Vaccinating children - choice by parent or state?
- Thread starter Loppan Torkel
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GreekAnalyzer
Back from the Dead
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I'm all for individual rights, but this is a public health issue. We have easily verifiable evidence that more people have died from not getting vaccinated than getting vaccinated. The only plausible reason to not get vaccinated is if there is an allergy to an ingredient of the vaccine. We could have eradicated measles and polio through cheap and safe methods years ago, but thanks to this pseudoscience children are at risk of maiming and death due to disease. The whole anti-vax movement is an affront to science itself.
Another reason not to get vaccinated is if a disease is harmless if naturally caught, like Chicken Pox.
Measles can kill, Mumps can make men sterile, and Rubella can cause miscarriage / lifelong disability if a pregnant woman gets it, so those three are pretty serious.
I also remember getting the flu every year without fail until around 17 years old. Since then I've never had a flu, I must have already caught all the most common strains.
Measles can kill, Mumps can make men sterile, and Rubella can cause miscarriage / lifelong disability if a pregnant woman gets it, so those three are pretty serious.
I also remember getting the flu every year without fail until around 17 years old. Since then I've never had a flu, I must have already caught all the most common strains.
Loppan Torkel
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Targeting the poor again, I see..
I wonder how many of those who are vaccinated here who have some sort of diagnose. ..not an attempt to pry, so don't answer.
Senethro
Overlord
What are you asking?
Wolfbeckett
Jerkin' and nonsense.
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And there we have it. This whole issue of parent's rights does not matter. You do not have the right as a parent to put your child at undue risk and it is a proven, undeniable fact that not vaccinating your kids puts them at undue risk. That should be the bottom line. Parents should not have the right to refuse to vaccinate their kids for the same reason that they don't have the right to make them work in a coal mine or play with guns. The fact that not vaccinating erodes herd immunity and puts people who ARE vaccinated at greater risk is just more reason for it to be mandated, but the first reason is sufficient all on its own.
For those wondering why people who are vaccinated even care about this, remember that vaccines are not 100% effective. The MMR vaccine, for example, is about 97% effective from what I've read. That means that it's effectiveness is high enough that if everyone is vaccinated, the disease disappears, because you don't encounter it often enough for that 3% chance to become a problem. As people stop vaccinating, though, you start to encounter the virus in question more and more often and that 3% starts representing a real chance at getting the disease.
http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/disneyland-measles-outbreak-hubbub/
This tells us exactly what you'd expect to find from a mostly, but not 100%, effective vaccine. Most of the people who got sick were unvaccinated, but a few of those who got sick were fully vaccinated, and the reason they got sick is because they got heavily exposed to the virus by people who were not vaccinated who allowed the virus to spread around in the first place.
This debate is already settled in my mind, there is more than enough evidence to conclude that vaccinations are a necessary public good in the same way that compulsory education is.
BvBPL
Pour Decision Maker
The government involving itself in the private health decisions of a family is an outrageous overstep and a gross violation of the principles of liberal democracy. If we accept the notion that freedom from governmental interference leads to a happier, better society then we must determine where the outer bounds of governmental power lay. If those limitations are to be meaningful in the least then they must protect the personal, intimate decisions of a family. The alternative is to open the door to criminalizing the private decisions of a family.
What's more, doing so would turn the doctor from a caregiver to an agent of the police. If the family does not want a vaccination then the doctor presumably would be obliged to report on them. The tradition of doctor-patient confidentiality was codified in the long-respect Hippocratic Oath. The notion that the doctor should become a police agent obliged to report upon the private decisions of a family disturbs that long-held rule.
The government should advocate for vaccination and take steps to make vaccination readily available to all people. However, obliging people to stick needles into the arms of their children is bridge too far and too broad a governmental overreach.
What's more, doing so would turn the doctor from a caregiver to an agent of the police. If the family does not want a vaccination then the doctor presumably would be obliged to report on them. The tradition of doctor-patient confidentiality was codified in the long-respect Hippocratic Oath. The notion that the doctor should become a police agent obliged to report upon the private decisions of a family disturbs that long-held rule.
The government should advocate for vaccination and take steps to make vaccination readily available to all people. However, obliging people to stick needles into the arms of their children is bridge too far and too broad a governmental overreach.
Rashiminos
Fool Prophet
It's an opportunity to be pro-life with regard to toddlers and win brownie points.
Spoiler :
Loppan Torkel
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I'm surprised how far the 'liberals' on this site are willing to go on this.
Nothing..? Just thinking out loud. No one expected administration of Pandemrix would increase the incidence of Narcolepsy. I wonder what the repercussions had been in the US. It's just interesting how certain people are about things and still have no clue at all where many of our time's illnesses come from.
BvBPL
Pour Decision Maker
There's enough hypocrisy to choke a horse around here.
Poorer than $250,000 per year? Yep, guilty as charged.Targeting the poor again, I see..
Evie
Pronounced like Eevee
Because some people genuinely cannot get vaccinated (allergies, etc), some people the vaccine won't work on, and some kids are just too young to have received the vaccine yet.
So long as its just those people, things remain relatively safe because there are few enough of them that the odds of contact and transmission even if there IS a case are low. But once you start throwing large amounts of anti-vaccers, it's a lot of people, and the groups above go from relatively safe to extremely vulnerable.
As the spartans famously said: If.
That notion is no more "true" than any other: it's sometime accurate, sometime not. Being free from government preventing murder does not lead to a happier, better society; rather the exact opposite. Being free from government throwing you in jail for being the wrong color does.
People who cant get vaccinated due to allergies aren't going to contribute towards epidemics because there's not many of them. The issue is people who wont vaccinate their children for other silly reasons. Too many unvaccinated kids = outbreaks.
Evie
Pronounced like Eevee
Yes, that is what I said. i'm listimg them as at-risk, eg endangered, due to the anti-vaccers making the disease more common.
This. I would also take it a step further by having the parents who refused thrown in jail for child abuse/neglect as well as stripping them of their breeding rights by sterilizing both of them.
warpus
Sommerswerd asked me to change this
It's got to be either mandatory... or if you make it optional (which you shouldn't), have a rule that kids who have not been vaccinated are not allowed to be enrolled in public schools. Heck, I'd even make it so that they aren't allowed to enter certain other institutions as well - as to not endanger those of us who aren't batcrap insane.
This anti-intellectual mumbo jumbo movement of idiot parents has got to stop either way.
This anti-intellectual mumbo jumbo movement of idiot parents has got to stop either way.
Farm Boy
I hope you dance
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Ultimately, as angry as it makes me, Bv and JR are almost certainly right.
Problem is that with diseases as contagious as measles, assuming it's a wrongness to a) actually force it done and b) actively deprive children of education because of stupidity, we do then need to lean much harder on quarantines and oldschool preventative measures. If there is an outbreak of measles I don't know why area schools would allow unvaccinated children into the soup of germs that is a primary school. This isn't punishment, it's protection(it's the 21st century, assignments can be done temporarily from home), and goodness willing it'll be educational without being unnecessarily coercive as well. This is what disease prevention and public health look like without vaccinations, time to start doing it and letting families choose.
Problem is that with diseases as contagious as measles, assuming it's a wrongness to a) actually force it done and b) actively deprive children of education because of stupidity, we do then need to lean much harder on quarantines and oldschool preventative measures. If there is an outbreak of measles I don't know why area schools would allow unvaccinated children into the soup of germs that is a primary school. This isn't punishment, it's protection(it's the 21st century, assignments can be done temporarily from home), and goodness willing it'll be educational without being unnecessarily coercive as well. This is what disease prevention and public health look like without vaccinations, time to start doing it and letting families choose.
Wolfbeckett
Jerkin' and nonsense.
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This is an absurd argument though because the government already has law after law on the books making it clear that you only have the right to raise your child as you wish as long as your decisions are not causing obvious harm to your child. You are allowed to discipline your child in a reasonable way, but not beat the tar out of them for back talking to you. You are allowed to choose how they spend their time outside of school, but not to make them work in a coal mine to give the family an extra income. This is what child abuse laws are all about. Not vaccinating your children is putting them at risk of harmful and potentially fatal diseases that are easily preventable. We already accept a lot of laws that protect children and mandatory vaccinations (with exceptions for those who are allergic or something, that's a different thing) fit right into that same wheelhouse.
Further, as we are seeing from the recent measles outbreaks, the decision of whether to vaccinate or not is not even a "private health decision" of families, because it is a decision that directly impacts everyone around you. If too high a percentage of the population goes unvaccinated, it puts EVERYONE at risk. This is not a private decision any more than deciding to drive while drunk is a private decision. It puts other people besides you and your family at risk, and that is exactly the kind of behavior that laws should exist to prevent.
(Mandatory article on The Onion satirizing this "private family decision" point of view)
warpus
Sommerswerd asked me to change this
Yeah, oldschool preventative measures like mandatory vaccinations - an approach that has worked very well in the past.. in fact, better than anything else.
Why turn away from something that actually works and keeps kids safe?
BvBPL
Pour Decision Maker
Not vaccinating your child does not create an obvious, immediate harm that justifies the state coming in to throw you in jail. Yes, not vaccinating a child does put the child at risk, but being at risk is different from having been harmed. Failing to vaccinate your child creates the potential for a possible harm in the future. It is distinguishable from abusing one's child as there's no contemporaneous harm present.
What's more, the likelihood that the potential harm will actually manifest is low relative to other risk taking behaviors. That distinguishes it from drunk driving which more likely to result in an actual harm to someone.
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