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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.
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
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.
... 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'
Australia has something similar. The government consulted with the major religions beforehand and none of them had problems with vaccinations.
I think we should go further and when unvaxed children come down with preventable diseases, their parents should be charged with child neglect.
Wouldn't spreading out the shots more make them more expensive to administer? That's just fine to me if it's socialized, but it's really not okay if it drives up the price of immunization for poor and uninsured families.
The autism claims are entirely discredited now.
The clustering of vaccinations is for purely logistical reasons: Shipping out vaccines and a person qualified to administer them to schools costs money, and getting them all done in one day is more practical than going back for several trips.
I don't know about the autism claims but I do know that getting 6 shots in one day can be a problem.
The autism claims were based of a study that was completely fabricated by the author.
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.
No one is facing violence. They simply can't send their unvaccinated kids to public school. They are more than free to home school their unvaccinated children and they will face no legal consequences.
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.
The main problem with legislating medical procedures is that in the event it turns out some unknown problem does exist with the procedure it will be difficult to get the law repealed/amended and in the mean time people are being subjected to a known to be damaging procedure potentially against their will becaus it's the law.
Unfortunately I think the antivaxers are the bodly autonomy equivalent of hate speech. I dislike everything they stand for, but for reasons more important than them I support their right to be idiots.
Because vaccines aren't always effective for everyone, and some people (e.g. immunocompromised individuals) can't get vaccines. But these people rely on herd immunity, which is depending on enough people being vaccinated that any disease that shows up isn't transmitted through the whole community. It's not the kids who don't get vaccinated that the legislators are worried about, it's everyone else.
And the rate of vaccinations in parts of California are so low that health officials are seeing the effects of lack of herd immunity.
Ask me how the Heisenberg Principle may or may not have saved my life.
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.
Vaccines have been in common use for many decades. If there were unknown problems, they would have shown up long before now.
What is specifixally is unshaky? We are seeing direct correlations between the rise of parents not vacinnating their kids and the resurgence of chilhood diseases that were hugely eliminated due to vaccination.
I presume you would exempt parents of unvaxed children who were unvaxed for reasons beyond their control, such as
1) Could not afford shots
2) No access to health care
3) Child could not get shots for medical reasons
I, for example, COULD NOT get my kid vaccinated vs. Hepatitis A because my healthcare provider didn't have the vaccine, and no pharmacy who HAD the vaccine would ADMINISTER the vaccine to a child, that I could find. (I tried 4.)
This persisted for a few months until I found a new pediatrician for my child.
So, maybe HOLD OFF on the prosecutions of parents until society has TRULY made an effort to make vaccines EASILY ACCESSIBLE to everyone. Like for example, "Oh, your kid is short of shots? We'll administer them in school for you, 2 weeks before classes. Just bring your kid in for their FREE IMMUNIZATIONS."
--PeterM
The only mob stupidity are the people who arbitrarily reject science that is incredibly well documented with study after study. Vaccines are safe and effective. No legitimate study has shown otherwise since vaccines were first administered. The only shaky information is spread by the people with unfounded distrust of vaccines.
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.
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
religiously founded or not, where MY right to not be exposed to deadly infections in civil society begins.
I have NO PROBLEM limiting freedom of religion for the defense of society. As someone pointed out, freedom of religion is NOT an unlimited right.
Consider for example a person whose religion involves ritual sacrifice and eating of the hearts of their political enemies.
I consider forcing vaccinations on people over their religious objections as of lesser degree, but in the same vein, as the example I just gave.
--PeterM
Do you have any actual evidence to back up your claims? It's also funny that you claim that vaccinations is pseudoscience. When the people who are claiming that vaccinations cause autism are using fabricated studies as their evidence.
Yep. It takes one to know one.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
You may think people with religious objections to vaccination (one or all of them) are nuts (and they may very well be)
That's not the word I would use to describe them.
And the government absolutely has the right... no, the duty, to pass legislation like this. What differentiates this from a real "religious freedom" issue is the consequences of not vaccinating your kids. It's not just you and your kids who are effected when you make that choice. If it was, this wouldn't be an issue. But you involuntarily effect others with your decision. You become carriers for diseases that have the potential to KILL OTHER PEOPLE. It's no different than you going outside and shooting a gun in a random direction. Sure, most of the time you won't hit anything. But that one time you do, it's pretty serious. The potential consequences of you and your kids running around without being vaccinated are serious. And, according to the first amendment, you can't force your religious beliefs on others. Giving them a disease because your religion told you not to get vaccinated is a pretty egregious violation of other people's rights.
You and I can argue about if it is or not, but it doesn't matter. First, this is Slashdot, Nothing really gets settled here. Second, this is now a political issue, so the debate will rage on, especially during election cycles. Finally, it is a question for the courts which will be argued by lawyers and adjudicated by judges, none of which likely read or care what to semi-anonymous posters on Slashdot decided, even if we came to some agreement.
Personally doesn't matter to me. First, I don't live in California nor plan to. Second, I didn't put my kids in public schools when they where that age. So I have no dogs in this hunt and never will, but I do see it as an attack on religious liberty, albeit the freedoms of others. Your opinion can differ, but don't expect me to care that much.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
My religion says I can rape and murder members of other religions. In fact its a sacrament. Laws against homicide are an assault on my religious freedom and I MUST be given a choice to not follow them.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
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.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
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.
Viruses don't care about your religion. Their mutation rate does not care what deity you believe in. It is too dangerous for society to allow humans to play incubators for the measles. It will eventually mutate and bypass the current vaccine. If it does many millions will die until we figure out a way to make a new vaccine.
The ONLY way to prevent this is to make sure there are not enough hosts for the virus to survive.
Your religious freedoms don't allow endangering everyone else around you. We also have people that have religious views on human sacrifice and we don't allow that either.
There are limits to religious freedom and this has to be one of those limits. A legitimate medical reason should be the ONLY way to get exempted from a vaccine unless you want to go live as a hermit and never encounter humans again.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
What many of you guys don't understand is that vaccines can cause harm. The vaccine compensation fund has paid out over $3 billion+ in damages due to people getting brain damage and all sorts of irreversible problems. They don't want to admit that vaccines cause harm because then people would stop taking them according to this AP news article: http://www.nytimes.com/aponlin... People used to be able to sue the vaccine manufacturers directly but now the government has made them immune from prosecution so that we can all get vaccinated, its because they love us all and care about us so much. Remember, this is the same government that said that the 9/11 dust is safe, that agent orange is safe, that GMO foods are safe, fluoride is safe, that blowing up chemical weapons is safe (aka gulf war syndrome), that DU (depleted uranium) is safe, etc. They care about us so much, we just need to do whatever they say, its for the collective. And there has been one case where someone with autism was given compensation for damage from vaccine: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/... Question: How many of the people who got sick with measles at Disneyland were vaccinated? Why haven't they released the numbers?
Of all the learning disabilities, willful ignorance is the most difficult one to overcome. If someone believes that vaccines are unsafe, there's little you can do to convince them otherwise. Throw as many legitimate peer reviewed studies as you can find at them, they will flatly ignore them. Point out the egregious and obvious flaws in whatever pseudoscience they present and they will accuse you of being a shill for the pharmaceutical company. They are the immovable object and nothing you say will get through.
There's nothing abstract about the idea of vaccinations. It's very well documented science.
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.
Because the same reason that's been posted and explained so many times there's no way a person who can actually read hasn't seen it many, many, many times: Herd Immunity. If you seriously have not read that before, Google it... or look at EVERY other thread on /. and probably EVERY other news site about vaccines.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
I'll let measles be the judge of that.
I hear your point, but it's still not valid to force people into this.
People must be free to do even stupid things, or we don't really have freedom. You cannot protect everybody from foolishness though some law, you cannot legislate morality. You must allow freedom, even if you don't agree with the reasons people use for doing what they do.
Look, I strongly argue with people I know who refuse to vaccinate. I think they are usually misinformed and are making a mistake. However, I also recognize that THEY have the choice, and where I encourage them to vaccinate their kids, I must support their right to choose differently than I would.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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.
Do you think that Islamic terrorists should be free to murder whoever they want because trying to stop them would violate religious freedom? They're certainly free to believe that it is justified, but they are not free to put it into practice.
In Employment Division v. Smith the Supreme Court ruled that the State can deny unemployment benefits to users of peyote, as the ban did not violate the Free Exercise Clause.
"To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself."
Even more to the point Jacobson v. Massachusetts ruled that the State only needs to justify compulsory vaccination on the State's basic police powers in order to be constitutional.
Anti-vaxx parents are free to believe that vaccines are an evil communist jew plot, AND they can choose not to vaccinate their kids. They just can't send their kids to public school. As long as the law is neutral and does not target any specific religious group (a tax on wearing yamulkes e.g.), there is no valid First Amendment challenge.
But, more to the point, failing to put this exemption into the law will open it up to constitutional challenge. Such challenges will likely be successful.
You mean like in New York?
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.
What heavy thing? If they have a legitimate reason not to vaccinate then they can get an exception. However not vaccinating children does cause a public harm. Even the most staunchly adherent Libertarian allows for government activity in cases of protecting the public.
I don't think the state will actually kill anyone over the matter, as that would just turn them into martyrs. More probably, the court will simply take custody of the child and relocate the child into a foster home that is at least in another city if not another state.
The next several years could prove to be very interesting...
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The Republicans that control CA...
I'm guessing *you* get your news from Fox News...
In real life, ain't many republicans around here in public office.
* no republican holds any state wide elected office
* State senate: 14R out of 40
* State legislature: 28R out of 80
* Mayors of largest cities: 3R out of 10
The religious exemptions used to be there, but they used to be rare and not at all part of mainline religions. Ie, some people object to any drugs of any kind on religious grounds, and traditionally these were exempt and it worked because of herd immunity. However the new argument that one should be allowed to reject drugs or vaccines developed with the use of stem cells is NOT a religious argument in my view; their religion which I am very familiar with has no tenets or scriptures forbidding this. Of course they have every right to protest this politically, but to claim that their religion forbids receiving such vaccines is a lie (thus a sin).
Oh, it's not a law yet. Only the CA senate passed this, it still has to go before the house.
West Virginia and Mississippi being ahead of California in doing something involving common sense?
"STATE OF CALIFORNIA SAFETY WARING: Drinking water contributes to urination"
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
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.
Even if vaccines CAN cause harm, so what?
I, and every male in this country, can be made to fight, kill, get wounded, die, and suffer innumerable hardships in defense of this country.
If I can be made to risk life and limb to defend this country (no choice), why can't EVERYONE be forced to take vaccines to defend this country too? Or do you think that contagious disease isn't EVERY BIT as deadly a threat to this country as an interruption in our oil supply?
-PeterM
Because some people have an actual medical reason that they cannot take the vaccine. These people need protection, whether you believe so or not. Also there's no threat of violence, silly libertarian.
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.
Sorry, but there is fundamentally areas of gray in this. Do parents have a right to ritually mutilate their children? Maybe (circumcision). Maybe not (female genital mutilation). Can you explain to me why religious freedom prevails in one of these cases and not the other? Can you produce a hard-and-fast rule that generalizes the answer for other similar issues?
I believe that immunization crosses the line where freedom of religion trumps public safety. You apparently do not. I think we both have legitimate arguments, but I don't think you can legitimately pretend that your opinion is objectively correct.
I hear your point, but it's still not valid to force people into this.
Is it valid for you to force your diseases on the population without their consent? I would say no.
People must be free to do even stupid things, or we don't really have freedom. You cannot protect everybody from foolishness though some law, you cannot legislate morality. You must allow freedom, even if you don't agree with the reasons people use for doing what they do.
Again, the issue in this case is that your stupidity has significant impact on others, up to and including death. Now, if this issue only affected the individuals involved directly, it would be completely different. If you want to tell your kid that the Great Green Arkleseizure sneezed the universe out of his nose and you're all waiting for the coming of the great white handkerchief, that's fine by me. It only affects you and your poor kid. If you want to make your kid wear specific types of clothes and magic underwear, that too is fine. It's just between you and your kid.
Where the line gets drawn is where you start impacting others without their consent. And while refusing to vaccinate your kid is orders of magnitude below strapping a bomb to your chest and blowing up a market, it's still you doing something that has the potential to kill someone who doesn't want to be affected by you in that way.
Make a choice that only affects yourself? Fine. Do whatever makes you happy. Start affecting other people (who don't share your beliefs) against their will? Sorry. I can't support that.
Look, I strongly argue with people I know who refuse to vaccinate. I think they are usually misinformed and are making a mistake. However, I also recognize that THEY have the choice, and where I encourage them to vaccinate their kids, I must support their right to choose differently than I would.
Again, by not vaccinating your kids, you are taking away choice from other people beyond yourself and your kid(s). They don't want the disease you're carrying around. And the only way to stop you from passing it on is either vaccination or internment in an isolation camp. Which of those two options is less egregious?
Making sure people have freedom of choice is fine. But you have to look at the larger picture and see how one choice takes away choices from others.
I'm not sure what the stem cell thing is, but I'm guessing that they object to how stem cells are produced in some cases. They would argue that the use of embryos (or even just the unfertilized component part of one) is enough to constitute a murder. (And this is a MAJOR world religion I'm pointing at.)
However, there are religious groups that object to blood transfusions, the use of "modern" technology like cars, phones and a whole host of things that most find silly. These beliefs are long standing and would preclude the use of vaccinations on religious grounds.
Like it or not, agree with them or not, this law encroaches on some religious freedoms for some. As such, it should not become law. But this is California....
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
The funny thing about this... there is no mainstream religion that actually bans vaccinations. Religious dogma predates the germ theory and therefore couldn't have possibly included vaccinations as anything banned.
In fact, it's the exact opposite. Most religions (at least Abrahamic religions) dictate that personal health is a paramount concern. Even if something required for good health would violate some religious law, good health overrides the religious law. For example, Judaism and Islam declare pigs as unclean animals. They are not to be consumed. However, if a pork derivative is used in a vaccine, the rule of good health means that not getting the vaccine would actually be violating religious law.
The "religious exception" was added in there so idiotic anti-vaxxers could deny their children necessary vaccinations without ever getting questioned, because asking a person about their religion is considered discriminatory.
Problems like being ineffective - that is, they just don't work or even worse, exacerbate the problem? Or problems like being generally dangerous with horrific side-effects that happen on a large scale? Never mind that, who gives a shit about Africa. Go USA!
I hear your point, but it's still not valid to force people into this.
Is it valid for you to force your diseases on the population without their consent? I would say no.
What are you talking about? I personally don't object to vaccinations. I've had mine and my children have had all the recommended ones. I'm not advocating that people not take them, quite the opposite. I've had a number of arguments with the Anti-Vaxers I know and they didn't like what I had to say. All I'm doing here is supporting their right to be wrong about this.
People must be free to do even stupid things, or we don't really have freedom. You cannot protect everybody from foolishness though some law, you cannot legislate morality. You must allow freedom, even if you don't agree with the reasons people use for doing what they do.
Again, the issue in this case is that your stupidity has significant impact on others,
No, I'm only supporting the right to a religious objection. As I said before, I would recommend that everybody get their vaccinations.
Start affecting other people (who don't share your beliefs) against their will? Sorry. I can't support that.
I see your point and I use this very argument with the AntiVaxers. However, religious freedom DOES mean that I have to put up with other's seeming foolishness and others put me in danger everyday. We cannot keep people from doing stupid things that endanger others, say like driving on bald tires in the rain, or driving too fast for road conditions and pass me on the right.
However, as I've point out to others. There are long standing religious beliefs which are not uncommon in this country that would have a person choose not to vaccinate. It MUST be their right to choose for them and their children, or we are stepping on religious freedom.
Look, I strongly argue with people I know who refuse to vaccinate. I think they are usually misinformed and are making a mistake. However, I also recognize that THEY have the choice, and where I encourage them to vaccinate their kids, I must support their right to choose differently than I would.
Again, by not vaccinating your kids, you are taking away choice from other people beyond yourself and your kid(s).
Nowhere have I said I didn't vaccinate my kids or that I would support the arguments against vaccination. My kids where vaccinated as recommended. So your argument doesn't apply to me.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Childhood vaccines are far more benign,...
My daughter had a few days of 105 degree fever after the MMR vaccine. And some of the other vaccines resulted in large swellings in her legs (i.e. most of her thigh) at the point of injection that persisted for months after the vaccination. But she couldn't talk at that point and, of course, now she doesn't remember back to when she was that young - so I don't know how much she suffered.
The honest scientific answer is our knowledge of how young children experience vaccination (and pain, etc. generally) is very limited - and, of course, there's likely to be a lot of individual variation. On one hand, I do generally agree that childhood vaccinations are necessary at this particular point in time. But I also look forward to the day when childhood vaccinations are no longer necessary (almost certainly within my daughter's lifetime).
I don't think the state will actually kill anyone over the matter
LOL!
The state will kill for any reason or no reason.
Part of the reason for feeling sick during those shots during basic training is members of the armed forces get shots for things that most civilians don't get shots for at any age - smallpox, anthrax, and cholera, for example, with the cholera vaccine being known to cause people to feel sick for a short while afterwards. Your vaccine experience in basic training is absolutely not comparable to what children experience.
My religion says I can rape and murder members of other religions. In fact its a sacrament.
So you're either a fanatic Christian terrorist or a fanatic Muslim terrorist or a fanatic what?
I would just ask all these anti-Vaxxers to show were in their holy book is vaccine banned. Problem solved.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
There are some religious types who like to juggle rattlesnakes. It is their right to do this, even if the rest of us all think it is stupid and dangerous. It isn't even neccessary to invoke religious freedom to permit this. That does not give them the right to put their children at risk by making them handle snakes.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
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).
First, it IS an assault on religious freedom despite what proponents will tell you.
Baloney. Your religious rights do not and should not extend to the point where you can transmit dangerous and easily preventable pathogens compromising public safety. You can believe whatever looney nonsense you want as long as it does not hurt others. Claiming religious exemption to vaccination demonstrably hurts other people and therefore should be illegal.
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.
What a load of complete nonsense. People don't have the right to do whatever they want, whenever they want. That would be anarchy and you cannot have a civil society where people are free to endanger others without restriction. Do you drive on the wrong side of the road without consequence? By your logic people should have complete "freedom to do stupid things".
But, more to the point, failing to put this exemption into the law will open it up to constitutional challenge. Such challenges will likely be successful.
You should certainly hope that such challenges are not successful. Lives literally depend on it. Furthermore there is nothing preventing people from opting out for religious reasons. They simply cannot put their child in public schools and endanger others in the process. They are perfectly welcome to home school or find alternative schooling but there are and should be consequences for demonstrably irresponsible and dangerous behavior.
if you can dismiss long standing religious objections to vaccinations on various grounds then there truly is little left that is sacred to religious liberty.
You say that like it's a bad thing :-)
How about this - we quarantine everyone who refuses to get vaccinated, same as we do with other people who are disease carriers and put the population at risk. You'll mostly die out from some bug or other, but hey - you're free to do so.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
So the "gun grabber" squads in California are a reflection of the US in general? Seriously? You're on crack. California is at the fringe of one end of the political spectrum.
It is not Peoria.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
What civil society is free from deadly infections? People die from COLDS and Flu you know...
Have you come down with polio lately? How about smallpox? I'm guessing you haven't had measles or mumps or reubella either. Here's a little tip for you. Vaccines work and they save lives. Just because we haven't cured every disease is no excuse not to vaccinate for the ones we can cure.
However in this case there are LONG STANDING religious belief systems that would object to vaccines for various reasons.
Don't care and neither should you. Your religious beliefs do not and should not grant you the right to endanger others. If you wish to quarantine yourself from society to protect your religious beliefs I will support that but if you want to participate in civil society then you need to take your medicine and stop doing stupid things that endanger others.
If this doesn't represent a valid objection reason to you on religious grounds, I'm not sure what does in your view.
There is NO argument you could make that would convince me that there is a valid reason to excuse anyone from a vaccine for any grounds other than medical necessity.
Remember Hobby Lobby? This is a similar issue. California simply doesn't have the power to do this.
Last I checked contraceptives are voluntary and not taking them doesn't result in communication of dangerous pathogens.
Just look in the real world. The people getting measles are very, very disproportionally those who didn't get vaccinated, even though they're a smallish subset of the population.
That's a pretty good real-world experiment.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
There are limits so I guess it's dependent on where you draw the line of parental rights.
Personally, I draw the line at "immediate danger of harm" meaning that unless the child is being put in immediate danger of harm, the state may not step in and take over the role of a parent. This means kids of stupid parents, as long as the "stupid" doesn't cause immediate harm to the kids, have to stay with their parents. As much as I don't like it, this means being able to choose not to vaccinate is allowed as it is not an immediate danger to the kids.
I'm not sure how you choose to draw that line, but I'm not sure how you can draw any other logical line and preserve parental rights and religious freedom in parenting.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
An immunocompromized individual belongs nowhere near a school. This is for their own safety. There's a strong likelihood they are quarantined from contact with the public already due to their condition. They may even have a special directive from their doctor telling them to STAY AWAY FROM SCHOOL.
The LAST thing that a person fitting your favorite loophole needs is to expose themselves to the germ exchange which is any large group of children.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
Shouldn't it be your choice to harm your child? Not the government's? If we lose freedom of choice we have no constitution. Freedom is what created America, don't you understand that?
Do you really believe that you have the constitutional right to harm ANY child? The days when women and children were chattels is long gone, but feel free to go to your nearest police station and start abusing your kid - they'll be better of in someone else's custody :-)
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
if you can dismiss long standing religious objections to vaccinations on various grounds then there truly is little left that is sacred to religious liberty.
You say that like it's a bad thing :-)
You say that with a smile on your face? What is this county coming to? If history is any indication of what happens when attitudes like this one of yours pervade society, it won't be good.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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.
No it isn't.
There is no religion I know of that says "Thou shalt recieveth government benefits".
This law only denies government funded benefits to those who refuse to vaccinate for whatever reason. Most private schools already refuse to accept children who aren't vaccinated, hell even Montessori and Steiner schools require a damn good reason to accept an unvaccinated child. Is this denying religious freedom? I dont see any difference between the government and private schools in this regard.
Being able to be stupid is not an inalienable right. Society has no reason nor responsibility to support anyone stupid enough to be an anti-vaxxer.
Claiming this law assaults religious freedom is like saying laws against assault religious freedom because they are trying to discourage god fearing people from burning witches and performing human sacrifices.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
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.
This is a good thing because religion must NEVER be used as an excuse to escape common sense. The same way with person beliefs, fighting known, proven science, isn't rational, this is a very good Bill!
You missed the part where he pays private school tuition right?
I don't think he's complaining about paying his taxes, but about being dinged twice (taxes then tuition) for the right to exercise his religious choice.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
You know, you MIGHT have an argument except for the truancy laws... School is mandatory in some form for all children of school age.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
You see, eating more nutritious foods, and maybe avoiding certain conventionally grown foods that are known to suck up pesticides (i.e. only buy organic apples), and maybe using fewer BPA-laden containers, and maybe exercising, and maybe taking a good multivitamin, and maybe cutting your sugar intake. How about not smoking and cutting back on the binge drinking? We could also work to reduce the industrial pollution we pump into the air and water. But those things are all just too hard to do. This would mean you can't eat pizza and beer for every meal and put all your garbage into the land fill.
But vaccines are easy to avoid. So we'll just blame everything on them.
Other posters have pointed out your flawed reasoning. However, here we go again, this time with the actual numbers.
Of 2,236,678,735 vaccines administered during the period, only 1,709 received compensation for adverse effects. That translates to less than 1 in 1.3 million.
Contrast that with the death rate for measles in the US of 3 per 1000 infections. Compare that to death rates of up to 28% who die in the underdeveloped world.
Dead is dead.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Sorry, but there is fundamentally areas of gray in this.
We agree on this. We are clearly in a shady area here. My principle says that I have to error on the side of freedom, religious freedom in this case. So like it or not, in the absence of a really compelling argument, you pick freedom...
Do parents have a right to ritually mutilate their children? Maybe (circumcision). Maybe not (female genital mutilation). Can you explain to me why religious freedom prevails in one of these cases and not the other? Can you produce a hard-and-fast rule that generalizes the answer for other similar issues?
Parental rights and religious freedom do have limits. I would draw the line for all parental rights question at "immediate danger of harm". Meaning that unless the parent's choice puts the child in imamate danger of harm, the state must not intervene. Lacking vaccinations does not generally present an immediate danger to the child so the parent has the right to choose, especially if there is a religious objection. Allowing a child to handle snakes or take drugs as part of a religious practice DOES present an immediate danger of harm and thus could be prevented by the state.
However, as with most rights, and how you draw the lines between what you are allowed to do, the state must have an iron clad reason which is compelling before they put limits on individuals rights and we must always error on the side of too much freedom.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
if you can dismiss long standing religious objections to vaccinations on various grounds then there truly is little left that is sacred to religious liberty.
You say that like it's a bad thing :-)
First, I'm not in your country. Second, here we provide free vaccination for childhood diseases, so cost is not a barrier or an excuse. Third, if you really believed in separation of church and state, the distorting effect of the religious right would not be a factor in your politics or your social policies.
Look around you. How many trillions of dollars has the US spent in the last 15 years to fight wars that, are caused or fueled by religious hatred. Without them, the US deficit would be declining.
You say that with a smile on your face? What is this county coming to? If history is any indication of what happens when attitudes like this one of yours pervade society, it won't be good.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
You can still have the parts of your religious liberty that don't involve harming other people. If taking away your sacred religious liberty to willingly endanger the lives of other leaves very little left, maybe your religion is more than a little fucked up.
Feel free to disagree.... You will just be wrong.
Wow... that doesn't sound like something a zealot would say....
No the Zealot says, if you don't agree with me, I'll kill you... I personally support everyone's rights to be wrong, if you choose to. I'm not too proud to admit that I don't have a corner on the "what's right" market all the time... I was wrong once that I remember, but it turned out I was mistaken about it.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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.
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
Religious freedom exists within the bounds of the law, not outside it.
Yes and no, it's within reason... The right to religious freedom can certainly be used to invalidate laws that targets religious conduct for no good reason. Say a law that makes the printing of a specific religious symbols illegal. Or a law that shoves beacon down the throats of religious non-pig eaters...
Most of the cases where compensation was paid were settled without any finding of fact. The reasons cited, if you had bothered to read, were that it was sometimes cheaper to settle, sometimes both parties wanted to eliminate the risk of court, sometimes it was the fair thing to do.
Also, you have the figure for the number of uncompensated people if you read the rest of the link. My bet is you didn't read any of it.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
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.
shaky information and misinformation? that describes the Antivaxxers, not the basis for the law.
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.
Oh, and (3), I guess I could move out of state and look for a new job. Fun!
You could also move to a "freer" country which doesn't require vaccination. I warn you, however, you will not like what you find when you get there.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Modern vaccines use fewer antigens than old fashioned ones. They aren't getting hammered with anymore antigens than if they ate some dirt, we just make sure that they get some antigens that make them immune to nasty bugs.
Sure add in school choice, you only need a few to half dozen kids to pay for a teacher + overhead with the amounts public schools cost per pupil.
Hell our overall education quality could skyrocket.
No sir I dont like it.
It is my understanding that herd immunity is something that occurs over time naturally through generational multiplication, a Darwinian-style removal of the organisms less suitable to survive and that evolving state provides an incubator for the adapted immune systems to become more potent. Using vaccines on immune systems that actually need them, then treating them or thinking of them as naturally immune in this whole stew sounds like a recipe for a weaker herd even if the vaccinated individual is better off in the short term, if even that. An "artificial herd immunity" comes about without the vital step of, you know, having actual immunity as a metaphorical whetstone for the whole to sharpen itself against. If I'm understanding this right, that's a disaster waiting to happen.
There's a problem with this: you can easily come up with counterexamples to yours that make sense.
"My religion prohibits the ownership of slaves, so I can't turn over the underground railroad travelers to the authorities."
"My religion requires I uphold human rights, so I can't follow my sergeants order to firebomb the innocent civilians."
"I had to march in Selma; I sensed it was a turning point for the nation."
"My religion requires paying taxes, because someone said give to Caesar what is Caesars and give to God what is Gods."
"My religion requires I protect the innocent from their oppressors."
These are also real cases. Your argument tends to take situations where people are doing something ethically wrong, such as trying to kill or steal with religion as an excuse. That isn't the maxim being discussed here. The maxim is more like:
"People have a right to decide for themselves what they put in their bodies" or "The state should not be able to force people to put things in their bodies they don't want to put in them" or something akin to this.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
They may be, as you say, willingly endangering everyone, but in reality they are not doing so out of any real sense of malice, so response with deadly force is absurd, to say the least. It is, in just one word, ignorance. Nothing more, and nothing less.
Killing somebody simply because they are ignorant ultimately amounts to killing someone simply because of what they believe.
Are you sure that's a road you want America to go down?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
So perhaps key allergen tests are required at schools to measure specific allergen pattern responses and getting gene data based around that allergen testing. This prior to blanket immunisation, could be done at the birthing hospital prior to release of the child. Thus facilitating more safe immunisation as well as pointing out the child's future dietary et al problems to the parent prior to experiencing those problems.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Huh? The vaccine companies remain responsible for what they create. If they release a batch of vaccines laced with cyanide, they will be legally culpable. Also, every ingredient in these vaccines is publicly available and frequently monitored, if you have wheat allergies or whatever else may set up a reaction, your doctor should know about it and set up an alternative or skip it.
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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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More people die from drunk driving NOW because most of us are vaccinated. If they weren't, a lot less people would be alive to be drunk driving.
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Well, if those people would kindly not sneeze where I or my children walk, that would all be fine and dandy. Your freedom ends where mine begins.
So we either force the religious nutters to take the vaccines or we lock them up/put them in reservations. If the kids wouldn't be affected by their parents being locked up or being relocated to a reservation, that would be fine with me.
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"Lacking vaccinations does not generally present an immediate danger to the child". Yes it does. It does to the kid and to the public in general. Having too many people that aren't vaccinated (eg. a community of religious people) presents a clear and present danger to everyone.
Not being vaccinated should be an exception only for the very rare occurrence where someone has highly allergic reactions to them.
"Do parents have a right to ritually mutilate their children?" No. The only reason people in the US still do have that 'right' is because it is socially acceptable. Every single medical institution finds the practice to be unnecessary and although it generally doesn't mess too much with people's general life (as is the case with female genital mutilation), male genital mutilation does desensitize the organ and may lead to avoidable complications (it is anesthetized surgery on a newborn after all).
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Religious people generally do not follow what their scripture says, they are almost always following a human leader who interprets and/or writes scripture. Also, the state has no right to interpret someone's religious tenets, therefore whatever they say they are interpreting it as holds in court, even if they change it during court proceedings.
The state has the right to forbid things regardless of religious freedom if it is in the public's interest to do so. Eg. you can't forbid someone to wear a specific dress unless that dress has razorblades attached to it.
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Well, in the US anyway. France and Turkey are making a strong effort to ban any outward appearance of religion. I'm expecting one day there will be an administrator declaring that a dress is too long and send the girl home to change.
If you pick a stupid religion, you pay. It's like with Scientology. If you believe in that crap, you'll lose all the money you have. If you are Mormon for some stupid reason, you pay extra 10% of your income to Church directly. I cannot prevent you from consequences of your actions and why should I care.
You are FREE to pick any religion you damn well please. The government has obligation to let you choose your religion, no obligation to make laws that make it more convenient for you to practice your religion. They have no obligation to pay any mind to your religion whatsoever.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
"1. If I send the kid to private school, I still must pay school taxes -- so I get dinged twice, once for the tax bill and again for the private school tuition"
And if you have no kids, you still pay property taxes for other kids to go to school. What's your point? I smell a lot of entitlement in your post. Even if the tide does turn eventually for home-schooled kids, unless those kids are locked up in a subterranean dungeon somewhere, they will and do interact with society. I don't want to have to take an infant to the ER again to be exposed to the kid whose parent didn't vaccinate them for measles (yes, I *have* had that wonderful experience). Measles is highly contagious and an infant isn't fully immunized against measles yet.
Forgot to add that the kid that wasn't vaccinated was a child of antivaxxers, and was in the ER for... wait for it... MEASLES.
1. Because vaccines don't provide 100% immunity. Nothing can. The more unvaccinated people there are, the more we're all exposed to the disease and the higher the risk of catching it despite being vaccinated. Also, there are people who for medical reasons (allergic reactions, compromised immune systems, still too young) can't be vaccinated. Every unvaccinated person poses a risk to them.
2. Yes.
3. This is true. However the risks from those side-effects are far less common and less severe than the risks from the disease when you're not vaccinated. Arguing that having a 1-in-100,000 chance of being crippled for life is better than having a 1-in-1,000,000 chance of needing a week in the hospital is... not a winning argument, I'm afraid.
4. As long as it's just you or your children, fine. But it's not, you're exposing everybody else to the consequences of your decision. You want the right to control what goes in your children's bodies, yet in the same breath you say we should have no right to control what goes in our children's bodies when it comes to the infections originating from your unvaccinated children. That doesn't fly. Note that the CA bill doesn't prevent you from refusing vaccinations. It simply means you can't send your children to public schools and subject everybody else's children to involuntary exposure to your children's infections if you won't get them vaccinated. You're free to send them to a private school that doesn't require vaccinations if you want.
5. How about the family who sees the same thing happen to their kids because before they were old enough to be vaccinated they caught something from your unvaccinated kids? Are you going to take responsibility for your actions there? If so, how exactly do you propose to compensate that family for the loss of their children?
California is a microcosm of the United States as a whole: liberal around the coasts, except for the south coast; and conservative inland, except near the large body of water on the border.
They also tend to run liberal in federal elections and conservative in state elections.
This split personality is behind a lot of California's budget problems, as one part of the populace with a majority vote has mandated spending on certain programs, and another part of the populace with a majority vote has prohibited raising certain taxes, leaving the legislature tightly bound between the rock of having to spend money and the hard place of not being able to raise it, requiring them to borrow it.
Which, come to think of it, is another microcosm of the United States as a whole, and the reason for the constant debt crises we keep having. Congress mandates spending, doesn't authorize the necessary taxes, and then blames the president for coming to the unavoidable necessity of borrowing to pay for what they've required him to spend and not allowed him to raise.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
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.
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.
You are making a classic error of comparing the normal progress of the disease with the rare side-effects of the vaccine. This is the (false) argument against measles vaccination -- "I (or most people, or my kids or my parents) had measles. It was uncomfortable for a while, but it got better. A tiny fraction of children have a bad reaction to the vaccine which is really nasty. It's not worth that tiny fraction getting the bad reaction to save everyone the mild disease". What's missing is the larger but still small fraction of people who have nasty complications of the disease and are left handicapped or dead.
Religious views do not give you the right to put millions of others at risk. Viruses mutate and that is inevitable. A vaccine is also not 100% effective in many people it just gives them a kind of limited immunity. We don't have treatments for many of the things we have vaccines for. If measles mutates it will kill millions of people and there is no guarantee how long it would take us to make a new vaccine.
In the end I don't care what your religion is I care if you are putting others at risk. Refusing to vaccinate is putting others at risk. You may not want to accept the biology on that or believe that your deity will never let that happen but most of the rest of the human race has accepted this and if you want to live with them you have to accept it also. If you don't want to live under our understanding of biology and vaccines then you can have religious freedom by yourself away from all other human contact.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
Some of the data was real, just completely useless because it pretended to be the general case instead of the specific. He bussed in autism sufferers from a wide area to skew the results and hoped nobody would notice and that everyone would buy the vaccine preservative that he had patented instead of the one he was pretending had problems.
So kids, it's like looking at the activity in the USA at midnight on a Wednesday night and drawing the conclusion that with so many people sleeping then everyone must be lazy at noon as well.
Very unlikely at this point. Some stuff like TB is even making a comeback.
Actually it is. Like it or not your government has you by the balls and has the right to execute you if it wants to. However since it has to listen to the majority if it wants to remain in control it has to pick its fights if it's going to keep control. "But nobody can squeeze my balls at the airport if I don't want them too" or "not valid to force people into this" is merely the cry of the naive who just doesn't get that for a society to function it has to do stuff that's going to get in the way of what some individuals want to do - and it's not just a desire to point guns at the faces of other individuals that it gets in the way of.
Civilisation is a team effort.
What the hell is nsnbc.me? It looks like total junk.
Wow, so because there's a 0.001-0.005% chance of a reaction requiring serious medical treatment? That's really as close to irrelevant as you can get, that sample size is so small that I'd be surprised if the vaccine alone was the only cause of any problems.
One pays taxes for schools so one can live in a society in which most people are educated. One pays tuition for a specific child to go to a specific school. To complain about that system is to admit not understanding why people pay taxes.
Then you are denying the rights of those parents who don't want their kids infected by religious kids. Someone's rights are going to be impinged, so should they the rights of those who have no choice or of those who have chosen religion?
Those laws do not, in fact, exist. What DOES exist is laws that say if you think your child was injured by a vaccine and the injury is anywhere on a long list of things which we know MIGHT happen, even if they only happen on a one in a billion cases - you don't have to prove your claim, you get paid. No need for lawyers, no need for expensive court cases, no need to deal with the incredible scientific complexity of actually proving causality - you win, guilt by the vaccine producer is ASSUMED.
The reason you get paid from a big fund is so that the vaccine producers can actually afford to pay these "guilty with no chance to prove innocence" claims against them. The reason the claimants get these "assumption that the other guy is guilty" benefits is because vaccines are often mandatory - and like all medicine they do have risks. Those risks may be incredibly minor but they exist and may hit some people - so those people are simply given the benefit of the doubt.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Not quite. If you consider that the chance of transmission isn't 100% and that given a well vaccinated population, 61% of those transmissions are stopped, it greatly reduces the spread of the disease. Note how quickly the last measles outbreak died down, even with a depressingly low vaccination rate where it started.
To answer your question - because it's more dangerous. A recent study compared incidences of side effects and injuries between those who got the usual schedule and children who had delayed or spread-out schedules - and found 80% more injuries in the latter group. Spreading vaccines out actually INCREASES the risks. They are extremely minor risks, but when spread out - they become much more significant.
Furthermore it increases the risk of actually getting one of the diseases the vaccines are meant to protect against by a huge margin as the delay period extends how long you are vulnerable before being vaccinated.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Actually some people did do what you ask. Their findings were that spreading vaccines out actually INCREASES the risk of negative complications.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
You are aware that herd immunity is not when every member of the herd is immune, but that a sufficient number of members are such that it will be difficult for the disease to transmit between two non-immune members of the herd?
Actually, that's not precisely what it means. What it means is that the herd has an immunity above the HIT, and therefore an infectious disease will burn itself out before it becomes endemic (*en*demic, NOT *epi*demic).
You are aware of what "herd immunity threshold" and "R(0) value" for a disease, mean, right? If not, let me refresh your memory:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
As you can see from the chart, the R(0) of measles is sufficient for some strains to require a 94% immunity in the population before the disease will burn itself out, rather than transmitting to a susceptible individual.
Since 6% of people can't be immunized (too young, Hep C, bad histamine complex on chromosome 6, immunocompromised by HIV or other infection, organ transplant, and so on), that requires *everyone else* be immunized.
In addition, if you read the text to the left of the R(0) chart, you'll see that the population has to be homogeneous for this to be meaningful. So what this means is that unimmunized people have to be uniformly distributed throughout the population. Which they are not.
Feel free to then drop down to the equations in the next section, and do the math for measles and pertussis.
Then come back, and we can talk more.
I'm also fairly certain the overall research/trial time for military vaccines is shorter than civilian ones
I wonder how improvements in logistics and remotely operated weapons systems change the need for this. The danger of having everyone on a base be incapacitated by illness while surrounded by a hostile enemy was huge 50 years ago and would easily outweigh possible dangers from side effects of a less-tested vaccine. Now, it's far easier to have drone patrols protecting a quarantined base and deliver men and equipment from reserves far away to fill the gaps in an overall strategy.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Not quite. If you consider that the chance of transmission isn't 100% and that given a well vaccinated population, 61% of those transmissions are stopped, it greatly reduces the spread of the disease.
This slows the burn rate.
Read Richard Preston's "The Hot Zone". The reason Ebola is such a non-problem is that it has a very high burn rate: from acquisition of the disease to death is a short path, and therefore, without outside help, it has a hard time traveling very far before all the carriers are either immune (small percentage) or dead (most of them).
Counterintuitively, a slow burn rate is actually a *bad* thing, for an infectious disease, and the more infectious the disease, the *worse* things are, if the disease has a slow burn rate.
As an historical example: Typhoid Mary's burn rate was 0.
Note how quickly the last measles outbreak died down, even with a depressingly low vaccination rate where it started.
That was primarily due to defacto quarantine, not immunization. When someone is home sick, or in the hospital in isolation sick, they are not in contact with people who are susceptible, but have not yet contracted the disease.
This is an incredibly important effect for hyper-virulent diseases like measles.
"Problem is this is hard to prove, and I doubt anybody would do any further serious research into it. Why won't they?"
There is research in such a stuff, but mostly from public university and as with all orphan disease not very much. The reason that it is not done is because there are so many research point and at the end of the day you have got to limit yourself to what you can find a funding for. The fact that you found a pubmed article belies your claim that nobody would research it. The simple truth, is that sometimes some stuff will simply through bad luck not be researched.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I thing a more accurate statement would be that California is at the fringe of all political spectrums.
Time to offend someone
Guess what, a vaccine is meant to trigger an immune response and what you have basically sounds like a very strong immune response. I bet you get over things like the common cold pretty quick, I know I do and have similar responses to vaccines, though not that bad. I feel like shit for a day and then am fine. Also no one ever said that vaccines were 100% safe and without side effects but I'll take feeling like shit for a day over a full blown flu for several days while feeling like shit the whole time and puking.
Time to offend someone
It's a bit more nuanced you have to look at risk of getting the disease + risk of bad outcome vs risk of bad outcome from the vaccine. For measles and most vaccines the math works.
Now take yellow fever my exposure risk is extremely low and the vaccine kills more than 1 in 500k.
No sir I dont like it.
You're suggesting to add expensive testing for every child to detect for some known issues that occur in approximately 1:1,000,000 children and this testing isn't likely to grab known issues. How much do you think that one in a million child receives in compensation for a bad vaccine? Divide that by a million and that tells you how cheap that testing needs to be to be worthwhile.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
California is a microcosm of the United States as a whole: liberal around the coasts, except for the south coast; and conservative inland, except near the large body of water on the border.
They also tend to run liberal in federal elections and conservative in state elections.
This split personality is behind a lot of California's budget problems, as one part of the populace with a majority vote has mandated spending on certain programs, and another part of the populace with a majority vote has prohibited raising certain taxes, leaving the legislature tightly bound between the rock of having to spend money and the hard place of not being able to raise it, requiring them to borrow it.
Which, come to think of it, is another microcosm of the United States as a whole, and the reason for the constant debt crises we keep having. Congress mandates spending, doesn't authorize the necessary taxes, and then blames the president for coming to the unavoidable necessity of borrowing to pay for what they've required him to spend and not allowed him to raise.
If you watch California elections they only borrow money for education and repairing aging infrastructure. They seem to find the money they need for everything else by raiding the schools. If the dumbasses who vote in California would stop approving billions of dollars in school bonds every election, this practice might actually change.
Let me ask you this. As the parent of a child with a transplant, would you prefer that it be really cheap and easy for every other parent who can, to get shots for their kids?
* What free clinics with free shots? I did a web search for my local area and didn't turn any up. Are these secret or something? I finally *did* get my kid her last HepA shot, but I was only able to do it by finding a new pediatrician for her. In practice I had to have health insurance and fork over a co-pay.
* I'm rather well-off, and it took me 3 months to get my kid her last HepA shot. My original health care provider didn't have it. I called 4 pharmacies but they wouldn't give it to a child. None of them informed me about any free clinics either! Finally I found a new pediatrician. How many parents d'you think are determined enough and have the means to get this done? Neither pediatrician informed me about any free clinics either! WHAT FREE CLINICS??
I *bet* you that MOST of the vaccination non-compliance is because of problems LIKE THIS instead of outright anti-vax BS. I got it done, but it took a while AND it was pretty hard! How about we make it REALLY EASY for people to have their kids fully vaccinated? I mean, how many people are going to comb the web, call 4 pharmacies, and finally switch pediatricians to get stuff like this done?
I *fully* support vaccination, how about rather than decrying/prosecuting parents who are having problems, you HELP THEM GET IT DONE? Like actual free clinics that aren't kept secret? Like vaccines offered in schools 2 weeks before classes?
--PeterM
> Hammering a small toddler with so much medication at one time seems unnecessary. Vaccinations are not medications. Ye olde Wikipedia says specifically that vaccinations are th, "administration of antigenic material (a vaccine) to stimulate an individual's immune system to develop adaptive immunity to a pathogen." Read the full entry to understand if that is not clear...it is not the same thing as giving someone a cocktail of drugs (medication).
Put this another way:
If measles goes through a small town public school with a thousand kids, three of those kids will die. Several will have life-long aftereffects.
If you vaccinate every human being in a large city, *1* will have *some sort* of adverse effect.
If 'reducing possible harm to children' is actually your end goal, there's no way in hell you'd argue against vaccines.
The problem, really, is that there are entire generations who've never seen a playmate die of measles, or have the polio leg braces, or the like.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
And - the part that many anti-vax folks forget - he fabricated the study to help sell his own version of the MMR. So he wasn't anti-vax, he was just pro-"the vaccine I made which will make me more money." (Of course, he quickly turned anti-vax when he saw dollar signs in that direction.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Wanted to agree with you but, as someone who is a semi-religious Jew, it's actually a religious commandment to break any and all religious laws to save lives. If someone needed urgent medical attention on the Sabbath and their only method of getting it would be for an Orthodox Jew to drive them to a hospital on the Sabbath (when you usually aren't allowed to drive), that Orthodox Jew would be committing a HUGE sin if he said "No, I'd rather observe the Sabbath." He might not drive the car back from the hospital (as that's not needed to save a life), but he wouldn't think twice about getting behind the wheel to save a person's life.
I can't speak for other religions, but I would hope that they would have similar rules. It just seems like common sense to me.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Oops.... That should have been: Wanted to agree with you and expand a bit. As someone who is.....
Really need to proof-read before I post!
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
I was overseas when they made a big push to take a relatively untested Anthrax vaccine. This was after it was determined that the enemies we were fighting weren't using Anthrax, and that the attacks (mailings) had all been to politicians and such. There was a lot of rah rah'ing over how important it was to take the vaccine as military members. I turned it down because they couldn't tell us anything about possible long term side affects. When talking about it with others no one seemed to have opted to take it.
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.
If you pro-vaccine people keep lying to us all the time I will stop listening to you. This is why I am not getting every vaccine recommended, not because I think there is a autism link. Merck, the company that makes the Mumps vaccine has been caught lying about the effectiveness of its' vaccine so it won't loose its' monopoly making it. They will tell you it is 95% effective, but it is well less that that, perhaps as low as 33%. Of course they tell everybody in the media that the outbreaks were due to vaccinated people, when in reality as many as 77% of the infected in the outbreak were vaccinated.
We also have countries like China where they mandate vaccination. They still have outbreaks of measles there even though 99% of the people are vaccinated. So again, this thing about herd immunity turns out to be a lie. And cigaretts don't cause cancer!
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
Do you have any links for that study. I found reference to a study done in Oregon regarding this but couldn't actually find the name of the study or anything. The article I read failed to mention any increased risk of complications. The only risks it discussed was what you would obviously expect given that the child goes longer without the vaccination, and that they might not finish the vaccination schedule.
Depending on your lifestyle I think the additional risk from taking longer to accomplish all the vaccinations can largely be negated. For kids who get farmed out to daycares and or travel extensively it is obviously more critical that they be vaccinated as quickly as possible. My own kids though have a stay at home Mom and don't have a lot of contact outside the home until Kindergarten.
Except they give you FDA blacked labeled vaccines. I loved getting multiple rounds of anthrax for no real reason. The reaction rates for anthrax vaccine are 5%-35% , those are good numbers. Also you get booster shots ie multiple shots per year. http://www.haaretz.com/news/di...
What about the anthrax vaccine I was forced to take?
Disagree.
Both sides are guilty of extremism here.
Vaccines do work. The theory is sound. But the implementation leaves a little to be desired.
It is possible to find kids that get the shots) and then develop an allergic reaction and die. In the past few months Tasha Greige and Rachel French died because of this. Look it up.
The problem is greatly exacerbated by giving tylenol for a fever. Reactions can be severe. We no longer give kids aspirin for a fever because of the neurological damage associated with Reye's Syndrome and there is mounting evidence we should be withholding Tylenol under the same conditions.
I'm pro vax and got my kids jabbed, but recognize the immunization program is a little oversold. Anti vax sentiment gets wrapped up with nuttiness like "it's intentional depopulation". Yeah not so much. It's hard to find objective discourse criticizing it without the sme website offering up that nonsense.
Here's what one guy who has expertise pointed out:
My name is Tetyana Obukhanych. I hold a PhD in Immunology. I am writing this letter in the hope that it will correct several common misperceptions about vaccines in order to help you formulate a fair and balanced understanding that is supported by accepted vaccine theory and new scientific findings.
IPV (inactivated poliovirus vaccine) cannot prevent transmission of poliovirus (see appendix for the scientific study, Item #1). Wild poliovirus has been non-existent in the USA for at least two decades. Even if wild poliovirus were to be re-imported by travel, vaccinating for polio with IPV cannot affect the safety of public spaces. Please note that wild poliovirus eradication is attributed to the use of a different vaccine, OPV or oral poliovirus vaccine. Despite being capable of preventing wild poliovirus transmission, use of OPV was phased out long ago in the USA and replaced with IPV due to safety concerns.
Tetanus is not a contagious disease, but rather acquired from deep-puncture wounds contaminated with C. tetani spores. Vaccinating for tetanus (via the DTaP combination vaccine) cannot alter the safety of public spaces; it is intended to render personal protection only.
While intended to prevent the disease-causing effects of the diphtheria toxin, the diphtheria toxoid vaccine (also contained in the DTaP vaccine) is not designed to prevent colonization and transmission of C. diphtheriae. Vaccinating for diphtheria cannot alter the safety of public spaces; it is likewise intended for personal protection only.
The acellular pertussis (aP) vaccine (the final element of the DTaP combined vaccine), now in use in the USA, replaced the whole cell pertussis vaccine in the late 1990s, which was followed by an unprecedented resurgence of whooping cough. An experiment with deliberate pertussis infection in primates revealed that the aP vaccine is not capable of preventing colonization and transmission of B. pertussis (see appendix for the scientific study, Item #2). The FDA has issued a warning regarding this crucial finding.[1]
(See more: https://alethonews.wordpress.c...)
A real MD (who is also an attorney) points out ascorbate mitigates the side effects:
http://www.peakenergy.com/arti...
"Klenner's paper (Klenner FR. The treatment of poliomyelitis and other virus diseases with vitamin C. J. South. Med. and Surg., 111:210-214, 1949.) on curing 60 cases of polio in the epidemic of 1948 should have changed the way infectious diseases were treated but it did not." - Robert Cathcart
The people telling you there's no problem are The third-leading cause of death in the United States.
Starfield B (July 2000). "Is US health really the best in the world?". JAMA 284 (4): 483–5. doi:10.1001/jama.284.4.483. PMID 10904513.
This was edited
Need Mercedes parts ?
For principle, we must error on the side of freedom.
You do realize that your hypothetical is only about a very small percentage of the population right? That if YOU are vaccinated, you are most likely safe from those who are not?
There will ALWAYS be unvaccinated people out there. Vaccinate your children and you won't likely have to worry about them being infected by the unvaccinated out there. Oh, you are in the vanishingly small slice of folks with kids who cannot have the vaccines for medical reasons? OR you are in that small percentage for which vaccines don't actually work? In reality it is the people who choose not to vaccinate who are taking the risks, not you.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Well, if those people would kindly not sneeze where I or my children walk, that would all be fine and dandy. Your freedom ends where mine begins.
You did vaccinate YOUR kids right? Why are you worried? Even if they ran into a room full of sick unvaccinated kids for a day, chances are they will emerge perfectly safe. I don't see the problem.. That someone else doesn't vaccinate doesn't put you and yours at risk, assuming you have them vaccinated..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
If I understand this proposed law, that is in fact the idea. Children can go to public schools only if they're vaccinated; but unvaccinated children can go to private schools or be homeschooled. Except, sometimes, when the state sends armed agents to seize homeschooled children because the state doesn't like the curriculum ( http://www.offthegridnews.com/current-events/police-seize-10-children-from-off-grid-family-because-theyre-homeschooled/ ).
Personally, I don't see how this proposal could survive a freedom of religion challenge. But as far as eliminating the "personal belief" exemption that California's had for decades, I believe it's perfectly Constitutional although a little out of character for the state. Five years from now, I expect that you'll only be able to opt out of vaccinations if you claim that it affects your eternal salvation.
"Lacking vaccinations does not generally present an immediate danger to the child". Yes it does. It does to the kid and to the public in general. Having too many people that aren't vaccinated (eg. a community of religious people) presents a clear and present danger to everyone.
No, not being vaccinated only means you have a greater chance of catching something. Large communities in this country don't do any vaccinations, yet most of their children do not die. They are not in immediate danger by not being vaccinated.
Immediate danger means it is dangerous right now (or soon), not that some possible harm may come in the distant future. Refusing lifesaving medical treatment for a child that was in a car accident is causing immediate harm. Not making them wear a helmet when riding their bikes is an immediate danger of harm, these you can rightly regulate. Not vaccinating does not present any immediate danger to the child, and although the state can strongly encourage you to vaccinate if they want, there MUST be exceptions allowed for medical and religious reasons.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
They have no obligation to pay any mind to your religion whatsoever.
But they do have an obligation sir. And I quote: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
They must not impede the free exercise of religion and to fulfill that requirement they must be VERY mindful of religious exercise or risk violating the terms of the constitution.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
The intersection of people who don't want to follow the CDC's vaccination schedule (for whatever reason, legitimate or otherwise) and people with some resources has got to be somewhat reasonably sized (eg: look at all the wealthy areas with well-informed people who don't buy into the "everything is safe" propaganda). That says growth industry in servicing the desire to avoid public school to me...
You had a lot of interesting points, and yes, some vaccines like tetanus (the second most deadly toxin known) are for preventing infections which are not transmitted human to human.
You had to toss in that worthless "cure everything with Vitamin C" quack and his friend the Orthopedic surgeon Cathcart though..
http://scienceblogs.com/insole...
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
Putting others at risk is NOT a good argument here, especially when you have to revert to "A sickness could mutate and kill" hypothetical to make your point.
I think you are way overstating the risks to others by people who choose not to vaccinate. Where what you say is POSSIBLE, so is the mutation of the common cold or flu into a virulent strain that wipes out a huge percentage of the population. Actually, for those things we have working vaccines for, the risk seems much less.
Without a real demonstrated immediate danger, we must error on the side of freedom and allow religious exceptions to any mandatory vaccination laws. Or shall we just trample on the first amendment based on a hypothetical danger? My principles say that a religious exception should be in this law.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Gee, miss the point much...
He was complaining that if he sends his kids to "PUBLIC SCHOOL" (which comes at no extra cost to him) he will be forced to violate his religious belief. Therefore, in order to practice his religion as he sees fit, he will be forced to private school his children, which comes at an EXTRA cost. So, the net effect of this law is to cause him to violate his religious practice OR pay money to the private school. It's the exact same effect as taxing his religious practice though force of law.
Nobody is complaining about the system of taxes that provide public schools, only that due to laws like this single out specific religious and force them to violate their religious views or incur extra costs. This situation should not be.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
For me this whole issue is less about religous freedom and instead about being free to make your own medical decisions. At what level of risk do we draw the line and violate another persons right to making their own medical decisions in favor of lowering our risk of catching an infectous disease?
How about if we look at a different scenario for a bit. Statistics have shown that violent crime is more often perpetrated by those of lower income, in heavily urbanized areas, and from single parent homes. What would you think of a proposal to deny social benefits to a pregnant single mother who refuses an abortion and lives below some arbitrary income level in a similarly arbitrary geographic region? I would hope that you find that proposal insane and unworkable. I feel much the same way about forcing anyone into any medical procedure or face being ostracized from important parts of society.
Key facts
Measles is one of the leading causes of death among young children even though a safe and cost-effective vaccine is available.
In 2013, there were 145 700 measles deaths globally – about 400 deaths every day or 16 deaths every hour.
Measles vaccination resulted in a 75% drop in measles deaths between 2000 and 2013 worldwide.
In 2013, about 84% of the world's children received one dose of measles vaccine by their first birthday through routine health services – up from 73% in 2000.
During 2000-2013, measles vaccination prevented an estimated 15.6 million deaths making measles vaccine one of the best buys in public health.
http://www.who.int/mediacentre...
Agreed. My wife may have an MTHFR mutation, which would give any potential future children serious risks to vaccination. Not having enough medical exceptions is what scares me about laws like this. We would have to rely on herd immunity, which of course this law would help with if it weren't for the fact that it would mandate vaccines to people who may be at risk from them.
Not entirely. There are some genetic metabolic disorders for which antibodies resulting from vaccines potentially present a serious risk. Not just ASD, but a few other risks. Can't find the journal articles at the moment, but they are out there.
And some bacterial diseases will never ever go away such as tetanus (lockjaw). So no matter what happens some vaccinations are here to stay.
You seem to confuse two issues:
1) Saying a certain religion is not acceptable and will be prosecuted and prevented from practice. Like Catholics in UK of 16th to 18th century. The Act of Supremacy of 1534 and the Scottish Reformation in 1560, which rendered Catholic practice illegal.
2) Making a law that will make illegal some specific act, which coincidentally your religion suggest you to do or demands of you to do. For example making it illegal to stone an adulteress.
First is prevented by the constitution and second is not, as long as it is not specifically aimed at forbidding practice of that religion without being in any other way a problem for the society.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
It's hard to find objective discourse criticizing it without the sme website offering up that nonsense.
Is it fair to paraphrase that as "The only people critiquing vaccines are utter kooks and I spend my time trying to find something said by the kooks that I can agree with"?
Why would you try so hard to believe things said by kooks? If you can't find any nonkooks saying the same thing, then maybe you shouldn't be motivated to believe it.
It is my understanding that herd immunity is something that occurs over time naturally through generational multiplication, a Darwinian-style removal of the organisms less suitable to survive and that evolving state provides an incubator for the adapted immune systems to become more potent.
To start with your understanding is wrong. Herd immunity is a state where the percentage of members in the herd who are immune to a disease is high enough that when an outbreak occurs, the outbreak ends and the disease becomes no longer present in the herd again.
Secondly for your natural Darwinian system to work, the disease would have to have to become the dominant selective pressure that determines which individuals are able to pass on their genes. In practice that would involve a close to 100% mortality rate on the unprotected population, because genetically inherited resistance to the disease has to become the most important selective pressure. Do you really think it's good idea to let the majority of the human population (probably including you) die from a disease over and over again over multiple generations to get "natural herd immunity" because you aren't a fan of the "artificial" process?
Fanatically anti-fanatical
I would say a quarantine after showing symptoms is less invasive than a preventative injection.
When I do my cost-benefit analysis, "invasiveness" is on the cost side and it carries small weight; on the benefit side are "preventiveness" and "health", and they carry large weight.
And yet still, I don't agree that quarantine is less invasive that injection. An injection is over in three seconds. Quarantine for, say, 41 days is more than one million times longer than that.
The cost-benefit analysis for vaccines is so unfathomably overwhelmingly in favor of the benefit that all reasonable people are aghast that we have to waste time arguing about it. Can't we argue about things where the costs and benefits are less obviously unbalanced?
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.
This is it. We won't hear it from kooks. The kooks lost all credibility in the past, it already happened, so it is not possible for them to convince me or anybody reasonable of anything ever again. True or not, the kooks simply cannot be trusted. If you will excuse the Godwin, Nazis had good taste in art but nobody cites Nazi art critiques because, alas, other things done by Nazis.
So, somebody else will have to write art critiques, and someone else will have to convince us that there is something wrong with a particular vaccine.
Yes. Yes you have.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Your theory might hold water if vaccines were the same as natural immunity, they aren't.
Not quite. The 'burn rate' is a measure of how quickly an infected person ceases to be a vector of infection (by getting better or dying). I'm talking about probability of getting infected at all. Technically, an immune individual shows a burn rate of infinity since they never carry the infection in spite of exposure.
So mass vaccination increases the effective burn rate as measured over the population.
This is Exhibit A for the existence of the 2nd Amendment.
No but they did a mediocre job of stopping Ebola in the US. Good enough.
There are many people with compromised immune systems and the vast majority do not need to live in sterile environments. Their immune system just does not work as well as it should or is overly sensitive. In both cases this has no real effect on virulent diseases as such. However it often means that they can not be vaccinated for those diseases.
It often means they are the ones who suffer and die when they catch them
I'm not confused...
There needs to be a really good reason to step on someone's religious liberty. In the two extremes you cite, the reason (or lack there of) is obvious. In THIS case, it's not so clear cut because we are between the extremes. When faced with a question like this, where you are in the grey, my principles say you error on the side of liberty.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
The link was shared with me on social media several months ago, I didn't save it unfortunately. But google found it really quickly: http://www.scientificamerican....
Quoting the article in Scientific American: "The risk of a febrile seizure following the MMR is approximately one case in 3,000 doses for children aged 12 to 15 months but one case in 1,500 doses for children aged 16 to 23 months"
Double the risk of the most common side effect.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Religion is a bit of a weird one. Taken to extremes religious belief can be used to supersede any laws and justify anything.
Is this not a country made of laws or those of ? I thought the point (after years of upheaval) was to have a government of men (flawed as tat may be) rather than one governed BY religion. A theocratic state if you will.
There are limits to juggling snakes. I think cruelty to animals would get you locked up. Religion or not. There are limits.
Thanks for the link.
I wish they had studied more than just MMR. At least the Febrile Seizures are essentially just an extra expense since they don't cause any long term issues and aren't damaging on their own. But that is an important thing to know and be aware of.
Which religions prohibit vaccinations?
If you claim that you do not have to be part of a recognised religion for your belief to take precedence. Then what you are saying is that anyone can claim the religious exception for anything. Do you not see why this can be a bad idea?
My son is 4 1/2 years old and I want him circumcised. I want an unnecessary potentially dangerous and most definitely traumatic operation performed on my child.
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/lo...
America is very odd
And our founding fathers wrestled with just such questions.
Look, as with all freedoms, there are limits. Religion just cannot be a cart blanch to any behavior we wish. You cannot just say "My religion says I must do this, or not do that" to get around some law you don't like.
However, when writing laws we MUST be mindful of religious options of others and take care to not inadvertently infringe on someone's religious freedoms without a good reason. We cannot curb freedom of the press without good reason, we cannot curb speech without really good reasons. Religious freedom is the same thing, you cannot pass a law that infringes on someone's exercise of their religion without good reason.
So the debate here is if the lawmakers in California have a good reason to not include a religious exception in their law. IMHO they do not have a compelling reason and should have included the religious exception.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Yep it is the wonderful balance that you and me and everyone else need to maintain.
Which religions prohibit vaccinations?
Two that I am aware of. Christian Science prohibits many common medical procedures and I believe that some Amish eschew all technology beyond horse and buggies. They are long standing established religions. But how long a religion has existed has nothing to do with this question. Remember that this CLEARLY is infringing on religious freedom, the question is about if this infringement is allowed by the constitution or not.
Religious freedom has limits, like freedom of speech has limits, so nobody is claiming that just because your religion says you can, you get to break the law. However, the question is about what can be made into a law, especially a law that clearly infringes on somebody's religious freedoms. Unless the government has a compelling reason it should not (and constitutionally cannot) infringe on any of the freedoms protected by the constitution. I don't believe that they have a compelling reason in this case.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I am getting bored of posting this link. READ IT. Now explain your theory.
http://www.who.int/mediacentre...
There is an evolutionary tendency for diseases to become less lethal and less incapacitating, since people do slowly adapt through evolution, and disease strains that keep their host functional longer tend to spread better. (There are exceptions; the malaria plasmodium depends heavily on healthy mosquitoes to spread, not healthy people.) This is one reason it's really hard to tell what caused ancient epidemics.
Chicken pox is a good example of a disease that appears to have become more harmless. I still hated having it, and I'm still vulnerable to shingles (I got a shot for it, but was told that only lowers my chances of getting shingles by half).
I'm not patient, really. Given natural selection, which will do a half-assed job of partly mitigating disease effects over a millennium or so, or vaccination, I'm siding with vaccination.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
You want to juggle rattlesnakes for religious purposes, go right ahead. You want to throw them at me for religious purposes, I've got a problem with that. You want to dilute herd immunity against potentially deadly diseases for religious reasons, I've got a problem with that.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
It is a real danger. We've seen outbreaks of deadly diseases.
I'd consider setting up a permanent unsafe situation as as bad as creating an immediate danger.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The certainty of current harm is worse than the possibility of future harm. Let them be fostered by same-sex couples if you want the best assurance for their safety.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I am merely pointing out they have no scientific evidence to justify that strong claim.
No evidence? That is itself a pretty strong claim.
Here's some really quick ones:
Effective: http://www.vaccines.gov/basics...
Safe: http://www.cnn.com/2014/07/01/...
These are just two of them. These results are so well-known (especially with people who lived when measles was rampant) that citations are generally regarded as unnecessary to provide -- anybody can look up the source on their own. You can maybe find a vaccine (particularly one not yet FDA-approved) that isn't safe and effective because it's a broad category -- it's like asking whether "liquids are safe and effective at quenching thirst", and the answer is yes, but don't drink mercury or poison or anything that isn't safe and effective.
Here's mine
Measles is a highly contagious, serious disease caused by a virus. In 1980, before widespread vaccination, measles caused an estimated 2.6 million deaths each year.
The disease remains one of the leading causes of death among young children globally, despite the availability of a safe and effective vaccine. Approximately 145 700 people died from measles in 2013 – mostly children under the age of 5.
Measles is caused by a virus in the paramyxovirus family and it is normally passed through direct contact and through the air. The virus infects the mucous membranes, then spreads throughout the body. Measles is a human disease and is not known to occur in animals.
Accelerated immunization activities have had a major impact on reducing measles deaths. During 2000-2013, measles vaccination prevented an estimated 15.6 million deaths. Global measles deaths have decreased by 75% from an estimated 544 200 in 2000 to 145 700 in 2013.
We no longer have 2.6 million people a year dying. All the recent outbreaks in the US and Canada have been among people who weren't vaccinated. And then there were these idiots to serve as an example.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Oops - the link
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
My point was that whenever you have a religious exception you have a mile wide hole in the law as anyone can claim religious exemption. As who can define a persons religion?
So should the religious exception be encoded in the law making it effectively toothless or should the law not allow religious arguments. (there are no religious arguments against vaccinations from most religions)
The number sounds about right - you have all the kids, plus a whole slew mandatory for military personnel, plus travelers, plus booster shots, plus the biggie - annual flu shots.
Since manufacturers have to pay a levy to the government fund for every dose they distribute for a disease (The MMR vaccine, since it covers 3 diseases, has to pay 3 levies per dose), it doesn't make economic sense to over-produce and over-distribute.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Thanks - same figures, but you expressed it much better than I did :-)
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Christian Scientists have been overruled many times and often prosecuted for letting children die without seeking medical attention (yep, often prayers do not work).
The Amish are not prohibited from vaccinations. They just have a low uptake and there are many inside the community trying to improve the uptake. They do not use religion as a reason to avoid vaccines.
Even Christian Science does not have a hard objection to vaccinations or dentists for that matter.
At the point where you're deciding the level of risk for someone else. Which is what you're doing when you decide to expose other people to diseases that can kill or cripple for life because you don't want to be vaccinated. Your want to be free to choose on that matter without me having any say in it? Figure out how to avoid spreading measles to anyone else if you catch them, then we'll talk.
As for your proposal, I do consider it unworkable, but that's irrelevant. Your "solution" doesn't address the problem you presented. It doesn't stop the child from being born, it doesn't keep him from being raised by a poor single mother in the inner city, and it won't prevent his possibly becoming a criminal because of it. If anything, your proposed solution makes the problem worse. Even if it were sane and workable, it should be rejected on that basis alone. Vaccination, meanwhile, has not only a massive amount of evidence but many decades of practical experience demonstrating that it does in fact decrease the problem.
Not quite. The 'burn rate' is a measure of how quickly an infected person ceases to be a vector of infection (by getting better or dying). I'm talking about probability of getting infected at all. Technically, an immune individual shows a burn rate of infinity since they never carry the infection in spite of exposure.
So mass vaccination increases the effective burn rate as measured over the population.
Only after you hit the HIT (Herd Immunity Threshold); below that, pretty much everyone who can get the disease, will, if it has a long contagious period prior to onset of symptoms, is contagious after symptoms remit and the person is not educated that they need to stay home longer, even if they "feel better", or the disease has asymptomatic carriers. Or some jerk decides to "work through it", and exposes their coworkers.
And as the math proves, measles and pertussis have an HIT too high to be able to pop over the top of the HIT to get to that saddle point. Their only saving grace is that people isolate themselves when they feel ill.
NB: measles is infectious 4 days before onset of symptoms, and up to 4 days after symptoms remit; pertussis, at least, is only infectious after onset of symptoms, and remains infectious for only 3 weeks (but symptoms last longer, if untreated with antibiotics); if treated with antibiotics, pertussis is no longer infectious after about a week. Measles is pretty insidious.
You are confused. If you stone my child or if you send your infected child to spread a disease that will maim my child, I don't see much difference in it. You are simply a criminal. Most countries already have laws that punish knowingly spreading a disease. This is a very natural extension. So there is a very good reason in this case.
As I said, you are confused.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
There are several issues with your stance:
- The virus could mutate because it is allowed to freely roam between hosts. Many millions may die because they are not going to be immune to the mutation.
- I and/or my children could be allergic to certain vaccines and thus would rely on herd immunity to keep us safe.
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If you will excuse the Godwin, Nazis had good taste in art but nobody cites Nazi art critiques because, alas, other things done by Nazis.
There's actually a lot of things I found interesting about Nazis that is never mentioned in high school or college history books. For example, part of their ideology was...strangely...staunchly in favor of animal rights. Also, Jew genocide wasn't one of their initial goals; at first they were either putting Jews into forced labor camps (to build the German economy, but it wasn't only Jews that ended up there) or just simply deporting them out of Europe. That is, until Hitler came up with his final solution, then instead of pushing them out of Europe they suddenly started bringing them in en masse to send them to the death camps.
Another interesting thing is that a lot of gays don't seem to understand where the pink triangle came from. It was actually a marking that gay males were required to wear (like how Jews were required to wear a double yellow triangle; lesbians were to wear black triangles) and initially gay men were sent to camps where it was believed that they could be converted to being straight, and they were forced to have sex with women, among other things, but initially being executed wasn't one of those things.
Also interestingly, pink was considered to be a very masculine color prior to that era, and switched around that time. Related? Maybe...Maybe not.
Oh, and the 1942 era stealth bomber...
but we can keep their kids from suffering for it.
And keep *our* kids/family members from getting sick of it as epidemy spreads.
Anti-vaxx lowers herd immunity, and thus increases risks of epidemy. Once the fraction of immune people drops bellow a critical threshold, a virus can freely spread among the population. That will not only affect anti-vaxx-ers, their kids, but also anyone else unlicky enough to not have immunity.
(Kids who didn't get the shot yet, people who CAN'T get shot because of allergy to some compound, people with lower/compromised immunity, people who had health problems at that specific time making them more weak and prone to additional diseases, etc.) these people aren't immune because of some weird believe. But they'll suffer too, just because there was a big enough amount of people with weird believe.
That's exactly the kind of situation where "One's freedom stop where the others' freedom starts".
People have the freedom to have any bat-shit crazy religion or other weird believe they want, as long as they don't pose a threat to the society. Anti-vaxx are a big biological danger to the society.
How would you react if a religious group claimed that they have a sacred ritual consisting of juggling with armed explosives in the middle of mall that needs to be explicitly crowded? Would you allow them on religious grounds? Or would you suggest that these peculiar weird ritual is too dangerous for the public and they'll have to skip?
Well anti-vaxx-er pose a similar risk.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Disclaimer: I*A*AMD, but just not in this field (I'm doing research).
I suspect that because I have a familial history of {Ce}liacs 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 would sound plausible.
Note that technically, it's not exactly the vaccine's fault. It's your genetic tendency to develop auto-immune disease that runs in your family that caused your nephropathy, and that *happens* to have been triggered by the vaccine. But had it not been the vaccine, it could have been any other trigger that disturbs your immunological system. One susceptible person could trigger an autoimmune disease after a cold. (In fact, Diabetes Type I, the one that more frequently in youth - is strongly suspected that the auto-immune disease is triggered most often by the immune response to infection). In fact that might also have been your case: the trigger might have been some virus you caught while serving, but you overlooked because it's frequent (even more so with lots of people packed in the same place like barracks) and thus forgot about it, but when thinking back you remember the vaccine.
(Same as psychedelic drugs:
Smoking pot doesn't force people to become psychotic. But there are a few people who have a genetic predisposition to psychosis and the joints happened to be the trigger that started it. But the guy could have just as likely gone bonkers after experiencing an intense emotional experience, etc.).
Problem is this is hard to prove, and I doubt anybody would do any further serious research into it. Why won't they?
Well, you might be surprised but actually *there is* research into these kind of stuff. There is a whole branch called "personalized medicine" which tries to gather *which exact* risk factors, variations, etc. you have, and adapt treatment to your specific needs.
(example which are already in production:
- analyse a collection of liver enzymes which play an important role in the destruction of chemicals, and thus influence critically the dosage of some meds.
example currently in study:
- for some cancer (like breast) it might make more sense not to do the same control regularly (currently, mammary X-rays, every 2 years for all susceptible women) but to adapt it (women with certain variant of BRCA genes should get yearly or every 2 year, the general female population might as well do the X-ray only every 5 years).
I don't happen to know where exactly is the research about genetic predisposition to autoimmune disease.
But that exactly the kind of stuff personalised medicine and the "your whole genome for less than a few k $" are for.
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.
Indeed there's a huge difference between:
- Must skip the vaccine for medical grounds (e.g.: known allergy to some compound inside the vaccine)
- Want to avoid so because it says so in a magical book that is always true and contains the true word of some beardy deity sitting on a cloud, and was written down by a bum who basically spent a year in the desert completely high on mushroom while seeking for divine inspiration).
The former is a valid reason to skip the vaccine for a given person, the latter is a good reason why I agree with Rch
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
You're trying to turn a fairly bumpy curve into a cliff and it doesn't really fit.
Our current vaccination rate for measles is not really adequate which allowed an introduced infection to spread a bit and even find a second epicenter due to travel. However, we do have a sufficient immunization rate that it died out fairly quickly. The empirical evidence proves that.
If you are correct, why isn't measles spreading in a big wave across the country right now? Most of the population has never had the measles.
There is a point where the immunization rate isn't adequate to significantly change the course of an epidemic, but there is no point where a low but existent rate of effective immunization makes matters worse through slowing the burn rate.
The autism claims are entirely discredited now.
Yes, but everyone is ignoring the fact that the DPT shot has been proven to be the cause of SIDS. An adverse physiological response of shallow breathing occurs 7-14 days after administering the shot. When's the last time you heard anyone advertise a stern warning about that?
Where did you read that? At some anti-vaxx site no doubt, read this instead.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/bo...
Andy Warhol got it right / Everybody gets the limelight
Andy Warhol got it wrong / Fifteen minutes is too long.
Christian Scientists have been overruled many times and often prosecuted for letting children die without seeking medical attention (yep, often prayers do not work).
The question was "Which religions prohibit vaccinations?" I'm pointing out that there ARE some that do, and with your admission at least ONE does. So the question about if this new law is a encroachment on religious freedom must be "Yes, Yes it is!"
Now shall we proceed to the question about if this encroachment is a valid one or not or do you wish to keep arguing that this has nothing to do with freedom of religion?
As you rightly point out, there are limits to religious freedoms (as there are to other rights), and failing to obtain immediate lifesaving medical treatment for your children is an example of such a limit. However, the question here is about vaccinations, which are NOT immediate medial care, nor is the child going to die if they don't get them. So the question is different from the blood transfusion or cancer treatments.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
There are several issues with your stance: - The virus could mutate because it is allowed to freely roam between hosts. Many millions may die because they are not going to be immune to the mutation. - I and/or my children could be allergic to certain vaccines and thus would rely on herd immunity to keep us safe.
But, none of these pose an immediate danger to others by unvaccinated kids. You cannot be sure of a mutation and you cannot say with certainty that this religious exception from vaccinations will cause anybody else to get sick in each specific case. The problem with your argument is that not vaccinating poses no immediate danger to anyone else PLUS it eliminates a possible danger from the side effects of vaccinations (not that I would recommend skipping vaccinations, but you have to agree that there is SOME risk with them).
No we need to have the religious exception here.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Vaccination is good on the whole, I don't argue against that. I do not see my right to life as being greater than another persons right to medical self determination. I wouldn't force someone to give me a kidney, blood transfusion, or bone marrow let alone be vaccinated to preserve my life.
The solution being used for vaccinations is unproductive for similar reasons as you cited for my example. By excluding the unvaccinated children from school you force them into homeschooling. Homeschooling, while it can be done well, frequently just leads to a deeper level of indoctrination. The parents are making decisions you don't agree with and so the solution is to punish the child and ensure they'll likely receive an even worse education? What do you think will happen when they grow up and have children of their own? After being forcibly ostracized as children they will simply be even more deeply entrenched in whatever points of view and beliefs that led their parents to not vaccinate them. I would rather foot the bill for a duplicate school system just to handle unvaccinated kids than exacerbate the problem by forcing them into homeschooling.
There have been outbreaks already of polio, measles, mumps and rubella in the US. That means that there are not enough people being vaccinated in order for anyone to be able to rely on herd immunity.
The religious (and that includes the Jenny-crowd) have already caused a return of once-eradicated diseases due to their 'religious exemptions'. These exemptions are CURRENTLY causing real harm to real kids (who do not have a choice in the matter) and even adults (especially the elderly), some of which may have real reasons.
Mutations are not that far fetched either, some of which have ALREADY HAPPENED in the UK, Thailand and Africa.
Religious exemptions are KILLING people, most of which who did not agree nor had any choice in the matter.
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"The church does not require that Christian Scientists avoid all medical care – adherents use dentists, optometrists, obstetricians, physicians for broken bones, and vaccination when required by law – but maintains that Christian Science prayer is most effective when not combined with medicine"
So if required by law vaccinations are OK with CS.
Religious freedom has its place but is often used as an "avoid the law" card.
And required vaccinations are not unusual. Many countries will not allow you in if you do not have certain vaccinations.
I realize I'm going to be attacked for this (maybe not, it's already 5 days old). Add that anyone searching for my name will see I'm vegan too and think I'm double-crazy and I should just not make this comment, but here it goes anyway.
Vaccines are good. Yes. They have prevented a lot of disease and saved lots of lives. Yes. Yet no one can explain to me why we need this bill.
1) Most cases of diseases on the vaccination schedule appearing in the U.S. come from travel to foreign lands (there are sources, I'm too lazy, use Google), 80% or so for measles, if I'm not mistaken. Why is this law so important while foreign travel is completely ignored? Okay, fine, do both, whatever, but the actual impact of this bill is going to be pretty small (point 2 below feeds this as well).
2) What of our current vaccine practices is failing so badly that requires this law? Vaccine rates are currently pretty darn high in California. Should we really sacrifice an education for underprivileged children for this relatively minor threat? Deaths from measles is at exactly 0 for the last 10 years. I think the status quo is okay, at least as far as school-aged children are concerned.
3) Yes, underprivileged children are the ones who will suffer. Everyone bandies about the personal belief exemption and Jenny McCarthy (McCarthyism irony?), but if you look at the California state data, conditional enrollees are the biggest unvaccinated population, twice that of personal belief. Conditional enrollees are ones who haven't provided records, but swear they will (but usually don't). Where are these conditional enrollees concentrated? In underprivileged areas (see http://www.cdph.ca.gov/program... for data, though you'll need to know your california neighborhoods to make sense of the info), at least that's the case in Los Angeles County. Malibu isn't the problem; south, central and east L.A. are. And if you think this law will actually make those conditional enrollees get vaccinated to go to school, you don't know Angelenos, at least not the ones I know who are underprivileged.
Also, I'm surprised that such an open-source happy community isn't requesting that government-required vaccines be open-sourced. If the government is going to force something upon me, I'd at least like to know the profit motive is removed. Senator Pan's most relied-upon person during all the hearings has been a paid Merck lobbyist after all. If this is really about public health, make Mr. Rotavirus-vaccine charge less than $500 a pop or at least discover there's a good reason it's so expensive.
however, the broader point is most instances of a vaccine-preventable disease in the u.s. is due to international travel (sorry, don't have time to look up the links right now, but they're out there; over 80% for measles iirc). so maybe it's not south and central america. who cares? shouldn't we be more focused on citizens who travel abroad and incoming visitors?
Have you looked at the conditional enrollment data for California schools? Infectious disease also doesn't pay attention to whether you signed a "Personal Belief Exemption" form, so why is there so much obsession over it? Twice as many kids are conditionally enrolled as are attending with a signed PBE form.
If it's everyone else, as you say, why does this law completely ignore the conditionally enrolled? There are at least twice as many, if not three times, as there are using the Personal Belief Exemption.
Wrong. This specific law, SB277, does not restrict itself to public schools. It also affects private schools.
Mostly it's through the ingredients. Vaccines use pig and cow parts, not to mention aborted fetuses. Many religions are against ingesting these. Some are not anti-vax at all, they just don't want the one that has pig parts.
So why does this specific law target belief, but not the actual population of unvaccinated children, conditional enrollees?
There's a serious flaw here. Those 2.2B doses were not administered to 2.2B distinct individuals. I'd venture to guess it's more like 150M distinct individuals. So, we're looking at about 1 in 100,000 experience an adverse reaction.
While the death rate of measles is about 3 per 1000 (actually I think it's closer to 1, but I'll let it slide), what's the rate of contracting measles under the status quo in the U.S.? Let's take 2014 data as a worst-case, 668 cases. That's about 1 in 500,000. So, the chance of dying from measles in the status quo is about 1 in 150M. That's only for a single year, so multiply by 80 to cover a lifetime, 1 in 2M or so.
So, you're about 20x more likely to get an adverse reaction from a vaccine than die from measles. OK, maybe death is worse than "adverse reaction" on average. All I'm asking is what is the benefit of this specific law? It's not like not passing it means suddenly no one in California ever gets vaccinated.
Being against this law is not about being against vaccines. You need to look at the incremental benefit of capturing the Personal Belief Exemptions (PBE). It's very small, 2.7% of kids. Contrast that with about 7% conditionally enrolled (that basically means, there's no paperwork, but they get to go to school anyway). In other words, immunization rates will go from 90% to 93% with this law.
The benefit is actually not even that great. You need a PBE even if you're only opting out of one vaccination. So it's more like going from 91.5% to 93%. For that incremental benefit, it's worth asking whether things like what's the rate of kids that will simply not go to school and is this worth our freedom. Obviously, if this law meant going from 0% to 93%, then it's a no-brainer; but that's not what this law is about.
Ah, but there's a subtlety. MMR is given in two rounds. The first confers over 90% effectiveness and the second, well, there's not much room to grow, is there? Under the proposed law, deciding against that second shot because 90% already confers "good health" would exclude you from private and public education (yes, private too).
Many vaccines are given in multiple rounds. They have similar issues.
And, really, do kindergartners need to be vaccinated against STDs? Really? Hep B is in the proposed law. Religion isn't even the principal reason to decide against that one.
No, we shouldn't be more focused on travelling citizens and incoming visitors.
Would you rather be fireproof or a tinderbox afraid of ANY possible source of ignition? Because someday, sometime, lightning is going to strike, and that fire is going to be set. When, not if, that happens, d'you want an uncontrollable conflagration or a fizzle?
Immunizing travellers is all well and good, but in a small fraction of those, even if you immunize them all, they're still going to be affected. Measles incubates for up to 12 days. D'you want to hold all travellers for that long? What about subclinical cases? Contagious but not showing symptoms?
Don't get me wrong, it's a good idea to require all travellers get their shots, but the right thing to do is defence in depth and have a resistant population here as well as immunized travellers.
--PM
I'd support a bill like this if it also included provisions for criminal charges against parents who 'opt out' and their child winds up having long-term effects, or dying, of preventable diseases.
Say, do you also believe that, say, seatbelts are a matter of personal choice?
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California's kids are already at 90% full immunization. When you already are more or less fireproof, why fireproof more?
If you want to come into the country, get your shots some safe amount of time ahead of traveling. Visas will not be granted unless. Simple. I'm sure there's a similar mechanism for returning citizens as well. I certainly wouldn't immunize at the time of entry, if that's what you're implying, as nice a straw man as that makes.
Again, over 80% of measles outbreaks in the U.S. in recent years originated from outside the United States. With this law, you get a slight increase in coverage (from 91% to 93%) of the other 20%, so optimistically, you're reducing outbreaks by 0.2%. Why bother when there's an huge, gigantic 80% chunk there for the taking?
To explain the 91%, about 3% of kids have a personal belief exemption (PBE). This law only targets them. It disappears the PBE. A PBE could mean a kid has no vaccines, it could mean they have all but one. So, I'm approximating that of the vaccines you'd want kids to have, PBE kids actually have about a third of them. The actual number is probably much higher and could be extracted from the cdph.ca.gov website. And, just for completeness, the other 7% of unvaccinated kids are not addressed by this law at all.
Are you talking about CA SB277? It doesn't have any criminal component at all, even for schools and parents that willfully disobey it. It doesn't have any enforcement mechanism. In fact, they gutted the mandatory reporting of individual schools' vaccine rates from the bill because that would cost the state money and force it to go through an extra committee.
I'm saying I'm against this law because its public health impact is very small. As stated before, you'll increase the immunization rate optimistically from 90% to 93% and more realistically from 92% to 93%. For that small of an improvement, it becomes important to ask what the downsides are. Again, if we were going from 0% to 93%, then, by all means, pass the bill. But that's not the situation.
I don't think there's any downside. But there are all sorts of upsides to working towards eliminating preventable, fatal diseases.
No child should have to risk death because their parents are stupid.
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Like I said, I'm in favor of requiring travellers to be fully immunized, but it's actually not really possible to stop *all* imported cases unless you're willing to put all incoming people in quarantine for a couple of weeks, whether they've been immunized or not.
90% isn't really good enough when we're talking about measles, which is about the most contagious of the serious diseases. You have a good point about the PBEs being of little significance to increasing immunization rates overall, but that doesn't mean it's not worth doing (see below).
Given my difficulties getting my own kid fully immunized (which I finally succeed in doing), I think we can boost immunization rates far higher simply by making it easier for people to get their shots than going after PBEs. Free clinics operated out of schools, well advertised, would be a good way, as well as permanently open walk-in immunization clinics.
Arguably, then, it's misplaced zeal to go after PBEs at all rather than just improving immunization availability. However, one way in which PBEs are more dangerous than simply lower overall immunization rates is that PBEs concentrate geographically, leading to local communities with, say, 70% or lower vaccination rates. These local communities are capable of supporting an epidemic, which, in the case of measles, could lead to a lot of infections in the surrounding 90% immunized population. Suppressing these *local* fires, which are a threat to the surrounding community, is a good rationale for going after PBEs. (Remember, immunizations don't always work, so an epidemic in a localized population can lead to lots of infections in the surrounding population.)
--PM
The problem is that other people see it as being their right to life, since we're talking about diseases that cripple or kill and not something that just gives you the sniffles. And they don't agree that you should get to decide to risk their lives because of your desire for medical self determination. Remember that we don't have to ask what things would be like if non-vaccination was common, we can look back at what they were actually like when that was the case. And it was not pretty.
Note that under the bill you can still refuse to get your kids vaccinated. You're just not going to be permitted to put the kids of parents who don't agree with you at risk because of your decision. And I suspect the kids will only be "deeply entrenched" until they get out of school and find out that having a quarter of your class consigned to braces or a wheelchair for life isn't normal. At that point your group will follow the pattern of similar groups like the Quiverful movement: having ~100% of their children reject the movement entirely. And if you want to prove me wrong, well, I'm perfectly fine with that just so long as you don't drag anyone into your experiment who doesn't agree to participate.
Our current vaccination rate for measles is not really adequate which allowed an introduced infection to spread a bit and even find a second epicenter due to travel. However, we do have a sufficient immunization rate that it died out fairly quickly. The empirical evidence proves that.
If you are correct, why isn't measles spreading in a big wave across the country right now? Most of the population has never had the measles.
It's not spreading all over because infected people from hot zones like the Philippines are not really doing a lot of traveling to the U.S., and, as I said, after onset of symptoms, people self-quarantine, and after an outbreak, people avoid other people they don't personally know, and avoid large gatherings of people where transmission is more likely.
Vaccination is not 100% effective, but strong border controls on people traveling from hot zones and strict quarantine rules are 100% effective.
Can't have an outbreak without a patient zero...
Yet we DID have a patient zero not long ago and the spread was very limited and died out quickly in spite of your claim that there is no herd immunity at our current level of vaccination.
There is a downside. "Stupid" parents will pull their kids from school. Do you really want "anti-science" parents home-schooling?
There's another downside. This particular bill puts the entire onus of enforcement on the school districts. That means they have three choices: accept unvaccinated kids conditionally, expel students or administer the shots. The first option naturally defeats the entire purpose of the bill. Either remaining option costs the school districts. They get federal money based on how many kids are actually in attendance and they don't currently have to administer the shots on any kind of scale this bill demands. That means that less education money is spent on education.
I'd love to hold society to the standard that no child should have to risk death due to parental stupidity. That's just not California. If you really want to uphold this ideal, you'll have to crusade for myriad causes, including gun control, obesity-fighting measures, tighter distribution of driver's licenses, promotion of breastfeeding, etc, etc. On the list of annual deaths in California caused by parental stupidity, lack of vaccination is near the bottom of the list.
Right, we can't stop ALL imports, just like we can't vaccinate EVERY local child. I'd suspect fairly simple measures, like requiring shots in a time-effective fashion as a condition of a visa, would stop at least 90% of that 80% though.
So, I ran the numbers. Here they are for the individual vaccines CDPH tracks: DTP 92.4%, Polio 93.1%, MMR 92.6%, HepB 94.9%, Varicella 95.5%. These are numbers for the incoming 2014 kindergarten class. That 90% number is kids that are up-to-date on all five.
The real elephant in the room is conditional enrollees. They make up 6.8%. Like PBE kids, it's not clear if they are vaccinated or not. There simply aren't records for these kids. If school districts would grow a set and not let these kids enter school, that would be far more effective than SB277 (bill in the OP article). The conflict is most conditional enrollees are in underprivileged areas where getting a kid to school is considered a victory. If we start throwing them out of school, equal access to education becomes an issue.
Your point about making vaccines more available and publicized I agree with completely.
Conditional enrollees has the same issue regarding geographic concentration. Because of this alone, I still find targeting PBEs a near complete waste of time. According to CDPH data, about 118 schools (out of 7464) have a PBE rate >=30%, representing 0.4% of incoming kindergartners. 388 schools have a conditional enrollment rate >=30%, representing 2.4% of incoming kindergartners (3x and 6x of PBE respectively). Getting all the PBE schools counts for something, but very little.
I certainly recognize that SB277 has benefits to public health. I just hope people realize that those benefits are really, really, really small and the hit to civil liberties and public education that we're taking to get those benefits is not.
All of this is true. However, lack of vaccination will rapidly climb the lists if America's current anti-science, anti-education and anti-logic trends are allowed to continue.
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