Relevant to the debacle: Washington releases report on first measles death in over a decade. The woman was on medication that suppressed her immune system and lived in an area with low vaccination.
Ughhhhhh. I just. I can't take anti-vaxxers seriously because most of them are horribly irrational and then shit like this happens and I kinda want to make them face the families of the people who fucking die as a result of their stupidity.
Anon person: the concerns about side effects, long term and short term are true for literally any medication. In terms of surprise long term side effects, many vaccines have been in use for upwards of 50 years, if there were side effects we didn't know about when we started, we would by now. If you've taken any medication invented in the last 30 years or so, then you're probably at more risk for unexpected side effects than you are from a lot of vaccines. And I know some anti-vaxxers don't take meds, but I think the amount who wouldn't seek treatment if they got a very serious medical condition is very small. Vaccines are basically one of the safest medical treatments we have. We never know everything about every possible treatment. Unless you're proposing never treating anything, that's no good reason to refuse vaccines. And what side effects there are (aside from mild fever and sore arm which are your immune system working and getting stuck with a needle respectively), side effects are incredibly rare. Stuff like anaphylactic shock does happen sometimes (you're about as likely to win the lottery, but it does happen), but that's basically unavoidable. Sometimes people are allergic to stuff, there's not much you can actually do about that, and if it does happen, it's much more treatable than a lot of the stuff we vaccinate for. Kids who have had an allergic reaction to a vaccine come under the medical exemption thing. I don't think there's ever been a proposition to not have one. Not vaccinating your kid is safe if only 1% or so of people do it. And obviously, most parents want the safest option for their kid. But if vaccination rates drop, everyone is much less safe than they would have been if everyone vaccinated. So who should get to be in that 1%? Surely it should be the kids with medical conditions that make vaccination dangerous or ineffective, right? I mean , I know everyone's kid is more important than the other kids, but if people are going to decide not to vaccinate their totally healthy kids then they have to be legally obliged to for the safety of everyone else. Re: the vaccines cause autism guy. It was a bit more than 'lied about some things'. It was more along the lines of being a total fraud who had financial investment in the solution he was proposing, a sample size of TWELVE, some of whom were kids he'd bribed for blood samples at his son't birthday party. You might notice that 'bribing children for blood samples without their parents knowledge' does not meet current standards of research ethics. He was struck off, which means he is no longer legally able to practice as a doctor, and the journal that published the article retracted it.
@Alexthings interesting! when you put it like that, it seems the pro-vax/anti-vax debate boils down to an ideological difference. so... anti-vax: parents/individuals should be allowed to refuse medical procedures that they feel could be harmful to them regardless of the potential danger to themselves or others. pro-vax: parents/individuals should not be allowed to refuse medical procedures that they feel could be harmful to them if the potential good outweighs the potential danger. addendum to the pro-vax: and if there is no other way to achieve the good, as there doesn't seem to be in the case of herd immunity. like, you can take away the driver's license of a person with, say, deteriorating eyesight, who would be a potential danger to others on the road. but in order to preserve herd immunity without requiring every healthy non-allergic person to vaccinate, you'd have to exile the intentionally unvaccinated, i guess? and i seem to recall someone quoting an anti-vaxxer who was upset at the idea that intentionally unvaccinated kids shouldn't go to public schools?
I think it's a bit more complicated than that. There's a whole lot of stuff about the importance of feelings vs actual risks. Like, if a parent feels strongly that their kid will develop autism if they get the MMR, that feeling is fundamentally wrong, and this is damn well provable. And if someone's causing a huge risk to society because they have provably false beliefs, then that's not about potential good vs bad, it's about danger to society. And the anti-vaxx movement is so strongly based in pseudoscience. Like, so much of the anit-vaxxer thing is about creating risks that don't actually exist, because a one in a million chance of a treatable reaction isn't actually very scary. And the conspiracy theorist nonsense, like, if people are seriously arguing that there's a secret agenda to give people autism via vaccines, then it's about a lot more than a medical autonomy thing. Why would you have to exile them? I mean, I assume a few would exile themselves if vaccination was made legally compulsory for some things, but that's not the normal way to go about it. Generally, you impose fines, get a court order, and if necessary take the kids away for a couple of days so they can get their shots. And generally if people know it's not actually avoidable, even if they kick up a fuss, they don't bother.
The California mandate is more or less an exile. If you don't vaccinate your child, your child cannot attend public school. My aunt/stepmom were the ones saying it wasn't fair to the unvaxxed kids to be forced into homeschooling. On the other hand, if unvaccinated kids and their subsequent disease risk are at public schooling, the immunocompromised kids will be forced into homeschooling. No one wins, but immunocompromised kids can't get vaccinated. They have no options. It's far less fair to them to be excluded, because their parents aren't actively making a choice that could result in exclusion.
@anon person that is the most cogent reasoning for anti-vaxxing Ive ever read. Thank you very much. I think, from that perspective, that people should have the right to put themselves in danger if they want, but not to make that choice for others. So yes, if you want to refuse vaccination you should be allowed to do that. But every choice has consequences, and if we as a society dont want those consequences to be 'dead babies' then i think refusing unvaccinated individuals public schooling and passports is fair. And i still dont believe, as a personal matter not as a matter of public policy, that there is any valid reason not to get most vaccines for most people. And there are REALLY COMPELLING reasons you should get them.
Anecdata: My grandmother has told me that my oldest aunt nearly died of measles when she was 6 - the vaccine simply didn't exist yet. She got her other four children vaccinated as soon as they were old enough. The youngest of them, my mom, is now 57; all of them are still alive and pretty healthy, age and rough lives considered, with the most pressing health issues being obviously age related or genetic. I was a sickly enough kid I'm pretty sure I would not have lived to adolescence had I lived in a pre-vaccination era. As it was, when I came down with chicken pox when I was 8 (this was before there was a vaccine for it), I was so sick I was hallucinating, delirious, and bedridden for two weeks. For a supposedly not-serious childhood illness. I got disabused of the notion that terrible things can't happen to me pretty young! Cost/benefit analysis is an important thing, and... this isn't very nice, but I get the feeling that a lot of antivaxxers have lived safe, healthy enough lives that they aren't very good at it (which, considering that the usual demographic for antivaxxers is white and well off, I suspect isn't too far off). Any risk at all can look like too much when you're not used to your life having big risks. When your life has already been full of big risks that weren't your choice to take, though, the small chance at side effects or unforeseen effects 30 years down the line (which I'm facing with the meds I'll have to take for the rest of my life) looks really, really good compared to the much higher chances of complications or death from illness (which for me are certain without my meds).
I think for one thing people forget that these once-common childhood diseases—measles, mumps, chickenpox, etc—weren't all that safe. I'm old enough to have had all three (they didn't start vaccinating for measles as early in the UK as they did in the US). I came out OK, but I knew a kid who had significant hearing loss from mumps. Measles kills people; less likely if they're in good health and nutrition, but still a fairly significant risk. I think back when these diseases were prevalent and inevitable, people didn't want to talk or think about the risks; you couldn't avoid them, and you didn't want to scare the kids, so ...
haven't read the entire thread yet but OH GOD THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU more coherent questions when I am more awake
Mm my opinions on vaccinations are a bit complicated. I didn't have all my vaccinations when I was a baby (missed MMR). I asked my mum about this, in the kind of scandalised, "what were you thinking" way. She told me that at the time (mid '90s UK), there were three major vaccination debates occuring. One was the now much-rebuked Wakefield study (although I think she might have mixed up her timeline, since I was born in '95 and the study wasn't published until '98). The second was the change in the vaccination schedule for infants. The number of vaccinations required in the first year of life shot (heh) up, and the general public weren't convinced that the effects of this had been adequately studied. The third was that the government had had the option of two versions of the MMR (I think?) vaccine for distribution by the NHS, and chose the cheaper of the two. All of these three things, plus the unpopularity of the Tory government, led to a situation where parents of young children didn't trust the government to protect their individual child's safety. They knew about the importance of herd immunity, but believed that the government might well choose significantly greater danger to the one child to save money while protecting the population at large. I don't know how much of that is factually accurate in terms of the science and levels of danger, but this is the situation as my parents in the UK saw it at the time. The thing is, I know exactly what decision I'd make regarding my own health: I would (and have) go and get all the recommended and necessary vaccinations under my own steam. But I'm not actually 100% sure what decision I would make, in that situation, about a tiny baby that I made and had full responsibility for. Although the current anti-vaxx movement does seem to have its head a really long way up its collective arse.
(Side note: Afaik, in the U.S. you DO get to decide that!! If the child of a Jehovah's Witness is bleeding out, the parents have the right to refuse a life-saving blood transfusion on the basis of their *~*~*~religious beliefs*~*~*~*!!!!!!! H a haha ha h a.........everything is terrible, real children have died because their parents are too religious, I'm perpetually mad about this forever)
