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Mississippi - the Nation's Leader In Vaccination Rates
HughPickens.com writes The NYT reports that Mississippi — which ranks as one of the worst states for smoking, obesity and physical inactivity — seldom is viewed as a leader on health issues. But it is one of two states that permit neither religious nor philosophical exemptions to its vaccination program. Only children with medical conditions that would be exacerbated by vaccines may enroll in Mississippi schools without completing the immunization schedule, which calls for five vaccines. With a vaccination rate of greater than 99.7%, Mississippi leads the national median by five percentage points and has the country's highest immunization rate among kindergarten students.
However, in recent weeks, the nearly unbending nature of Mississippi's law requiring students to be vaccinated has been in jeopardy, with two dozen lawmakers publicly supporting an exemption for "conscientious beliefs" turning Mississippi into one more battleground between medical experts who champion vaccinations and parents who fear the government's role in medical decision-making. "We have been a victim of our success, and people don't realize how bad these diseases are," said Mississippi state epidemiologist, Dr. Thomas E. Dobbs III, before lawmakers met to consider a bill that would have expanded exceptions to the vaccine requirement. Members of the education committee for the House of Representatives, in effect, endorsed the state's current approach. By a voice vote, they advanced a heavily amended version of the bill that now calls for only technical changes to Mississippi's law, which has been largely untouched since the late 1970s. The amended version of House Bill 130 puts into law the state's existing practice of granting medical waivers to children whose physicians request them, and in doing so, removes the Mississippi Department of Health's ability to deny such requests. "If a medical professional thinks it's wise not to vaccinate, then that will be the gospel," said House Education Committee Chairman John Moore, R-Brandon.
However, in recent weeks, the nearly unbending nature of Mississippi's law requiring students to be vaccinated has been in jeopardy, with two dozen lawmakers publicly supporting an exemption for "conscientious beliefs" turning Mississippi into one more battleground between medical experts who champion vaccinations and parents who fear the government's role in medical decision-making. "We have been a victim of our success, and people don't realize how bad these diseases are," said Mississippi state epidemiologist, Dr. Thomas E. Dobbs III, before lawmakers met to consider a bill that would have expanded exceptions to the vaccine requirement. Members of the education committee for the House of Representatives, in effect, endorsed the state's current approach. By a voice vote, they advanced a heavily amended version of the bill that now calls for only technical changes to Mississippi's law, which has been largely untouched since the late 1970s. The amended version of House Bill 130 puts into law the state's existing practice of granting medical waivers to children whose physicians request them, and in doing so, removes the Mississippi Department of Health's ability to deny such requests. "If a medical professional thinks it's wise not to vaccinate, then that will be the gospel," said House Education Committee Chairman John Moore, R-Brandon.
Parents are granted a tremendous amount of leeway over what to do with their children. But at the end of the day, children are not "things" for parents to do with as they wish. They're people. A parent may have a sincere and deeply held belief that children don't actually need to eat, that if they meditate enough they can gather the energy they need from the sun. But that doesn't mean that Child Protective Services aren't going to get involved if the parents refuse to feed their child. No, there's no easy definition for where the line between parental rights / belief dominate and where child abuse begins should be. But there must be a line.
And ignoring the fact that the person we're talking about here is too young to make informed decisions, even if that wasn't the case, it still wouldn't be a reasonable argument. Even if we were talking about adults, while you're free to endanger yourself to your heart's content, you don't have the right to endanger others. You may feel that drunk driving is perfectly safe and it's just your personal choice and drunk driving laws are an infliction on your freedom of movement, but the law sees it differently for damned good reason, and you will be punished if caught. Want to endanger yourself? Fine, go do it. Want to endanger me? Nope, and thank $DEITY that there are laws and law enforcement to stop you. You don't have an inalienable right to put your neighbors at risk of mowing them over with your car, and you don't have an inalienable right to walk around them as a disease vector.
I would have you sign my banana, but it's on the roof.
Its because they don't have internet, so don't know they should be scared of vaccinations.
Your "conscientious" rights don't include the right to put other kids who *can't* get immunized at risk (or adults who weren't immunized as kids). If you want to conscientiously object to getting your kid immunized, then a school should have the right to conscientiously refuse to admit your kid. Create a special conscientious school or something and keep the fuck away from the rest of us.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
I think medicaid could be a factor. I'm from Canada, so I really like my tax funded healthcare. I think that specifically funding certain things like vaccinations to assure that everybody can receive them without cost is a huge advantage to the entire country. I can see why some people wouldn't want to pay for somebody else's knee surgery, or heart transplant if they brought it on themselves by their own lifestyle, but things like vaccinations help the entire population, are just about every person is born susceptible to these diseases. So it makes sense to make sure that as many people as possible are immunized. If somebody isn't immunized, then even the rich people who are insured are at risk in the event that their infants are too young to be vaccinated, or couldn't be vaccinated because of medical complications.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I'm no antivaxxer, but do they have the lowest rates of autism, or merely the lowest /diagnosed/ rates? Given their poverty one can imagine fewer people going to the doctor in those states.
By "moderate anti-vaxxer", you mean "I've got Dunning-Kruger and think I know more than doctors and scientists who study this for a living". You're hardly the only slashdotter who wrongly thinks he's smarter than actual experts.
"I'm a moderate anti-vaxxer"
In other words, you're only somewhat stupid?
If somebody isn't immunized, then even the rich people who are insured are at risk in the event that their infants are too young to be vaccinated, or couldn't be vaccinated because of medical complications.
The self-indulgent rich are actually a huge part of the vaccination problem. Check out where some of the latest outbreaks have been- Hollywood, Disney world, etc- not places for people with no money.
A journalist named Seth Mnookin wrote a book, "The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science and Fear", and was Interviewed recently:
Further:
There's also a great comment attached, by a poster named 'Tom Billings (qualifications unknown)', that gets into the causes of autism: Genetic
Actually, it's simpler than that. It's just very unpopular, because it says things about humans we don't like to hear. You don't need government subsidizing something for it to increase. That is only one cause of some increases in some things.
The genes associated with autism are mostly SNPs and single folds. Single nucleotide polymorphisms and single folds are single mutation events. You would expect those to be just as common throughout history as a result. So, why don't we see in the past the same rates of autism we see today? It's brutally simple. The children born with such genetic differences mostly didn't survive to reproductive age. They were murdered.
His comment goes on and it's worth a read.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
I've found very few MDs who have any kind of listening skills. I've known some brilliant ones. But many of them are shills for the drug companies, pushing unnecessary drugs and just all-around being ineffective. We're told to revere doctors, but the reality is that MDs are not scientists -- they're technicians, and often not terribly skilled ones. These facts are not lost on their patents. People just don't trust doctors. Vaccines are just one more dubious thing that MDs push on us.
This distrust of the medical profession totally understandable, and you shouldn't call people morons for feeling this way. Most people are not scientists who can do their own research. Their only source of information is these doctors they don't like. If we want to fix the vaccination problem, we have to fix the doctors and get them to stop doing stupid things like prescribing antidepressants for autoimmune diseases. [*]
The science of vaccines is solid. As with anything, it's not entirely risk-free, but the risks are worth the benefits for protection against some serious diseases. It's also irresponsible to put other people at risk. IF (huge IF) there is any correlation with autism, that correlation is miniscule compared to the effects of the other shit we put in our bodies (horrible American diet, pollution, etc.). But people are much more willing to skip a vaccination appointment than not eat that Big Mac.
Incidentally, I heard recently something interesting about flu shots. If those who decide which viruses are being innoculated against predict them correctly, then flu shots work great. If, on the other hand, their predictions are too far off the mark, the flu shot may actually make you MORE vulnerable to viruses that they missed. Of course, you should verify this claim before deciding not to get a flu shot. This isn't a matter of effectiveness of vaccines but rather an issue of getting the right ones.
[*] In medical school doctors are expliclty taught that if someone comes in with a constellation of symptoms, especially if they have them written down, then that person is a hypochondriac. The thing is, auto-immune diseases are not exactly a 1-in-a-million phenomenon. Hashimoto's and Lupus are quite well understood. They come with constellations of symptoms, and they also come with brain fog, which basically forces people to write down their symptoms. My wife had to perform her own differential diagnosis based on the symptoms to determine (abductively) that Hashimoto's is the clear best explanation, but nevertheless, she had to fight with one of the few endocrinologists in the area just to get tested. Of course she tested positive, but even in the face of the evidence, this doctor still doesn't want to engage in any kind of treatment plan. Why? Because endocrinologists make all their money from pushing drugs on diabetics and have no interest in anything else.
That's amazing. What an amazing story. Get this out to the scientific community pronto, they've been pissing about doing studies of tens of thousands of people for decades, but fuck that, because you got sick a bit as a kid and now that you haven't been vaccinated you don't get sick. So yeah let's chuck the vaccines, based on what you think you experienced.
TLDR anecdotes count for precisely fuck-all.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
The Onion as usual got right to the core of it :)
"Regardless of what anyone else thinks, I fully stand behind my choices as a mom, including my choice not to vaccinate my son, because it is my fundamental right as a parent to decide which eradicated diseases come roaring back."
Vaccine refusers are some of the most odious, self-entitled pricks on this planet.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Most of the antivaxxers I know are more inclined towards the right. Some poster above commented with a link to a study confirming this statistically, but my anecdotal experience tells me that evangelical, organic, don't trust science OR government types are the primary culprits of this kind of thinking.
It really comes from a mix of ignorance and arrogance - people don't even know enough about science, medicine, or history to have a clue how wrong they are about every aspect of this decision. It's basically a textbook example of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
When I was a kid I got a lot of vaccines. My income was zero. Now I get almost no vaccines and my income has skyrocketed.
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