, this type of program was needed. The only two options would be to nationalize production of vaccinations, or to let all these diseases decimate the human species into eventual extinction.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
I have an idea.... lets hire a bunch of doctors to use science to figure all that out. We can name them something like The Center for Disease Control.
Unless you are a doctor, or epidemiologist, what you're really saying is you want to argue that your uneducated opinion is as valid as centuries of medical knowledge. They have thought about the ramifications.. decades ago (and still do today). They've thought about what vaccines... decade ago (and still do today). The CDC isn't a drug company.. they don't make money by pushing drugs onto people; there job is to keep people alive, to prevent massive outbreaks, and to try to protect people from their own stupidity.
Sadly, they've sorely underestimated the level of stupidity involved.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
It's funny you mention a rabid animal...
We now live in a country where if I choose not to get my dog vaccinated against rabies, not only am I fined, but am legally responsible for the medical care costs of anyone my dog infects.
But if I choose not to vaccinate my child and they get someone else sick, then it's OK, because it was my *choice*.
The inescapable conclusion in my mind is that we care more for the welfare of our dog population than we do our human one.
The Demagoguery over this issue is breath taking.
If you recall, Rick Perry mandated HPV vaccinations in 2007.
Lots of people totally lost their shit over this despite the fact that HPV can cause cancer and the vaccine is effective and not just because of donations. The term parental choice was thrown around a lot.
Many people in the news on their high horse about Christie 's comments are the same ones who were shitting bricks about Perry''s mandate. Hell, even Obama was on the fence about vaccinations in 2008.
So file all this under Complete and Utter Presidential Race Bullshit.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
No vaccine is 100% effective.
That's very clearly the case. We used to have a really useful and highly effective vaccine that gave protection against the root cause of the problem we are discussing here: ignorance. The vaccine was education. Sadly as this has been watered down it has become less effective with the result that we now see increasing outbreaks of ignorance worldwide resulting in new symptoms such as intelligent design and not having your kids vaccinated as well as some old symptoms, like astrology, re-emerging.
Sadly governments have not responded to this by once again strengthening the vaccine, education, that has protected us for so long. Instead they seem to prefer to treat each individual symptom of the disease by passing laws. This is simply not going to work: already new strains of ignorance, such as intelligent design, have proven remarkably resistant to this treatment and have started to attack the education vaccine directly weakening its effectiveness further.