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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).
... the constitutional right to freedom of religion. If you are required by law to do something that your religion actually prohibits, then you are not free to really practice your religion in that country at all.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
We know vaccines are safe & effective so there is no need to do randomized double blind clinical studies to prove any vaccines are safe & effective. Anyone who questions the official pseudoscience can enjoy homeschooling their kids.
While I might agree with the merits of vaccinating for most diseases, there is certainly room for reasonable people to disagree considering no actual science has been done. And I mean science in the strict sense of the word, if you haven't done a randomized double blind study then it can be a lot of things, but it's not science. Especially considering the huge uptick in all forms of autoimmune disease over the same period, you'd have to be a complete idiot to not at least think there *could* be a connection.
California's southern border situation is far, far more dangerous than a few un-immunized natives. Immunization rates in central and south America are far, far lower than here in the US. But the right wants cheap labor and the left wants illegal votes, so we have no representation in this area. One naturally wonders why the obsession with immunization when public health is manifestly less important than open borders.
I'm pro-vaccines, after all they've done a huge amount of good over the years. They're not an unqualified good, some people do experience negative outcomes but the chances of that are extremely rare so for society as a whole they're a net positive when used approrpriately. I am concerned however with trends I've seen for dogs and horses where the vaccines schedules and number of booster shots keep getting increased. For the most part it looks like greed rather than science and with a public mandate I'm worried that behavior may move to human vaccinations.
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.
Of course, you are aware that due to medical inability for 6% of people to be vaccinated, and a non-zero vaccine failure rate, and the fact that we do not perform post-vaccination immunoassay to verify that the vaccination has been effective (and then revaccinate the shit out of the person until an immunoassay shows it to be effective), therefore herd immunity for measles and pertussis is mathematically impossible.
Right?
You *should* get vaccinated for these diseases, and you *should* get your kids vaccinated for these diseases. If the vaccine is effective, which for measles, it is 61% of the time according to a recent WHO study in Buenos Ares, Argentina, then you've saved your ass, or you've saved your kids ass.
But you are totally a moron if you believe that you are doing this out of altruism, rather than out of a selfish desire to save your own ass, because you will not, in fact, prevent either outbreaks or spread of these two diseases.
Particularly if we let people from hot zones with known active outbreaks fly into the U.S. with no border procedures to prove they don't have the diseases, and then let them go to Disneyland and infect the 39% of the 94% who are vaccinated (but for which the vaccine was ineffective), or the additional 6% who are immunocompromised to the point they can't tolerate being vaccinated.
P.S.: Now if you want to pick a different example, like Polio, chickenpox, or smallpox: yes, it's possible to achieve herd immunity. But most idiots who are bad at math tend to use measles or pertussis as their examples, because the outbreaks are always in the news (hint: because they are impossible to prevent via any method other than quarantine, and that's politically correct, even if we are talking about Ebola, for which there is no vaccine).