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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.
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.
There's a saying about leading a horse to water....
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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.
We require classes and certification for motorcycle riders, car drivers, etc, where the danger/cost is sometimes more to oneself than to others (or the costs of bearing your public health burden if you get injured) -- it's not unreasonable then where the danger is a person inflicting injury on a child with no say in the matter.
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.
You want to live in our borders, protected by our military, using our infrastructure, functioning in our economy? You want all of the benefits society has to offer? Then you have to pay by behaving the way society says you should. You have to accept limitations on your freedom in return for protections we can afford. You can still enjoy a great many freedoms along with plumbing, electricity and consumer goods - but you have to obey certain rules in return. Good societies maximize the return while minimizing the price tag (i.e. - your kids will be educated, but they have to be immunized against certain diseases so that they won't cause harm to their fellow students. In return, society asserts that their fellow students will not give your kids these diseases and you will end up with reasonably well educated children).
Columbus wasn't all that different from anti-vaxxers. The idea that the Earth was round was widely accepted at the time. However, Columbus recalculated the circumference of the Earth and came to the conclusion that it was smaller than everyone else thought. He was, of course, quite wrong. We've known the general size of the Earth pretty accurately since ancient times.
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.
These people already distrust anything science. They likely didn't get the point in high school and have been training their resistance to critical thinking and evidence based reasoning ever since. All that this will do is start a bunch of human rights complaints. The government would probably have better luck forcing all non-vaccinated kids into one school for the parentally challenged.
It's hard to see this from the parents' point of view, but keep in mind that their fears are not *completely* without merit.
The original polio vaccine was a weakened strain, and it was possible to get the disease from the vaccine.
This meant that there was a time when getting polio from the wild was less likely than getting it from the vaccine, so it's completely reasonable from the *individual* point of view that the best course is the one that minimizes risk.
Factor in the general devotion parents have to their child's well-being, and it 'kinda makes sense.
Then it was thiomersal. Thiomersal is a mercury compound mixed with vaccines to suppress fungi growth and such.
At the time, there was a large body of indirect evidence that suggested Tiomersal was safe. There was a lot of evidence, but it was all indirect(*).
Then one researcher published a study that directly linked thiomersal to autism and suddenly, the emperor has no clothes!
You see, direct evidence trumps indirect evidence every time. Indirect evidence makes assumptions about similarity that may or may not be true.
When the autism study came out, everyone realized that the evidence was indirect, and everyone freaked. It took medical science another decade to show that they were right.
In my opinion, I think science got lucky. Scientists relied on indirect evidence for something that was an emotional powderkeg, and it *could* have gone the other way. This sort of thing has certainly happened before(**), and still happens (***).
And also in my opinion, I'm not 100% certain that the science was right about this. Thiomersal was removed from most vaccines "out of an abundance of caution", and the political pressure on "being right" and "showing the researcher was a fraud" was so high that I'm not sure either question was fairly settled.
I'm not an anti-vaxer at all, just looking at the history.
The position against vaccines is incorrect, but not *completely* baseless.
(*) For example, Thiomersal is ethyl mercury, and risk was extrapolated from known exposure to methyl mercury.
(**) Tetra ethyl lead, for instance.
(***) Science now says that SSRI's are ineffective, despite being the go-to prescription medication for depression.
Good thing they didn't make Christopher Columbus sit through science classes explaining how flat the earth was before they let him sail on his voyage of discovery. If they made him sit through 'science' classes explaining what all the smart people of the day thought they knew, it's possible that we'd all still be in Europe.
Actually no one thought the earth was flat for thousands of years before columbus, the ancient Greeks figured it out (along with the approximate circumference of the earth)t back in the BC's. The flat earth non-since was a 19th century revisionism.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
There are a subset of children who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons.
There's also a subset for whom the vaccination isn't effective. For most diseases the immunity rate after the course is 95-99%.
Between these people and those who can't have it for medical reasons, there just isn't much slack - because the risk to the vulnerable members of the population rises exponentially as the vulnerable population increases. This effect is called "herd immunity", as you mentioned.
I don't read AC A human right
Seriously, if they're going to opt to not vaccinate their kids, they should be obligated assume liability for every child their unimmunized kid gets sick.
As such, they should also be obligated to take out an insurance plan to actually PAY for the medical bills of children made ill because of their decision.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I'm okay with this. Being part of a society is a compact of violence, so the only proper way of rejecting that compact is with violence. As far as vaccinations go, that horse done left the barn a while ago, but feel free to die for it.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Maybe we just have to see people in iron lungs again to regain our sanity.
The whole shit only started when people didn't know real diseases anymore first hand. I mean, fuck, the first smallpox vaccinations had a mortality rate that was not THAT much under that of a real infection and you did almost invariably get really sick from it (after all, it WAS pretty much a deliberate exposure to the pathogen) and STILL people considered this to be a great step ahead and were pretty much begging for it.
Maybe a few million have to die again before some people regain their senses. And at least this time there is a good chance that it will wipe out those that deserve it. At least most of those affected will.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Of course my sample is not representative, but of the people who I know who are, let's say it, are selective on vaccination are biochemical science PhD's (in major pharmaceutical companies), creators of biological medications and medical doctors. There is no denial about benefits of the vaccines, however only selected vaccines are taken and at the age that is ordinarily much later than "recommended" vaccination schedule. Also, vaccines are never mixed.
I will give an example. Right now 6 month infants are "recommended" hepatitis B vaccine. Usually and ordinarily people have Hepatitis B risk, if they are sex workers, prisoners, police and similar.
Who exactly needs to take classes? And what exactly we are going to learn in these classes?
If people understood the risk of skydiving, for example, and lived their lives "scientifically", nobody would ever skydive.
Skydiving does not lead to public health emergencies.
When we had to rush my son to the hospital after a bad reactions his vaccination (MMR), the doctors just said, "this is so rare, like one in a million". He had to have an inhaler for years after that. So when it came time to vaccinate our daughter, I asked for insurance. A million to one chance of bad reaction they say, so I figured give the vaccine manufacturer 2:1 to make money, I offered to buy insurance for $1000, so that if my daughter has any complications , $500,000,000 goes into her healthcare fund. Guess what, no takers. So we declined. It seems when they tell you bad reactions are so rare, they are obviously lying, or they could make good money selling insurance. No class will convince me how low risk this is until you can find an insurance company willing to back those stats up by selling insurance - make them sit through a class and see if their actuaries are convinced.
No, because if most other people are vaccinated they're extremely unlikely to encounter an active carrier, and even less likely to pass it on to another vulnerable person.
It's called herd immunity.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
These people have generally made up their minds despite all the evidence to the contrary, often down the "I don't trust this vaccine" or the "the vaccine will be worse than the disease" or even the whole disproven autism connection. Despite my attempting to explain the benefits and science behind it, these patients rarely change their minds - and I treat adults. The most commonly given vaccines we give to adults are all either protein, polysaccharide or heat killed and have near zero ability to infect or cause anything beyond local irritation or at worst an allergic reaction in egg- allergic patients for the flu shot. I can explain all that and the immunology and science behind it (if I care to run way over the 20 minutes allotted for a patient visit) and hardly anyone changes their minds. (Clearly, I am a physician)
Do you realize that nearly every modern study on the safety of vaccinations is invalid?
Nearly every study conducted uses the VAERS data - this data is scientifically worthless.... blah blah blah blah
In lieu of every modern study of vaccinations, which are supposedly flawed, please answer these questions:
Do you or anyone in your extended family have or ever had smallpox?
Do you or anyone in your extended family 50 years old or younger have or ever had polio?
Do you or anyone in your extended family 50 years old or younger have or ever had diptheria?
Do you or anyone in your extended family 50 years old or younger have or ever had rubella?
If the answer to these questions are all "NO" then vaccines work. No fancy science is needed to prove an anti-vaxxer wrong.