California Senate Approves School Vaccine Bill

mpicpp writes: California state senators have passed a controversial bill designed to increase school immunization rates. SB277 would prohibit parents from seeking vaccine exemptions for their children because of religious or personal beliefs. California would join West Virginia and Mississippi as the only states with such requirements if the bill becomes law. "SB 277 is about increasing immunization rates so no one will have to suffer from vaccine-preventable diseases," said Sen. Ben Allen (D- Santa Monica) who coauthored the bill with Sen. Richard Pan (D-Sacramento).

Comments

Re:Now if only the rest of the country would follo

[Mister Transistor]

This is true, I'm glad someone said it. Especially the part about the shot line in the military being different.

I did the same thing when joining the Navy and me and most of my company were sick as hell for a week or so. But, they immunize you instead of simple MMR, for dozens of things including exotic jungle rots and things like malaria, etc. Things that you would never encounter if you stayed in the USA, and weren't in some muddy jungle or strange desert somewhere with their localized exotic diseases.

Re:I can see this running afoul of....

[Defenestrar]

I think it was the Rehnquist court that developed a "conviction test" that was pretty useful. (i.e. It was something like not bending your conviction even when faced with pressures or threats by all of the following: state, peers, family, death, etc...). By that test, many people do not hold religious convictions - especially with respect to the law. I could be thinking of another Justice though... IANAL. It's got me curious again, I'll have to hit Google later, or perhaps one of my books to find that test.

Higher immunization rates in South America than US

[PeterM from Berkeley]

Hello,

    I hate to inject some facts into your prejudice, but it's a sad fact that large swaths of South America have higher immunization rates for measles (as an example) than the US does.

    Even Mexico is only 2% behind US vaccination rates on measles. Check it out:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

--PeterM

Re:Common sense prevails! (Only Partially!)

[nbauman]

Actually the federal government's National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program has a reasonable basis.

There are 2 kinds of vaccine injuries:

(1) The avoidable injuries that come from the manufacturer clearly violating the good manufacturing procedures, like improperly filtering the vaccine preparation or letting it get infected.

(2) The inevitable injuries that come even when the manufacturer does everything right, meets the good manufacturing procedures. That's because the immune system is complicated, and we don't understand everything about it. (Furthermore, they sometimes have to make tradeoffs between a vaccine that protects you better from the infectious disease, but has more adverse effects, and a vaccine that has fewer adverse effects, but doesn't protect you from the infectious disease as well.)

I think the inevitable serious injuries occur at the rate of 1 in a million vaccinations. These are the kids who just drew an unlucky lottery ticket. Nobody's wrong.

There were a lot of problems with the vaccine program, and manufacturers stopped making a lot of vaccines, because they were getting hit with big-dollar product liability lawsuits. Some of them were justified, some of them weren't, and some of them, nobody knows, because the immune system is complicated, and we don't understand everything about it.

In order to encourage manufacturers to make vaccines, and parents to vaccinate their kids, the federal government set up what amounts to a no-fault program. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

They listed a lot of known serious complications that everybody agreed were caused by vaccines. Kids with those complications were automatically compensated, and it was fairly generous compensation, designed to match what they would get if they went to court and won. That's worked pretty well.

The idea is, if a kid gets vaccinated, in order to protect society as a whole, and draws the unlucky lottery ticket, then society ought to insure him for that bad luck. That's the proper role of insurance.

Then along come the parents whose kids have serious complications where people don't agree it was caused by vaccines. Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't, and sometimes (usually) nobody knows. Those go to a special vaccine court. From the occasional articles I've read about it, they seem to be pretty generous in giving the injured child the benefit of the doubt. I can accept that. It's better to err on the side of compensating people who don't deserve it, than err on the side of not compensating people who do deserve it. But they held the line at the vaccine-autism connection, and rejected those cases.

Re:Does anyone else see the irony?

[Anonymous Coward]

The evidence that Measles vaccines work is... not really convincing. There is no blinded RCT (despite the claims of Merck, follow their refs), and the observational data is suspect due to at least two reasons 1) Lack of correlation between different lab tests and clinician diagnosis 2) The loss in popularity of Measles parties. Together these can account for >99% reduction in incidence. However, these factors have not really been studied.

People prefer to jump to conclusions, which is not scientific. In science we need to rule out alternative explanations. I think the bar to be considered a "successful" vaccine is currently much too low to justify any mandatory use. My mind can be changed by studies ruling out those alternative explanations or a successful quantitative prediction derived from the current vaccine theory. Another problem is the simultaneous mass vaccinations performed in the 1960s may have been successful in interrupting the virus transmission, but this is not the same approach to vaccination used today (giving it to children "as they come").

I've posted this list a few times on this site. I welcome any peer reviewed literature to add to it that addresses or adds to my concerns listed above.

“A likely reason for this is that the case may have been misdiagnosed as a non-specific viral illness. Measles has become relatively uncommon in Singapore with two decades of widespread measles vaccination, and especially after the second dose policy was implemented in 1998. Many primary care doctors may not even see a single case of measles in a year. This makes diagnosis more difficult.”

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17609829

“This was not a blind study, since the investigators knew which children had received measles vaccine. It seems probable that the occurrence of so much ‘measles-like’ illness in the vaccinated children was a reflexion of the difficulty in making a firm diagnosis of measles in the African child at one visit.”

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2134550/

“As only approximately 7% of the clinically-diagnosed cases of measles reported locally turned out to be measles by laboratory testing, there is a need for laboratory confirmation of measles to avoid misidentification of cases and improve disease surveillance.(2)”

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17609829

“Before the introduction of measles vaccines, measles virus infected 95%–98% of children by age 18 years [1–4], and measles was considered an inevitable rite of passage. Exposure was often actively sought for children in early school years because of the greater severity of measles in adults.”

http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/content/189/Supplement_1/S4.full

"“It is evident from Table IV that many children in all three groups were unwell and that the proportion was greatest in the live-vaccine group (61 %), less in the killed/live-vaccine group (54%), and least in the unvaccinated group (38%)...
Table VI shows the cases of measles reported by the parents and those seen and diagnosed by the doctor. Of the total cases reported the doctor saw about 60%, and, of these, confirmed the parents' diagnosis in 93 % in the control group, 64% in the killed/live-vaccine group, and 70% in the live vaccine group."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1843609/

"Measles
Evidence from cohort studies
Effectiveness against measles was investigated in three cohort studies (Marin 2006; Marolla 1998; Ong 2007)...
There was a lack of adequate description of exposure (vaccine content and schedules) in all cohort studies. Another recurring problem was the failure of any study to provide descriptions of all outcomes monitored. A lack of clarity in reporting and systematic bias made comparab

Re:Now if only the rest of the country would follo

[Harlequin80]

Ummmm I think you are talking crap.

http://www.cdc.gov/rotavirus/s...

Prior to the vaccine, almost all U.S. children were infected with rotavirus before their 5th birthday. Each year, among U.S. children younger than 5 years of age, rotavirus led to

more than 400,000 doctor visits,
more than 200,000 emergency room visits,
55,000 to 70,000 hospitalizations, and
20 to 60 deaths.

Also from the CDC website - Rotavirus vaccine risks - http://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafe...

  It is possible that an estimated 1 to 3 U.S. infants out of 100,000 might develop intussusception within 7 days of getting their first dose of rotavirus vaccine. That means 40 to 120 vaccinated U.S. infants might develop intussusception each year.

What the fuck is intussusception?
a medical condition in which a part of the intestine invaginates (folds into) into another section of intestine

Treatment?
The intussusception can be treated with either a barium or water-soluble contrast enema or an air-contrast enema, which both confirms the diagnosis of intussusception, and in most cases successfully reduces it. The success rate is over 80%. The remaining 20% require surgery.

So to summarise
Prior to the rotavirus vaccine there were 55,000+ hospitalisations and 20+ deaths per year due to rotavirus. Post vaccine your worst case risk is a minor surgery which occurs 8 to 24 times a year. I think I know which I would prefer.
 

Re:Now if only the rest of the country would follo

[stevelinton]

There is no evidence for risks of clustering that I am aware of. On the other hand not clustering means, at least, more risk of individual children missing shots due to greater complexity, more visits to doctors with more risk of infection with unrelated diseases and more cost, which could be spent on other public health measures that would presumably reduce other risks.

If you do think clustering vaccines adds risk, there is a fairly straightforward, if somewhat lengthy, route to address this.

First get a PhD in virology or some other appropriate discipline and a suitable job.

Next, carefully design a series of experiments that will help answer your question and get relevant approvals for it (ethics, safety,....)

Now apply for an NIH (or your country's equivalent) grant to perform it.

Perform it, analyse the results, publish them.

If they show significant extra risk from clustering, then, after a little bit of bureaucratic inertia while people find out about and understand your study and try and work out what changes to procedures would reflect it without risk elsewhere, the chances are clustering would be reduced.