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California Senate Approves School Vaccine Bill
mpicpp writes: California state senators have passed a controversial bill designed to increase school immunization rates. SB277 would prohibit parents from seeking vaccine exemptions for their children because of religious or personal beliefs. California would join West Virginia and Mississippi as the only states with such requirements if the bill becomes law. "SB 277 is about increasing immunization rates so no one will have to suffer from vaccine-preventable diseases," said Sen. Ben Allen (D- Santa Monica) who coauthored the bill with Sen. Richard Pan (D-Sacramento).
I expect to see a lot of anti vaxx outrage and legal challenges, but this is a good first step.
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Infectious diseases don't pay attention to your religion or any of your other crackpot obsessions about autism or mercury or whatever this week's flavor of craziness is.
So the prevention of said diseases shouldn't either.
There's a problem with this: It destroys the concept of law entirely, because for every law there exists a person somewhere who has a religion that demands they disobey the law.
"My religion prohibits the use of electricity, so I can't install a fire alarm in my business to meet state building regulations."
"My religion requires I capture an endangered species for ritual sacrifice."
"I had to kill by baby in the microwave, I sensed he was possessed by a demon."
"My religion prohibits paying taxes, because all my property is just being held on behalf of God."
"My religion requires I kill innocent citizens to defend my people against their country."
"I know my daughter was critically ill, but my religion does not allow me to seek medical treatment, as it shows a lack of faith in God."
All of these are real cases - and those are just in the US. These situations show that freedom of religion cannot be absolute, because absolute freedom of religion renders every area of law effectively meaningless: You would be able to literally get away with murder by claiming you believed it to be a religious mission.
I am all for free speech and entitlement to personal opinion. But the very role of government and public policy is to have a rational and objective view on what is reasonable for citizens to do and not do as part of civil society. It is not to merely sway with the wind and throw up one's hands and say, well, we can't offend anyone's beliefs so we shouldn't do our jobs for fear of being voted out of office.
It is high time that both we as citizens and we as government not put up with or enable a small ridiculous minority of extremist views to hold the rest of society hostage, with the threat of lawsuits.
There is such a thing as being overly reasonable. And there are many more issues that don't rise to this level of publicity, that policy makers give in to, for fear of negative repercussions, rather than doing the right thing.
No, there are not "legitimate concerns" about childhood vaccination.
Ah, but this is what comes from nonsense like "teach the controversy!" and from a mistaken notion that the phrase "there are two sides to a story" means that all views must be equal.
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.
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... --
The federal laws passed in the mid-80s that insulate the responsibility of vaccine creating companies to flaws in their products needs to rescinded or heavily revised.
It is the fact that the companies creating these vaccines are largely not culpable for their products that has driven the anti-VAX movement. FIX THAT or this law will be ignored.
No. The anti-vax movement has been largely driven by greed, stupidity, and the parents need to "blame" someone.
What's lost in most discussions of the fraud doctor in Britain is that he was trying to discredit the current vaccination regime so he could push his own = greed. Parents, preferred listening to that jackhole and dipshit blondes who's only claim to fame is stripping for cash instead of medical professionals with actual knowledge = stupidity. The whole blame game is the demented way humans interact with seemingly everything. Their child has autism = it MUST be someones fault.... which in reality is just more stupidity.
The companies that produce these vaccines are shielded from individual lawsuits because individual lawsuits would very quickly bankrupt said companies. The result of that would be no vaccines, which would lead to everyone in society fucking dying of easily treated illnesses = more fucking greed and stupidity ("everyone" being hyperbole, obviously, but given current transportation ease and population, "millions" would be a given) . Complications from vaccines are fairly rare, and very serious complications/death even more-so.... but vaccines are of critical importance to our species in the present day. If the argument is: let millions of people die each year because of diseases that can be easily vaccinated against, or requiring parents to keep their disease ridden kids out of school unless they vaccinate... that's an easy one: fuck the idiot parents.
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I'm not an anti-vax person myself, but I do suspect that at least one of the vaccines I received in the Army caused my current chronic kidney disease, which is caused by a misformed IgA antibody. I suspect that because I have a familial history of Ceceliacs disease, which is suspected by some to be related to IgA Nephropathy, and the timeline of when I developed IgAn coincides perfectly with the progression of the disease and the time that I received those inoculations. That, and this:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
Problem is this is hard to prove, and I doubt anybody would do any further serious research into it. Why won't they? Because the anti-vax movement has made anybody who does easily lose credibility, because the anti-vax movement repeatedly and often makes very stupid claims (autism? are you fucking kidding me?) that cause everybody else to come down hard on anybody who speaks honestly about any potential down sides of it.
There may very well be good reasons to not vaccinate in some cases, but those reasons will be hard to find when idiots keep crying wolf for no reason other than they happen to be Jenny McCarthy fans.
Still though, and I do myself admit, I still accept that it's better to have practically zero cases of polio in exchange for a few cases of IgA Nephropathy, even though I happened to get the shitty end of the stick (dialisys, which is where I'll probably end up very soon, is a lot better than an iron lung.) That said, even if it is proven that vaccination is the cause of my condition, I'll still support it anyways.
California is a mix of odd politics. Partially heavily left leaning, partially heavy right leaning, and a whole lot of libertarian leaning to combine a bit of both. We want the government to keep their hands off of our pot and our taxes.
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.
We want the government to keep their hands off of our pot and our taxes.
Well, you're not doing a very good job of expressing your wants as reflected by your very high taxes and still-not-legalized pot.
Bollocks. Religious freedom exists within the bounds of the law, not outside it. It means no one can tell you that you can't do something otherwise legal for religious reasons, not that you get a free pass on illegal activities. You want to pray before meals, preach a certain thing, dress a particular way, wear a religious symbol around your neck, pass out books on the street, cool, that's freedom of religion, and that is part of living in a free society. You want to willingly put your children at risk of potentially fatal diseases (otherwise known as child neglect) then call it freedom of religion, nope, that's not ever remotely similar and that's not what freedom of religion means. Freedom of religion is not a pass to do whatever you want and then call it oppression when someone tries to hold you accountable.
If you want to do stupid things to yourself, that's fine. I'll be the first to complain about liberty and government overstep when laws are passed to protect people from themselves. You want to do something stupid that might result in your own demise, as long as you're not taking anyone else down with you, then have at it. It's none of my concern. However, this is not about what you do to yourself, it is about what you do to others. Child neglect is not a right, and you don't get to put your kids and other kids at risk and then shout 'But religion!' when you are expected to act like a mature reasonable decent human being and demand that the rest of the world respect your excuses as to why you put your kid at risk of easily preventable and potentially serious disease.
I think it was the Rehnquist court that developed a "conviction test" that was pretty useful. (i.e. It was something like not bending your conviction even when faced with pressures or threats by all of the following: state, peers, family, death, etc...). By that test, many people do not hold religious convictions - especially with respect to the law. I could be thinking of another Justice though... IANAL. It's got me curious again, I'll have to hit Google later, or perhaps one of my books to find that test.
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
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.
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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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.
Aside from the fact that that wasn't an ad hominem, that's a really weird way of phrasing things. It's like saying that 100% of people standing out in the rain experience rain-related effects, including being hit by lightning. It's technically true, but it's phrased in a way to imply that way more people get hit by lightning than actually do. The reality is that 100% of people get wet and a tiny fraction of a percent get hit by lightning. Lumping them together as "effects of rain" makes the statistic basically meaningless. Was that intentional?
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