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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).
I expect to see a lot of anti vaxx outrage and legal challenges, but this is a good first step.
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Infectious diseases don't pay attention to your religion or any of your other crackpot obsessions about autism or mercury or whatever this week's flavor of craziness is.
So the prevention of said diseases shouldn't either.
Not really considering that California is the very definition of lack of common sense.
-- Slashdot, making the Left look conservative since 1997.
There's a problem with this: It destroys the concept of law entirely, because for every law there exists a person somewhere who has a religion that demands they disobey the law.
"My religion prohibits the use of electricity, so I can't install a fire alarm in my business to meet state building regulations."
"My religion requires I capture an endangered species for ritual sacrifice."
"I had to kill by baby in the microwave, I sensed he was possessed by a demon."
"My religion prohibits paying taxes, because all my property is just being held on behalf of God."
"My religion requires I kill innocent citizens to defend my people against their country."
"I know my daughter was critically ill, but my religion does not allow me to seek medical treatment, as it shows a lack of faith in God."
All of these are real cases - and those are just in the US. These situations show that freedom of religion cannot be absolute, because absolute freedom of religion renders every area of law effectively meaningless: You would be able to literally get away with murder by claiming you believed it to be a religious mission.
I am all for free speech and entitlement to personal opinion. But the very role of government and public policy is to have a rational and objective view on what is reasonable for citizens to do and not do as part of civil society. It is not to merely sway with the wind and throw up one's hands and say, well, we can't offend anyone's beliefs so we shouldn't do our jobs for fear of being voted out of office.
It is high time that both we as citizens and we as government not put up with or enable a small ridiculous minority of extremist views to hold the rest of society hostage, with the threat of lawsuits.
There is such a thing as being overly reasonable. And there are many more issues that don't rise to this level of publicity, that policy makers give in to, for fear of negative repercussions, rather than doing the right thing.
No, there are not "legitimate concerns" about childhood vaccination.
Ah, but this is what comes from nonsense like "teach the controversy!" and from a mistaken notion that the phrase "there are two sides to a story" means that all views must be equal.
Not really considering that California is the very definition of lack of common sense.
If Californians lack common sense, my dear Ageoffri then Texans, Georgians, Floridians and all the other people living in bible belt states are congenital idiots.
First, it IS an assault on religious freedom despite what proponents will tell you. You may think people with religious objections to vaccination (one or all of them) are nuts (and they may very well be) but that does not give the government the right to violate their freedom to do stupid things. It's called liberty. You may not like other's choices, but you MUST give them the choice.
No it's not. They can still choose not to vaccinate their kids in accordance to their beliefs. They just aren't allowed to send their kids to public schools.
There are some legitimate concerns about child vaccination.
Any legitimate concerns about child vaccinations have been addressed for a very long time now. Every study that comes out continues to prove how safe and effective vaccines are. They prove beyond any legitimate doubt that vaccines are so effective that the very small segment of the population that cannot tolerate them are effectively shielded by the herd immunity. There are absolutely no legitimate studies that question the safety and effectiveness of vaccines.
On the other hand, there is an epidemic of willful ignorance when it comes to vaccinations. A large segment of the population flat out refuses to believe that they've been duped by someone trying to sell something. They refuse to admit that the science is overwhelming and undeniable. They flat out refuse to acknowledge facts staring them in the face. But, sadly, that's a disease that is impossible to overcome.
The federal laws passed in the mid-80s that insulate the responsibility of vaccine creating companies to flaws in their products needs to rescinded or heavily revised.
It is the fact that the companies creating these vaccines are largely not culpable for their products that has driven the anti-VAX movement. FIX THAT or this law will be ignored.
No. The anti-vax movement has been largely driven by greed, stupidity, and the parents need to "blame" someone.
What's lost in most discussions of the fraud doctor in Britain is that he was trying to discredit the current vaccination regime so he could push his own = greed. Parents, preferred listening to that jackhole and dipshit blondes who's only claim to fame is stripping for cash instead of medical professionals with actual knowledge = stupidity. The whole blame game is the demented way humans interact with seemingly everything. Their child has autism = it MUST be someones fault.... which in reality is just more stupidity.
The companies that produce these vaccines are shielded from individual lawsuits because individual lawsuits would very quickly bankrupt said companies. The result of that would be no vaccines, which would lead to everyone in society fucking dying of easily treated illnesses = more fucking greed and stupidity ("everyone" being hyperbole, obviously, but given current transportation ease and population, "millions" would be a given) . Complications from vaccines are fairly rare, and very serious complications/death even more-so.... but vaccines are of critical importance to our species in the present day. If the argument is: let millions of people die each year because of diseases that can be easily vaccinated against, or requiring parents to keep their disease ridden kids out of school unless they vaccinate... that's an easy one: fuck the idiot parents.
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I'm not an anti-vax person myself, but I do suspect that at least one of the vaccines I received in the Army caused my current chronic kidney disease, which is caused by a misformed IgA antibody. I suspect that because I have a familial history of Ceceliacs disease, which is suspected by some to be related to IgA Nephropathy, and the timeline of when I developed IgAn coincides perfectly with the progression of the disease and the time that I received those inoculations. That, and this:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
Problem is this is hard to prove, and I doubt anybody would do any further serious research into it. Why won't they? Because the anti-vax movement has made anybody who does easily lose credibility, because the anti-vax movement repeatedly and often makes very stupid claims (autism? are you fucking kidding me?) that cause everybody else to come down hard on anybody who speaks honestly about any potential down sides of it.
There may very well be good reasons to not vaccinate in some cases, but those reasons will be hard to find when idiots keep crying wolf for no reason other than they happen to be Jenny McCarthy fans.
Still though, and I do myself admit, I still accept that it's better to have practically zero cases of polio in exchange for a few cases of IgA Nephropathy, even though I happened to get the shitty end of the stick (dialisys, which is where I'll probably end up very soon, is a lot better than an iron lung.) That said, even if it is proven that vaccination is the cause of my condition, I'll still support it anyways.
California is a mix of odd politics. Partially heavily left leaning, partially heavy right leaning, and a whole lot of libertarian leaning to combine a bit of both. We want the government to keep their hands off of our pot and our taxes.
We want the government to keep their hands off of our pot and our taxes.
Well, you're not doing a very good job of expressing your wants as reflected by your very high taxes and still-not-legalized pot.
Bollocks. Religious freedom exists within the bounds of the law, not outside it. It means no one can tell you that you can't do something otherwise legal for religious reasons, not that you get a free pass on illegal activities. You want to pray before meals, preach a certain thing, dress a particular way, wear a religious symbol around your neck, pass out books on the street, cool, that's freedom of religion, and that is part of living in a free society. You want to willingly put your children at risk of potentially fatal diseases (otherwise known as child neglect) then call it freedom of religion, nope, that's not ever remotely similar and that's not what freedom of religion means. Freedom of religion is not a pass to do whatever you want and then call it oppression when someone tries to hold you accountable.
If you want to do stupid things to yourself, that's fine. I'll be the first to complain about liberty and government overstep when laws are passed to protect people from themselves. You want to do something stupid that might result in your own demise, as long as you're not taking anyone else down with you, then have at it. It's none of my concern. However, this is not about what you do to yourself, it is about what you do to others. Child neglect is not a right, and you don't get to put your kids and other kids at risk and then shout 'But religion!' when you are expected to act like a mature reasonable decent human being and demand that the rest of the world respect your excuses as to why you put your kid at risk of easily preventable and potentially serious disease.
Obviously each state has it's own personality for lack of a better term.
I'm mostly just annoyed at how he made a broad sweeping generalization of an entire state with a less than favorable one liner and got modded up for it. Here I can do the same thing. Everybody in Kentucky is a hill billy. Everybody in Georgia is racist. Everybody in China is a communist. You see how stupid it sounds, and he got modded up for saying that crap.
Ability to metabolize toxins and excrete them varies widely between individuals, many people have deficiencies in their abilities. Children's ability to metabolize toxins are not the same as adults. To top it off, the resources in the body needed to metabolize them (antioxidants, enzymes, conjugating molecules) are consumed by many things in the environment --> Did the chem-lawn folks just spray your lawn? Did you recently repaint the infant's room before you brought the baby home from the hospital? New carpeting in the house? On a constant basis, you are breathing, touching, drinking and eating toxins -- everything is contaminated to some measurable degree today (with lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium, etc)...usually in very very small quantities, but some of these things bio-accumulate. So how much stuff is your body dealing with when you get the vaccine and how will that affect development? The medications you might be taking all rely on the same chemical transformations and consume those resources as well.
In case you wonder if these toxins can have any effect, here is something produced by the United States NIH discussing the impact of environmental toxin exposure on children. http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/11041...
Clinical toxicology (understanding the effect of toxins on the body) is not nearly as advanced as many of you probably imagine it is. Much of our knowledge comes from the last 15 years and a great deal is still not known. By the way, knowledge of clinical toxicology is virtually absent from the MD curriculum (at least here in the US).
And one last point to everyone who is pro-vaccine and antagonistic to those who aren't, I would like to point out that if YOU did not do the science yourself, then these issues come down to who you trust (I wouldn't trust Jenny McCarthy either). I bet all of you have an opinion one way or the other about climate change, but almost none of you have actually looked at the data and models yourself. Claiming "its science you idiots" when you did not do the science is pretty similar to religion....belittling someone with a *belief* that differs from yours because yours must be the one true god.
Strange that I got modded offtopic for speaking about vaccinations in a reply to a post about vaccinations. Just to be clear. No one, and I mean no one in the medical field says that vaccinations are totally safe. They say that there are risks but that the risks of not getting vaccinated are greater. I don't see why steps to minimize any risks are so unacceptable. I for one see no reason to cluster so many shots in one group when there is really no added risk by spreading them out. Hammering a small toddler with so much medication at one time seems unnecessary. I know a lot of the people here consider themselves experts on every fucking thing and feel that any time someone questions their greater knowledge they must react viciously.
active duty military receives a hell of a lot more vaccines than stateside school children.. and travel to places where there's a hell of a lot more risk of catching something. you could very well be sicker without those shots.
The problem is that quarantining does not heal (quarantining the polio kid won't save his legs) and there has to be an infected host that spreads the disease so it won't be just one, there will be dozens if not hundreds of kids that require quarantining by the time the first one shows up with symptoms (read up on the lifecycle of these preventable diseases)
Vaccination is a good idea until we have the technology to auto-vaccinate or to eradicate the disease worldwide.
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Aside from the fact that that wasn't an ad hominem, that's a really weird way of phrasing things. It's like saying that 100% of people standing out in the rain experience rain-related effects, including being hit by lightning. It's technically true, but it's phrased in a way to imply that way more people get hit by lightning than actually do. The reality is that 100% of people get wet and a tiny fraction of a percent get hit by lightning. Lumping them together as "effects of rain" makes the statistic basically meaningless. Was that intentional?
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