Hate to tell you, but yes. I’ve yet to hear of an anti-vaccer who opposed just one vaccine. Polio was on the edge of being wiped out, but the last unvaccinated holdouts revived it.
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I would imagine so. Your father died no long before polio vaccines became available; what a shame. My family’s home movies included a sequence of me playing on the swing set in the back yard with the boy across the street just after we had both gotten our polio vaccinations, and I think the vaccine had only recently become available at that point, from what I remember my mother telling me. She was so relieved that a vaccine had been developed. We were probably about 5 years old at the time, so that would have been around 1958.
When my mother was growing up, the cause of polio was not generally known. Her parents wouldn’t let her go swimming in the summer, because it was thought that polio might somehow be connected with swimming. As a result, she didn’t learn to swim until she was an adult, and she never felt but so sure of herself in the water. You’d better believe that all of us kids had swimming lessons as soon as we qualified for them, and she took us to the neighborhood pool nearly every day during the summer.
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I have no wish to punish kids because of their parents, but even less do I want the parents’ beliefs to endanger other children or anyone else in the community. If the parents don’t want them vaccinated, then they can arrange to home school them, or find a private school that will allow them to attend without vaccinations.
That said, I’m all for tightening the exemptions as far as the First Amendment will allow. And if the exceptions can be kept below the threshold that endangers herd immunity that way, then I’m fine with that.
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Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if this Barbara Loe Fisher is also a champion of the Home Schooling Movement in the United States. They almost seem to go hand-in-hand at some level. One of the most noticeable things I’ve seen over the years since I’ve raised my son is the number of parents that are too unwilling to expend any energy to run their children to a health care professional to get vaccinated, even when its freely available at the local Health Department. They pretend to be philosophically opposed to vaccines, but the rationale is based on nothing more than some generalized feelings, their own fear of needles, or a ready excuse involving what they’ve heard based on junk science.
When I enrolled my child in public education it was mandatory to vaccinate. We had to prove our children were up-to-date on their shots before entering school by submitting their vaccine records. Followups were expected to be submitted in subsequent years when other vaccines were scheduled to be completed. Since the home schooling movement has buttressed itself against our conventional educational system, its found a convenient way to protect parents from accountability. So many parents have been allowed to avoid their parental responsibility to make sure the greater community as well as their own children are kept healthy from communicable diseases, based on the best scientific approach we have at this time. That’s where I suspect this thing has gone off the rails.
And Jenny McCarthy and the assholes that believe her and people like her, haven’t done anyone any favors with their ignorant views either.
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If they want to live in the Dark Ages, fine. Let them. But no cherry picking which science/technology they think is fine. Take away their cell phones, computers, televisions and DVD players so that they don’t get contaminated by the science involved.
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So it really IS a small world after all!
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Again: it doesn’t affect just them. It affects other, innocent people as well. To repeat: it doesn’t just affect them.
.
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After spending a great deal of time articulating that government does not have the authority over the medical decisions of adult citizens as my primary argument against state laws restricting abortion, it is hard to argue that the state should now have the power to make this medical decision.
So I will approach it from a slightly different direction. We are not talking about adults, able to make rational decisions, but children. Parents who make poor choices for the children because of their belief in the supernatural (both faith healing and “natural living” are beliefs in supernatural nonsense), have proven themselves not qualified to make decisions for their children. Approach it from a child-abuse perspective would be helpful.
However, the state should not have the power in general to order a medical intervention. In light of this, I propose the following perfectly justifiable law that does not do this, yet would help greatly: require all children to receive vaccinations, or medical exceptions, to receive any tax credit or deduction.
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Fisher’s math is off by several orders of magnitude.
It’s not “57 cases in a population of 317 million”: it’s 57 compared to the usual number of cases in the entire US, per year. (Hint: that number is 60. source)
95% of the average number of cases per year are all happening in this one outbreak.
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DarWinnowing.
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It’s years too late, and too late for who knows how many people, especially kids. Someone ought to have come down on this herd of morons long ago. Another case of both the “media” and the people having no spine. In some cases people have been encouraging these nitwits as a part of some “anti big government” stupidity.
These imbeciles should be the first to get the health care bills that will last a lifetime because someone who didn’t have a choice was made the victim of someone else’s sheer and duplicitous nonsense.
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Can’t these parents keep their diseased and inferior children locked behind closed doors?
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Ever notice how HomeSchooling and Religious fanaticism coincided with the decrease in collective IQ in the US?
A great boon to being stupid was GWBush – and his misunderestimations of our children is learning.
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Actually, the vast majority of the unvaccinated children won’t get the diseases either. The reason is that the rest of us all have the vaccine. So these negligent anti-science fools have this luxury to decline only because the rest of us are responsible.
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More proof that Jenny McCarthy does not do her own laundry.
How can she possibly put clothes in the washing machine and not get blood from her hands on them?
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Might be because the kid wants to go to Disneyland and meet Mickey rather than go to the state capitol and meet Jerry.
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I’m thinking that these are intended consequences…
HomeSchoolin’
Religious’Right’
Anti-Government
Fox
encourage reliance on propaganda by folks who wallow in willful ignorance.
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My husband was at risk after his stem cell transplant, he was able to get re-vaccinated one year later. He jokingly asked his oncologist if it would give him autism and the side eye he got from her was pretty funny. We had to laugh to let her know we weren’t crazy.
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From the CDC:
Ear infections occur in about one out of every 10 children with measles and can result in permanent hearing loss.
As many as one out of every 20 children with measles gets pneumonia, the most common cause of death from measles in young children.
About one child out of every 1,000 who get measles will develop encephalitis (swelling of the brain) that can lead to convulsions and can leave the child deaf or mentally retarded.
For every 1,000 children who get measles, one or two will die from it.
Measles may cause pregnant woman to give birth prematurely, or have a low-birth-weight baby.
My oldest brother got encephalitis after measles, and, yes, it was touch and go whether he’d live through it. He did and was ultimately OK, but my parents had a very bad week. Why would any parent choose to play this sort of roulette?
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[quote=“NCSteve, post:12, topic:15872”]
“It’s premature to blame the increase in reports of measles on the unvaccinated when we don’t have all the facts yet,” said Barbara Loe Fisher, the president of the National Vaccine Information Center, a group raising concerns about inoculations. “I do know this: Fifty-seven cases of measles coming out of Disneyland in a country with a population of 317 million people is not a lot of cases. We should all take a deep breath and wait to see and get more information.
[/quote] Likewise two deaths due to Ebola [in a country with a population of 317 million people] are an insignificant blip of absolutely no concern.
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