Study Finds Unvaccinated Students Putting Other Students At Risk 1025
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."
They're stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:They're stupid (Score:5, Funny)
I think there is a Vaccine for that. Maybe that is the problem, the parents missed their vaccinations?
Re:They're stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, the anti-vaxxer movement could be a fantastic way of getting dumbfuck retards out of the gene pool. Unfortunately, as can be seen by TFA, anti-vaxxing doesn't affect only its adepts but also innocent people around them. Too bad.
Here in my own country, we have a vaccination plan with quite a few mandatory vaccines. Everybody has a little booklet we call the Vaccination Bulletin, where the nurses keep track of all the vaccines we take. We go to a Health Centre and get vaccinated for free. Kids can't attend public school unless they show their Vaccination Bulletin and prove all the mandatory vaccines are in order. Everybody vaccinates their kids. The only exceptions I can think of is ghetto people who may not do it, out of neglect. And anyway, only a very small minority of them.
Maybe you could institute a similar policy in the USA. If the nut heads don't want to vaccinate their kids, they should home school them. That would keep their little walking petri dishes away from normal children. Yes, for an American this may sound like anti-freedom, but I think my freedom of not getting infected with a bunch of crazy diseases far outweighs the rights of other people to be dumbfucking stupid. And I believe the anti-vaxxer crowd is a very small minority, even in the USA (here they're non-existent). Why should they have the right to hurt the vast majority of normal people?
Vaccines protect people in the developed world from a huge bunch of diseases that were eradicated decades ago or only exist in third world countries. Do you Americans really want to become Uganda in the name the freedom to be stupid? Get a fucking grip, already!
Re:They're stupid (Score:5, Informative)
Re:They're stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
>Your freedom to swing your arm ends at my nose
It seems that very often one cannot take a walk on a street without touching someone's overstretched nose.
Re:They're stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:They're stupid (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
Please explain for all the stupid people in the room how, if student A is vaccinated but student B is not, that this will make student A sick.
This means the exact opposite in this context unless you can prove that an unvaccinated individual can make a vaccinated one sick.
Most vaccines don't completely prevent you from becoming infected, but they severely reduce the risk of infection and transmission - meaning that the disease cannot get a grip in a community. There's also for example student A's baby brother who didn't get his jabs yet but is still at risk when student B visits student A (this is a particular problem for measles)
Student A at risk because of imperfect efficiency (Score:5, Informative)
Please explain for all the stupid people in the room how, if student A is vaccinated but student B is not, that this will make student A sick.
From the top of my head:
Vaccine aren't 100% efficient. There might by a few case where the student received the vaccine but didn't develop the antibodies. (Just an example: if you're sick with a fever, there's a risk that the ongoing inflammation will destroy the vaccine content (through macrophages) before antibodies are developped (through lymphocytes))
There might be student aren't anti-vaxx but who aren't up-to-date just yet (they missed a dose or whatever).
There are people who have a compromised immune system (that's an example from TFA) and can't get vaccinated.
There are people who have allergies and for whom the vaccine might be risky (another example from TFA). (As an example: for practical purpose, flu vaccines are grown on eggs. If you're allergic to the egg proteins, no shot for you, even if you're not anti-vaxx).
There are people who have been vaccinated but can't momentarily fight the disease due to a compromised immune system (AIDS, or even disease as simple as mononucleosis can momentarily b0rk the immune system).
etc.
(Case in point: with some disease (like the flu) it's better to vaccinate the population which is at risk of spreading the disease, rather than the group which is at risk of the disease - it better to vaccinate the care taking/nursing/medical personal, rather than the weak elderly patients.)
You end-up with a bunch of people who aren't anti-vaxx, but which still aren't protected against the disease.
- If the number of non vaccinated people is underneath a specific treshold. Nothing happens. When somebody gets the disease due to complex unlucky circumstances, nothing happens, because chances are the sick person will never meet another susceptible person. The disease just can't manage to find enough victims to spread among.
- If the number of non vaccinated people rises above a specific treshold, the shit hits the fan: the disease get a big enough and dense enough population among which to spread. There's a far greater chance that the disease in one sick person will get a chance to meet a susceptible person to whom to jump. Disease which were taught to be almost eradicated suddenly appear again and run epidemic.
By being selfish and refusing to vaccine, anti-vaxx will raise this number above the treshold. They will not only pose a danger to themselves, but to the population as a whole including all the "innocent" categories cited before who weren't anti-vaxx, but will suffer because of the anti-vaxx.
In a completely selfish way, it makes sense for the anti-vaxx to refuse the vaccine: vaccine aren't perfect and there very slight chance of secondary effect (ranging from simple inconvenience to more serious effect). Even rarest problem don't have a rate of absolutely zero but slightly above. And if the disease is almost eradicated chance, the chance to catch is are nearly zero.
But that behaviour is really dangerous for the community because as a consequence of it, the number of susceptible people is at risk at passing the treshold. They end up making the chance to catch the disease non-zero. By just wanting to avoid a statistically really rare inconvenience, they put the community at a bigger risk.
The example is the polio. In theory it has been recently almost eradicated, chance of catching it are nearly non existant. But vaccine against polio isn't a synthetic product, but a "stunned" virus. There a very slight but not completely null chance to develop a serious effect, something like a polio (sorry I don't remember if it was either because the virus wasn't stunned enough, or because the immune system was compromised).
So the reasoning inside the head of anti-vaxx goes "chance of problems with vaccine > chance of problems with polio" therefore "don't get the vaccine".
But the problem is that, in consequence of just a reasoning, the treshold has b
Re:They're stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the fraudulent distortions of the anti-vax crowd is heir claim that disease rates were going down anyway.
Sounds familiar... Oh yeah: "We don't need the IT people anymore - the machines are running fine!"
Re:They're stupid (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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I think there is a Vaccine for that. Maybe that is the problem, the parents missed their vaccinations?
Unfortunately, no. There's no vaccine against stupid.
Although some people work at stupid so hard, a lobotomy would actually make them smarter.
Re:They're stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
And that's why they need educated. And the education system itself is to blame for this. Too much rote learning, and not enough learning how to learn and learning how to think. It's not terribly difficult to sit down and think for a second and realize that if you dont get vaccinated, you're dependent on everyone else still getting vaccinated in order to not get sick. And even then, that still leaves "outside the herd" sources of infection, as well as diseases that arent transmittable (and have no herd immunity effect), such at Tetenas (spelling, I know).
But that requires thinking and reasoning skills, and too many people seem to only have the ability to yell at the tv "Stupid conservatives/liberals".
Re:They're stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to mention the people who can't be vaccinated for genuine allergic reasons. They rely on the vast majority of normal people getting done and are the really really innocent parties when the negligent parents won't vaccinate their own.
You can't fix stupid (Score:3)
And that's why they need educated.
With apologies to Ron White, you can't fix stupid. There's not a class you can take or a pill you can eat.
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Don't be a nitpicking nelly. "He can't see the forest for the trees", to say it another way. You can get all nitty gritty with the details, but the content is what I'm more concerned with. Besides, I majored in engineering, not grammar. Moment, bending, internal stresses, elasticity, those are my bag. Plus I'm typing at work and I don't know about you, but I don't really pull up Plussman's English Manual for /. posts. This is the "rote" part I was complaining about, the inability to think and look at what's
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Ah, you must not be familiar with the subfamily know as the American-Engrish dialect.
Re:No, they're right! (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Someone may be stupid (Score:3)
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Re:They're stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:They're stupid (Score:5, Interesting)
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: (Score:3)
Well, for starters, your son might be gay...
Re:They're stupid (Score:5, Informative)
There are all sorts of ways to get hep-b, including a dormant version passing from mother to child and then becoming active in the kid.
I am not sure where you got your numbers, but I am seeing US infection rates near the million range. It is possible that what you are seeing are the numbers AFTER vaccination, meaning they are low because the vaccine is working as intended.
Re:They're stupid (Score:5, Interesting)
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:They're stupid (Score:5, Informative)
1. The major forms of transmission for hepatitis b are anal sex and iv drug use.
Incorrect, the most common form of transmission worldwide is vertical transmission, from mother to child at birth. Vaccines prevent this. Furthermore the vertical transmission of hep-b causes the worst damage, with the highest likleyhood of ending up in cirrhosis, and early death from liver cancer. So while the incidence near birth is low in the west, the consequences are higher making vaccination more worthwhile.
Secondly, there will reach a point where your son could experiment with IV drugs or even homosexual encounters, don't you want him to be protected in that instance?
If you are alergic to bakers yeast then you will likely be alergic to the hepatitis b vaccine.
You cannot have an allergy at birth to anything. It takes at least one contact with the allergen to build up an immune response.
Why should I stress my son's immune system out
Your son's immune system is 'stressed out' by the new contact with the world outside the womb. Adding any number of vaccines is a tiny drop in the ocean compared to all those new antigens.
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In order to know which vaccines my son should get, I had to essentially become and expert in each vaccine.
And where did you obtain this expertise? How many experiments did you do do verify your hypothesis?
Re:They're stupid (Score:4, Informative)
Justify why a newborn needs a hepatitis b vaccine. Go ahead call me stupid when I've done the research.
1. The major forms of transmission for hepatitis b are anal sex and iv drug use.,
1. Primary method of transmission is mother-to-child, via bodily fluids (you know, stuff the infant is utterly coated in when they're born?) or breastfeeding.
2. Testing for Hep B can be unreliable at certain phases of the disease.
Because... (Score:3, Insightful)
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Can we see a peer-reviewed version of the Carlin study, please?
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These are not synthesized germs, there is no mother nature, and there is no way it was intended to work.
You are making patterns out of random chance, a pretty normal human failing, but a quite dangerous one.
Re:Because... (Score:5, Insightful)
Your post could be shortened to "I don't know how vaccination works".
Almost every person with a healthy natural immune system exposed to Poliovirus will brush it off with no symptoms and gain additional lifelong protection.
That's the only slightly correct sentence in your post. But all the conclusions you draw are wrong.
Immunization via vaccination is based on exactly that fact: Given an healthy immune system, an exposition to the Poliovius will create an immune answer which a) stops the Poliovirus from spreading and b) gives you a lifelong protection. And that's how vaccination works. Your body gets a dose of dead or at least deactivated Poliovirus, your healthy immune system creates the immune answer, and you gain lifelong protection -- and that without the risk of actually catching Poliomyelitis, which an exposition to the real thing would yield.
Re:Because... (Score:5, Informative)
Vaccines should be mandatory. (Score:3, Insightful)
This is why vaccinations need to be mandatory. If you want to live in society, you have to follow society's rules and that includes rules that keep you from putting others at serious risk.
Re:Vaccines should be mandatory. (Score:4, Insightful)
Agreed. The only exemptions should be for allergy or other medical problems - those are sufficiently rare that herd immunity should not be compromised.
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Earth, Hitler. 1938.
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He also ate breakfast and opposed smoking.
Should we stop eating breakfast and start smoking?
Re:Vaccines should be mandatory. (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, you know who else used logical fallacies to support his arguments?
Hitler.
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You mean people who think they are special when they are not?
You will grow up, your ideas will change and you may even come to realize that having a functioning society is good for even you.
Being a human means being part of society, and to do that you have to expect some give and take. Vaccines or quarantine are one of those.
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I have the same philosophy but I only apply it to the the eugenics people. That is, the people who believe in eugenics should be sterilized.
Re:Vaccines should be mandatory. (Score:5, Insightful)
Did you read TFA? or at least TFS?
These children which aren't getting vaccinated because their parents don't understand science are putting other children at risk.
So it may not be their own children which natural selection sorts out, it may be the children of parents who have accepted that vaccines work, aren't more likely to cause autism, and aren't part of some government conspiracy.
So their "personal belief exemptions" are putting the lives of other people at risk -- basically they've gotten the right to become potential carriers of disease:
You can't just have people opting out of things which is intended to prevent disease in greater society if it puts other people at risk. You're free to choose for yourself, but not when you're talking about communicable disease.
Someone needs to explain to these parents that the rest of the world shouldn't bear the risk of them being stupid. If it was only them and their offspring who might be affected, go ahead. But it isn't.
Re:Vaccines should be mandatory. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Some people have allergic reactions to the vaccines themselves. You can let those people remain un-vaccinated and herd immunity will still work. I think you typically need about 90% vaccination rate to stop a disease.
Re:Vaccines should be mandatory. (Score:4, Insightful)
Agreed, parents who don't should be forced to wear dunce hats in public as they are usually to thick to even have a remotely reasonable reason why.
Re:Vaccines should be mandatory. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why vaccinations need to be mandatory. If you want to live in society, you have to follow society's rules and that includes rules that keep you from putting others at serious risk.
Wow what a slippery slope that is... So for instance should H1N1 vaccinations be required? What about flu shots? If everyone got the flu shot we would likely run out before the high risk people (the young and elderly) had a chance to get it. Not to mention the potential side effects of many vaccines. Personally I and my children are vaccinated for everything I consider a serious disease (polio, etc.), but not H1N1 for instance because the chance of death is practically non-existent. In a free society you have the choice to be stupid... If you take away that choice then its no longer a free society.
Re:Vaccines should be mandatory. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not a slippery slope. Vaccination recommendations and requirements (yes, you are quite rightly required to be immunized in some places, for some things), are based on a quantitative risk/benefit analysis.
It actually amazes people from outside the US that children unvaccinated for things like whooping cough would be allowed into a public school.
Re:Vaccines should be mandatory. (Score:4, Informative)
the flu averages about 36k deaths per year according to the CDC [cdc.gov]. though the number swings around quite a bit year to year.
and that in 1952 at the height of the polio epidemic there were only 60k cases and 3k deaths in the US. according to this [kidshealth.org]
so even if vaccines were never developed you would still be more likely to die from flu than one of those "stable diseases".
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The flu kills just as many 5 year olds as octogenarians. The elderly and the very young are the highest risk age groups.
I also bet the old geezer would object to you saying his life was worth less than some kid who just barely stopped drooling on himself.
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Mostly an annoyance?
I take it you never have actually had the flu. I spent a week in bed, high fever and hallucinating.
This is the problem the flu vaccine has, what most people call the flu is not influenza but some other minor cold. The actual flu is no joke.
Re:Vaccines should be mandatory. (Score:5, Informative)
As someone who has some expertise in this:
The Flu vaccine is actually pretty effective. After all, they pretty much make a new one each year. They've had quite a bit of practice by now. However, getting a vaccine is not a full protection against the flu. The problem is twofold:
First, the flu virus mutates very quickly, and likes to mutate in ways that change its antigen "signature". Though there are some interesting attempts at more general vaccines, currently, you can't even make a vaccine for H1N1 flu strains. You have to pick a specific subgroup of H1N1 strains, because even within the H1N1 type, there are variations that appear differently to our immune system. The same holds for the "old" H3N2 flu, and the even older H2N2 flu. It's not uncommon for a strain to mutate enough over a single season that last year's vaccine no longer works.
Second, because there are so many different strains in the wild and they shift so quickly, you can't create a vaccine that is targeted against all of them. Why not? That wasn't part of my specialty. I think it has something to do with confusing the immune system with too many similar things. Anyway, the point here is simpler: Vaccine makers don't even try to protect against all the strains. They use clinical samples to determine which strains are looking to be the most common, pick the top four or five, and make a vaccine that protects against those.
So, what happens if they guess wrong, and a rare strain from the previous year suddenly spreads wildly? Well, you don't get vaccine effectiveness. What if one of the popular strains goes through some mutations early in the season? Well, same effect. You've probably got a vaccine that won't help much. Is this the fault of the vaccine? No. It's the fault of the virus that mutates faster than vaccines can be created and tested. They are trying to find ways to make them faster, but that would only work if you were willing to get multiple shots per year. The better solution is to find a way to make vaccines that apply to larger groups of strains, but it takes time and lots of data.
Of course, this all gets thrown out the window if you're a fan of Intelligent Design (aka: Creationism). In that case, vaccines don't work because God hates you and chose to use his powers to fiddle with a Germ Spirit and make it immune to the poisons created by the Unbelievers. He's punishing you for not having more faith in him. Of course, there's nothing you can do in this case, so there's no point in trying to understand exactly why it happened.
Re:Vaccines should be mandatory. (Score:4, Informative)
Vaccination does not work for everyone, and it does not work for everyone equally. Complete vaccination of whole populations serves two purposes. Firstly, to protect against the disease, but secondly, to reduce the pool of disease carriers to a level where an outbreak is unlikely or even ceases.
In short, if the vaccination does not work for some child, or there is a child with a bona fide allergy to the vaccine who cannot take it, that child is much less likely to contract the disease at all if no one around them is a carrier.
Taken to it's furthest extent, we can eliminate entire diseases that way. With no one for the disease to jump to, it dies off in the isolated hosts and can no longer reproduce. That's why smallpox no longer exists outside some very, very well guarded labs. And if you know anything about history, smallpox killed huge numbers of people, and scarred, disfigured, and otherwise damaged those it didn't kill. Making it almost completely extinct is a very good thing and is a direct result of vaccination.
Re:Vaccines should be mandatory. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Vaccines should be mandatory. (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately, the ones that suffer aren't only the kids of the parents who don't vaccinate. If it were only those parent's kids, I'd be in favor of vaccination being voluntary. However, when Parent A doesn't vaccinate his/her kids, they increase risk of infection for Parent B's baby (too young for vaccination), Parent C's child (can't be vaccinated due to valid medical reason such as allergies), and Parent D's child (vaccine didn't take). A person's rights to raise their kids how they want don't extend to putting other kids at risk.
No, education should be optional: vaccine or GTFO. (Score:3)
Tough on the kids, but if the flat earthers want to devolve back to their Garden of Eden fantasy, let's get the party started.
The only real question is which group is going to end up as the Eloi and which the Morlocks. Me, I'm not that keen on the sun.
Re:Vaccines should be mandatory. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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It *might* work, but it is extremely not cost effective. Parents of special education kids have no choice in the matter, their kids need assistance and that is that. Parents of non-vaccinated children have a simple solution that is right in front of them, and often public funded or at least defrayed. Setting aside whole wings or creating whole schools for them is ridiculous if they can easily comply.
If it was an open scientific question as to whether vaccination was dangerous, you might have a point, but
Re:Vaccines should be mandatory. (Score:5, Funny)
No way!
Those that are vaccinated should be safe anyway.
If they are not, then there's no reason to vaccinate.
I've heard that mathematicians working at the cutting edge of theoretical statistics have recently hypothesized the existence of probabilities other than "0" and "1". It's pretty cool stuff, with potential implications in all sorts of areas...
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And increasing the odds for the disease to develop resistance against vaccination. Sick people spread millions of little bits of virus around, some of those have mutations, and some of those mutations will make them resistant against current vaccines. A mix of vaccinated and unvaccinated people is probably the best possible breeding ground for resistant strains.
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It's implicit in the definition of "society". If you don't participate, you're just a parasite clinging to the side.
Re:Vaccines should be mandatory. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Vaccines should be mandatory. (Score:5, Informative)
Paying property taxes implies that you own property, which in turn implies that you're using the legal ownership guarantees of the society and thus participating.
Yes, you can exist independently of society; it's just a such a darn miserable existence that no one chooses that. And if some do, that existence is likely to be a short one, since humans are herd animals and don't really do well on their own, even if we don't count receiving an education as participation.
Re:Vaccines should be mandatory. (Score:5, Insightful)
nd what if I don't want to live in society? Fine. But TFA is about parents sending unvaccinated kids to school. They do want the benefits of society, but not any responsibility
How is this news now? (Score:5, Insightful)
Every reputable medical doctor, along with every pundit even slightly knowledgable about medicine or even basic biology has been warning of this issue ever since the antivaxxer morons got their idiotic campaign going.
There's a shock... (Score:5, Insightful)
I suspect that, rather than "Despite the successes of childhood immunizations", it would be because of those successes that the 'controversy' is presently raging...
Because of the effectiveness of widespread childhood vaccination, we've had at least a generation of people with minimal firsthand exposure to all the wacky pathogenic fun that used to be quite common. Plus, depending on the herd immunity requirements for a given pathogen and vaccine, being part of the first n% of opt-outs is basically cost-free. It isn't until you get closer to herd immunity breakdown that being unvaccinated starts to carry any serious additional risk of infection.
If you have a situation where people's knowledge of the risks is largely historical and the odds are pretty good that you can free-ride your way past them in any case, it (sadly) seems only to be expected that there would be room for assorted controversy to flourish.
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rtfa: The people who refuse the vaccines on the basis of some stupid beliefs are putting the people that can't take the vaccines because of some medical condition at risk.
Re:There's a shock... (Score:5, Insightful)
Also I don't get why unvaccinated students are putting other students at risk.
Another example of the reason why stupid should be painful. And given the topic, fatal.
Re:There's a shock... (Score:5, Informative)
According to the article, some people cannot get vaccinations due to allergies or other medical conditions. Those people are put at risk.
Also, some vaccinations are not 100% effective, so anyone for whom the vaccination was not effective is put at risk.
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Re:There's a shock... (Score:5, Informative)
Also I don't get why unvaccinated students are putting other students at risk.
A couple of reasons ;
i) Vaccination isn't a perfect shield against disease.
If vaccination gives you 90% immunity, and you spray a whole school with the disease, 10% of the kids will get it. But happily, diseases don't spread like that - they need human hosts. If the only person you come into contact with is your teacher, and they get the disease, you'll be exposed. But if he's vaccinated too, your chances of getting it just went down to 1%, because his chance of contracting it is lower. Herd immunity matters because it reduces the number of carriers, which decreases the risk that anyone, vaccinated or otherwise, will even contact the disease, let alone contract it.
ii) The more hosts a disease has, the more it will mutate.
Viruses reproduce at a prodigous rate under great selection pressure - they mutate quickly. Chances are, that one will develop a mutation that makes the current vaccines less effective, or ineffective. The more chances the virus has to reproduce, the more likely this will happen. Therefore unvaccinated folks are doing the equivalent of putting a sign in their lot saying "Terrorists welcome! Come experiment here to discover new ways to kill decadent infidels!"
Re:There's a shock... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you don't use a condom, the only people at risk are you and your partner. (Well, and anyone else that person sleeps with, but the immediate risk is just the two of you.)
If you don't get vaccinated, you can spread diseases to people who are too young to get vaccinated, people who's vaccinations didn't take (vaccination isn't 100% effective for everyone), people who can't get vaccinated due to allergies/illness/etc. And you don't have to have intimate contact with these people. Walk by one of them in a store and you might have passed on your virus. Sneeze on your hand, touch your desk, and you'll pass your virus on to the person who sits there next class period. This is bad enough when we're talking about something minor like a cold. However, if you're talking about whooping cough, mumps, or polio, your lack of vaccination could mean severe injury or death to someone else.
Re:There's a shock... (Score:5, Informative)
"Also I don't get why unvaccinated students are putting other students at risk. Wouldn't vaccinated students be risk-free? This article reads to me like "Teenagers foregoing condom use putting teenagers who don't have sex at risk" ... "
sigh.
not this idiotic crap again.
There's always some moron who's too lazy to actually do some reading first to at least know what they're challenging.
in a certain percentage of people who get vaccinated the vaccine doesn't "take".
it varies by vaccine. in some the uptake is 95%+ in others 80% or lower. in some it's only a hair above the percentage of the population who need to be immune to maintain herd immunity.
so if you get the shot there's only a 95% chance that your body will react to it and make you immune.
there's also the immune compromised, the very young and the very old.
so johnny idiot decides vaccines are evil and doesn't get his kid vaccinated. nod only does johonny idiots kid get sick or die but also a certain percentage of the children of non-negligent parents who just got unlucky or were sick. they suffer because negligent parents drag everyone bellow the herd immunity threshold.
Bad Risk Assessment (Score:5, Insightful)
At its core, the anti-vax movement is bad risk assessment for a few reasons. First of all, the horrors of the diseases that most vaccinations prevent against haven't been seen in a few generations. People my age (30's) with kids have never lived in a world where you could get polio or mumps at any moment and wind up dead, on an iron lung, deaf, scarred for life, etc. They score the risk of these infections as low because they don't see them. (The fallacy here being that the *reason* they don't see them is because of vaccines.)
Then, they hear scare tactics from certain people (Wakefield, McCarthy, etc) who claim that vaccines contain mercury/fetal tissue/generic toxins/etc that will harm their child. One shot and suddenly your child will catch The Autism. (Picture that in a much scarier font and cue a woman screaming off camera.) This would be so horrible and so, they conclude, we must stop all vaccinations until they are proven 100% safe.
The fallacy with this last one is that 1) there has never been a proven link between vaccines and autism, 2) even if there was, the diseases vaccines prevent are far worse than autism, and 3) no medical procedure is 100% safe. In fact, nothing anyone does is 100% safe. Driving in to work? You could get in a car crash and die. Better not commute to work until they can design cars that are 100% safe. Walking down the street? You could trip, hit your head, and die. Better not walk until they design 100% safe sidewalks.
The fact is that risk that vaccines pose is minuscule (and mainly limited to allergic reactions or slight fevers) and the threat these diseases pose is huge should they make a comeback. It is only bad risk assessment that makes vaccines look like a bigger threat than the diseases.
Re: (Score:3)
Maybe not, but the vaccine companies won't tell you the truth of the matter either
That's a pretty poor logical jump. I could make some extreme, fraudulent claim ("Vaccines cause flipper babies and a second head to grow out of your neck"), they could deny it, and your logic would state that what they said can't be trusted, therefore avoid vaccinations. The problem is the entire link to autism was fabricated. It wasn't the companies coming out and disproving data that showed a link - there was never a link in the first place.
Some of the vaccines stop super rare diseases that are no worse than getting a cold
This is actually a legitimate complaint. There are some things
Thank you Jenny McCarthy (Score:5, Informative)
Jenny McCarthy body count [jennymccar...ycount.com]
“I do believe sadly it's going to take some diseases coming back to realize that we need to change and develop vaccines that are safe. If the vaccine companies are not listening to us, it's their f___ing fault that the diseases are coming back. They're making a product that's s___. If you give us a safe vaccine, we'll use it. It shouldn't be polio versus autism.”
Jenny McCarthy in Time Magazine, April 2009
Re: (Score:3)
Choice works both ways (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Great to see Romney's getting such good advice (Score:4, Informative)
... from his buddy Donald Trump who recently claimed:
“Massive combined inoculations to small children is the cause for big increase in autism spread shots over long period and watch positive result.”
That's almost as bad as Akins "legitimate rape" comment (note: Romney's running mate co-authored the anti-abortion bill by the Republicans.). If you think this thinking is restricted to "just" a potential senator and vice-president please note the Republican platform REMOVED the clause allowing for abortions in case of Rape or Incest.
Judge them not (just) by what they say but what they do.
Natural resistance is not always a good thing. (Score:3)
Malaria caused a selection for sickle-cell anemia. The ability to survive does not have to mean survival of the fittest.
One of our strongest attributes is supposed to be our brains and the ability to work out solutions and/or create tools to help us survive adversity. It should be clear by now that if we were to try and survive in the wild without using even the most primitive of tools or our capacity to reason, most of us would fail. Though eventually selection of the physically stronger, faster, tougher and more vicious would probably make us more like our primitive ancestors.
Another consideration is that the children who "SURVIVED" grew up with immunity to diseases like chicken-pox. I chose the vaccine for my daughter because I did not want her to be one of the few who died. It's stupid lottery to play.
Re:SCAREMONGERING. (Score:5, Informative)
Vaccines are not that profitable. Please adjust your tinfoil hat.
Re:SCAREMONGERING. (Score:5, Interesting)
Having worked in the medical research field, I can tell you with certainty that vaccines are that profitable...
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.
Re:SCAREMONGERING. (Score:5, Informative)
revenue not profits
you have to spend money on R&D, FDA approval, complying with all kinds of regulations selling to the government, bulk discounts. very little profit on vaccines
Re: (Score:3)
Well, then you want to catch every single child you can, to maximize the profit, right? After all, you invested in R&D, FDA approval & compliance with regulations. But once you have it on the assembly line, each vial of vaccine can't really cost much on top of those up-front costs.... so we'd better start immunizing all those stragglers too!
Lawsuits, education (ie. defending against boneheaded accusations), distribution, storage... We're struggling in this country to keep vaccine makers interested in continuing to make a flu vaccine, and that's probably one of the best health-for-the-dollar investments one can possibly make. Death from flu is similar to death from drunk driving (~11K drunk driving deaths; 3K-40K flu deaths a year depending on the severity of the season), and yet not getting a flu vaccine is not ostracized like driving drunk i
Re:SCAREMONGERING. (Score:5, Insightful)
If that is your sole argument, that someone is lobbying the government to force people to get vaccinated so these companies can make money, you've lost any semblance of logical argument.
The fact that you consider homeopathic to be medicine, which it isn't, and choose to focus on the money aspect, which is completely irrelevant to the medically sound reason to be vaccinated, shows your lack of common sense.
I can assure you when people were being vaccinated for smallpox or polio, no one gave a rats ass about who was making a profit, or if a profit was even being made. All they cared about was that the yearly sweeps of infections that plagued the country came to a stop.
Are you now going to complain about all the money those big bad corporations made eradicating smallpox and polio? How about rinderpest, an equally devastating disease which has afflicted animals since before the time of Greeks? Are you going to complain about the money corporations made selling this vaccine to the animal industry to innoculate animals to prevent them from getting infected and making it the second time in human history that a disease has been wiped from the face of the Earth?
It seems counter-intuitive to complain these companies are making money to produce a product which will, eventually, make the use of that product unnecessary (in the case of smallpox and rinderpest). After all, wouldn't it be easier to make something which only treats the symptoms rather than cures it? That way they could have a perpetual source of income.
You and Jenny McCarthy would make a great pair. You should go on tour.
Re: (Score:3)
If the program was not profitable, the drug companies wouldn't produce the vaccines
I wouldn't say that vaccines aren't profitable. What I will say is that they're closer to computer equipment profit margins(1%), not jewelry store ones(50+%) like designer drugs have.
My grandfather had polio. I'm all for vaccination. While we're at it, I support putting unvaccinated kids together in special schools. That way when a MMR type outbreak happens they all get it and the parents get to experience the consequences of their failure. Oh, and it makes the news in a splashy public way so more par
Re:SCAREMONGERING. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:SCAREMONGERING. (Score:5, Informative)
And that all goes into the drug company's pocket, because, of course, vaccines cost nothing to make.
Vaccines make so little profit that there's difficulties in keeping the manufacturing of them going--and research into new ones has almost stopped.
Re:SCAREMONGERING. (Score:5, Informative)
In fact, that's the main reason behind the special "vaccine court" that handles claims of problems with vaccines. Vaccines make so little profit that any legal risk they pose to the company could tip the scales into them being not worth the effort. The vaccine court is a way to weed out the frivolous claims (i.e. "this vaccine turned my son autistic and my evidence is Jenny McCarthy") and take action on the valid cases. If vaccines were dumped into the main court system, lawsuits would spread like wildfire over every imagined complaint. The companies would have to defend themselves against them and vaccines just not be worth the effort, money-wise. They would be losing money (via frivolous lawsuits) and their production would be stopped. Then we'd all suffer through those diseases again.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:SCAREMONGERING. (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
Re: (Score:3)
You say "on par", but the reality is that until vaccines were discovered, smoking wasn't that big a deal due to the probability that one of the diseases we now vaccinate against would kill you. Smoking is among leading causes of death because we managed to clear out a whole host of really nasty bugs.
I personally believe in this day and age, anyone actively preventing vaccination of a child should be brought up on charges of crimes against humanity. Not even slightly hyperbolic.
Re: (Score:3)
I find that you deserve death by torture.
My logic is just as unassailable as yours.
Re:Hmmmm, color me confused.... (Score:5, Informative)
The only students at risk are those who do not get vaccinated
False. Some number of children can't be vaccinated for legitimate medical reasons, usually allergic reaction to the vaccine ingredients. Then there's a certain number, ranging from 1-5+% that the vaccine simply doesn't take, they are not 100% effective. These two classes of people rely on the fact that the diseases they are vulnerable to aren't present in the general population, if there is an outbreak, the sick people don't come into contact with enough vulnerable people for the disease to spread at a rate that can sustain itself. The numbers necessary are different for each disease, but generally range from 90-99% need to be immune to prevent a wide scale outbreak. These people are harming more than their own children (which would be bad enough), they put everyone else at risk too.
Re:What risk? (Score:5, Informative)
Vaccines aren't 100% effective. There are some for whom the vaccine didn't work. If we were talking about a fully vaccinated population, it wouldn't matter. Herd immunity would protect these people (along with those too young to get vaccinated and those who have valid medical reasons like allergies). However, if too many people stop vaccinating, herd immunity breaks down and these people are subjected to a disease that their immune system isn't ready for.
Re:Why do the Vaccine's need to be filled with CRA (Score:5, Informative)
Oh noes, the chemicals!
First, most vaccines don't contain mercury anymore. Second, vaccines only ever contained very small amounts, as a preservative. If you eat fish even a few times per year, that plus your exposure through drinking water probably adds up to more mercury than you'd get from a vaccine, even if you did get one of the vaccines that still has mercury in it.
The preservative is necessary to keep the vaccine from going bad long enough that it can be reasonably distributed.
Re:Why do the Vaccine's need to be filled with CRA (Score:4, Insightful)
Not to mention that mercury was blamed for "vaccines cause autism." They removed the mercury. Autism rates still rose. So they changed their claim of why "vaccines cause autism" to something else. Every time the link they claim is proven false, they move the goal posts somewhere else so they can claim that "vaccines cause autism" hasn't *really* been disproven and that the burden is on everyone else to disprove claim #1,263.
Re:Rights (Score:4, Insightful)
Your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose. Not vaccinating your kid exposes mine to potentially life-threatening disease. If you think that the (vanishingly small) risk of complications from vaccination is more important than my (vaccinated) kid's risk of contracting a disease that has mutated inside your (unvaccinated) kid.. well, you're bad at math. And, a selfish short-sighted asshole.
I've never really understood why it is that something you were going to do anyway becoming mandatory means that you should automatically resist it. You've lost nothing except the choice you weren't going to make, and society has benefited. Making vaccinations mandatory is not the same as Hitler storming across Europe, get a grip. If the slope were really that slippery, we would have fallen down into the abyss a long long time ago.
Obligatory car analogy: Sure, you have the right to drive around with faulty brakes. At least in this state, you do not need working brakes to pass the yearly inspection. You can argue that you're risking nobody except yourself.. except, you're not. Your passengers, and the other people on the roads that you slam into because you can't stop, would disagree.
Part of living in a civilized society is recognizing when your actions have consequences for others that have no say in the matter. Yes, you can make the choice not to vaccinate your kid. But realize that your actions have consequences for others. (It may come as a shock to you that there are other people in the world besides you and your child.) One of the major problems we (USA) have as a society is the attitude of "I've got mine, fuck you." Take responsibility for your choice; keep your kid away from mine. If your idealism leads to my kid's death.. then it's not worth protecting. Die for your ideals if you want; it's your life to throw away.
An exercise in arithmetic (Score:3)
To the innumerate, perhaps. Let's do some simple arithmetic:
Autism is typically diagnosed around the same time that children receive their childhood vaccinations, even in children who do not get vaccinated. Let's ignore the likely possibility that due to media reports, parents are more likely to be alert to symptoms of autism right after vaccination,
Re:Mandatory Vaccines? (Score:4, Insightful)
Interesting how "my body, my choice" has such limited applicability.
Typhoid Mary would agree you if she were alive today.