We force everyone to be licensed to drive a car. Because it is a public safety issue. Vaccinations are a public safety issue. And the constitution very specifically gives the government the right to do things like that under the ‘general welfare’ portion of their mandate. Thousands of kids die because of some idiotic ‘personal freedom’ argument. That is almost inhumane. Not getting vaccinated is like risking a child’s right to life in favor of your right to be a dumbass.
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Last I checked, getting a driver’s license wasn’t an invasive medical procedure with side effects including seizures, coma or death. But please enlighten me if you’ve heard otherwise.
Also I have been respectful of your viewpoint but you have chosen to call me a “dumbass”. That’s unfortunate and it makes me less likely to listen to you on this or any other topic in the future.
Finally, because this article has the “anti-vaccine” comment being made by a Fox news person, people here have decided that “anti-vaccination” is another Fox news, conservative tenet and are deriding it as such. People who have concerns about vaccines are not necessarily all “dumbasses” or “Fox News conservatives”.
I’d say the people who have a hard time weighing information and recognizing gray areas are pretty closed minded. Seems that such people exist on the liberal side of the spectrum as well. Who knew?
Not to worry, they will find someone on the street outraged about vaccinations and bring them on as a “medical expert” to let us all know that vaccinations are a sin.
That’s awfully thin-skinned of you if you expect to be around here very long.
The herd immunity issue is quite real, and the only people who question it are those who falsely believe that immunizations are bad for children—when quite the opposite is true.
Terrible diseases that used to be quite common are now quite rare because of mass immunization programs, both here and in other countries.
Opposing programs that are proved to be a boon to public health does indeed make someone a dumbass—if not a deadass.
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and the FOX News trolling for dumb-shits continues…
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Dr Alverez may find himself kicked off the Fox News Medical Team for actually supporting sound medical advice.
… and it’s a shame that this “cult of the individual,” as seen with the pseudo-populism and glibertarianism on the Right, seems to cast the individual and the community as antagonists.
Yes, our system was founded on a respect for individual rights, but also on a search for a "more perfect union. E pluribus unum and all that.
These glibertarians, in their push for atomizing society into estranged, alienated individuals, seem bound to deny the existence of a common good, or a national purpose – in this case, public safety.
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Well, yes, in the absence of a vast body of peer reviewed and often-duplicted experimental and population statistics studies showing that the overwhelming majority of people are susceptible to involuntarily shooting up some heroin, blazing up a doob and knocking back a few shots of vodka without even knowing they’ve done so before starting up their cars and setting off chain collisions, that would be a rather arbitrary, capricious and perhaps even totalitarian thing to do.
On the other hand, forcing people to, say, take an eye test and requiring them to have surgery or buy medical devices to correct vision problems, even if they really don’t want to and think they have a sacred god-given to drive while legally blind, as a condition of being licensed to drive is why we fucking have governments.
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I’m old enough to have seen peers with whooping cough and polio and to have endured both varieties of measles, plus chickenpox, and mumps. There was even a case of smallpox in our little town. Everyone in my family has been vaccinated for everything available as soon as it became possible. We get re-upped for tetanus in years ending in 0 on our birthdays.
One of the little remembered side effects of measles is the birth defect risk that happened when a pregnant woman caught measles.
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This is why slippery-slope arguments are usually incorrect and inapplicable.
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Gotta love the Raising Arizona reference.
Lee is the frontrunner for “FOX Asshole of the Day,” but t’s only 4:46 p.m.
My problem with your position is that you are freeloading on the protective effect (yep, that herd immunity) that the rest of us are creating by getting the vaccines. With enough freeloaders, those of us getting the vaccinations (which, as we all know, are not 100% effective) start to see increased risk of infection.
Left to choose for themselves, more people likely would do as you have and skip all the individual risk of vaccination and enjoy the benefits of herd immunity (I wouldn’t, because I would still greatly prefer the high chance of protective effect over avoiding the low chance of some meaningful harm). A far greater number would just not bother to get vaccinated, because of the inconvenience. Herd immunity would quickly disappear in many places in the US.
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Too bad there’s no vaccine against stupidity.
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Global thermonuclear war, but that one really does have some worrisome side effects.
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Last year when I took a trip to South America. I told my doctor that it had been over ten years since my last shot. The shot was forthcoming immediately.
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We need to abandon the idea that medicine is capable of curing every illness, and also lose the idea that it is an all or nothing profession. Sometimes people have bad reactions to perfectly normal procedures, but we are so litigious, and our expectations of perfection are so high, that we assume there is fault to be found, and there must have been a medical error. Perfectly normal treatments can occasionally go wrong because nothing is guaranteed. The human body is complex and varied.
Vaccines are very safe for the vast majority of treatments, and the preventative benefit for society as a whole is huge. Vaccination is one of the most extensively studied forms of medicine. Consider the lost productivity from the serious illnesses that would occur in an epidemic, and the lingering effects and even deaths that can happen when generally preventable illnesses are allowed to proliferate by abandoning vaccination. Polio, mumps, measles, pertussis, chicken pox, influenza are all often preventable but there needs to be a large percentage of the population that gets the vaccines for them to be effective.
To me, non-scientifically trained people attempting to adjudicate medical treatments is similar to non-scientists deciding that the majority of climate scientists are wrong with their conclusions about climate change. It arises out of an anti-intellectual mindset. To assume that the medical profession would continue to administer a treatment that is harmful (to children, no less)strains credulity.
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it’s true that one or two people per million who get a driver’s license don’t have seizures as a result (assuming they don’t have a preexisting condition), but it’s also not the case that not getting a driver’s license leaves them and their neighbors more exposed to severe health issues that lead to disability and death. So it really isn’t a valid comparison.
First off, according to the CDC, the side effect including seizure, coma, or death occur in well less than one in a million cases. It specifically says on the CDC’s website “These are so rare it is hard to tell if they are caused by the vaccine.” Since they have the data from at least 200 million people over 50 years, I am going to assume that means that is is ridiculously rare and probably has nothing to do with the vaccine at all. So, let’s be generous to your cause and say one in a million people who get the vaccine die (that is super super generous since it specifically says less than one in a million get either seizures OR coma OR death). That is 0.000001% fatality rate. Or 200 people over the last 50 years.
Also according to the CDC, there were fewer than 1,000 cases of whooping cough from 1970’s to the early 1990’s when the anti-vax nuts started their crusade. By 2000 there were ~9,000 cases. In 2012, because of the decreased vaccination rates, directly tied to fraudsters like Andrew Wakefield and Jenny McCarthy and Michelle Bachmann, there were 50,000 cases. The CDC also tells us that whooping cough has a 1.6% death rate. That isn’t counting the 23% who will contract pneumonia, or the 47% that will get apnea. So in 2012 alone, the anti-vaxers killed 800 kids.
So while you talk about the pro-vaccine people having a hard time weighing information, I will ask you: which number is bigger? 200 over 50 years? Or 800 in one year? This isn’t rocket science. If you can’t figure that out, then dumbass it is.
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Actually there is no current routine recommendation for an additional pertussis booster doses beyond the ‘once in a life time’ Tdap dose. (With the exception of pregnant women who should have a dose with every pregnancy. As you stated, children are the most vulnerable.)
From Ask The Experts:
http://www.immunize.org/askexperts/experts_per.asp
We would like to avoid stocking both Tdap and Td vaccines. Is CDC likely to recommend that Tdap completely replace Td in the immunization schedule in the near future?
Currently, CDC recommends giving only 1 dose of Tdap to adolescents and adults who have not previously received the vaccine, with the exception of pregnant women, who should be vaccinated during each pregnancy. If CDC eventually recommends that people who are now recommended to receive only 1 dose of Tdap receive an additional dose, CDC is likely to recommend that they receive only 1 additional dose. Therefore, medical settings will need to continue to stock Td vaccine in order to administer it to patients who need to complete the full primary 3-dose tetanus and diphtheria series and also to administer 10-year booster doses of Td throughout the lifetime of those who have completed the primary series.
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