California Senate Approves School Vaccine Bill 545
mpicpp writes: California state senators have passed a controversial bill designed to increase school immunization rates. SB277 would prohibit parents from seeking vaccine exemptions for their children because of religious or personal beliefs. California would join West Virginia and Mississippi as the only states with such requirements if the bill becomes law. "SB 277 is about increasing immunization rates so no one will have to suffer from vaccine-preventable diseases," said Sen. Ben Allen (D- Santa Monica) who coauthored the bill with Sen. Richard Pan (D-Sacramento).
Common sense prevails! (Score:5, Insightful)
I expect to see a lot of anti vaxx outrage and legal challenges, but this is a good first step.
Re:Common sense prevails! (Score:5, Insightful)
+1. We can't vaccinate people against stupidity, but we can keep their kids from suffering for it.
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I knew that IBM was never fond of VAX, but I didn't think it reached the level of outrage.
Re:Common sense prevails! (Only Partially!) (Score:5, Insightful)
The federal laws passed in the mid-80s that insulate the responsibility of vaccine creating companies to flaws in their products needs to rescinded or heavily revised.
It is the fact that the companies creating these vaccines are largely not culpable for their products that has driven the anti-VAX movement. FIX THAT or this law will be ignored.
No. The anti-vax movement has been largely driven by greed, stupidity, and the parents need to "blame" someone.
What's lost in most discussions of the fraud doctor in Britain is that he was trying to discredit the current vaccination regime so he could push his own = greed. Parents, preferred listening to that jackhole and dipshit blondes who's only claim to fame is stripping for cash instead of medical professionals with actual knowledge = stupidity. The whole blame game is the demented way humans interact with seemingly everything. Their child has autism = it MUST be someones fault.... which in reality is just more stupidity.
The companies that produce these vaccines are shielded from individual lawsuits because individual lawsuits would very quickly bankrupt said companies. The result of that would be no vaccines, which would lead to everyone in society fucking dying of easily treated illnesses = more fucking greed and stupidity ("everyone" being hyperbole, obviously, but given current transportation ease and population, "millions" would be a given) . Complications from vaccines are fairly rare, and very serious complications/death even more-so.... but vaccines are of critical importance to our species in the present day. If the argument is: let millions of people die each year because of diseases that can be easily vaccinated against, or requiring parents to keep their disease ridden kids out of school unless they vaccinate... that's an easy one: fuck the idiot parents.
Re:Common sense prevails! (Only Partially!) (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that quarantining does not heal (quarantining the polio kid won't save his legs) and there has to be an infected host that spreads the disease so it won't be just one, there will be dozens if not hundreds of kids that require quarantining by the time the first one shows up with symptoms (read up on the lifecycle of these preventable diseases)
Vaccination is a good idea until we have the technology to auto-vaccinate or to eradicate the disease worldwide.
Re:Common sense prevails! (Only Partially!) (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not an anti-vax person myself, but I do suspect that at least one of the vaccines I received in the Army caused my current chronic kidney disease, which is caused by a misformed IgA antibody. I suspect that because I have a familial history of Ceceliacs disease, which is suspected by some to be related to IgA Nephropathy, and the timeline of when I developed IgAn coincides perfectly with the progression of the disease and the time that I received those inoculations. That, and this:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu... [nih.gov]
Problem is this is hard to prove, and I doubt anybody would do any further serious research into it. Why won't they? Because the anti-vax movement has made anybody who does easily lose credibility, because the anti-vax movement repeatedly and often makes very stupid claims (autism? are you fucking kidding me?) that cause everybody else to come down hard on anybody who speaks honestly about any potential down sides of it.
There may very well be good reasons to not vaccinate in some cases, but those reasons will be hard to find when idiots keep crying wolf for no reason other than they happen to be Jenny McCarthy fans.
Still though, and I do myself admit, I still accept that it's better to have practically zero cases of polio in exchange for a few cases of IgA Nephropathy, even though I happened to get the shitty end of the stick (dialisys, which is where I'll probably end up very soon, is a lot better than an iron lung.) That said, even if it is proven that vaccination is the cause of my condition, I'll still support it anyways.
Not really (Score:3)
"Problem is this is hard to prove, and I doubt anybody would do any further serious research into it. Why won't they?"
There is research in such a stuff, but mostly from public university and as with all orphan disease not very much. The reason that it is not done is because there are so many research point and at the end of the day you have got to limit yourself to what you can find a funding for. The fact that you found a pubmed article belies your claim that nobody would research it. The simple truth, is
Possible, but not exclusively caused by. (Score:3)
Disclaimer: I*A*AMD, but just not in this field (I'm doing research).
I suspect that because I have a familial history of {Ce}liacs disease, which is suspected by some to be related to IgA Nephropathy, and the timeline of when I developed IgAn coincides perfectly with the progression of the disease and the time that I received those inoculations.
That would sound plausible.
Note that technically, it's not exactly the vaccine's fault. It's your genetic tendency to develop auto-immune disease that runs in your family that caused your nephropathy, and that *happens* to have been triggered by the vaccine. But had it not been the vaccine, it could have been any other trigger that disturbs your immunological system. One susceptible person could trigger an autoimmune disease after a cold.
Re:Common sense prevails! (Only Partially!) (Score:5, Informative)
Actually the federal government's National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program has a reasonable basis.
There are 2 kinds of vaccine injuries:
(1) The avoidable injuries that come from the manufacturer clearly violating the good manufacturing procedures, like improperly filtering the vaccine preparation or letting it get infected.
(2) The inevitable injuries that come even when the manufacturer does everything right, meets the good manufacturing procedures. That's because the immune system is complicated, and we don't understand everything about it. (Furthermore, they sometimes have to make tradeoffs between a vaccine that protects you better from the infectious disease, but has more adverse effects, and a vaccine that has fewer adverse effects, but doesn't protect you from the infectious disease as well.)
I think the inevitable serious injuries occur at the rate of 1 in a million vaccinations. These are the kids who just drew an unlucky lottery ticket. Nobody's wrong.
There were a lot of problems with the vaccine program, and manufacturers stopped making a lot of vaccines, because they were getting hit with big-dollar product liability lawsuits. Some of them were justified, some of them weren't, and some of them, nobody knows, because the immune system is complicated, and we don't understand everything about it.
In order to encourage manufacturers to make vaccines, and parents to vaccinate their kids, the federal government set up what amounts to a no-fault program. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
They listed a lot of known serious complications that everybody agreed were caused by vaccines. Kids with those complications were automatically compensated, and it was fairly generous compensation, designed to match what they would get if they went to court and won. That's worked pretty well.
The idea is, if a kid gets vaccinated, in order to protect society as a whole, and draws the unlucky lottery ticket, then society ought to insure him for that bad luck. That's the proper role of insurance.
Then along come the parents whose kids have serious complications where people don't agree it was caused by vaccines. Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't, and sometimes (usually) nobody knows. Those go to a special vaccine court. From the occasional articles I've read about it, they seem to be pretty generous in giving the injured child the benefit of the doubt. I can accept that. It's better to err on the side of compensating people who don't deserve it, than err on the side of not compensating people who do deserve it. But they held the line at the vaccine-autism connection, and rejected those cases.
Now if only the rest of the country would follow! (Score:5, Insightful)
Infectious diseases don't pay attention to your religion or any of your other crackpot obsessions about autism or mercury or whatever this week's flavor of craziness is.
So the prevention of said diseases shouldn't either.
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Wouldn't spreading out the shots more make them more expensive to administer? That's just fine to me if it's socialized, but it's really not okay if it drives up the price of immunization for poor and uninsured families.
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The autism claims are entirely discredited now.
The clustering of vaccinations is for purely logistical reasons: Shipping out vaccines and a person qualified to administer them to schools costs money, and getting them all done in one day is more practical than going back for several trips.
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Strange that I got modded offtopic for speaking about vaccinations in a reply to a post about vaccinations. Just to be clear. No one, and I mean no one in the medical field says that vaccinations are totally safe. They say that there are risks but that the risks of not getting vaccinated are greater. I don't see why steps to minimize any risks are so unacceptable. I for one see no reason to cluster so many shots in one group when there is really no added risk by spreading them out. Hammering a small t
Re:Now if only the rest of the country would follo (Score:4, Informative)
There is no evidence for risks of clustering that I am aware of. On the other hand not clustering means, at least, more risk of individual children missing shots due to greater complexity, more visits to doctors with more risk of infection with unrelated diseases and more cost, which could be spent on other public health measures that would presumably reduce other risks.
If you do think clustering vaccines adds risk, there is a fairly straightforward, if somewhat lengthy, route to address this.
First get a PhD in virology or some other appropriate discipline and a suitable job.
Next, carefully design a series of experiments that will help answer your question and get relevant approvals for it (ethics, safety,....)
Now apply for an NIH (or your country's equivalent) grant to perform it.
Perform it, analyse the results, publish them.
If they show significant extra risk from clustering, then, after a little bit of bureaucratic inertia while people find out about and understand your study and try and work out what changes to procedures would reflect it without risk elsewhere, the chances are clustering would be reduced.
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Actually some people did do what you ask. Their findings were that spreading vaccines out actually INCREASES the risk of negative complications.
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I don't know about the autism claims but I do know that getting 6 shots in one day can be a problem.
The autism claims were based of a study that was completely fabricated by the author.
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There are some legitimate concerns about child vaccination.
Any legitimate concerns about child vaccinations have been addressed for a very long time now. Every study that comes out continues to prove how safe and effective vaccines are. They prove beyond any legitimate doubt that vaccines are so effective that the very small segment of the population that cannot tolerate them are effectively shielded by the herd immunity. There are absolutely no legitimate studies that question the safety and effectiveness of vaccines.
On the other hand, there is an epidemic of w
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They prove beyond any legitimate doubt that vaccines are so effective that the very small segment of the population that cannot tolerate them are effectively shielded by the herd immunity.
Of course, you are aware that due to medical inability for 6% of people to be vaccinated, and a non-zero vaccine failure rate, and the fact that we do not perform post-vaccination immunoassay to verify that the vaccination has been effective (and then revaccinate the shit out of the person until an immunoassay shows it to be effective), therefore herd immunity for measles and pertussis is mathematically impossible.
Right?
You *should* get vaccinated for these diseases, and you *should* get your kids vaccinate
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Re:Now if only the rest of the country would follo (Score:5, Insightful)
No, there are not "legitimate concerns" about childhood vaccination.
Ah, but this is what comes from nonsense like "teach the controversy!" and from a mistaken notion that the phrase "there are two sides to a story" means that all views must be equal.
Re:Now if only the rest of the country would follo (Score:4, Informative)
This is true, I'm glad someone said it. Especially the part about the shot line in the military being different.
I did the same thing when joining the Navy and me and most of my company were sick as hell for a week or so. But, they immunize you instead of simple MMR, for dozens of things including exotic jungle rots and things like malaria, etc. Things that you would never encounter if you stayed in the USA, and weren't in some muddy jungle or strange desert somewhere with their localized exotic diseases.
Re:Now if only the rest of the country would follo (Score:5, Informative)
Ummmm I think you are talking crap.
http://www.cdc.gov/rotavirus/s... [cdc.gov]
Prior to the vaccine, almost all U.S. children were infected with rotavirus before their 5th birthday. Each year, among U.S. children younger than 5 years of age, rotavirus led to
more than 400,000 doctor visits,
more than 200,000 emergency room visits,
55,000 to 70,000 hospitalizations, and
20 to 60 deaths.
Also from the CDC website - Rotavirus vaccine risks - http://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafe... [cdc.gov]
It is possible that an estimated 1 to 3 U.S. infants out of 100,000 might develop intussusception within 7 days of getting their first dose of rotavirus vaccine. That means 40 to 120 vaccinated U.S. infants might develop intussusception each year.
What the fuck is intussusception?
a medical condition in which a part of the intestine invaginates (folds into) into another section of intestine
Treatment?
The intussusception can be treated with either a barium or water-soluble contrast enema or an air-contrast enema, which both confirms the diagnosis of intussusception, and in most cases successfully reduces it. The success rate is over 80%. The remaining 20% require surgery.
So to summarise
Prior to the rotavirus vaccine there were 55,000+ hospitalisations and 20+ deaths per year due to rotavirus. Post vaccine your worst case risk is a minor surgery which occurs 8 to 24 times a year. I think I know which I would prefer.
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I can see this running afoul of.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I can see this running afoul of.... (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a problem with this: It destroys the concept of law entirely, because for every law there exists a person somewhere who has a religion that demands they disobey the law.
"My religion prohibits the use of electricity, so I can't install a fire alarm in my business to meet state building regulations."
"My religion requires I capture an endangered species for ritual sacrifice."
"I had to kill by baby in the microwave, I sensed he was possessed by a demon."
"My religion prohibits paying taxes, because all my property is just being held on behalf of God."
"My religion requires I kill innocent citizens to defend my people against their country."
"I know my daughter was critically ill, but my religion does not allow me to seek medical treatment, as it shows a lack of faith in God."
All of these are real cases - and those are just in the US. These situations show that freedom of religion cannot be absolute, because absolute freedom of religion renders every area of law effectively meaningless: You would be able to literally get away with murder by claiming you believed it to be a religious mission.
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To save googling: Amish, native american tradition, forget the name but not hard to find, Kent Hovind, the 9/11 attackers among many, Dale and Leilani Neumann.
Re:I can see this running afoul of.... (Score:4, Informative)
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They can still choose not to vaccinate and practice their religion. They simply won't be allowed to go to a public school.
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If you are required by law to do something that your religion actually prohibits ...
Nobody is required by law to vaccinate their kids. They just can't send unvaccinated kids to public schools where they endanger other people. You are entitled to your religious views, but you are not entitled to impose the consequences onto other people. Feel free to home-school.
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In most countries parents are obliged by law to vaccine their children.
In most countries home-schooling is either not really possible or bluntly illegal.
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And when your special antivaxxer school suffers a measles or whooping cough outbreak, you can shout "YAY FOR FREEDOM!!!"
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If you think requiring vaccination to attend free public school makes you a slave, you might want to rethink your priorities a little....
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If you home-school, do you still have to pay school taxes?
I have no children. I never had children. I will never have children. I still pay school taxes. It's one of those things that society has agreed upon in my neck of the woods.
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If you home-school, do you still have to pay school taxes?
Sure, just like all of those other taxes that you don't get to opt out of because you don't use the services they pay for.
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Wrong, they can practice all they want; AT HOME. No shots? Then keep your fucking kids away from the public and at home! Dopes
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Except that you're not actually forced to get the vaccine for your kids. You can still choose not to vaccinate your kids. You just won't be able to send them to a public school and will have to find an alternative way to educate them. Which is easier in CA than it is in many other states given the support CA gives to alternate education (including home schooling).
Beyond that, there are many conflicting rights with respect to vaccinations. Which rights should take precedence? (yes, I know the answer you
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Frankly, Health of the General Population > Freedom of religion.
If your "religion" demanded that you fire a machine gun into the air for 5 minutes a day, you'd find very little tolerance for it.
Either scenario has a probability of harming someone around the same order of magnitude, I guesstimate. So why should the first be any different?
Australia ditto (Score:2)
Australia has something similar. The government consulted with the major religions beforehand and none of them had problems with vaccinations.
I think we should go further and when unvaxed children come down with preventable diseases, their parents should be charged with child neglect.
Charged only if actually negligent (Score:2)
I presume you would exempt parents of unvaxed children who were unvaxed for reasons beyond their control, such as
1) Could not afford shots
2) No access to health care
3) Child could not get shots for medical reasons
I, for example, COULD NOT get my kid vaccinated vs. Hepatitis A because my healthcare provider didn't have the vaccine, and no pharmacy who HAD the vaccine would ADMINISTER the vaccine to a child, that I could find. (I tried 4.)
This persisted for a few months until I found a new pediatrician fo
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I presume you would exempt parents of unvaxed children who were unvaxed for reasons beyond their control, such as
1) Could not afford shots 2) No access to health care 3) Child could not get shots for medical reasons
--PeterM
In Australia the shots are free and there would be obvious exemptions for kids who can't be vaccinated for medical reasons, but maximizing Herd Immunity to protect these kids is another reason for vaccinating as many as possible.
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I think we should go further and when unvaxed children come down with preventable diseases, their parents should be charged with child neglect.
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finally, some responsibility (Score:5, Insightful)
It is high time that both we as citizens and we as government not put up with or enable a small ridiculous minority of extremist views to hold the rest of society hostage, with the threat of lawsuits.
There is such a thing as being overly reasonable. And there are many more issues that don't rise to this level of publicity, that policy makers give in to, for fear of negative repercussions, rather than doing the right thing.
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Considering that the vast majority of people have been vaccinated and vaccines aren't 100% effective, the answer to your question wouldn't be the huge blow to vaccination policy that you're thinking it would be.
Here are some more questions that may provide some context:
How many people who didn't get sick with measles were vaccinated?
How many people are there who got sick with measles and were vaccinated, compared to the total number of people who were vaccinated? Now, how many people are there who got sick
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I just wonder whether the effectiveness rate is much higher than what they say because I bet 90%+ or more of the people who got ill were vaccinated.
In most cases, you'd lose that bet. For example, at the Disneyland measles outbreak, 54 people became infected, 48 of them were unvaccinated, 6 of them were vaccinated. Now given the general vaccination rate of around 92% that means roughly 8% of the people exposed would be unvaccinated. If we assume that measles was 100% effective in infecting the unvaccinated and that the exposed people were vaccinated at roughly the average rate, that would mean that roughly 594 people didn't catch measles because of
Mostly good (Score:4, Interesting)
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Not really considering that California is the very definition of lack of common sense.
If Californians lack common sense, my dear Ageoffri then Texans, Georgians, Floridians and all the other people living in bible belt states are congenital idiots.
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I'll let measles [cdc.gov] be the judge of that.
Re:Does anyone else see the irony? (Score:5, Insightful)
California is a mix of odd politics. Partially heavily left leaning, partially heavy right leaning, and a whole lot of libertarian leaning to combine a bit of both. We want the government to keep their hands off of our pot and our taxes.
Re:Does anyone else see the irony? (Score:5, Insightful)
We want the government to keep their hands off of our pot and our taxes.
Well, you're not doing a very good job of expressing your wants as reflected by your very high taxes and still-not-legalized pot.
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Yep. It takes one to know one.
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So the "gun grabber" squads in California are a reflection of the US in general? Seriously? You're on crack. California is at the fringe of one end of the political spectrum.
It is not Peoria.
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Obviously each state has it's own personality for lack of a better term.
I'm mostly just annoyed at how he made a broad sweeping generalization of an entire state with a less than favorable one liner and got modded up for it. Here I can do the same thing. Everybody in Kentucky is a hill billy. Everybody in Georgia is racist. Everybody in China is a communist. You see how stupid it sounds, and he got modded up for saying that crap.
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West Virginia and Mississippi being ahead of California in doing something involving common sense?
"STATE OF CALIFORNIA SAFETY WARING: Drinking water contributes to urination"
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No one is facing violence. They simply can't send their unvaccinated kids to public school. They are more than free to home school their unvaccinated children and they will face no legal consequences.
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What is specifixally is unshaky? We are seeing direct correlations between the rise of parents not vacinnating their kids and the resurgence of chilhood diseases that were hugely eliminated due to vaccination.
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What heavy thing? If they have a legitimate reason not to vaccinate then they can get an exception. However not vaccinating children does cause a public harm. Even the most staunchly adherent Libertarian allows for government activity in cases of protecting the public.
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Because vaccines aren't always effective for everyone, and some people (e.g. immunocompromised individuals) can't get vaccines. But these people rely on herd immunity, which is depending on enough people being vaccinated that any disease that shows up isn't transmitted through the whole community. It's not the kids who don't get vaccinated that the legislators are worried about, it's everyone else.
And the rate of vaccinations in parts of California are so low that health officials are seeing the effects of
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An immunocompromized individual belongs nowhere near a school. This is for their own safety. There's a strong likelihood they are quarantined from contact with the public already due to their condition. They may even have a special directive from their doctor telling them to STAY AWAY FROM SCHOOL.
The LAST thing that a person fitting your favorite loophole needs is to expose themselves to the germ exchange which is any large group of children.
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Re:This law will not stand... (Score:5, Insightful)
First, it IS an assault on religious freedom despite what proponents will tell you. You may think people with religious objections to vaccination (one or all of them) are nuts (and they may very well be) but that does not give the government the right to violate their freedom to do stupid things. It's called liberty. You may not like other's choices, but you MUST give them the choice.
No it's not. They can still choose not to vaccinate their kids in accordance to their beliefs. They just aren't allowed to send their kids to public schools.
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You and I can argue about if it is or not, but it doesn't matter. First, this is Slashdot, Nothing really gets settled here. Second, this is now a political issue, so the debate will rage on, especially during election cycles. Finally, it is a question for the courts which will be argued by lawyers and adjudicated by judges, none of which likely read or care what to semi-anonymous posters on Slashdot decided, even if we came to some agreement.
Personally doesn't matter to me. First, I don't live in Califor
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I don't think the state will actually kill anyone over the matter, as that would just turn them into martyrs. More probably, the court will simply take custody of the child and relocate the child into a foster home that is at least in another city if not another state.
The next several years could prove to
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I don't think the state will actually kill anyone over the matter
LOL!
The state will kill for any reason or no reason.
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They may be, as you say, willingly endangering everyone, but in reality they are not doing so out of any real sense of malice, so response with deadly force is absurd, to say the least. It is, in just one word, ignorance. Nothing more, and nothing less.
Killing somebody simply because they are ignorant ultimately amounts to killing someone simply because of what they believe.
Are you sure that's a road you want America to go down?
Your right to be a vector of disease ends (Score:2)
religiously founded or not, where MY right to not be exposed to deadly infections in civil society begins.
I have NO PROBLEM limiting freedom of religion for the defense of society. As someone pointed out, freedom of religion is NOT an unlimited right.
Consider for example a person whose religion involves ritual sacrifice and eating of the hearts of their political enemies.
I consider forcing vaccinations on people over their religious objections as of lesser degree, but in the same vein, as the example I jus
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religiously founded or not, where MY right to not be exposed to deadly infections in civil society begins.
I have NO PROBLEM limiting freedom of religion for the defense of society. As someone pointed out, freedom of religion is NOT an unlimited right.
What civil society is free from deadly infections? People die from COLDS and Flu you know...
Religious freedom is NO limited, on that you are correct. However in this case there are LONG STANDING religious belief systems that would object to vaccines for various reasons. If this doesn't represent a valid objection reason to you on religious grounds, I'm not sure what does in your view. Remember Hobby Lobby? This is a similar issue. California simply doesn't have the power to do this.
No argument other than medical necessity (Score:2)
What civil society is free from deadly infections? People die from COLDS and Flu you know...
Have you come down with polio lately? How about smallpox? I'm guessing you haven't had measles or mumps or reubella either. Here's a little tip for you. Vaccines work and they save lives. Just because we haven't cured every disease is no excuse not to vaccinate for the ones we can cure.
However in this case there are LONG STANDING religious belief systems that would object to vaccines for various reasons.
Don't care and neither should you. Your religious beliefs do not and should not grant you the right to endanger others. If you wish to quarantine yourself from society to protect your religious beliefs I will support t
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You may think people with religious objections to vaccination (one or all of them) are nuts (and they may very well be)
That's not the word I would use to describe them.
And the government absolutely has the right... no, the duty, to pass legislation like this. What differentiates this from a real "religious freedom" issue is the consequences of not vaccinating your kids. It's not just you and your kids who are effected when you make that choice. If it was, this wouldn't be an issue. But you involuntarily effect others with your decision. You become carriers for diseases that have the potential to KILL OTHER PEOPLE. It'
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I hear your point, but it's still not valid to force people into this.
People must be free to do even stupid things, or we don't really have freedom. You cannot protect everybody from foolishness though some law, you cannot legislate morality. You must allow freedom, even if you don't agree with the reasons people use for doing what they do.
Look, I strongly argue with people I know who refuse to vaccinate. I think they are usually misinformed and are making a mistake. However, I also recognize that THEY h
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I hear your point, but it's still not valid to force people into this.
Is it valid for you to force your diseases on the population without their consent? I would say no.
People must be free to do even stupid things, or we don't really have freedom. You cannot protect everybody from foolishness though some law, you cannot legislate morality. You must allow freedom, even if you don't agree with the reasons people use for doing what they do.
Again, the issue in this case is that your stupidity has significant impact on others, up to and including death. Now, if this issue only affected the individuals involved directly, it would be completely different. If you want to tell your kid that the Great Green Arkleseizure sneezed the universe out of his nose and you're all waiting for the coming of the great white handkerchief, that's fine by me. It
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I hear your point, but it's still not valid to force people into this.
Is it valid for you to force your diseases on the population without their consent? I would say no.
What are you talking about? I personally don't object to vaccinations. I've had mine and my children have had all the recommended ones. I'm not advocating that people not take them, quite the opposite. I've had a number of arguments with the Anti-Vaxers I know and they didn't like what I had to say. All I'm doing here is supporting their right to be wrong about this.
People must be free to do even stupid things, or we don't really have freedom. You cannot protect everybody from foolishness though some law, you cannot legislate morality. You must allow freedom, even if you don't agree with the reasons people use for doing what they do.
Again, the issue in this case is that your stupidity has significant impact on others,
No, I'm only supporting the right to a religious objection. As I said before, I would recommend that everybody get their vaccinations.
Start affecting other people (who don't share your beliefs) against their will? Sorry. I can't support that.
I
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There are some religious types who like to juggle rattlesnakes. It is their right to do this, even if the rest of us all think it is stupid and dangerous. It isn't even neccessary to invoke religious freedom to permit this. That does not give them the right to put their children at risk by making them handle snakes.
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There are limits so I guess it's dependent on where you draw the line of parental rights.
Personally, I draw the line at "immediate danger of harm" meaning that unless the child is being put in immediate danger of harm, the state may not step in and take over the role of a parent. This means kids of stupid parents, as long as the "stupid" doesn't cause immediate harm to the kids, have to stay with their parents. As much as I don't like it, this means being able to choose not to vaccinate is allowed as it is
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My religion says I can rape and murder members of other religions. In fact its a sacrament. Laws against homicide are an assault on my religious freedom and I MUST be given a choice to not follow them.
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My religion says I can rape and murder members of other religions. In fact its a sacrament.
So you're either a fanatic Christian terrorist or a fanatic Muslim terrorist or a fanatic what?
I would just ask all these anti-Vaxxers to show were in their holy book is vaccine banned. Problem solved.
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Viruses don't care about your religion. Their mutation rate does not care what deity you believe in. It is too dangerous for society to allow humans to play incubators for the measles. It will eventually mutate and bypass the current vaccine. If it does many millions will die until we figure out a way to make a new vaccine.
The ONLY way to prevent this is to make sure there are not enough hosts for the virus to survive.
Your religious freedoms don't allow endangering everyone else around you. We also have peo
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if you can dismiss long standing religious objections to vaccinations on various grounds then there truly is little left that is sacred to religious liberty.
You say that like it's a bad thing :-)
How about this - we quarantine everyone who refuses to get vaccinated, same as we do with other people who are disease carriers and put the population at risk. You'll mostly die out from some bug or other, but hey - you're free to do so.
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Do you think that Islamic terrorists should be free to murder whoever they want because trying to stop them would violate religious freedom? They're certainly free to believe that it is justified, but they a
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The religious exemptions used to be there, but they used to be rare and not at all part of mainline religions. Ie, some people object to any drugs of any kind on religious grounds, and traditionally these were exempt and it worked because of herd immunity. However the new argument that one should be allowed to reject drugs or vaccines developed with the use of stem cells is NOT a religious argument in my view; their religion which I am very familiar with has no tenets or scriptures forbidding this. Of co
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I'm not sure what the stem cell thing is, but I'm guessing that they object to how stem cells are produced in some cases. They would argue that the use of embryos (or even just the unfertilized component part of one) is enough to constitute a murder. (And this is a MAJOR world religion I'm pointing at.)
However, there are religious groups that object to blood transfusions, the use of "modern" technology like cars, phones and a whole host of things that most find silly. These beliefs are long standing and w
Re:This law will not stand... (Score:5, Insightful)
Bollocks. Religious freedom exists within the bounds of the law, not outside it. It means no one can tell you that you can't do something otherwise legal for religious reasons, not that you get a free pass on illegal activities. You want to pray before meals, preach a certain thing, dress a particular way, wear a religious symbol around your neck, pass out books on the street, cool, that's freedom of religion, and that is part of living in a free society. You want to willingly put your children at risk of potentially fatal diseases (otherwise known as child neglect) then call it freedom of religion, nope, that's not ever remotely similar and that's not what freedom of religion means. Freedom of religion is not a pass to do whatever you want and then call it oppression when someone tries to hold you accountable.
If you want to do stupid things to yourself, that's fine. I'll be the first to complain about liberty and government overstep when laws are passed to protect people from themselves. You want to do something stupid that might result in your own demise, as long as you're not taking anyone else down with you, then have at it. It's none of my concern. However, this is not about what you do to yourself, it is about what you do to others. Child neglect is not a right, and you don't get to put your kids and other kids at risk and then shout 'But religion!' when you are expected to act like a mature reasonable decent human being and demand that the rest of the world respect your excuses as to why you put your kid at risk of easily preventable and potentially serious disease.
Religious freedom vs public health (Score:3)
First, it IS an assault on religious freedom despite what proponents will tell you.
Baloney. Your religious rights do not and should not extend to the point where you can transmit dangerous and easily preventable pathogens compromising public safety. You can believe whatever looney nonsense you want as long as it does not hurt others. Claiming religious exemption to vaccination demonstrably hurts other people and therefore should be illegal.
You may think people with religious objections to vaccination (one or all of them) are nuts (and they may very well be) but that does not give the government the right to violate their freedom to do stupid things. It's called liberty. You may not like other's choices, but you MUST give them the choice.
What a load of complete nonsense. People don't have the right to do whatever they want, whenever they want. That would be anarchy and you cannot h
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Do you have any actual evidence to back up your claims? It's also funny that you claim that vaccinations is pseudoscience. When the people who are claiming that vaccinations cause autism are using fabricated studies as their evidence.
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Just look in the real world. The people getting measles are very, very disproportionally those who didn't get vaccinated, even though they're a smallish subset of the population.
That's a pretty good real-world experiment.
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Just about every substance will cause an adverse reaction in some small percentage of the population. It's unfortunate bu
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What you don't understand is the harm the diseases prevented cause. Way more than vaccines do. You sound like a typical anti vax moron.
Re:Vaccines can cause harm FYI, no personal choice (Score:4, Insightful)
Aside from the fact that that wasn't an ad hominem, that's a really weird way of phrasing things. It's like saying that 100% of people standing out in the rain experience rain-related effects, including being hit by lightning. It's technically true, but it's phrased in a way to imply that way more people get hit by lightning than actually do. The reality is that 100% of people get wet and a tiny fraction of a percent get hit by lightning. Lumping them together as "effects of rain" makes the statistic basically meaningless. Was that intentional?
Military service can be mandatory, can cause harm (Score:2)
Even if vaccines CAN cause harm, so what?
I, and every male in this country, can be made to fight, kill, get wounded, die, and suffer innumerable hardships in defense of this country.
If I can be made to risk life and limb to defend this country (no choice), why can't EVERYONE be forced to take vaccines to defend this country too? Or do you think that contagious disease isn't EVERY BIT as deadly a threat to this country as an interruption in our oil supply?
-PeterM
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Shouldn't it be your choice to harm your child? Not the government's? If we lose freedom of choice we have no constitution. Freedom is what created America, don't you understand that?
Do you really believe that you have the constitutional right to harm ANY child? The days when women and children were chattels is long gone, but feel free to go to your nearest police station and start abusing your kid - they'll be better of in someone else's custody :-)
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Other posters have pointed out your flawed reasoning. However, here we go again, this time with the actual numbers [hrsa.gov].
Of 2,236,678,735 vaccines administered during the period, only 1,709 received compensation for adverse effects. That translates to less than 1 in 1.3 million.
Contrast that with the death rate for measles in the US of 3 per 1000 infections [wikipedia.org]. Compare that to death rates of up to 28% who die in the underdeveloped world.
Dead is dead.
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Put this another way:
If measles goes through a small town public school with a thousand kids, three of those kids will die. Several will have life-long aftereffects.
If you vaccinate every human being in a large city, *1* will have *some sort* of adverse effect.
If 'reducing possible harm to children' is actually your end goal, there's no way in hell you'd argue against vaccines.
The problem, really, is that there are entire generations who've never seen a playmate die of measles, or have the polio leg braces
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The funny thing about this... there is no mainstream religion that actually bans vaccinations [skepticalraptor.com]. Religious dogma predates the germ theory and therefore couldn't have possibly included vaccinations as anything banned.
In fact, it's the exact opposite. Most religions (at least Abrahamic religions) dictate that personal health is a paramount concern. Even if something required for good health would violate some religious law, good health overrides the religious law. For example, Judaism and Islam declare pigs as
Higher immunization rates in South America than US (Score:4, Informative)
Hello,
I hate to inject some facts into your prejudice, but it's a sad fact that large swaths of South America have higher immunization rates for measles (as an example) than the US does.
Even Mexico is only 2% behind US vaccination rates on measles. Check it out:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/... [washingtonpost.com]
--PeterM