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.

Comments

Re:Banning children of uneducated parent from scho

[lgw]

You can't deny nearly a fourth of the kids from education. Of course the Republicans here want to do that since they're anti-science and support mandatory vaccinations.

Arrest the parents for child endangerment. The foster homes will get the kids vaccinated and they'll get an education. No reason to tolerate child abuse.

Re:Banning children of uneducated parent from scho

[hey!]

In my experience it's not necessarily uneducated parents. Uneducated parents, if they have access to a pediatrician, are apt to follow his or her advice. It's educated parents who question, and the miseducated ones question and come up with bad answers.

What we are looking at in the anti-vaxxer movement is Emersonian self-reliance run amok. We've succeeded in teaching a generation not to put blind trust in authority figures, but without an interest in STEM for its own sake and with limited critical thinking skills, they have no choice but to turn to alternative authorities, individuals who embody everything that should be feared in an authority: deviousness, venality and ruthlessness.

Re:GOOD.

[Michael Woodhams]

Vaccines can be used to eradicate measles, we just haven't tried.

Vaccines have eradicated smallpox and are on the verge of eradicating polio (42 paralysis cases worldwide last year, so far this year we're running at 1/3 of last year at the same time, 3 vs 9 cases.)

In terms of eradication, smallpox had everything going for it: an effective cheap vaccine, no animal reservoir, obvious symptoms, and the political/social will to make it happen (because it was such a terrible disease.) By comparison, polio can circulate without obvious symptoms, making it hard to eradicate.

Measles eradication has everything going for it that smallpox did, except for the will. People who think measles vaccines are dangerous should campaign for measles eradication. Their children will get the vaccine, but their grandchildren and every later generation until human extinction will not.