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Ontario Parents Refusing To Vaccinate Their Children Could Be Forced to Take Science Class (qz.com)
Ontario is considering making parents who choose to not vaccinate their children for non-medical reasons take a science class. The health ministry of Canada's most populous province has proposed a bill which would force those parents sit through the education session before applying for a vaccine exemption. In the class, they will be taught about the importance of vaccination for their children. Quartz offers more context: Ontario was the first province in Canada to introduce immunization laws (PDF) in 1982, which required children attending school be vaccinated against certain diseases -- including diphtheria, tetanus, polio, and measles -- unless they have a signed exemption. After routine immunization was introduced, cases of those diseases dramatically reduced.
Parents who apply for an exemption (PDF) for non-medical reasons risk having their child pulled from school if there's an outbreak, or the immediate risk of an outbreak, of a designated disease.
They should be forced to take a mental fitness test, an IQ test, and while they're doing that, their children are jabbed. Fuck "parental rights". Those should stop the very second a child's health is put at risk. Children are wards of their parents, not possessions, and if we're going to force the children of Jehovah's Witnesses to have blood transfusions to save their lives, why would we give some idiot parents the option of endangering their children's lives by allowing them to deprive their children of vaccinations.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Oh ya...u jus try to lern me them ther science and I'll lern you 'bout my rifle.
Re-education camps. These always work out great.
An educational class would be helpful in dispelling many myths surrounding vaccinations.
Topics should include: Iron lungs and polio. Deafness and rubella (and the subsequent dramatic drop-off in deaf children after the vaccination was created). Thimerosal is not the same as methyl mercury. There is no proven link between vaccinations and autism. Autism is better than death. Autism is better than the iron lung. Autism is better than Meningitis. Jenny McCarthy is not a doctor or scientist. Herd immunity is important in preventing permanent disabilities and death.
The only adjustment I feel is okay for a parent to make with respect to vaccinations is adjusting the recommended vaccination schedule and taking a slightly staggered approach (1-2 week gap). According to CDC statistics there are a couple of recommended vaccines that do have a slightly higher adverse incident rate (small fractions of a percentage point). By staggering these separately from those without a (slightly) higher adverse incident rate, I think a parent can feel a lot better about vaccinating their children. This is something a parent can actively do that ensures the child becomes vaccinated and also mitigates the (very small almost negligible) risks associated with doing so.
Vaccines are a net positive for society and it's actual stupidity to suggest otherwise.
Vaccination exemptions for non-medical reasons should outright be school exclusions. You should not be able to willingly endanger other students because of vacuous beliefs. Take care of your child's schooling to the standard of the province and you can exclude them all you'll like, don't and they'll be vaccinated and reintegrated into school.
This anti-vaxxer movement needs to be culled ruthlessly.
This entire situation is horrifying.
What is worse I don't know:
the fact that the application of such medicine is mandated by the state
the fact that such medication is necessary
or how these dogmatic people verbally ravage anyone with standing on their sovereignty
People are not cattle. But our leaders and apparently many of our peers think they are, whether they have the fortitude to realize it or not.
In a free society you cannot force people to modify their bodies like this. The state cannot mandate what the composition of your body is to be. This is an extremely profound destruction of freedom. Any evidence to any immediate benefit is irrelevant in whole.
The point is it is the responsibility of the state to keep these diseases out of its borders, it is not the responsibility of the masses to compensate for this failure in policy and be complicit in a failure of justice and freedom also.
While there is some of it everywhere, a big bastion of antivaxing is in techy areas of California. The people in to it are generally above average in an academic sense. So what is going on? It is something you see all too often with geeks: Smartest Motherfucker in the Universe Syndrome. They get the idea that they are much smarter than everyone else, since they often are, and thus are good at everything. They are convinced they've found out a truth those stupid doctors don't know or are covering up. Their intelligence leads to a hubris which leads to them doing dumb shit.
Being intelligent doesn't make one informed.
These people already distrust anything science.
Then they should take another course which shows them all the good that science has done for them.
It's not an issue of knowing or trusting science, or knowing "all the good that science has done". It's an issue of not believing that life needs to lived as a technocracy, or using rigid scientific principles as the only guide.
If people understood the risk of skydiving, for example, and lived their lives "scientifically", nobody would ever skydive. Nobody would ever eat fugu. There are lots of activities that carry a lot more risk than not vaccinating their child that occur every day.
Having a government that punishes people for exercising freedom is not reasonable. And being forced to take time off work to take an indoctrination class ("look at all the good things science does for you, shouldn't you obey science?") is a punishment.
Probably simpler to say they have to give up pretty much everything they have except for a few things like animal skins, home made bows and spears.
Yes, let's make people who don't live the way we want them to do things the way we want them to in the most severe way possible.
Freedom means that people can do things that we don't personally agree with, and that don't always obey strict scientific principles, and even sometimes don't produce the maximum benefit for other people.
First, I want to be clear that I am pro-vaccination.
Any vaccine has a certain number of people that are permanently injured by that vaccine (that's why there is a vaccine injury fund in the US), but, the overall number of people it saves (including immune compromised individuals) outweighs that very, very small risk that you could be hurt or killed by that vaccine.
However:
Certain specific vaccines likely killed more people than they saved because the threat of the illness was overestimated (deaths due to specific outbreaks of certain flu strains vs. deaths/injuries due to the vaccine.)
Other vaccines have had safety issues with certain batches and were recalled after injuring/killing various people.
Again, it's very, very rare. But that brings me to my next point:
I see no reason to not vaccinate myself and my children. I support herd immunity, and that it helps the greater good. However, I want the choice to be able to vaccinate as there could be a case where I don't feel a particular vaccine is safe. Simply being told to "trust" someone else that something is safe and being forced to have something put into my body and my children's body is not OK. Certain jobs or institutions can mandate vaccinations before being part of them - that's my choice for using them. However, there is a big difference between making a conscious decision to do something vs. being told you must do it.
When you're told that you must put something in your body, no matter if it is for the "greater good", then you are not truly free. Mandating general vaccination is tyranny.
Not to mention it, once the precedent is set, what is to stop mandatory gene therapy, genetic modification techniques, etc to "prevent" potential problems? Just because you approve of the situation today for mandatory vaccinations, would you be OK with how things are tomorrow? What if there are unintended consequences?
The only way to solve the "anti-vaxxer" problem is by education, so I don't disagree with having people attending a science class before opting out, but, I don't think it will resolve the issues. The problem is greater than one science class can resolve.