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.

Comments

Should Be...

[MightyMartian]

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.

Re:Should Be...

[angel'o'sphere]

IQ != knowledge

You would be surprised how high people are tested in IQ tests that have completely bollocks attitudes to certain things.

Re:Should Be...

[beelsebob]

The issue with stopping parents rights the second a child's health is put at risk, is that it invites over officious idiocy from child services, like "oh my god, I saw some snot dribbling from their nose once, therefore you're not cleaning them regularly enough, and their health is at risk!"

As with all politics, it's about scale. In this case, it's pretty clear that depriving children of vaccines is a pretty ridiculous risk to expose a child to without very good reason, and a ridiculous risk to expose other people who can't be vaccinated to as well, but blanket statements about "if it affects the child's health it should be done forcefully" are not helpful.

Re:Should Be...

[MightyMartian]

The courts do it for more immediately necessary medical therapies. Coming from a Jehovah's Witness background (an atheist now for over thirty years), I do remember as a kid all the whackos praying and flailing about because a judge forced a little JW kid to have a blood transfusion over the objection of the righteous parents. I suspect in many hospitals, as soon as they found a JW minor was admitted, they had the lawyers on standby.

While immunization doesn't have the urgency of a blood transfusion, it still represents a significant personal and public health risk to have people not vaccinating their kids, so yes, I think, whether it is "helpful" or not, there should be clear limits on the medical interventions that parents can have the power to deny their children. Children are not possessions, they are not slaves, and where any guardian abuses their powers over a child, I see no problem with social workers, doctors and the courts intervening to make sure the child's medical needs are dealt with.

Re: Should Be...

[Izuzan]

You mean like the case of CPS investigating a mother for letting her 3 kids play alone in the fenced in back yard ? (Kids aged 10, 8, 4.. in that range)

Not far enough

[Nemyst]

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.

Antivaxing in particular

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Mandating Vaccination is Tyranny

[Phasedshift]

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.

 

Not completely baseless

[Okian Warrior]

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.

Re:Won't Work

[lister king of smeg]

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.