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Diphtheria Returns To Spain For Lack of Vaccination
TuringTest writes: A six-year-old child was admitted to a hospital in Barcelona and diagnosed with diphtheria, which hasn't occurred in Spain since 1986 and was largely unheard of in western Europe. The boy had not been vaccinated despite the vaccine being available in free vaccination programs. Spanish general health secretary called anti-vaccination campaigns "irresponsible" and said: "The right to vaccination is for children, not for the parents to decide." The child is in critical condition, though he's now being treated with a serum expressly brought from Russia through an emergency procedure.
I'll take it a step further and state that the blonde bimbo should be tried on charges of attempted genocide.
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Good luck going against religious beliefs that curtail vaccinations. That "endangerment" has one hell of an establishment in the community.
Several states in the US have done so successfully. No reason why more couldn't. You do have a fair point though. It's amazing how much nonsense we put up with in the name of "respecting religious rights" even when they are clearly crazy and/or self destructive.
Unless you are ready to pull the trigger of the gun of force.
Fine, don't wanna vaccinate your kids, they shouldn't be allowed in public schools. This is a nice, fair solution. If people want to make their kids a vector for eradicated diseases (hey it's their "right") they should make other arrangements for education.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
how is it a public safety issue, the ones who do get vaccinated aren't at risk... so they only endanger themselves and likeminded folks
Wrong. Not everyone can get vaccinated because some people legitimate medical conditions making it inadvisable. Sometimes they are too young. Sometimes they have allergy or other medical conditions that prevent their vaccination. These people depend on herd immunity to avoid the illness. If people start avoiding vaccines for non-medical reasons then these people who cannot be vaccinated are endangered by those who recklessly decide to avoid vaccination for no good reason.
Furthermore diseases have a substantial and measurable cost to society. We have finite resources both financial and time to devote to treating diseases and if we waste them on something that could be solved with a cheap and safe vaccine then we necessarily cannot spend those medical and financial resources on something else. Should we spend a few dollars for a vaccine or thousands on a treatment. THAT is a public health issue.
Schools?
Personally, I'd expect to see signs on every office, library, store, business, government building, restaurant, laundromat, bowling alley, etc etc etc that say "NO SHIRT NO SHOES NO LEPERS"
It doesn't (and didn't!) help with Disneyland I agree. But it might be able to persuade some of the less-rabid or on-the-fence parents to get their kids vaccinated.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Now you're just being a pedantic assclown.
Where there's one anti-vaxxer, there's more anti-vaxxer.
Just like infectious diseases.
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The problem with that argument is that the "parents" in this case are not qualified to make that decision. They don't have the education nor the data to determine whether or not their child might be susceptible to one of those "serious side effects" that may strike 1/1000 of a percent, at most. When considering that the potential equivalently-bad-or-worse consequences from the diseases themselves have percentages on the left side of the decimal point, they are avoiding a slim chance of something rare by almost guaranteeing a bad outcome if their child gets exposed. And they volunteer their child into the service of exposing other people to that illness.
If we didn't have the anti-vaxxers or the people who think vaccines are a plot for some kind of non-microscopic genocide, we'd probably have a few less diseases in the world to worry about or continue vaccinating against. After all, how many people get a small pox vaccination these days?
Speaking as a guy who is on the autism spectrum (diagnosis of Aspergers - from a registered psychologist, I might add, not just a Doctor Google diagnosis - a couple of years ago): that crowd is, in essence, saying that people like me should not exist. That they would rather see hundreds of thousands dead, and millions crippled for life, than see one person like me exist in the world.
I know that autistic children can be a burden. They demand more care, more attention, more specialist intervention early in life than a neurotypical child. I get that. I understand it. I have two friends who each have one autistic kid (one with a son, one with a daughter), and another who has two (her elder, a son, was vaccinated; her younger, a daughter, was not - not until long after the autism diagnosis was clear. In fairness, this was around the time of the MMR scare. Fuck you very much, Andrew Wakefield.) But as you say, these parents would rather see their kids alive with autism than dead from some vaccine preventable disease. And, for all the problems I've had through my life as a consequence of who I am - so would I.
Seriously. Is autism the best these guys can do as a reason to not vaccinate? Penn and Teller debunked that a long time ago.