Study Finds Unvaccinated Students Putting Other Students At Risk

New submitter haroldmandel writes in with a story about the increase of certain diseases in school-age children due to parents not having their kids vaccinated. "Parents nervous about the safety of vaccinations for their children may be causing a new problem: the comeback of their grandparents' childhood diseases, reports a new study from the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. Despite the successes of childhood immunizations, wrote Penn Nursing researcher Alison M. Buttenheim, PhD, MBA, in the American Journal of Public Health, controversy over their safety has resulted in an increasing number of parents refusing to have their children vaccinated and obtaining legally binding personal belief exemptions against vaccinations for their children."

Re:SCAREMONGERING.

[Dr_Barnowl]

He didn't need to be paid, the mind control nanobots they put in the vaccines made him do it.

Alternate hypothesis ; anti-vaxxers are actually a shadowy conspiracy of the radical Green movement who want the human race thinning out a bit to lower our impact on Mother Earth.

These diseases cause not just death, but maiming and suffering on a grand scale when allowed to spread unchecked. Not being vaccinated is on a par with smoking - it's a stupid and bad for not just your health but for the health of those around you.

Vaccination must have been very successful for us to even HAVE an anti vaccination movement, because the memory of the horrors of childhood diseases makes anyone bearing it a lifeline proponent of getting your shots...

What risk?

[Meneth]

How can the vaccinated students be at risk? They're supposed to be immune.

Re:Vaccines should be mandatory.

[Zocalo]

I don't doubt that this is going to go through the upper reaches of legal system sooner or later, but initially at least, I think the solution is probably more in your second sentence than the first; non-vaccinated kids are putting other kids at risk, so perhaps the schools and local authorities need to start thinking about this in terms of risk and liability. Say one of the non-vaccinated kids is shown to have introduced a serious illness into a class, which then rips through the non-vaccinated pupils in that class and probably also picks up a few of the vaccinated ones too since vaccination isn't always 100% effective. If fatalities and/or life-changing debilities result it's probably just a matter of time before someone decides to sue their school board for gross negligence in failing to adequately protect little Johnny from what ails/ailed him, regardless of whether little Johnny was vaccinated or not.

Not a lot a school is going to be able to prevent that from happening, particularly since some particularly nasty diseases are contageous before the symptoms become visible. Segregating the non-vaccinated kids individually clearly isn't going to be viable, so that really just leaves a choice between a school insisting on its pupils being vaccinated or them being unable to attend. Of course, neither of those options are likely to be palatable to the parents who strongly believe in the non-vaccination of their kids, even if the school provides them with some suitably frank educational material [youtube.com], so the courts are still going to get involved.

Re:SCAREMONGERING.

[Sarten-X]

Having worked in the medical research field, I can tell you with certainty that vaccines are that profitable...

• They're profitable for the data center operators, who spend six months running database queries to assemble a clinical trial.
• They're profitable for the insurers, who no longer have to pay for treatment of some very difficult diseases.
• They're profitable for the utility companies who charge for powering the lab equipment for several years while a vaccine is produced.
• They're profitable for the data analysts, who are paid to go over the results from the lab tests only to say "chemical A did not significantly do anything different than chemical B".
• They're profitable for the researchers who get paid for spending a decade understanding the biological mechanisms of any particular disease, and finding ways to disrupt them (and nothing else).

Finally when it's all said and done, the actual pharmaceutical company can bring in billions of dollars in revenue selling the vaccine, which is just about enough to fund the next few projects.

Choice works both ways

[Geeky]

How about letting choice run both ways? If you choose to refuse vaccination for your child, the school can choose to refuse to allow them in? Exemptions only allowed in the case of provable medical conditions such as allergies.

That way, if your community decides that it wants vaccinations, you can either go along with it, find an alternative school somewhere else or choose to home school.

Re:Vaccines should be mandatory.

[texas neuron]

The flu vaccine does not really prevent the flu (20% effective). Instead, it prevents serious complications of the flu (80% effective). I am surprised that no one has mentioned that vaccines are actually cost effective. Virtually all other treatments and screenings are not. So there is a medical cost to society when people choose to not vaccinate.

Re:Vaccines should be mandatory.

[iter8]

My son was immunosuppressed because of a kidney transplant when he was an infant so he couldn't be vaccinated. We depended on herd-immunity. It was always scary to run into someone who was anti-vaccine. I thought "It's bad enough that you're putting your own kid at risk, but you're seriously endangering mine." The anti-vaccine people aren't always uneducated, many of the ones that I encountered were college grads. I guess they slept through biology class. Many seemed to think vaccination was some sort of plot by "The Man".

Re:They're stupid

[jc79]

Why does having a vaccination "stress [your] son's immune system out" more than his routine everyday exposure to hundreds of potential pathogens, such as those on your skin or in his crib?

There's a good review here [wiley.com] of the development of the human immune system both pre- and post-natal. It's entirely possible that the difference in immune function between young children and adults is an adaptive trait, given that most classes of pathogen will be encountered in the first few months of life. Your baby might look fragile, but he's had T-cells since he was a 12-week old fetus.

Re:No, they're right!

[K. S. Kyosuke]

By avoiding modern health system, you'd be bringing us back to the Middle Ages. If you cut down the average life expectancy, it won't be effective to properly take care of the children, why send them to college until they're twenty-five when half of them will be dead before they are forty? Eventually we'd all sink to the level of dirt streets and chamber pots being emptied out of people's windows and famines and everyone of us would have a really bad time. Oh, and no Nintendo for you.

BTW, meanwhile, evolution happily churns on, no matter whether you like it or not. You don't have to be worried about that.

Re:They're stupid

[Just Some Guy]

That's the policy everywhere I've lived in the US, too, except that there are personal belief and medical necessity exemptions. The former is an obvious loophole; the anti-vax idiots just claim that they're religiously opposed to shots or something like that. The second is kind of problematic and I'm not sure how to solve it. There are certain people that can't receive particular vaccines for immune deficiency or allergy reasons. That's fine. The problem is that any doctor seems to be able to issue these exemptions. That unfortunately currently includes chiropractors, who seem to be opposed to vaccines for trade reasons (because chiropractic theory and disease theory aren't compatible).

The obvious first step would be to limit medical exemption forms to only being issued by MDs (and maybe DOs? I think they're also pro-science), but then you'll have the chiropractic lobby complaining that they're being treated as second-class citizens.

For the record, I love me a good chiropractor for back pain relief. They just don't have any business involving themselves in the vaccine non-controversy.

Re:They're stupid

[daem0n1x]

You post is just a bunch of straw men attacks.

You do know that the authorities want to administer Gardasil to boys [reuters.com], right?

What's wrong with that?

The flu shot contains mercury [cdc.gov] (it's good for your baby [youtube.com], "they" say)?

It contains a tiny amount of mercury, smaller than you'd get from eating fish. So, what's the problem? If you dread mercury that much, don't drink water or eat fish.

They are also recommending lithium be added to drinking water [medicalnewstoday.com], as well.

Who are "they"? It was just a simple study! You make it sound like there's a hidden conspiracy for drugging Humanity!

Don't be afraid to re-evaluate your beliefs from time to time. Culture, attitudes, environment...life...changes, and so should you.

I do, you clearly don't. Otherwise, you'd be showing me any valid data, not trying to fool me into your beliefs using out-of-context data and alarmist bullshit.

Re:They're stupid

[DeadCatX2]

You know, I find it completely immoral that an insurance company might choose to deny payment for a necessary medical treatment...

and yet I find myself agreeing with you wholeheartedly that insurance companies shouldn't be obligated to pay for a disease that an individual acquired by intentionally denying routine vaccinations.

Ouch! The cognitive dissonance! It burrrns us!

Re:They're stupid

[cayenne8]

I remember back when I was a kid, and the vaccinations were mandatory....they actually lined us up in school about 1st or 2nd grade..and shot us up there....

I remember it was interesting..which ever one leaves the mark on your arm...for me, it would never 'take'. I never got the scab nor the mark on my arm.

The almost didn't want to let me in school, but I had the paperwork in my records saying they'd try to shoot me up at least twice...and I should be good to go.

Re:They're stupid

[ekgringo]

Well, gee, if a playwright from a century ago says that vaccinations are a scam, it can only be true!