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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
This is to do with day care for pre-schoolers, I don't think we are at the stage where we are going to stop kids attending school. Even the link in the above story to the Australian Anti-Vaccination Network --a link to the AVN ... FFS editors, how about here instead?! --doesn't make that claim.
The Federal policy in force at the moment is the "no jab, no pay" policy, meaning that parents of unimmunised children are not eligible for childcare related tax rebates etc.
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
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.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
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