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Nurses In Australia Face Punishment For Promoting Anti-Vaccination Messages Via Social Media (medicalxpress.com)
HughPickens.com writes: Medical Express reports that nurses and midwives promoting anti-vaccination messages in Australia could face punishment including being slapped with a caution and having their ability to practice medicine restricted. Serious cases could be referred to an industry tribunal, where practitioners could face harsher penalties such as having their registration suspended or cancelled. The Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia released the vaccination standards in response to what it described as a small number of nurses and midwives promoting anti-vaccination via social media. The statement also urges members of the public to report nurses or midwives promoting anti-vaccination. Promoting false, misleading or deceptive information is an offense under national law and is prosecutable by the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency. "The board will consider whether the nurse or midwife has breached their professional obligations and will treat these matters seriously," the statement said. However Dr. Hannah Dahlen, a professor of midwifery at the University of Western Sydney and the spokeswoman for the Australian College of Midwives, worries the crackdown may push people with anti-vaccination views further underground. "The worry is the confirmation bias that can occur, because people might say: 'There you go, this is proof that you can't even have an alternative opinion.' It might in fact just give people more fuel for their belief systems."
Good.
Implement this in more countries please.
There was actual harm done because of the sticky stupid of antivaccine activists, so of course their Board will purge in response. People who make themselves allies of the first Horseman of the Apocalypse (Pestilence/plague) do not belong in the healthcare business.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
WTF is the point of spending years training to become a nurse / midwife if they just decide to ignore evidence of the efficacy of vaccination and promote woo? Anyone pushing antivax nonsense should be barred from practicing as a nurse or midwife. It should be that simple.
Donald Trump had his kids vaccinated: https://www.quora.com/Has-Dona...
Maybe we deserve this world ?
When you say we can't trust any vaccines, that's not a sound professional opinion. However, when you jump into attacking people who don't want to get Gardasil (which is far less safe than most vaccines) or Anthrax (many military veterans have had serious problems with it) because we can trust the Polio and MMR vaccines you're even worse than the anti-vaxxers. Know why? Because all it takes to disprove an anti-vaxxer is show the real harm that the core vaccines that are battle-tested prevent. Some science popularizing elitist wingnut who borrows from the legitimacy of those vaccines to hound people who don't accept that vaccines as a category are safe (because no medicine as a category, is categorically safe) is directly tying the reputation of proven medicine to unproven medicine.
If what they are promoting goes against the evidence and leads to harming patient then they should be barred.
Having an opinion is one thing. Holding a position on a verifiable matter, that leads to putting patients at increase risk is at odds with the goal of your profession is a completely different matter.
They want to push some thoroughly debunked agenda? feel free but don't pretend you're a medical professional
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
To quote Isaac Asimov who put it more eloquently than I can: “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
My niece got a full blown case of the measles form the vaccine. The doctor was a bit shocked. But law measle cases have to be reported to the CDC, which the doctor did. But CDC stats never recorded the case. Getting the measles from the vaccine doesn't count. See how that works?
Measles vaccines are attenuated -- which means it contains a live strain. If just a fraction of a fraction of this attenuated strain gets transmitted, some will ultimately mutate into alternate forms and reappear. Giving such a large breeding ground to these viruses might eventually lead to a strain even worse than any known natural strain.
Things are rarely black-and-white, though most people seem to see it that way. It's dangerous when our leaders loose color vision, but it is easy to understand why. Just follow the green.
:T:R:A:N:S:
So confident in your opinion that you can't "risk" someone having a different opinion? Are you afraid you might not be able to defend your position against them? Because that is the main reason for censorship.
Look up SV40 polio vaccine from years ago. They bring that up and suddenly your viewpoint begins to crack. There are other more recent ones that have had problems as well, but you don't think people have the right to discuss them because you are anti-science and can't defend your position. Funny thing being that vaccines with issues are very rare, you can't stand letting anyone know about them and promote censorship to keep it hidden.
I'm actually getting sick of these anti-science whackos like you that think scientific discussion should only be what YOU approve. If you can't defend your position with scientific proof, you don't have a valid scientific position and are a fraud depending on censorship and name calling instead.
If you were just HONEST, you would be far more convincing, and convincing people vaccines are good SHOULD be easy. Because you resort to censorship and name calling first, it appears you have something to hide and all you will get is anti-vaxxers yelling SV40 (which hasn't been a problem for decades) and causing more people to look up problems and causing more anti-vaxxers because in reality they disagree with your censorship and it has nothing to do with vaccines.
That's the problem. There isn't any. Give me one randomised double blind controlled trial of sufficient size epidemiologically speaking, that proves both efficacy and safety of any vaccine compared to a pure placebo, like pure distilled water.
And of course it's ok to call bullshit on any opinion that you're in disagreement with, but let's not act like a bunch of brown-shirt fascists and persecute people for their opinion and dissent, because in that case their might soon be a reason to persecute you for any dissenting opinion that you might express in your life.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
I do not know if autism is inherited; you assert that it is not. This is may be why genetic testing is not done for autism.
Autism can and does run in families but I don't know if there is a gene or genes you can check for it. There is a spectrum of conditions, you're not autistic or not autistic, there are shades in-between. It's very likely there is no one cause for autism.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
What is the evidence that this was thanks to vaccines and not improvements in hygiene and nutrition?
I thought most anti vaccine people also felt we would be better off eating more natural and raw foods. So our current nutrition should be making us less healthy.
Last I checked, serious viruses like smallpox don't really care how healthy you are when exposed. Some of the worst kill a disproportionately high percentage of the healthiest people by turning our own immune system against us.
"The worry is the confirmation bias that can occur, because people might say: 'There you go, this is proof that you can't even have an alternative opinion.' It might in fact just give people more fuel for their belief systems."
That's right. On this matter there is no room for an alternative opinion because it isn't a question of opinion. Vaccines work and they are safe and are critical to keeping the population healthy. That is a proven and indisputable fact. You have the right to elect to not get a vaccine but you should not be allowed under any circumstances to spread misinformation or discourage others from vaccination. If you want to decline to be vaccinated that is your prerogative but there should be some quarantine consequences to your actions. Nurses who should know better discouraging others from getting vaccinations is particularly odious and to my mind criminal. Such people have no business being in the field of medicine.
The vaccinations do not give immunity to everyone that gets them. Also, some people are unable to get them for medical reasons.
That's even more reason why everyone who CAN get a vaccine SHOULD.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Apparentley there is no more freedom in opinion in Australia, and also no more freedom of speech.
Freedom of speech does not apply here. Conscious misrepresentation of known and proven facts by medical practitioners who should know better is called malpractice. It's a crime with real consequences for good reason. They are literally harming patients by spreading provably false and dangerous information. People who do that should at minimum lose their license to practice medicine and if anyone is demonstrably harmed they should go to jail for their actions.
Herd immunity is the concept that with a sufficiently high enough level of vaccination a disease is unable to move effectively from one host to another due to a lack of hosts. Via this mechanism, individuals who are unable to receive the vaccine (due to a negative reaction or not being old enough) or individuals in which the vaccine does not take (it happens) are still protected from the disease. This threshold varies based on the disease in question but here's some common ones. Influenza (33-44%), Ebola (33-60%), SARS (50-80%), Mumps (75-86%), Polio (80-86%), Smallpox (80-86%), Rubella (83-86%), Diptheria (83-86%), Pertussis (92-94%), Measles (92-95%).
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
Well, seeing as how they aren't practicing "medicine" in the first place, this doesn't seem much of a punishment.
They are doing more harm than good by discouraging vaccination.
-TheDawgLives suckitdown
We have this idea in free society that people are entitled to their own opinions and the government should not force people to believe one thing or another. And it’s not like we lack precedents where totalitarian governments actively suppress ideas that might disrupt their regime. So we do need to keep in mind that indvidual people should be free to be wrong and be assholes. That kid in the gorilla costume at Tennessee State was an asshole, but should he be brought up on criminial charges? We need to ensure that “assholes” are not summarily suppressed. Richard Dawkins acts like an asshole but he’s still right about evolution.
Now, when it comes to these nurses, the situation is entirely different. They are entitled to their *personal* opinion. But this is a matter of professional activity. In their capacities as nurses (even on their own time), they represent their employers. As a CS professor, I could be dismissed for a wide range of inappropriate behaviors in my “personal life,” including hooking up with an undergrad and making offensive and racist statements on social media. I can maintain my right to express an opinion, and my employer can exercise their right to not be associated with someone who does not represent their core values. (Although, I will say that I’ve heard that BYU won’t grant tenure to anyone who they see as not sufficiently “Mormon,” and I think that’s reprehensible, so there is some room for debate on this, which is why we have courts.)
There’s also not much room on this subject for “personal opinion.” Science doesn’t have answers for everything, but all attempts to show a solid link between vaccines and autism have failed, and those attempts have been numerous. This isn’t based on a single publication with no replication studies. This topic has been beaten to death. It be shown that their statements are factually wrong. They are also not researchers in this area. If they were, then they would be in a position to conduct further studies to see if they could prove a link. Instead, they are just talking out their arses.
Even more important, they are putting people in danger. And that’s what this is all about. The benefits of vaccines are not in dispute, and the risks are minimal and nebulous. When your scientific illiteracy puts people in danger, you need to be stopped.
Well, think of it this way.
A housing development has a rash (pun intended) of break-ins.
They get together and decide to institute mandatory installation of alarm systems.
The number of break-ins goes down in direct proportion to the number of houses have alarm systems installed, until all the houses have them installed, and the number of break-ins is almost, but not quite, zero per year.
After a while, people start to think 'we don't have a break-in problem, why are we mandating these alarm systems?'
New houses under construction start to be built without alarm systems. What do you suppose happens to the break-in rate?
The price of freedom (from preventable disease) is eternal vigilance (of vaccination rates.)
It's real easy to say 'we don't need vaccines' when you've never seen a playmate in polio braces, or when pictures of a wall full of children in iron lungs is a quaint historical anachronism. When you don't have an Uncle Bob who's sterile from a bout of mumps. When having a dead sibling is unusual, and probably the result of accident or something, and not 'measles.'
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Are you or have you ever been an anti-vaxxer? If yes, you are blacklisted.
Sounds like you think resorting to McCarthism is ok as long as you agree with the reasons for it.
Its "McCarthyism", and such an interesting term since the head of the anti-vaxxer movement is one Jenny McCarthy, a woman who isn't a doctor, and her main claim to fame is that she has photos taken of her while not wearing clothing.
You mistake politics for science. "McCarthyism" was a modern day witch hunt, using early cold-war paranoia about communism to advance a political carreer. It destryed the lives of a number of people, including it's perpetrator.
Anti-vaxxing is an unscientific plan to take advantage of the emotional aspects of children with disabilities by blaming it on an unrelated activity. Oddly enough, it ignores that unvaccinated children sometimes die as a result of its adherents.
It isn't politics - its science.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Have you ever seen scientific study of the full schedule of vaccines in a double blind?
No and you haven't either. Conducting such a study would be hugely unethical because it would involve exposing large numbers of people to preventable diseases with known means of prevention. Double blind studies are ideal when possible but there are plenty of other valid means of studying diseases without resorting to double blind studies.
A vaccine may be safe, but the full schedule of vaccines has NEVER been studied.
Not true at all. It has been studied extensively. Furthermore there is substantial empirical evidence than any safety concerns about the full schedule of vaccines is a very small effect if it exists at all.
Now, tell me. where is the actual science on the full schedule of vaccines?
In the clinical studies for each and every vaccine and diseases that could conceivably be related to their administration. I suggest you go speak to an epidemiologist since you are in need of a clue about this. I'm sure they'll be happy to fill you in.
In other words, do you have scientific proof that a full vaccine schedule is safe. Until then, you're just sciency not scientific.
Yes we do have proof that a full vaccine schedule is safe. Scientific proof in the form of a measurably healthier populace and hugely reduced incidence of disease with barely any measurable side effects despite copious studies about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines.
Because the leading class in the west prefers an extrovert personality, many people who would otherwise just be called introvert are now labeled autistic. If that process starts to really take off the term looses most of its meaning (see the ADHD case). If the way society values character traits changes it might even stop to become a problem (homosexuality in civilised countries).
At least if you are a professional in a field.
Because I would expect my professional to be at the level of current science and technology. I do expect my mechanic to think that sand isn't the best lubricant for my gear box, I do expect my doctor to know that it's not a good idea to sprinkle holy water that he got from the holy pond in his garden into my open chest wound and I do expect my IT security guy to know that it's not a good idea to let the new server sit on the ley line in front of our HQ for a night to absorb the good energies.
If you want to believe that, great. But get out of your field of work before you do. If you want to offer "alternative" stuff, move into that profession instead. I am sure there is a market for that too, else people would not have invented that snake oil. But if you are my nurse and responsible for working on my child, I do fucking EXPECT you to give him or her that MMR shots and not avoid it because you "don't believe in it".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.