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Australia To Ban Unvaccinated Children From Preschool (newscientist.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: No-jab, no play. So says the Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, who has announced that unvaccinated children will be barred from attending preschools and daycare centers. Currently, 93 percent of Australian children receive the standard childhood vaccinations, including those for measles, mumps and rubella, but the government wants to lift this to 95 percent. This is the level required to stop the spread of infectious disease and to protect children who are too young to be immunized or cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons. Childcare subsidies have been unavailable to the families of unvaccinated children since January 2016, and a version of the new "no jab, no play" policy is already in place in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland. Other states and territories only exclude unvaccinated children from preschools during infectious disease outbreaks. The proposed policy is based on Victoria's model, which is the strictest. It requires all children attending childcare to be fully immunized, unless they have a medical exemption, such as a vaccine allergy.
Wonderful. Good on ya, Australia. Outside of very uncommon medical situations, there is no damn reason for anything less than this. It's a goddamn embarrassment that there are fracking measles outbreaks in the 21st goddamn century, much less that they're getting larger and occurring with increased frequency.
Vaccines save lives. Full stop.
This is a great idea. I'm sad that kids with stupid parents cannot get into school, but it's not worth risking all of the other kids, especially those who cannot get the vaccine due to medical reasons.
In my Grandparents' generation, the recruiting posters said, "your country needs you" and people signed up to fight in a *war* to protect their families and communities, and many of those people didn't come back. Now we simply ask that you get a couple tiny jabs to protect your family and community from some of the most terrible diseases imaginable, and people think there's too much risk. Yes, there's a *tiny* risk, but you still choose to drive little Johnny all over town to soccer practices and birthday parties, putting your precious cargo at far higher risk of death from a car accident than any risk from the vaccine, and then there's the fact that your child is now much more likely to get those diseases. It's literally ridiculous.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
It's not uneducated parents that are the problem. It's a lot of middle-class mothers who are totally convinced by the pseudo-science and rubbish that's peddled on the internet and by "Wellness" gurus. Australia seems to be infested with them.
Someone has just been hammered for this.
The Paleo Diet is alive and well here, pushed by a chef who somehow has become a dietary-science expert and made a mint from pushing books that contain dangerous pseudo-diets.
We also seem to be very susceptible to charlatans spruiking special-cancer treatments that do nothing but give false hope, drain someone's bank account and leaves them dead quicker.
You a troll? This guy didn't say "I got mine screw you". He served the community by taking a risk and getting himself and his kids vaccinated. That's the exact opposite of "got mine screw you".
What he's saying is, "I contributed to the public safety at some small risk to myself and mine, SCREW the people too selfish and cowardly to do the same!"
"It's a lot of middle-class mothers who are totally convinced by the pseudo-science and rubbish"
You're being far more charitable than called for.
I think many of these parents fully understand the risks involved, but have chosen the selfish path.
If you shield your child from vaccinations you shield them from the low risk of vaccine related complications (which in rare cases can be very serious). Given the very low risk that your child will be exposed to the more serious diseases these vaccines protect against, and therefore the chances of getting the more rare side effects of these diseases are extremely low.
This approach can trade minimising the absolute risk to their child against increasing the risk to the community. However, this only works if they're in a very small minority of parents adopting this approach AND the risk levels (in particular, the risk of those diseases in the community) stay the same during the period at which the child can make such decisions for themselves.
Both of those assumptions have been false, the number of people not vaccinating has increased, and, consequently, the risk of contracting these diseases has been increasing as herd immunity decreases. It is unfortunate that it will be their children who will suffer from their selfishness.