It’s the same old story


Denialists claiming to be pro-science. Politicians insisting on a balanced treatment. A population ignorant of the science indignantly rejecting a clear and well-established, evidence-based conclusion.

I’m not talking about creationism, although it’s exactly the same story. It’s the anti-vax position now.

That dishonest weasel, Chris Christie, is now talking about respecting the choice of anti-vax parents.

Mary Pat and I have had our children vaccinated and we think that it’s an important part of being sure we protect their health and the public health, Christie told reporters here Monday. But the likely Republican presidential candidate added: I also understand that parents need to have some measure of choice in things as well, so that’s the balance that the government has to decide.

Christie, however, said there has to be a balance and it depends on what the vaccine is, what the disease type is, and all the rest. He added, Not every vaccine is created equal and not every disease type is as great a public health threat as others.

This is absurd, almost as absurd as declaring the earth to be 6000 years old. Vaccination is effective; the arbitrators of that effectiveness should be qualified doctors, not ignorant politicians pandering to the stupid vote; and some things are not a matter of opinion, and not subject to the whims of the biggest dumbasses in the population. “Balance” should not be an issue in public health (what, we need to have equal numbers of the sick and dying vs. the healthy and thriving?) just as it isn’t a concern when determining what biological science to teach our kids.

This is what the current measles epidemic, caused by asses who refuse to vaccinate, is doing.

We’re now living in a country where the fostering of New Age nonsense has led to one of our richest states, California, being the leader in child suffering, while Mississippi now has the honor of the nation’s best child vaccination rate — and freedom from measles outbreaks. Measles is not some irritating rite of passage for children, with a few spots and a bit of itching and then it’s all over — kids die of this disease, and often it’s the innocent who are the casualties, not the privileged jerks who don’t want their kids to be afflicted with imaginary side-effects. Read Roald Dahl’s letter about his daughter, who died of the measles. I wouldn’t expose my kids to that kind of risk.

And then there are the irresponsible ‘professionals’ who spread lies about health care. Just as with creationism, it has to be made clear that these aren’t innocent differences of opinion, but that the public is being lied to.

Comments

  1. says

    “Mary Pat and I have had our children vaccinated and we think that it’s an important part of being sure we protect their health and the public health,” “I also understand that parents need to have some measure of choice in things as well, so that’s the balance that the government has to decide.”

    Translation: I really accept that vaccines are important. They kept my kids and those around them safe and healthy. But I totally support you greatly endangering your own child and those around them cause hej, mine are safe!

    There are now doctors refusing to see unvaccinated children.
    That’s a bit of a two-edged sword, becasue it means those kids, who didn’t make that utterly stupid decision, are going to bear the consequences.
    OTOH, it’s also not fair that children who are sick already bear the consequences.

  2. leerudolph says

    I am looking forward (not with pleasure, although with some prospective Schadenfreude alongside the trepidation) to the point when the number of deaths caused by the present outbreak of measles in the USA exceeds the number of death from that previous outbreak of Ebola in the USA that was so much in the news, and Governor Christie’s thoughts, some time ago…can’t quite remember when…somehow, hasn’t been in the news lately.

  3. says

    Transcription of the image at Giliell’s link @1:

    Mike Ginsberg
    In my practice you will vaccinate and you will vaccinate on time. You will not get your own “spaced-out” schedule that increases your child’s risk of illness or adverse event. I will not have measles-shedding children sitting in my waiting room. I will answer all your questions about vaccine and present you with facts, but if you will not vaccinate then you will leave my practice. I will file a CPS report (not that they will do anything) for medical neglect, too.

    I have patients who are premature infants with weak lungs and hearts. I have kids with complex congenital heart disease. I have kids who are on chemotherapy for acute lymphoblastic leukemia who cannot get all of their vaccines. In short, I have patients who have true special needs and true health issues who could suffer severe injury or death because of your magical belief that your kid is somehow more special than other children and that what’s good for other children is not good for yours. This pediatrician is not putting up with it.

    Never have, never will.

    Thought it was worth having a transcript, as it’s likely to become a talking point in the thread.

  4. Vatican Black Ops, Latrina Lautus says

    The thought of a parent who would deny their child safe, preventative medical care, particularly care that would help stave off a crappy disease like measles, just makes me lose my shit. Kids have a hard enough time growing up in this fucked up world of ours, they don’t need to suffer needlessly. Thanks a fucking ton Ms. Jenny Fucking McCarthy and friends.

  5. karmacat says

    Even chicken pox in rare instances can cause death due to secondary infections. And adults are at higher risk for complications from chicken pox. The fear of possible vaccine side effects has prevented the use of lyme disease vaccine for humans even though you can get it for dogs

  6. bigwhale says

    If I don’t have the freedom to expose my kids to deadly diseases or to let them play in a room with a loaded gun, this this isn’t any Murica I recognize!

    Children are dying and we are arguing about theoretical rights! Actually it is typical denialism. Beat them on the science and they resort to talking about rights, but they will still claim they have the science tomorrow.

    The top link I saw when googling “measles deaths”:ZERO U.S. Measles Deaths in 10 Years, but Over 100 Measles Vaccine Deaths Reported

    :(

  7. tulse says

    Translation: I really accept that vaccines are important. They kept my kids and those around them safe and healthy. But I totally support you greatly endangering your own child and those around them cause hej, mine are safe!

    “And I’d rather pander to my political base than make them see reason and try to save children.”

  8. says

    Do you support mandatory vaccination? Or some sort of penalties (no unvaccinated kids in public school, let’s say) for those that refuse?

  9. leerudolph says

    The fear of possible vaccine side effects has prevented the use of lyme disease vaccine for humans

    More precisely, the manufacturer’s fear of possible lawsuits alleging harm from possible vaccine side effects.

    I live in a spectacularly Lyme-infected-tick-prevalent part of Massachusetts. I was, years ago, the first person in town to be diagnosed with (and successfully treated for) Lyme disease. When Lymerix came out as a human Lime disease vaccine, I was among the first in town to take it; it stayed on the market long enough for me to have a 3-year booster shot. My immunity appeared to persist for some time after that. Thereafter, my antibody titre remained high enough that blood tests (at least, the Western blot that they were using then) couldn’t tell if I were reinfected, but I seemed not to get it again for quite a while (of course, after the first infection I became very assiduous at tick-searching myself after gardening, etc.; still, I’d get a bite about once a year). Eventually, a few years back, a tick bite led to a bulls’-eye rash. Again, a simple course of antibiotics cured me.

    I wish I could still get Lymerix, however. And I remain immensely cross at the huge community of “Lyme woo” people, who infest my town as badly as the ticks, but are harder to avoid; I don’t think that they (or their early instars) were particularly involved in the manufacturers’ decision, but their existence surely didn’t help.

  10. beergoggles says

    And yet he had no problem using the full power of the government to hold and quarantine some poor nurse that had been treating ebola patients.

  11. Gregory Greenwood says

    This attitude isn’t at all limited to the US. Some figures within the Anglican and Catholic clergy in the UK are getting their robes in a bunch about mitochondrial DNA transplants proposed for use in treating certain types of serious heritable conditions, and helpfully titled ‘three parent children’ buy the ever responsible popular press.

    Over here we have seen clerics claim that vast swathes of scientists in the field of genetics have not proven that a mitochondrial DNA transfer technique wouldn’t result in attributes of the donor determining things like eye colour, height etc. to the satisifaction of the church, that the technique is unsafe (exactly why is rarely discussed), and that there is supposedly some poorly explained conspiracy to ‘rush’ legislation to legalise the procedure through Parliament.

    Meanwhile, children continue to die, probably preventably, from heritable mitochondrial conditions, and all really so that the Church can cling to its vision of a one man, one woman, pair bond based family unit – you know, the basis of all their heinous homophobia – and can drone on about the supposed sanctity of each foetus and how any medical procedure that might result in the destruction of a foetus is really, really bad.

    So, dead children = no problem. Dead ball of non-conscious cells = unimaginable tragedy. Christian ‘morality’ at its finest.

  12. numerobis says

    Christie’s statement seems carefully calibrated to be readable either as “yay, governor wants me to have freedom to kill my kid” or “yay, governor wants evidence-based medicine to guide whether a given vaccine is required or not”.

    I suspect he’d aim for the former in practice.

  13. numerobis says

    I hadn’t realized that the Lyme vaccine market exit was due to woo — I had heard it was due to low sales (related, I guess).

    These days there’s no Lyme’s where I hike, but it won’t be a full decade before it spreads up to there.

  14. tulse says

    At least with the mitochondrial transfer, the Catholics are being consistent with some pre-existing explicit principle (namely, that fertilized eggs have souls). Sure, it’s an idiotic principle, but at least it’s a principle. The anti-vax folks seem to base their behaviour instead on basic selfishness and stupidity around the actual science of vaccinations.

  15. says

    I wish people (and the news media) would pay as much attention to how anti-vac ideas have been debunked as they pay to deflated footballs.

  16. says

    andrew

    Do you support mandatory vaccination? Or some sort of penalties (no unvaccinated kids in public school, let’s say) for those that refuse?

    Yes.
    I am ultimately not happy with denying them school, because first they don’t get adequate healthcare and then they’re denied adequate education.
    Mandatory vaccination, only health exceptions. End of story.
    I’m fully aware that I’m not going to get that. There’s no mandatory vaccination in Germany whatsoever (over 1.700 cases in 2013), and one of my greatest fears was that the little one would contract it from some unvaccinated kid when I dropped her sister off at daycare or picked her up before she could be vaccinated. An acquaintance’s kid got measles from her unvaccinated cousins 1 week before her own vaccination was scheduled.
    Ultimately, it’s time we hold parents who deny their children healthcare responsible.

  17. Holms says

    Oh, your child isn’t vaccinated? Hey that’s totally your choice, but then, public schools are no longer obliged to accept the enrollment of your child. Can’t risk the health of the other hundreds of kids attending after all.

  18. Saad says

    Gilell, #19

    I am ultimately not happy with denying them school, because first they don’t get adequate healthcare and then they’re denied adequate education.

    Mandatory vaccination, only health exceptions. End of story.

    Agreed.

    Denying a child entry into school is wrong. They shouldn’t have to suffer for the fault of their dumbass parent(s).

  19. anbheal says

    @19 Giliell — I’m not sure you should phrase it in the passive tense, the children “are denied” education and healthcare. To me it seems their parents DENY them these things, to satisfy their parents’ own psychological need for Santa Claus to be real. If a pediatrician or a school says a child cannot enter until they are epidemic-free, then that isn’t denial either — it’s protection and care, of all the other children.

    Don’t get me wrong, I totally understand your point, of visiting the sin of the father upon the child, and indeed it is the parents who are culpable. But nothing is being denied those children. Their parents are victimizing them, and the public health efforts are protecting other kids….or, if you will, denying the rest of the kids the right to get sick or die due to total assholes in the neighborhood.

  20. rq says

    I know a couple of parents who don’t vaccinate (disclaimer: not America) and they scare the hell out of me. Not because they’re terrible people, but because of the wrong information they are willing to believe – and for the fact that they are endangering other children – if not my (happily vaccinated) children, but those around them who may not be able to be vaccinated for medical reasons.
    One couple I know is rather interesting, as the father is obstinately anti-vax, but his wife (medically educated) is staunchly pro-vax – and the wife wins every time, because at least the father has the decency to say that he doesn’t have the background knowledge to speculate, and that his opinion is based on his feelings (still stupid, but he’s a conspiracy buff, what can ya do?).

    I’m pretty okay with the idea of mandatory vaccinations for children, esp. those of school age – with health exceptions. And since ‘New Age life-style’ or ‘purity’ are not medical issues, I see no problems in by-passing parental opinion in these cases. Parents are required by law (no?) to have the best interests of their children at heart, anyway – plus, there’s that whole principle of the greater public good, which has gotten smoking in public places kicked out in some areas of the world, and should also be applied to vaccination.

  21. Azkyroth Drinked the Grammar Too :) says

    At least with the mitochondrial transfer, the Catholics are being consistent with some pre-existing explicit principle (namely, that fertilized eggs have souls). Sure, it’s an idiotic principle, but at least it’s a principle.

    Consistency with idiotic principles is not praiseworthy.

  22. sambarge says

    If Obama endorsed oxygen, Republicans would die of asphyxiation.

    Hey! Cervantes might be on to something here. Does anyone have a contact in the Obama administration? We could settle the next presidential election by default by getting all the Republican candidates to stop breathing in defiance of Obama’s stance on the benefits of oxygen.

  23. blf says

    The criminals who are denying vaccinations to their kids for non-medical reasons are putting other kids & people at-risk should the unvaccinated child contact a preventable virus. Should that child or one of the people the child infects die, are not the parents guilty of intentional homicide? Those “parents” bloody well knew not-vaccinating was dangerous (even if they didn’t believe it or invented excuses or listened to quacks), and they deliberately decided not to vaccinate. As a result, someone died. How is that not intentional, and how is that homicide?

  24. Terska says

    Denying public school is probably not much of an incentive for vaccinating. Home schoolers are often big time anti-vaxers.

  25. andyo says

    By a happy (?) coincidence I was just listening to the first ep of The Infinite Monkey Cage last week, and this gem popped up:

    Dara O’Briain: […] People like their own opinions, and like the fact that there are many things in which their opinions are extremely valid, and dislike being told “there are topics in which your opinion doesn’t actually count for anything”. And people don’t like to hear that, we live in a culture where people are constantly expecting their opinions of things and—

    Brian Cox: “I have a right to my opinion.”

    O’Briain: “I have a right to my opinion”, “my opinion should be heard”, “my opinion should be regarded as equally valid as anyone else’s opinion”, and they’re certain of it which… that is nonsense.

    […]

    Brian Cox: It can be dangerous, can’t it? Particularly, childhood vaccinations, for example. That’s a very dangerous thing to have an opinion on. You need to trust the experts. It’s like getting on a plane and saying “I don’t think the wings should be like that. I just don’t like those wings. I want cubic wings”.

    Can’t wait for March 12 here in LA. Brian Cox and Sean Carroll may just collapse into a black hole of awesome.

  26. says

    During her ill-fated presidential campaign four years ago, then-Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) denounced the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, arguing that it can lead to mental retardation. Bachmann’s claim had no foundation in reality, and the remarks sparked a larger discussion of her habit of saying ridiculous things. The right-wing lawmaker’s campaign never recovered. […]

    It was just four months ago that Christie, responding to a perceived public health threat, decided to detain a nurse in a tent with no heat or running water, as part of a mandatory, 21-day quarantine policy he’d cooked up. Hickox, who had helped treat Ebola patients in West Africa, was asymptomatic, but at least at first, the Garden State governor said his policy was nevertheless the right call.

    Sure, Hickox’s freedoms matter and personal choices matter, Christie said, but they were simply less important than a perceived public health threat. The governor said he had a responsibility to look out for everyone’s interests, and if that meant inconveniencing someone, well, too bad. Christie’s line, in effect, was simple: we can’t take chances with public health. […]

    Christie’s background on the issue only makes this appear more serious. In 2009, after the governor’s Democratic predecessor approved vaccine mandates, the Republican candidate went out of his way to appease anti-vaccination activists. “I have met with families affected by autism from across the state and have been struck by their incredible grace and courage,” Christie said at the time. “Many of these families have expressed their concern over New Jersey’s highest-in-the nation vaccine mandates. I stand with them now, and will stand with them as their governor in their fight for greater parental involvement in vaccination decisions that affect their children.”

    Benjy Sarlin added this morning that an anti-vaccination activist who helped create the NJ Vaccination Choice Coalition, says she’s “spent a lot of time with Governor Christie working on this,” adding, “He’s been absolutely constant on this issue since I first met with him in 2008.” […]

    http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/christie-stumbles-the-politics-vaccinations

  27. futurechemist says

    1 thing I don’t get about Chris Christie is that he made this vaccination statement which supports parental choice over children’s health. But a few years ago, he signed a bill banning sexual orientation change therapy for minors, which decidedly supports children’s health over parental choice. So he’s fairly inconsistent about when children need to be protected from parental ignorance..

  28. says

    President Obama sat down with NBC’s Savannah Guthrie and he took a far more sensible approach. “I understand that there are families that in some cases are concerned about the effect of vaccinations. The science is, you know, pretty indisputable,” the president said. “We’ve looked at this again and again. There is every reason to get vaccinated, but there aren’t reasons to not…. You should get your kids vaccinated. It’s good for them, but we should be able to get back to the point where measles effectively is not existing in this country.”

    http://www.today.com/news/president-obama-measles-you-should-get-your-kids-vaccinated-2D80467430

  29. Josh, Official SpokesGay says

    Saad

    Agreed.

    Denying a child entry into school is wrong. They shouldn’t have to suffer for the fault of their dumbass parent(s).

    I think you might reconsider. The needs and safety of all kids in the school need to be weighed. If a parent refuses to vaccinate his child, do you truly believe that the most ethical course of action is to accept that child in school no matter what? No matter how many other children could be sickened?

    I don’t really think you do?

    Folks, some of you don’t know (some of you are young enough that things had changed by the time you became parents) how it used to be in the US. When I was a by growing up in the 70s and 80s, vaccines were mandatory in schools. This was not controversial. This was not seen as some excessive government interference.

    If you’re boggling at this, I suggest gently that you need to recalibrate your response. What you think of as normal today (even if it’s regrettable) is a very recent, very deliberate incursion into what used to be standard, science-based, conventional public policy.

    You cannot claim to care about the best public health outcomes, to care about the safety of school children, yet support the idea that schools may not bar unvaccinated children. Those things don’t work together coherently.

  30. Amphiox says

    Unfortunately I don’t see any practical way in which mandatory vaccinations can possibly be enforced in a way that targets the parents who make that decision and not the children. Fine the parents and most of the anti-vaxxers will likely happily pay the fine, and bleat loudly about being oppressed as they do so. Anything more invasive (are you going to send the police to hunt them down and march they and their children, at gunpoint, to the local medical clinic?) and you’re going to end up looking like a police state and hand a huge public relations victory to the anti-vaxxers that just might discredit the whole concept of vaccinations for the general public. And rest assured that there will be plenty of anti-vaxxers who will happily deliberately provoke such a confrontation

    The only thing you can really do is make certain things like school attendance and non-emergent doctor’s appointments, contingent on vaccination status, and that will harm the children, while most of the anti-vaxxer parents will be happy and proud to homeschool and avoid regular medical care. And the many others may well just attempt fraud. They will easily find sympathetic unscrupulous healthcare professionals or others who can forge vaccination status documents. At that point, are you going to contemplate mandatory antibody-titre testing to prove vaccination status before letting a child attend school?

    And at the end of the day a vaccine, if injected, involves a hard foreign object penetrating an individual’s body, and even if oral, is still a foreign substance put into the body. In other words, a mandatory vaccination is a violation of an individual’s bodily autonomy and physical integrity, which is different from something like seatbelt or bike helmet requirements. If you’re going to justify such a violation on the grounds of preventative health, then the same argument applies for mandatory requirements for food, and dictating by law what parents can and cannot feed their children, which, frankly, would have an even greater public health benefit than vaccinations, and entail a lesser invasion of bodily autonomy, though similarly would be utterly impossible to enforce.

    I would think long and hard about these implications before jumping on the mandatory medical intervention bandwagon. At the very least I would require very good evidence that the best available method of encouraging voluntary vaccination has already been tried and shown to fail to maintain herd immunity to a sufficiently high degree. (Because for the public safety concern you don’t need 100% vaccination, you need whatever number is high enough to ensure effective herd immunity, which is usually in the 95% range. The system can tolerate a small number of diehard anti-vaxxers so long as they remain a small enough minority.)

    For example, if we consider the current measles outbreak, and how much refusal to vaccinate has contributed to it, if we want to prevent it from happening again, we have two options. One is mandatory universal vaccination. The second is an improved method of encouraging voluntary universal vaccination. I would prefer two unless it is demonstrated that two does not exist or does not work.

  31. says

    Terska: But homeschooling isn’t easy and something people can just do, on a whim (especially single parents). I’d imagine *most* who would home school are probably already doing so. I’m sure there would be others who would start if requirements for vaccinating became stronger, but I’m not sure I’m convinced by the argument that there would be a mass exodus to home schooling.

  32. Josh, Official SpokesGay says

    Important- denying entry to public schools for unvaccinated kids is NOT primarily supposed to be “an incentive” for those families who refuse. Its primary purpose is to protect the kids in the school from the unvaccinated. Yes, it also functions as an incentive.

    But I’m seeing comments that seem to indicate folks think “Well if it doesn’t persuade the Smith family then it’s a failed policy.” No, it isn’t. If it prevents the Smith family’s unvaccinated kids from infecting other children, the policy worked exactly as it should.

    This is similar to the mistake we sometimes make when we say, “Well, that aggressive argumentation would not have persuaded ME, so therefore it’s bad and useless.” YOU are not the only target audience. The others around—bystanders, people just watching—are also taken into account.

  33. Amphiox says

    One COULD set up a system whereby unvaccinated children are not allowed to attend public school, and are instead homeschooled, AND concurrently set up regulations for homeschooling to ensure the homeschooled children get the proper curriculum taught to them.

    But again you must consider the practical question. How are you going to enforce that? What kind of invasive monitoring are you going to apply to the homeschooling parents to ensure that they follow this curriculum you set? What penalties for non-compliance will you put in place? What will you do to the die-hard anti-vaxxer Christian Scientist parent who will try to take their family “off the map” so they can homeschool in the way they prefer, in peace? Are you, in the end, if they refuse all other inducements for compliance, going to send the police after them to enforce your requirements at gunpoint? If you aren’t going to do that, will you, in the end, simply tolerate those diehard noncompliers and look the other way? And if you do THAT, how will that affect the credibility and sustainability of your overall system of enforcement?

  34. Beatrice, an amateur cynic looking for a happy thought says

    I think marilove makes a good point. How many parents would actually decide to homeschool just because of mandatory vaccination?

  35. Josh, Official SpokesGay says

    Another example of the bystander effect that used to be achieved in the US in living memory. That bolded part? Read that again. If you still think this is some untested, uncharted waters, you are wrong. This ground has already been broken. We already know it works. We need to return to what we did just a few decades ago. Just because you didn’t know that mandatory school vaccinations were common policy in recent memory doesn’t mean we have to do this 101 stuff again.

    It was. Do you accept that? Can we move on from “Oh, we don’t know what would happen.” ? Yes, we can.

    Most parents who don’t vaccinate are probably not hardcore antivaxxers. They have vague concerns. This part is especially important: They enjoy a social and legal atmosphere in which it is comfortable and easy to default into irresponsible antivax behavior. Why do they enjoy that atmosphere? Because all but two states permit “personal belief” exemptions.

    It’s legal. They see other parents doing it. They see people like us being afraid to even suggest that it might be OK to bar their kids from school.

    If we returned (again, reminding you that we used to do this just a couple of decades ago) to the standard policy the culture would shift enough that the less-committed parents would fall in line with the prevailing social atmosphere and vaccinate their kids. Most of them are not going to want to upend their lives to become homeschool families.

    As a friend remarked, “school is as much a babysitter as it is a learning environment.” Great swathes of parents aren’t simply going to give that up if we say “vax your kids or they don’t come.”

  36. Amphiox says

    The biggest hurdle to mandatory vaccination enforced by things like restricting school attendance is going to be simple fraud. To get their children into public school many anti-vaxxer parents might simply choose to lie about their children’s vaccination status. And there are enough anti-vax physicians and other healthcare professionals out there that they would not have trouble finding someone willing to fake some documents, or give them the vaccine dose, nudge-nudge-wink-wink, document that they’ve come and received the vaccination, and just turn the other way when the parents throw the vaccine in the garbage instead of giving it to their kids.

    Which brings us back to the practical question of enforcement. Are you going to implement a mandatory testing program to prove vaccination status, like a mandatory drug testing program?

    Or perhaps you forego that initial test, and implement instead after-the-fact punitive measures. So if, say, an unvaccinated child is sent to public school with fraudulent vaccination documents, and an outbreak occurs and other children die, charge the parents with murder? (Then you’ll have to deal with the fact that antibody titre tests are not available for every vaccinated disease, are not 100% sensitive or specific for vaccination status, and an honestly vaccinated child may still fail to develop immunity, and thus appear on testing to be unvaccinated.)

  37. Josh, Official SpokesGay says

    Amphiox, again, I think you’re making this more complicated than it needs to be. I know I just posted my comments, but after you get a chance to read them, I hope you’ll change your mind and see that this is not the complicated rocket science that it seems to be.

    No one is suggesting mandatory titer testing. Nothing that draconian was ever required to make the FORMER public policy of mandatory vaccination successful. It WAS much more successful than what we have today.

    This is really easy. Really.

  38. says

    And what about the Ray Rice debacle? Are you STILL sure it’s not about violence? A woman was beat to a bloody pulp and it was caught on camera and no one really gave a shit!

    And , if it’s not a sport of violence, then why are there so many problems with brain injuries and concussions? You cannot make the claim that a sport is not violent if it is literally killing players due to the violent nature of the sport.

    The inability for fans of sports to think critically about their sport is … astonishing to me.

    “It’s not a violent sport at all! Players just get massive amounts of head injuries and serious concussions all the time because of … well, it just happens for no reason! Surely not because the sport is inherently violent!”

    Have you watched football recently? With open eyes?

  39. says

    Ignore previous comment. I did it AGAIN! I’m on hold with Richo. This hold music sucks. I need to pay more attention. La la la.

    I’m with Josh.

    And “police state”? What? For requiring people get vaccinated? Talk about hyperbole.

  40. says

    Josh
    You’re arguing against a strawman here. Our solution is quite clear: mandatory vaccination.
    I hate how this discussion always revolves about what you’re going to do to the children who bear no guilt for having been born to idiot parents in the name of public safety.
    Yep, would somebody think about the bloody children, please?
    They’re innocent children who don’t deserve to die of measles any more than the baby who was too young for vaccination or the immune compromised child who couldn’t get vaccinated.
    We’re looking for a solution to protect all children.

    Amphiox
    Well, don’t make the penalities money or ban from public schooling*, make it really mandatory as in CPS will show up and take the kid to the doctor. Which is what would happen if I didn’t comply with regular check-ups for my kids: I’d first get a friendly reminder, then an unfriendly one, then CPS would show up and give me a stern talking to and if I kept refusing they’d take matters to court. Yes, that’s quite a toolbox and the ultimate steps would be very hard. BUt a child still has a right to adequate healthcare.

    *Funny thing, why is nobody asking for an employment ban on unvaccinated adults? You could totally be self-employed, right? Also a ban from using public transport, ok?

  41. says

    Here is a recent post by John Snyder at Science Based Medicine some might find informative on this topic: Hot-Zone Schools and Children at Risk: Shedding light on outbreak-prone schools.

    …and here is a recent article at the Post that scares the daylights out of me: Private schools putting NYC at risk for measles outbreak.

    Thanks to pockets of anti-vaccinators exploiting loopholes in state policy, particularly on the Upper East Side, outbreaks here are inevitable, health experts say.

    NYC public schools require vaccinations for all students and grant religious and medical exceptions rarely. Only 0.19 percent of public school students received the religious exemption this year, while 0.01 percent were granted a medical exemption.

    But private schools may accept nearly any medical and religious exception they deem worthy, and more than 90 private schools in the city report vaccination rates for their children below the recommended 95 percent last year. For 24 of those schools, the rates dipped below 80 percent.

    At the Rudolf Steiner School on East 79th Street, which is part of a global system of schools founded by the decidedly anti-vaccination philosopher of the same name, only 76 percent of students have been fully vaccinated.

  42. twas brillig (stevem) says

    re no school for unvaccinated:

    The policy of denying public school to children not vaccinated (due to their parents’ decision), is not to be considered a motivation to vaccinate, nor a punishment for not vaccinating. Instead it is a simple health protection policy of public schools. Still possible for vaccinated to be vectors, risking the life of an unvaccinated. Likewise, vaccines are not 100% effective (a small percentage of the population will still be infect-able, even vaccinated. So an unvaccinated person could risk those.
    The public-health issues are adequate justification for the schools to ban unvaccinated students.

    re Oxygen:
    Obama’s support for Oxygen will definitely put Repubs off the rails. Rather than refusing to breathe, they’ll declare O2 as that dangerous component, making arson possible. Therefore Obama supports arsonists. QED. Mike drop.

  43. Beatrice, an amateur cynic looking for a happy thought says

    Vaccination is mandatory over here. Children won’t be accepted to kindergarten if they weren’t vaccinated, with exceptions for health reasons.

    Sanctions for parents who refuse to vaccinated could legally vary from a fine to having the child taken away (but I don’t think things have even gone to the second extreme).

  44. says

    make it really mandatory as in CPS will show up and take the kid to the doctor.

    Oh, man. There was a story going around on Facebook of a doctor who refuses to treat non-vaccinated children, and he also stated that he contacts CPS (although he admits it probably doesn’t do much, if anything).

    This got MAJOR PUSH-BACK on my facebook feed:

    But there’s nothing CPS can do that the police can’t. But the CPS interview is terrifying. I’ve been through it, and I’ve recently heard an interview on my local public radio station of a mother whose two kids and husband were out through a CPS interview for letting her kid play at a park. The CPS agent asked the SMALL children whether they’ve been sexually assaulted, about whether their parents do drugs, about whether their parents fight in front of them, about what they eat, etc. after that ordeal, her son had a fear of going to sleep for WEEKS, because one of the questions was about bed times, and he was terrified of getting in trouble if he couldn’t fall asleep fast enough, and he couldn’t fall asleep fast enough because he was so scared. CPS also collects the contact info for the parents’ employers, and calls them for interviews. It’s all completely unnecessary for this situation, and terrifying to boot. Again, I agree with you on all other points, but not the CPS thing. I never said I think they’d take the child away- and they won’t. It’s everything else about CPS, and the fact that they can accomplish nothing that the police can’t, with less trauma for the child.


    But calling CPS doesn’t just make it socially reprehensible- it punishes the child. My point with the story was that they will do that awful interview on the kids regardless of the reason why they were called. How is my story beside the point?


    There are ways to make anti-vax socially reprehensible without punishing the children. Calling CPS isn’t one of them.


    The goal is to punish the parents and disallow them from enrolling their kids in public school. Cops can do that as well as CPS, again, without terrifying the child with a ridiculous interview.

    AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON they went. This person was so naive to think that the COPS are appropriate, but couldn’t really articulate why when I pressed.

    I think banning from school and certain medical practices (some doctors may decide to treat unvaccinated children and that’s fine) and calling CPS on those parents who continue to put their children in danger is appropriate, depending on context and circumstance.

  45. ragarth says

    First, antivaxxers are wrong. –stated just so people don’t think I’m defending them.

    But that graph is misleading. It’s showing a cumulative total which can only go up, not down. If 2001 to 2003 had 300 cases and 2004 had 0 cases, it would flatline at 300. This style of graph has its uses, but its also used for baking data and giving a false visual representation of information. This makes this graph style low hanging fruit for an antivaxxer to dismiss the entire argument by simply looking at the graph, realizing its cumulative, and dismissing it as dishonest since its impossible for it to effectively display any downward trends.

    There’s plenty of good evidence for pro vaccine use out there. Indeed, I’m pretty sure this exact same information could have been displayed in a much better way that doesn’t undermine the effectiveness of the argument being made.

  46. tulse says

    that graph is misleading. It’s showing a cumulative total which can only go up, not down. If 2001 to 2003 had 300 cases and 2004 had 0 cases, it would flatline at 300.

    You’re reading the graph incorrectly — it is cumulative per year, not over the entire period covered. That’s why all the lines start near 0 in January. (As per the article the graph comes from, “There were 644 new measles cases in 27 states last year, according to the CDC”, which is precisely what the graph shows at the end of 2014.)

  47. Ichthyic says

    It’s showing a cumulative total which can only go up, not down.

    the point of the graph is to show the rate of change.

    it’s fine, and it’s not misleading.

    you read it wrong.

  48. Ichthyic says

    I’ve been saying for years that antivaxxers should be at risk for civil suits. They clearly pass the threshhold of “reckless endangerment”, and if a specific outbreak can be traced to a specific family (which has been done several times that I know of, even without doing an exhaustive survey), then there are clear damages that reparations can be sought for.

    wanna stop antivaxxers? suing a few of them in a class action suit will send a very loud and clear message.

    I was actually pretty harshly criticized for this position by people who thought that there was no criminal basis to charge an antivaxxer with. I disagree, but the point was it’s a civil case, not a criminal one.

    now, there are plenty of others who are starting to see the value in this position, and have started publishing papers in the journals to support the idea:

    http://www.academia.edu/2344148/Free_to_choose_but_liable_for_the_consequences_should_non-vaccinators_be_penalized_for_the_harm_they_do

  49. frog says

    I’m with Josh on this one.

    I’m of the cohort that wasn’t permitted to attend school (even the private schools had this rule!) without full documentation of vaccinations. But of course, my parents grew up during the Depression and WWII, and they remember friends contracting polio, measles, and other deadly diseases. They know from firsthand experience how terrible these diseases are.

    Saw a tweet that said “If my kid can’t bring peanut butter to school, your unvaccinated kid shouldn’t be allowed to bring their viruses.”

  50. says

    Josh – I agree with you 100%. We do not have to re-invent the wheel here. It worked: we eradicated native cases of dangerous childhood diseases, and now they are coming back. Gosh, what to do, what to do?

    I was also just thinking that in dense urban environments like NYC, schools are the least of it: public parks are de facto back yards; sports leagues, swim teams, scouting and hundreds if not thousands of other interest groups bring home-schooled and private-schooled unvaccinated kids into regular contact with mostly vaccinated public school kids. This could dangerously lower the herd immunity among school-aged playmates/teammates. Some of these interest groups could (IMHO should) require vaccinations just like the public schools do, but what do you do about a public park that happens to be near a school with a 24% unvaccinated rate? The only way I can see is to require private school kids to be vaccinated too. (Only medical exceptions.)

  51. rietpluim says

    @Amphiox #34 – I think allowing a germ to make a child ill while a simple vaccine could have prevented it is a violation of physical integrity.

  52. brendano says

    It takes organisation to effectively tackle the antivax nutters of this world. Aussie public health activists have had a few wins over the last 12 months, by exposing corrupt financial practices and the failure of antivax organisations to follow regulatory frameworks. A Melbourne surgeon, John Cunninham, an organisation called Friends of Science in Medicine, and a loose but determined coalition of FB citizens at Stop the Australian (anti) Vaccination Network and via Twiiter’s @stopavn and #stopavn have effectively closed down Australia’s most strident anti-vax propaganda machine.
    We have been busy educating journalists and media organisations on the ethical dangers and mistakes made in ‘false balance’ journalism. This is working.
    Most recently public health activists have had a lot of fun with Sherri Tenpenny and her Aussie acolytes, and we have guffawed with joy as we read her press release cancelling her upcoming Australian Tour of Terror. Our sights are now set on Stephanie Messenger, an anti-vaxxer who has set up dodgy a dodgy anti-vax church, charity and ‘Foundation’. The lols continue …. All the sordid details can be read on FB, Twitter and reasonablehank.com

  53. Saad says

    Josh, #33

    I think you might reconsider. The needs and safety of all kids in the school need to be weighed. If a parent refuses to vaccinate his child, do you truly believe that the most ethical course of action is to accept that child in school no matter what? No matter how many other children could be sickened?

    I don’t really think you do?

    Sorry, I wasn’t saying let vaccinated kids into school.

    I was agreeing with Giliell’s “Mandatory vaccination, only health exceptions” as the best solution as opposed to just barring unvaccinated children from schools. That just hurts the children even more. I’d much rather just “hurt” the parents’ nonsensical beliefs by making vaccination mandatory.

  54. Josh, Official SpokesGay says

    Gileill, why do you think I’m arguing against a strawman? Why do you think I’m disagreeing with you? I’m not. But I am at loss.

  55. Josh, Official SpokesGay says

    I thought this would be obvious to anyone who’s ever read anything I’ve written, but apparently it isn’t. This is so basic I’m annoyed that I have to issue this disclaimer:

    Of course I agree that every child needs protection and of course I care that the the children of antivax parents are hurting those children. Of course I don’t want to throw those children away.

    I shouldn’t have to fucking say this, Giliell, but I do: my endorsement of mandatory school vaccination DOES NOT MEAN I THINK THE UNVAXED KIDS PROBLEM SHOULD BE IGNORED.
    God damn. Why would you think that? Slow down a little please—you read a LOT of sinister stuff into my comments sometimes. It’s weird.

    I don’t know what the answer is to making sure unvaxxed kids get vaxxed. I know that the barring them from schools solution won’t help those children of those parents. I. Know. That. I’m not an uncaring misanthrope.
    I don’t know how to tackle that, but I agree it needs to be tackled.

    I’ll try to remember to offer folks every single ridiculously obvious caveat to anticipate every loathsome thing you apparently believe I’m capable of every single time I say anything.

  56. Josh, Official SpokesGay says

    I’m very confused. Yes, I understand that you think vaccination should be mandatory. I AGREE. That’s what “you can’t come to school if you’re not vaccinated” means. It means it’s mandatory. What am I missing here? Why do some folks believe these things are in conflict?

    No, I don’t know what the right answer is for dealing with parents who won’t vaccinate their kids even if that means they can’t go to school. I don’t know. But how in the world does that lead anyone to think that “mandatory vaccines for school attendance” is not “mandatory vaccines?”

    If you want to propose the criteria should be even stricter and include penalties, you may argue that. I’m not saying anything inconsistent with what you’re asking for.

  57. Josh, Official SpokesGay says

    Complication: In the context of the US (yes, I know my fellow interlocutors here are not all in the US; I know it. You don’t need to tell me. I PROMISE.), it’s harder to know what to do above and beyond mandatory vaccines for school. Our US sense of individualism is so toxic and misguided that it often feels impossible to suggest anything even remotely like “all people must be vaccinated” without people losing their flipping minds about death camps.

    I hate that. I don’t endorse it. I want it to change. But I don’t know how to do it. That, and only that, is why I haven’t proposed anything *beyond* “mandatory for school.” That doesn’t mean I don’t agree with you that that is not enough.

    Really. Super truly. On your side.

  58. says

    A doctor who still has a license to practice medicine is advocating the anti-vaxxer position:

    “We should be getting measles, mumps, rubella, chicken pox, these are the rights of our children to get it,” said Dr. Jack Wolfson of Wolfson Integrative Cardiology in Paradise Valley.

    Wolfson does not believe in vaccination. “We do not need to inject chemicals into ourselves and into our children in order to boost our immune system,” he said.

    This guy is from Phoenix, Arizona. Apparently this is a hotbed of anti-vax activism, just like California.

    When Wolfson was asked about cases where children can’t get vaccinated, like 3-year-old leukemia patient Maggie Jacks, he responded, “As far as I’m concerned, it’s very likely that her leukemia is from vaccinations in the first place.” He then blamed the Jacks family for exposing their daughter to measles by bringing her into a medical clinic.

    http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/02/02/1361729/-While-CDC-warns-of-huge-outbreaks-this-doctor-tells-people-not-to-vaccinate-their-kids

    See also:
    http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2015/01/30/antivaccine-cardiologist-jack-wolfson-and-the-resurrection-of-false-balance-about-vaccines/

  59. rq says

    An additional issue that may apply to the US is the issue of past eugenics programs (and etc.). Just today when trolling through my twitter feed for things to post on the Later This Morning thread, the topic was touched on, as a reason why some older folk don’t trust the medical establishment and are leery of vaccines.
    So I’d say in addition to the individualism, the US medical establishment has some trust issues to overcome, as well.

  60. says

    More info on Dr. Jack Wolfson, the guy who reemerged today as a hero of the woo-infected, of the “freedom loving” far right wing, and of a bunch of “natural medicine” mormon advocates in Arizona. I don’t think Wolfson is a mormon, but I see him being lionized on mormon anti-vax forums (as well as many far-right religious forums).

    […] In 2004, I met the most amazing woman who would soon become my wife. Heather is a chiropractor and has a heavy focus on nutrition and healthy, chemical free living. Since meeting her, I have changed my whole life and medical practice style. I have switched from the sickness paradigm to one of health and wellness. I read countless books, studied hundreds of articles, and attended as many conferences as possible. I met with natural doctors including chiropractors, homeopaths,naturopaths and different types of healers (at which most medical docs would scoff). I immersed myself in the natural lifestyle. Most importantly, I opened my mind from the brainwashing of medical training. My explicit goal in treating patients is finding the cause of disease instead of using the band-aid approach. The CAUSE is the CURE. In 2012, I decided to leave the large cardiology group and open Wolfson Integrative Cardiology […].

    Wolfson Integrative Cardiology link.

  61. Josh, Official SpokesGay says

    Gileill—comments happen sometimes before one refreshes. This happens to you, too. I’m sure you can understand that. I know you can, in fact.

  62. Josh, Official SpokesGay says

    Your original was off-putting enough. You didn’t need to talk at me the way you did, with the “won’t somebody think of the bloody children.” That shouldn’t have been aimed at me. You’d have been piqued had I done it to you. I know I shoot from the hip a lot, but you do too, Gileill. You’re not perfect either, and you’re perfectly capable of aiming a screed at me for no good reason. I’m willing to back the fuck off you if you’ll back the fuck off me. Kay?

  63. says

    More on Dr. Jack Wolfson:

    http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/jack-wolfson-vaccines-doctor-measles

    […] “I’m not going to sacrifice the well-being of my child. My child is pure,” Dr. Jack Wolfson said in the interview. “It’s not my responsibility to be protecting their child.”

    Wolfson was responding to a public appeal for all parents to vaccinate their children from Arizona pediatrician Dr. Tim Sacks, whose leukemia-stricken daughter was exposed to measles after an unvaccinated American family introduced the disease into the greater population during a trip to Disneyland. […]

    The “my child is pure” and the “not my responsibility to protect their child” quotes stuck with me because that’s what I hear people in my neighborhood saying.

  64. says

    Speaking of Republican politicians, Senator Rand Paul went further than Governor Christie:

    Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) on Monday said that most vaccinations ought to be voluntary, a stance that goes beyond his old rival New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s (R) view on parental choice in immunizations.

    Conservative radio host Laura Ingraham asked Paul whether vaccines should be mandatory after Christie’s office tried to walk back the governor’s remarks on allowing parents to have “some measure of choice” in vaccinating their children. Paul went a step further than his potential 2016 presidential opponent in his response.

    “I’m not anti-vaccine at all, but particularly, most of them ought to be voluntary,” Paul said. “What happens if you have somebody not want to take the smallpox vaccine and it ruins it for everybody else? I think there are times in which there can be some rules, but for the most part it ought to be voluntary.” […]

  65. rq says

    Lynna
    If they live in the city, there is no way their child is ‘pure’. Pollution is everywhere!
    Not that they’ll accept that kind of reasoning. :P

  66. tulse says

    Generally, any time you see the term “integrative” in the context of a physician, one should be braced for deep woo.

  67. says

    rq @72, I agree. There are no “pure” children anywhere. That’s a ridiculous statement from Dr. Wolfson. He should be censured by other doctors.

    One of the favorite anti-vax organizations of many rightwing politicians and religious groups is the Eagle Forum. The Eagle Forum is such a formidable force for ignorance that it was even featured in HBO’s “Big Love” series. It is not solely mormon, but in Utah it is heavily mormon. In other states the members are rabid right-wingers of every stripe.

    […] a number of top GOP presidential contenders, including Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum have promoted Eagle Forum, the conservative organization founded by right-wing icon Phyllis Schlafly, which regularly pushes false claims about vaccines. […]

    An entire section of Eagle Forum’s website is devoted to criticizing vaccines. The group has repeatedly promoted the myth that vaccines are linked to autism, featuring articles on its website about how efforts to vaccinate children are a form of government control that jeopardizes the freedoms of parents and families.

    Along with its own misinformation, Eagle Forum refers members to anti-vaccine groups such as the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, National Vaccine Information Center and the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, which counted Rand Paul as a member for over two decades. […]

    Right Wing Watch link.

  68. Amphiox says

    @Amphiox #34 – I think allowing a germ to make a child ill while a simple vaccine could have prevented it is a violation of physical integrity.

    It would be if you knew of CERTAIN that the child would become infected. Like someone had a syringe full of measles right there and were about to inject it into the child.

    But you’re not. It is a probability of exposure, which varies with a whole host of other factors besides the presence or absence of the vaccination.

    Whereas a vaccination is a CERTAIN breach of physical integrity, and a CERTAIN violation if it is done without informed consent.

    What a STUPID argument for you to make. Surely you know the difference between a CERTAINTY and a PROBABILITY. You should be ASHAMED of yourself for even thinking of such an intellectually dishonest argument.

    You’re better than that.

  69. Amphiox says

    Well, don’t make the penalities money or ban from public schooling*, make it really mandatory as in CPS will show up and take the kid to the doctor.

    And if the diehard antivaxxer parents should physically resist CPS coming to take their children to the doctor, do you believe they should be compelled to do so, with threat of force, at gunpoint by police, if necessary?

  70. says

    Amphiox

    And if the diehard antivaxxer parents should physically resist CPS coming to take their children to the doctor, do you believe they should be compelled to do so, with threat of force, at gunpoint by police, if necessary?

    They should have custody for the part “medical care” removed. Which actually happens. In the USA, too. If they think that escalating matters to the point that CPS has to remove the children by force, they probably shouldlose custody alltogether, because they clearly don’t have their child’s best interest at mind.

  71. says

    Whereas a vaccination is a CERTAIN breach of physical integrity, and a CERTAIN violation if it is done without informed consent.

    This is ridiculous. It is none of these. Vaccinations are generally VERY VERY VERY safe. Much safer than not vaccinating.

    You’re an anti-vaxxer, aren’t you? This is the same shit arguments they use.

  72. Amphiox says

    Another consideration. Vaccines are not 100% effective and they are not 100% safe. Every vaccine has a certain risk of legitimate and REAL adverse reactions, some severe.

    Certainly in aggregate the benefits outweigh the risks, but when we are making these arguments we are talking population statistics, while the decision to vaccinate is a personal one made by individuals. For the individual child who happens to be unlucky enough to get a severe adverse reaction there is no benefit, only harm.

    And sooner or later, if you have a mandatory vaccination program, that case will happen. A child will be individually harmed by the vaccination, and will get no benefit, individually, from it. In a setting where the vaccination was voluntary, with informed consent, this is acceptable – an individual or their proxy has considered the risks, understood the implications, took their chances, and they were unlucky. It happens.

    But if the vaccination had been mandated and the parents had NOT initially wanted the vaccination? You have effectively sacrificed the wellbeing of a small number of children on the altar of herd immunity, a benefit for the group, but which those particular children do not get to partake of, and you have inflicted this harm upon them against their will, or the will of their proxy decision makers (and the harm to a child is not felt by the child alone. The parents, other family, friends, and indeed all members of that child’s social circle will be harmed as well). Who is responsible now?

    From a practical point of view, particularly in the intensely individualistic culture of the USA, what do you think is the most likely outcome? The parents will likely sue. The case will be very public and very messy. The anti-vaxxer movement will rally to their cause. The mandatory vaccination program will very likely be discredited for at least a generation, and even worse, the public fallout is likely to discredit the whole idea of vaccinations in general, driving MORE people into the anti-vaxxer camp. The end result is more public resistance to the vaccination program, fewer vaccinations, a drop in herd immunity, and potentially less total children vaccinated than if you had stuck with a voluntary program.

  73. Amphiox says

    This is ridiculous. It is none of these. Vaccinations are generally VERY VERY VERY safe. Much safer than not vaccinating.
    You’re an anti-vaxxer, aren’t you? This is the same shit arguments they use.

    I believe in voluntary vaccination.

    I also believe that informed consent for medical procedures is close to absolute and should never be violated except for very good reason.

    And until you show me evidence , peer reveiwed and properly corroborated, that 1) mandatory vaccination is more effective than a good voluntary vaccination program for maintaining herd immunity and 2) the difference between the two, in real world, practical application, is large enough that it results in measureable real world harm, then I will not be supporting any form of mandatory vaccination program.

  74. Amphiox says

    Yes. As for the anti-vaxxer? Boo hoo, cry me a fucking river.

    So if the anti-vaxxers also happens to be a second amendment nuts, who barricades their home, you’d support sending in the SWAT team and shooting them?

  75. Amphiox says

    Vaccinations are generally VERY VERY VERY safe. Much safer than not vaccinating.

    But not PERFECTLY safe. So it is 1 in 1000, 1 in 10,000, maybe even 1 in a million. But that one does exist. If you mandate the vaccination it means that 1 child will suffer so that all the others will not. 1 child you harm against their will, so that a million may be healthier.

    If you happen to be that one child in whom the vaccine does not produce immunity and instead produces a disabling adverse event, then for you, individually, the vaccine is NOT safer than not vaccinating. If you happen to be that one child who gets the disabling adverse event, and who otherwise would not have been exposed to the disease in question (since that too is only a risk, never a certainty), then the vaccine was NOT safer for you than not vaccinating. Vaccine safety (and safety for all medical interventions) is a population statistic, not an individual one.

    It’s a “Walking Away from Omelas” situation, if it is mandatory with strict enforcement. (And without strict enforcement it is not truly mandatory).

    It is not a problem if the program is voluntary, where every individual can make the informed decision to accept the small chance of risk for the greater chance of benefit, but if it is mandatory then that is not the case. If it is mandatory, then YOU, as a society, are making the deliberate decision to inflict harm, without benefit, on one individual (or several), you don’t know who, but someone, in exchange for benefit to others. I do not consider this a ethically tenable situation without informed consent.

  76. Akira MacKenzie says

    Then we’re going to have some dead gun nuts/anti-axxers. Your point? Please explain to me why I should give two-shits for the libertarian, superstitious scum who are fucking up this world through their beliefs and actions?

  77. says

    Amphiox

    And sooner or later, if you have a mandatory vaccination program, that case will happen. A child will be individually harmed by the vaccination, and will get no benefit, individually, from it. In a setting where the vaccination was voluntary, with informed consent, this is acceptable – an individual or their proxy has considered the risks, understood the implications, took their chances, and they were unlucky. It happens.

    This is patent bullshit. In case of a serious adverse reaction in a child it is completely irrelevant for the child whether their parents made the decision or the government. The only thing you’re doing here is guilt-tripping parents whose child was the unlucky one.

    And until you show me evidence , peer reveiwed and properly corroborated, that 1) mandatory vaccination is more effective than a good voluntary vaccination program for maintaining herd immunity and 2) the difference between the two, in real world, practical application, is large enough that it results in measureable real world harm, then I will not be supporting any form of mandatory vaccination program.

    So you have no evidence for your position but your beliefs, and you demand a level of evidence that is probably not even doable. Yeah, sure.

    So if the anti-vaxxers also happens to be a second amendment nuts, who barricades their home, you’d support sending in the SWAT team and shooting them?

    So that’s the bar for public policies now? They could affect a 2nd amendment gun fondler and therefore we shouldn’t do anything?

  78. Amphiox says

    So you have no evidence for your position but your beliefs, and you demand a level of evidence that is probably not even doable. Yeah, sure.

    Now THIS is so egregiously intellectually dishonest that I am almost at a loss for words.

    YOU are the one proposing something new, ie a mandatory vaccination program. The onus us ON YOU, not me, to provide the evidence that it will actually be better than the status quo. YOU must prove that a mandatory vaccination program will ACTUALLY, in practical reality, result in more children being vaccinated and an improvement in herd immunity, versus the status quo. In other words the onus is on YOU to provide the evidence that a mandatory vaccination program can be practically enforced.

    And given that, then onus is STILL ON YOU, the one proposing an intervention that involves greater coercion (mandatory vaccination), to provide the evidence that it would be better than the alternative that requires less coercion (improved voluntary vaccination).

    You’re arguing exactly like a creationist here, trying to say that evolutionists have to “disprove” the existence of their creator.

    And I KNOW you are capable of better than this.

    This is patent bullshit. In case of a serious adverse reaction in a child it is completely irrelevant for the child whether their parents made the decision or the government. The only thing you’re doing here is guilt-tripping parents whose child was the unlucky one.

    What the hell? How is it “guilt-tripping” the parents if it is a mandatory program? If it is a mandatory program the parents are free from all guilt, since the decision was not in their hands.

    And the point of my argument has NOTHING to do with the child. The child suffers the same no matter what. But if the program was mandatory then the RESPONSIBILITY for the child’s harm is ON SOCIETY. Because it was SOCIETY that took the decision out of the hands of the individuals and made it for them, by mandating the vaccination.

    Your mandatory vaccination program had better have a system for compensating families who do suffer harm from adverse events.

  79. throwaway, never proofreads, every post a gamble says

    If it is mandatory, then YOU, as a[n] society anti-vaxxer, are making the deliberate decision to inflict harm, without benefit, on one individual (or several), you don’t know who, but someone, in exchange for benefit to others your unvaccinated child. I do not consider this a ethically tenable situation without informed consent.

    Sounds like it’s a two way street.

  80. Beth says

    @Amphiox – I agree with what you’ve posted here. Thanks for making an argument against the popular opinion at this blog. It’s not something I’ll do here.

  81. Beatrice, an amateur cynic looking for a happy thought says

    Amphiox,

    Your mandatory vaccination program had better have a system for compensating families who do suffer harm from adverse events.

    Sure, it’s called socialized health care.

  82. Amphiox says

    So that’s the bar for public policies now? They could affect a 2nd amendment gun fondler and therefore we shouldn’t do anything?

    Not a “bar”. An important consideration for PRACTICAL APPLICATION. Because we KNOW the two populations (anti-vaxxers and anti-government gun nuts) overlap enough that this is a FORESEEABLE POTENTIAL outcome of implementation of the policy.

    And when (not if ) it happens, it will be a huge public event, in the headlines of the news throughout the nation. What would the effect of that be on public perception of vaccinations in general? From the PURELY PRACTICAL point of view of wanting to get as many children vaccinated as possible, in the individualistic culture of the United States, how likely do you think that such an event, which again, is a likely foreseeable outcome of any mandatory vaccination program with sufficient enforcement “teeth” (and without that teeth, how would your mandatory program wherein the anti-vaxxers can all find loopholes to not get vaccinated be any different from the current status quo? The law would be on the books, but the same people who are not getting vaccinated now are STILL not getting vaccinated) in the United States, effect public perception of vaccinations.

    I think there is a very serious risk, in the United States, that such an outcome (as only the most extreme example of the general reaction to a mandatory vaccination program) will drive people away from vaccinating, and win sympathy for the anti-vaxxer’s cause, resulting in FEWER vaccinations than what would have happened with a voluntary vaccination program.

    And if your goal is the protection of children by increasing herd immunity, and having a mandatory program runs that kind of risk, WHY DO IT, if a voluntary program can produce the same or similar levels of herd immunity without that risk?

    So again, you HAVE TO SHOW, with evidence, that the more coercive option, the mandatory program is ACTUALLY, PRACTICALLY, when all foreseeable factors regarding practical enforcement are considered, going to result in actually more real live children being vaccinated, than the less coercive alternative of an improved voluntary program.

    Until you do that, the improved voluntary vaccination program should be the default first choice of policy. It should be the Null Hypothesis.

  83. Ichthyic says

    Whereas a vaccination is a CERTAIN breach of physical integrity, and a CERTAIN violation if it is done without informed consent.

    so, are seatbelts a violation of physical integrity?

    frankly, I don’t think the argument you are using here is one used by the antivaxxers themselves.

  84. says

    Amphiox

    YOU are the one proposing something new, ie a mandatory vaccination program. The onus us ON YOU, not me, to provide the evidence that it will actually be better than the status quo.

    Goodness what a liar. Mandatory vaccination is not new. Not even in the most exceptional country of the USA. As was mentioned by others. But if you want evidence, look up the GDR vs. FRG.

    What the hell? How is it “guilt-tripping” the parents if it is a mandatory program? If it is a mandatory program the parents are free from all guilt, since the decision was not in their hands.

    I’m sorry if this wasn’t clear. Your system is guilt tripping parents, because apparently you believe that vaccine injury is magically different when the consent was voluntarily given by the parent. If you do get 99% f the population to vaccinate voluntarily, vaccine injuries, though extremely rare, will still happen, at the same level at which they happen if you get 99% of the population by a mandatory vaccination. So the “Omelas” scenario for mandatory vaccination is bullshit. BTW, Ursula LeGuin is not happy with anti-vaxxers using that story.

  85. Amphiox says

    Sure, it’s called socialized health care.

    A mandatory vaccination program would work much better in a place like Canada that does have socialized health care. (Though even here the bar is still the same, you should not be considering the more coercive option, the mandatory program, unless you can demonstrate that it is superior to the less coercive option, the improved voluntary program).

    But that won’t be working for the United States, which does not now have, and will not in the foreseeable future have, anything approaching socialized health care.

  86. Ichthyic says

    Your mandatory vaccination program had better have a system for compensating families who do suffer harm from adverse events.

    It already does.

    there in fact have been several notable class action lawsuits filed on behalf of people injured by vaccines, and then of course there is:

    http://www.hrsa.gov/vaccinecompensation/index.html

    so, yeah, if you are injured by a vaccine and can demonstrate that, there are avenues for compensation available.

    as some have already mentioned… we HAD a system in place that WAS working just fine for decades.

  87. Amphiox says

    Your system is guilt tripping parents, because apparently you believe that vaccine injury is magically different when the consent was voluntarily given by the parent.

    If you’re going to continue lying about what I say so egregiously, I am done talking to you.

    Goodbye.

  88. Ichthyic says

    So if the anti-vaxxers also happens to be a second amendment nuts, who barricades their home, you’d support sending in the SWAT team and shooting them?

    argument from consequences fallacy.

  89. Beatrice, an amateur cynic looking for a happy thought says

    Amphiox,

    But that won’t be working for the United States, which does not now have, and will not in the foreseeable future have, anything approaching socialized health care.

    And it has nothing even approaching a widely accessible quality science education so there goes your “improved method of encouraging voluntary universal vaccination”.

  90. carlie says

    I’m perfectly fine with people not vaccinating their children.
    BUT.
    If they do so, the consequence then needs to be that their child does not get to spend time in large-group settings with other children. They should be required to homeschool, and shouldn’t be allowed at any public group event without showing test results from the most recent week showing no disease. Right now, if vaccinating is just a “personal choice”, the people running around being carriers are forcing the negative effects of that choice onto other people. Fine, don’t vaccinate, but then you should have to take all of the effects on yourself. It’s just like Christians who rail on about how important it is to stand up for your beliefs “no matter what”, but then as soon as they get a consequence as minor as being told “no, it’s illegal for you to deface someone’s billboard”, they go into a nuclear meltdown about how “their rights are being taken away”. Nope. You want to stand up for not vaccinating fine, but your consequence is that you’re then medically unsafe to be allowed around others and if you believe strongly enough that vaccinations are dangerous, you’ll take it.

  91. Glenn Graham says

    Very happy to report that my local candidate in our state election here in Queensland is pro vax basing her decision on the “overwhelming medical evidence”. She won.

  92. says

    So again, you HAVE TO SHOW, with evidence, that the more coercive option, the mandatory program is ACTUALLY, PRACTICALLY, when all foreseeable factors regarding practical enforcement are considered, going to result in actually more real live children being vaccinated, than the less coercive alternative of an improved voluntary program.

    I somehow knew that your required evidence would involve a holodeck in which we could simulate an alternative reality where we experimentally set up two groups.

    Your mandatory vaccination program had better have a system for compensating families who do suffer harm from adverse events.

    Since you’re so woefully uninformed that you don’t know that those systems already exist now, you probably shouldn’t take part in the discussion.

  93. Fetchez la Vache says

    @Amphiox
    Huh. Isn’t the current outbreak of measles pretty strong evidence that the voluntary vaccination policy doesn’t work as well as the mandatory policy we used to have? When I was growing up (US), I was vaccinated by requirement. I don’t recall any outbreaks of any of the diseases we had vaccines for.

  94. freemage says

    Amphiox

    2 February 2015 at 3:59 pm

    This is ridiculous. It is none of these. Vaccinations are generally VERY VERY VERY safe. Much safer than not vaccinating.
    You’re an anti-vaxxer, aren’t you? This is the same shit arguments they use.

    I believe in voluntary vaccination.

    I also believe that informed consent for medical procedures is close to absolute and should never be violated except for very good reason.

    And until you show me evidence , peer reveiwed and properly corroborated, that 1) mandatory vaccination is more effective than a good voluntary vaccination program for maintaining herd immunity and 2) the difference between the two, in real world, practical application, is large enough that it results in measureable real world harm, then I will not be supporting any form of mandatory vaccination program.

    This criteria was already met, far up on the page. In the 70s and 80s, we had mandatory vax programs with health-only exemptions, and the results of that were clear–we hit a period of no outbreaks. We’ve added to the exemptions, making them functionally voluntary, and had outbreaks. The graph up on the page shows the increasing rate of measles outbreaks over a period of time when we know there’s increasing resistance to taking vaccinations. The experiment you claim to want has already been performed, and it has found the resistance to mandatory vaccination wanting.

    Since your alleged criteria have already been met, it is safe to say that you are either too stupid to see it, or too dishonest to acknowledge it. This places you into the “Fool or Liar” class, and thus, renders you dismissable.

  95. says

    Amphiox

    But not PERFECTLY safe. So it is 1 in 1000, 1 in 10,000, maybe even 1 in a million. But that one does exist. If you mandate the vaccination it means that 1 child will suffer so that all the others will not. 1 child you harm against their will, so that a million may be healthier.

    If you happen to be that one child in whom the vaccine does not produce immunity and instead produces a disabling adverse event, then for you, individually, the vaccine is NOT safer than not vaccinating. If you happen to be that one child who gets the disabling adverse event, and who otherwise would not have been exposed to the disease in question (since that too is only a risk, never a certainty), then the vaccine was NOT safer for you than not vaccinating. Vaccine safety (and safety for all medical interventions) is a population statistic, not an individual one.

    It’s a “Walking Away from Omelas” situation, if it is mandatory with strict enforcement. (And without strict enforcement it is not truly mandatory).

    I’m quoting you.
    How is the situation for the child harmed by the vaccine different in a system with mandatory vaccination than in a system with voluntary vaccination?
    The only difference is who made the decision. You want to dump the responsibility on the parents.
    Also, of course, without vaccination certain diseases aren’t a risk but a certainty. Read up on measles epidemics in unvaccinated populations. Sooner or later you would get them and then you’d get well again or you’d die. Ever had the measles? Whoomping cough? Chicken pox?

  96. Josh, Official SpokesGay says

    Amphiox: PLEASE READ THIS! Are you aware that the US did, in actual real fact, have mandatory vaccinations (for public school kids) VERY recently? The thing that you say can’t work was the actual reality here in my lifetime.

    Now you know that. Please tell me that you’ll acknowledge that and that it does require you to rethink your position?

  97. says

    Amphiox 76

    And if the diehard antivaxxer parents should physically resist CPS coming to take their children to the doctor, do you believe they should be compelled to do so, with threat of force, at gunpoint by police, if necessary?

    No, at that point they should just plain be arrested, and their children placed with responsible foster caretakers (and yes, I know about the problems with the existing foster system; they need to be fixed, but that is only tangentially germane to the situation, inasmuch as any discussion of this type really does need to address all kinds of systemic problems that don’t initially appear related. For instance, there’s the problem that exists today in the U.S. where it’s possible that parents can’t actually pay for needed vaccines. The solution, of course, is universal health care).
    #70

    Every vaccine has a certain risk of legitimate and REAL adverse reactions, some severe.

    The vast majority of which risks can (and should) be checked for before the vaccine is administered. Indeed, the existence of people who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons is one of the key arguments in favor of ensuring that everyone who can be vaccinated is.
    #91

    And when (not if ) it happens, it will be a huge public event, in the headlines of the news throughout the nation. What would the effect of that be on public perception of vaccinations in general?

    The same thing that happens every time gun nuts get in a shootout with the cops: people who already agreed with them will continue to support them and agree with them, most people who don’t agree with them will continue to not agree with them, call them crazy, and go on at length about ‘responsible gun owners’ and ‘second amendment rights’, and sensible people will ask if we now we can finally start talking about some kind of sensible gun regulation finally. What’s your point?

  98. says

    Amphiox #86:

    Your mandatory vaccination program had better have a system for compensating families who do suffer harm from adverse events.

    Here:

    Acknowledging that vaccines, as with any medication, are not without risk to the patient, that vaccines, unlike other medications, are a medical intervention generally given to healthy individuals, and that vaccination has benefits beyond the individual by significantly benefitting the public health through creation of herd immunity, the VICP was established to shift the monetary costs of vaccine injuries away from vaccine recipients and manufacturers. Using a vaccine injury table and a simplified administrative process through the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, this no-fault system is designed to fairly compensate children and their families (along with adult recipients of these vaccines) for the costs associated with the rare injuries related to vaccination. An excise tax on each dose of covered vaccine funds the compensation program.

    [Source (pdf)]

  99. machintelligence says

    Your mandatory vaccination program had better have a system for compensating families who do suffer harm from adverse events.

    Google “vaccine court” to find out all about this program.

  100. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    This whole argument is one that touches on one of my pet peeves. You have the freedom to make choices, like not vaccinating your child, but, you as a parent should take responsibility for said decision, and take out an insurance policy to cover any infections, along with complications up to and including permanent disability or death, your child gives to other people due to your actions. Either the policy or the vaccination. Make your choice, and live with the consequences….

  101. robertwilson says

    I was going to say other countries have very successful mandatory programs (Brazil for example where I was born and raised), but the objection to that would’ve been the US has different circumstances (no socialized healthcare + gun nuts).

    Fortunately that has been addressed by pointing out the US has had its own mandatory programs. (I’d add that in fact it still does in the military for example).

    Of course it’s still possible to move the goalposts and say the circumstances are too different now, once again requiring the holodeck evidence as Giliell put it.

  102. anat says

    Let’s not forget another population here: The kids who are undervaccinated due to life circumstances that impede regular access to medical care. There should be fewer of them thanks to Obamacare, but there are also the kids who move frequently (homeless and on verge of homelessness, unstable families, changes in custody etc) and as a result don’t have a consistent health provider. So concurrent with any means to keep the ones who are unvaccinated by parental choice away we should be looking for more ways to ensure that whoever wants to vaccinate their kids can do so easily, and actively looking for kids who missed out on some of their shots to help them catch up.

  103. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    I will acknowledge there is a very small population of children that shouldn’t receive the vaccines for medical reasons. But, in my world view, that requires a panel of three doctors, two of which are pro-vaccination without true medical reasons, like a suppressed or bad immune systems, for there to be no vaccination. Essentially take to the pediatrician the child goes to out of the picture.

  104. says

    anat

    Let’s not forget another population here: The kids who are undervaccinated due to life circumstances that impede regular access to medical care. There should be fewer of them thanks to Obamacare, but there are also the kids who move frequently (homeless and on verge of homelessness, unstable families, changes in custody etc) and as a result don’t have a consistent health provider.

    While there need to be meassures to provide healthcare for these kids, like for example having a vaccination nurse visit schools regularly (I’m pretty sure it’s possible to find out which schools need more frequent visits than others), they are not the group that’s responsible for atrociously low vaccination rates.
    The unvaccinated kid is more likely to come from an affluent family, sadly one with educated parents. No kid at a Rudolf Steiner school is poor, because poor parents can’t cough up a few hundred bucks a month in fees.

    Nerd

    You have the freedom to make choices, like not vaccinating your child, but, you as a parent should take responsibility for said decision, and take out an insurance policy to cover any infections, along with complications up to and including permanent disability or death, your child gives to other people due to your actions.

    They should be liable, financially and criminally. Not just for the damage they cause to other kids, but also to the damage they cause to their own kids.
    Children are people, not property. Parents have a duty of care. Also, what about one unvaccinated kid due to parental stupidity passing a disease to another unvaccinated kid due to parental stupidity? It’s not that only parents #1 are at fault.
    This is also the problem why making this a parental choice or linking it to school attendance is such a problematic thing:
    Vaccines benefit the population at large AND the individual. To deny it to a child means to deny a child protection. Linking it to school attendance does not address the issue of unvaccinated children moving in public space (don’t forget, the recent US outbreak started at Disneyland, not a school) and it does nothing about unvaccinated adults. Thos diseases are not called “childhood diseases” because you only get and spread them as children. You’re just as much at risk as an adult, some of them can even be worse for adults. They’re called childhood diseases because it used to be that you’d get them during your childhood because every few years there’d be an outbreak so at one pount during your childhood you were quite sure to get them.

  105. says

    Amphiox

    <n other words, a mandatory vaccination is a violation of an individual’s bodily autonomy and physical integrity, which is different from something like seatbelt or bike helmet requirements.

    This argument is a complete red herring in the context of discussion of childhood vaccinations. The kids aren’t actually given a choice either way. Indeed, it would be not only pointless but totally impossible to do so, given the age at which vaccinations start.

  106. says

    Late to the party on this one, but I remember not just mandatory vaccination, but getting my shots *during school*. Mind you, back then we also had school dentistry. A couple of years of neo-liberalism fixed all that nasty socialist nonsense though – just closed down *all* public schools in the area. Much better! And yes, I’m bitter.

  107. says

    Ah, I did a bit of reading up on the measels in Germany. Every 2-3 years we get some outbreak. The last big ones were an alternative woo infested school and the visitors to an international fair in Berlin. Eastern Germany is generally safer than western Germany cause they used to have mandatory vaccination. Given that a huge proportion of the infected are by now adults (up to 40% over 25 yo), it shows how the mandatory vaccination in the GDR still protects people. A third one was actually brought by unvaccinated immigrants, but it then spread like a wildfire through the oh so cosmopolitan and heavily woo-infested Berlin population.

  108. says

    Building that herd immunity takes time, but destroying it is all too quick. It’s even worse for the chicken pox, for which everyone in my generation is a carrier, as it hangs around in the nerves forever (as I understand it). Had to watch my 3m yo. go through it, with permanent scarring, as my wife unluckily had a recurrence (shingles) just after giving birth, and the vaccine isn’t given until 12m. She has a deep feeling of guilt over it, although we both understand rationally that it’s obviously in no way *actually* her fault.

    Upshot is, my son will be a carrier, able to inadvertently infect new infants, for the best part of the next century. It’ll take *at least* that long to eliminate it from the population, but can then be brought back by selfish idiots at any time. So, yeah, +1 mandatory vaccination.

  109. says

    gondwanarana
    Yes, but it’s only infecuous when breaking out.
    Talk about chicken pox. Back when I was a kid people wouldn’t avoid chicken pox. There was no vaccine, so your child would catch it anyway, which means you’d kind of take adavantage of the breakouts during primary school. Best get over with it. Only I never contracted it. I spent all day with my chicken pox cousin, no rsults. I would cheer up my chicken pox BFF, healthy as a cow. Many years later, still pre vaccine another cousin from a different part of Germany visited us. What we hadn’t known was that her youngest had chickenpox, it was only diagnosed upon their return and I caught it. At 21. Gods that was hell.

  110. tulse says

    So all the arguments against vaccinations work for fluoridation of the public water supply, right? Fluoridation is a violation of one’s purity of essence, it is coercive, it may have as-yet-undetermined negative consequences, it may be a plot by those with nefarious purposes, etc. etc. So, to be consistent, anti-vaxxers should oppose fluoridation, right?

  111. karmacat says

    Amphiox,
    You mention the one child who is at risk for side effects from vaccines. However, that one child is more at risk for complications and death from those diseases. My sister-in-law is a pathologist and one time she mentioned that she saw a child who had died from a staph infection after scratching a lot due to chicken pox. NOt vaccinating your child is almost as bad as taking your child to faith healer instead of a doctor. Parents who don’t vaccinate their children are driven by fair. It is like being very afraid of flying but not being afraid of driving.

  112. Esteleth, RN's job is to save your ass, not kiss it says

    Giliell, I remember Shot Day (as it was known) in grade school. Basically, all the kids were herded into the gymnasium and lined up. You walked up and stood in between two nurses and opened your mouth. You got a shot in each arm and some drops in your mouth. You were then given some candy and told to go out onto the playground.

    As regards the kids who cannot be vaccinated: they’re not a reason to drop mandatory vaccinations, they’re a reason for mandatory vaccinations. After all, their health requires everyone else to be immunized.

  113. Amphiox says

    You mention the one child who is at risk for side effects from vaccines. However, that one child is more at risk for complications and death from those diseases.

    You DO NOT know this and CANNOT know this for any particular individual child. All you can say is there are certain odds for one side and for the other, and the odds favour vaccination. The degree to which any particular child is at risk for complications and death from disease is dependent on many factors which YOU DO NOT KNOW, so you CANNOT SAY for any particular child that they DEFINITELY will be at more risk for complications and death from a disease than they would be for a vaccination related injury. Somewhere out there there is a child who happens to live in a community where the prevalence of the disease in question is so low that, coupled with that child’s future lifestyle choices, which again, you CANNOT KNOW, his or her lifetime risk for being exposed to the disease, catching the disease, and then developing the severe outcomes of that disease (which is partly going to relate to that particular child’s genetics, which again, YOU DO NOT KNOW), will turn out to be even LOWER than the low risk of vaccine-related injury.

    You do not know who that child will be. Out of every 1 million random children, perhaps only 1 child will be like this. But THIS CHILD EXISTS. And if you institute a mandatory vaccination program that includes strict enforcement, you are guaranteeing that this particular child will be exposed to a greater risk than any benefit he or she will ever obtain from the vaccination. You are sacrificing this child’s wellbeing for the sake of the wellbeing of all the other children.

    When it comes to risk evaluation, you are not entitled to impose YOUR personal evaluation of what does odds actually mean to someone else’s life. You are not entitled to impose YOUR particular set of values regarding someone ELSE’s bodily autonomy.

    Not without a very good reason, and not without showing that there is no other alternative to achieve the benefit you wish that does NOT require such an imposition.

    That is why we HAVE informed consent to begin with. Otherwise we might as well mandate ALL beneficial medical interventions for EVERYONE, and give NO ONE a choice.

    So once again, a mandated vaccination program can only be justified if you can demonstrate with evidence that the best available voluntary program that you can implement is insufficient for the stated goal of improving herd immunity, preventing disease, or stopping an outbreak, or whatever else your public health goal might be.

    Mandatory programs should be considered options of last resort in free societies.

  114. longship says

    PZ, you are not spelling newage correctly. It is one word, and it rhymes with sewage, and has many of the same characteristics.

    Best regards.

  115. consciousness razor says

    You do not know who that child will be. Out of every 1 million random children, perhaps only 1 child will be like this. But THIS CHILD EXISTS.

    You do not know that such a person exists. You may know there’s some chance that they might exist. And even giving a definite probability for all of the various factors is pretty much out of the question.

    Feel free to replace any of the above with all-caps if you need it.

  116. says

    It’s not merely a matter of public health. It’s also a matter of the health of an individual child. Even if we take the common, but less commonly argued and justified, of anti-paternalism, and say that people shouldn’t be forced to do what is for their own good, we still shouldn’t overlook that children are their own people, not merely adjuncts to their parents. If my wife and I wanted to have sex with, torture, kill and eat our children, I couldn’t imagine many people talking about “bodily autonomy” and saying how we should be free to make our own decisions with regards to what we do with our own bodies. Children are their own beings, and it’s perfectly acceptable for society to do what is in the interests of a child even if that is against a parents wishes.

  117. Amphiox says

    This is the last thing I am ever going to say on this forum regarding the question of mandatory vaccination for the general public, as a general policy.

    We cannot dehumanize anti-vaxxer parents as irredeemable child abusers, throw the book at them, and be done with it. Apply your human empathy and put yourself in the position of such a parent. Most of them sincerely love their children and sincerely want what is best for their children, like any other parent. Most of them SINCERELY believe that vaccines are HARMFUL to their children. The inaccuracy of their belief is immaterial to their motivations.

    If the government suddenly mandated that you HAD to do or allow something done to your children that you SINCERELY believe is harmful to your children, how would you react? How likely would you be to comply with that mandate? What would you do to get around that mandate? If the government sent the CPS to take away your children because of your refusal to comply with a mandate that you SINCERELY believe is grievously harmful to your children, would you resist? Would you resist with force? If there are Cliven Bundy types willing to take up arms to resist a government mandate on mere land, how likely do you think such people would be willing to do the same for the sake of the welfare of their OWN CHILDREN, as they sincerely perceive it?

    This gets into the question enforcement and practical results. If the threat of measles encephalitis is not enough to compel these people to vaccinate their children, how likely would a legal mandate and threat of legal sanction be to do it instead? If these diehard antivaxxers do not comply with your mandate, then how is a mandate any different from the current status quo, where the diehard antivaxxers also will not vaccinate?

    You say we can send the CPS after these parents. You say “fuck the parents”. Well when you “fuck the parents”, the you fuck the child. Consider how much trauma a CPS process does to ALL the children in a family. Who are you to judge that the harm from this trauma is less than the potential harm from vaccinable diseases? I submit to you that except in the case of an actual epidemic (in which case a temporary mandatory vaccination program for the at-risk areas IS an acceptable option) the harm so inflicted on the child has an excellent chance of being GREATER than the potential risk of serious complications from a disease which is normally at low prevalence in the community. Then consider what additional resources you’d need to put into the CPS, which is overloaded with casework as it is, to even make such a thing viable.

    The problem you want to solve is the failure of herd immunity from too many people not vaccinating their children. Your solution needs to effectively get more children vaccinated. Your target population for a mandated program can be split into two groups

    1.) The diehard antivaxxers who will resist to the end whatever you do.

    2.) On-the-fence antivaxxers who will not vaccination in the current status quo, but who would not fight a mandate if one existed.

    Your mandated program will not be very successful in getting the children in group 1 vaccinated no matter what. These are people so committed to their cause they are willing to allow themselves be destroyed for it. At which point, do you seriously think that the benefit gained from improved immunity to certain diseases will outweigh the harm you’ll be inflicting on these children by destroying their otherwise loving and devoted families? For this group then, how is a mandated program going to be any different than the status quo? other than the fact that you now have legal sanction to go after and punish these parents in group 1. Now ask yourself, honestly, if you are really truly interested in helping these children, or if what you really want is an excuse to punish these anti-vaxxers for their ignorance and obstinacy.

    Which brings us to group 2. A mandated program will effectively get the children in this group vaccinated, but if these parents are on-the-fence enough to comply without the need for extreme and costly coercion to a mandate, don’t you think that they are likely to be open to persuasion? Don’t you think that one ought to try persuasion first on these parents. If finding a better method of persuasion than the status quo results in effectively getting this group to vaccination, is that not the same outcome, in the end, as a mandated program, only with less governmental oppression and coercion? Is not a situation where the children get vaccination without government coercion superior to one where the children get vaccinated with government coercion?

    Is that not the fundamental LIBERAL policy position, that if you have a choice of two policies that can achieve the same goal, you prefer the one that involves the LEAST coercion?

    How then, can you justify a mandated vaccination program when improving the existing voluntary programs remains an option that you can still try?

  118. rq says

    Matthew
    I believe there have been cases where Jehovah’s Witness children have been, essentially, forced to have blood transfusions for their health, in opposition to their parents’ wishes.
    In other words, yes.

  119. Esteleth, RN's job is to save your ass, not kiss it says

    Amphiox, what you’re not considering is that until relatively recently mandatory vaccination was the status quo. Your concern trolling over “what of families whose trust is smashed” is noted, but it ignores that families until the early 1990s seemed to do okay with mandatory vaccination coupled with government compensation of people with documented vaccine injuries.

  120. says

    I don’t understand this argument at all. Just as no one should have the right to mutilate their child, they should not have the right to needlessly expose their child to possibly fatal, highly contagious diseases. Medical neglect by parents, like any other parental neglect, is abuse, and the state has the responsibility to protect children from such abuse.

  121. Saad says

    Amphiox, 130

    Somewhere out there there is a child who happens to live in a community where the prevalence of the disease in question is so low that, coupled with that child’s future lifestyle choices, which again, you CANNOT KNOW, his or her lifetime risk for being exposed to the disease, catching the disease, and then developing the severe outcomes of that disease (which is partly going to relate to that particular child’s genetics, which again, YOU DO NOT KNOW), will turn out to be even LOWER than the low risk of vaccine-related injury.

    You do not know who that child will be. Out of every 1 million random children, perhaps only 1 child will be like this. But THIS CHILD EXISTS. And if you institute a mandatory vaccination program that includes strict enforcement, you are guaranteeing that this particular child will be exposed to a greater risk than any benefit he or she will ever obtain from the vaccination. You are sacrificing this child’s wellbeing for the sake of the wellbeing of all the other children.

    1) Okay, so how will a voluntary vaccination program help this child? Or are you saying medically ignorant parents would magically know their child will have a rare deadly reaction to the vaccine and choose to not vaccinate?

    2) Somewhere out there is a child who will develop measles and die if unvaccinated. You do not know who that child will be. Out of every 1 million random children, perhaps only 1 child will be like this. But THIS CHILD EXISTS.

  122. Esteleth, RN's job is to save your ass, not kiss it says

    Incidentally, I’m baffled that “I don’t want to face the consequences of having my child vaccinated, if those consequences include a small risk of injury” outweighs “I don’t want to face the consequences of not having my child vaccinated, if those consequences include a high risk of injury.”

  123. Saad says

    Amphiox, I hope you’ll return to explain how voluntary vaccination prevents that 1 in a million rare adverse event.

  124. tulse says

    We cannot dehumanize anti-vaxxer parents as irredeemable child abusers, throw the book at them, and be done with it. Apply your human empathy and put yourself in the position of such a parent. Most of them sincerely love their children and sincerely want what is best for their children, like any other parent. Most of them SINCERELY believe that vaccines are HARMFUL to their children. The inaccuracy of their belief is immaterial to their motivations.

    This could be said about parents who believe in faith healing, or that their child is possessed and must be tortured to exorcise the demons. Sincere beliefs that are simply wrong are not sacred.

  125. says

    Amphiox
    As others have said:
    What’s the difference between voluntary vaccination and mandatory vaccination with respect to the child who has a severe reaction?
    Also, as mentioned before, within an unvaccinated population, the risks of contracting many diseases like measles is almost 100%. Of course, in a society where vaccination rates are high, risks are much smaller. Are you actually saying that because others take the infestimal small risk of the vaccination you can just cash in on the protection they off without having the least obligation to do your part?

    We cannot dehumanize anti-vaxxer parents as irredeemable child abusers, throw the book at them, and be done with it. Apply your human empathy and put yourself in the position of such a parent. Most of them sincerely love their children and sincerely want what is best for their children, like any other parent. Most of them SINCERELY believe that vaccines are HARMFUL to their children.

    Boo-fucking-hoo
    I used to have an anti-vaxxer, anti-actual-medicine person in the family. Thankfully my cousin dumped her. Her younger kid got scarlet fever, easily treatable with antibiotics. But she didn’t give him any. So he suffered. Then he contracted pneumonia. Yep, the form my kids are vaccinated against. Ad a result he was sick for SIX fucking weeks and lost way too much weight. He had to start school a year later than normal because he was so behind in his development due to the long sickness and recovery period. So, I don’t give a shit about her sincerely held idiotic beliefs. The harm that’s being caused to her is completely irrelevant to the question.
    It’s about the rights of the child

  126. consciousness razor says

    Is that not the fundamental LIBERAL policy position, that if you have a choice of two policies that can achieve the same goal, you prefer the one that involves the LEAST coercion?

    No, it isn’t. That’s more or less glibertarianism. You even have to pretend things are “the same” when they’re not.

    The fundamental liberal policy position, if we’re going to bother to say anything so general in the first place, is that the “government” is for cases when something is needed in a society and governmental/public policies/programs/institutions are the best (or only) ways to accomplish them. If it is in fact good and necessary, then there’s no point in confusing ourselves with language about it being “mandatory” or “coerced” or “forced” or “tyrannical” or whatever the fuck. If we’re forcing stuff to happen which is necessary for a good society, that’s just a fancy way of saying that we’re causing good stuff (or avoiding bad stuff). Which is a good thing to do. By definition.

  127. PatrickG says

    Has Amphiox responded AT ALL to many, MANY people pointing out that we HAD mandatory vaccination RIGHT HERE in the United States for a LONG TIME resulting in HERD IMMUNITY and NO OUTBREAKS?

    No? Okay then.

    Also, did I do the caps right?

  128. llewelly says

    cervantes:

    If you read the NYT story on this, they point out that his remarks followed Obama’s unambiguous call for parents to have their kids vaccinated.

    Christie has been singing that tune since at least 2009 : http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/02/02/christie-i-stand-with-autism-fearing-anti-vaxx-parents.html

    Rand Paul has been anti-vax his entire political career, and Ron Paul has been anti-vax since at least the middle 1990s.

    The myth that it’s all a reaction to Obama’s statements doesn’t hold any water. As always, the NYT hasn’t a clue.

  129. llewelly says

    If you get really sick, your choices will be quite constrained. If you die, your freedom is wholly gone.

    Letting anti-vaxxers spread disease doesn’t increase freedom, no matter how sincere or loving their beliefs are; instead, it takes freedom away from children.

  130. llewelly says

    My mother ranted about the evils of vaccines all the time when I was a kid, but because schools were much more careful about enforcing vaccine mandates and gave far fewer religious exemptions, I got most of my vaccinations anyway, though not on time.

    Government mandates are never perfect, but they are quite effective at preventing diseases, even when a vocal minority of the public sincerely hates vaccines.

  131. Saad says

    PatrickG, 144

    Has Amphiox responded AT ALL to many, MANY people pointing out that we HAD mandatory vaccination RIGHT HERE in the United States for a LONG TIME resulting in HERD IMMUNITY and NO OUTBREAKS?

    Still waiting on an answer to my polio question too.

  132. Esteleth, RN's job is to save your ass, not kiss it says

    On Tumblr, someone posted this:

    You know you’re a nineties kid when vaccinations were mandatory and no one in your class got measles.

    Kinda sums it up, IMO.

  133. PatrickG says

    Esteleth: That’s perfect! And describes my growing up juuuust right.

    Still can’t wrap my head around people decrying the evils of mandatory vaccination. This was only 20 years ago folks, and no, the world didn’t end nor were government supervillains engaging in random subcutaneous experiments.

  134. Beatrice, an amateur cynic looking for a happy thought says

    And there’s mandatory vaccination going on in the world right now, without the world ending.

  135. says

    Excerpts from a well-written article:

    […] In recent days, attention has turned to the philosophical and religious exemptions available to non-vaccinating parents in 19 states.

    An estimate based on state records indicates there are more than 13,000 kindergartners in California unvaccinated based on the beliefs of their parents. […]

    If you don’t want your child vaccinated, that’s your choice. But the consequence of that choice is they can’t attend a public school. We treat kids who bring some Jif peanut butter in their sandwich for lunch like terrorists who just tried to sneak a dirty bomb onto campus, but in 19 states we’re willing out of “balance” to create a public health hazard because it would hurt the feelings of anti-vax parents to tell them to their faces that their beliefs are stupid and not worth putting the larger population at risk. […]

    these are scared and confused parents making bad choices. But being scared shouldn’t be a license to put everyone else around you in potential jeopardy. […]

    We, as a society over the past 30 years have, over and over again, made the decision that public health trumps individual choices when there are public consequences. It’s the reason smokers are huddled around each other outside trying to keep warm during a lunch break. […] And yet, here we are placating people who could possibly spread contagious infections in public places, and everyone involved knows about that possibility and we’re all just waiting around for the bottom to fall out.

    It makes absolutely no sense.

    http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/02/02/1361507/-Your-right-to-believe-in-nonsense-should-end-when-you-start-spreading-a-highly-contagious-disease

    Like others up-thread, I too am worried that banning unvaccinated children from public schools will only encourage attendance at schools that are anti-education and pro brain-washing. Look at Bobby Jindal’s horrible voucher-funded schools in Louisiana, for example.

  136. zenlike says

    tulse

    We cannot dehumanize anti-vaxxer parents as irredeemable child abusers, throw the book at them, and be done with it. Apply your human empathy and put yourself in the position of such a parent. Most of them sincerely love their children and sincerely want what is best for their children, like any other parent. Most of them SINCERELY believe that vaccines are HARMFUL to their children. The inaccuracy of their belief is immaterial to their motivations.

    This could be said about parents who believe in faith healing, or that their child is possessed and must be tortured to exorcise the demons. Sincere beliefs that are simply wrong are not sacred.

    The whole screed of Amphiox can be read as “parents own their children, they can do whatever the fuck they want with them.”

    Also, indeed awaiting Amphiox’s answer to Saad’s question. But if Amphiox is logically consistent, the answer would be that the whole campaign which eradicated polio was indeed immoral.

  137. says

    It’s all the fault of illegal aliens. No, really. At least that’s what some ragged-edge-of-the-rightwing are claiming:

    An Alabama congressman with virulently anti-immigrant beliefs has a new theory on who may be causing the current measles outbreak: “illegal aliens.”

    […] Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) was asked by the host whether he saw any correlation between immigration and the measles outbreak that has erupted in the United States.

    Brooks began by offering a red herring that “illegal aliens” are bringing new diseases into the country, before going on to suggest that they could be behind measles as well.

    Said Brooks: “It might be the introvirus that has a heavy presence in Central and South America that has caused deaths of American children over the past 6 to 9 months. It might be this measles outbreak. There are any number of things.” […]

    http://thinkprogress.org/immigration/2015/02/03/3618647/mo-brooks-measles-immigrants/

  138. PatrickG says

    @ zenlike:

    I’m sure Amphiox would rather argue that the concept of bodily autonomy wasn’t well-developed back in the days of polio, and therefore your question is irrelevant. Also, xe really doesn’t like needles, or telling people what they should eat.

  139. says

    Something surprising came out of the mouth of “Fox and Friends” co-host Peter Doocy on Tuesday morning.

    “There are no two sides to the issue. Vaccines work,” Doocy said. […]

    Doocy’s strong statement of support for vaccinations contrasted with Fox’s welcoming attitude toward the many anti-vaccine activists who’ve guested on its programs over the years. Back in 2011, co-host Clayton Morris declared “Fox & Friends” to be “at the forefront” of the debate over whether childhood vaccines were linked to autism. […]

    Yes, even Fox News hosts now know that the anti-vaxxer stance is hogwash.

    Talking Points Memo published a brief history of the hogwash, which I have shortened to present the highlights below:

    February 1998, Dr. Andrew Wakefield published a research paper in British medical journal The Lancet that suggests the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine may cause autism.

    October 2001, An Institute of Medicine report concluded there was inadequate evidence to either prove or disprove that thimerosal, a preservative containing mercury that is used in small concentrations in some vaccines, may cause neurodevelopment disorders like autism. […]

    2004, The Institute of Medicine revisited the hypothesis that MMR and other thimerosal-containing vaccines may cause autism. This time, the IOM concluded there is no evidence to support that notion.

    June 2005, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. published an article, “Deadly Immunity,” in Slate and Rolling Stone alleging that government health agencies knew about a causal link between vaccines containing thimerosal and autism but tried to cover it up.[…]

    December 2006, British journalist Brian Deer published an investigation in the Sunday Times that found Dr. Wakefield was paid more than $665,000 by lawyers trying to prove that the MMR vaccine was unsafe.

    February 2008, […] Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said […] that there is “strong evidence” that a preservative in vaccines causes autism.

    April 2008, TV star and former Playboy model Jenny McCarthy […] went on CNN’s “Larry King Live” to talk about the vaccine toxins and schedule that she believes contributed to her son’s disorder. She insisted that parents’ anecdotal information “is science-based information” […]

    October 2009, […] Chris Christie (R) voiced strong support for anti-vaccine parents during an interview […] and said there needed to be more opt-outs for families who are strongly opposed to vaccines. […]

    February 2010, The Lancet retracted Wakefield’s paper […]

    January-February 2011, Slate pulled Kennedy’s “Deadly Immunity” from its website, stating that “continued revelations of the flaws and even fraud tainting the science behind the connection make taking down the story the right thing to do.”[…]

    December 2013, The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported a spike in measles in the U.S. in 2013. […] The CDC said 98 percent of those measles patients were unvaccinated. […]

    December 2014-January 2015, A measles outbreak began sometime in mid-December at California’s Disneyland Park. The CDC reported that between Jan. 1-30, at least 104 people from 14 states had contracted the virus.

    Feb. 1, President Obama responded to the measles outbreak by urging parents to vaccinate their kids in a pre-Super Bowl interview. He added that the science supporting immunizations is “indisputable.”

    Feb. 2, […] Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) [argued] that most vaccines “ought to be voluntary” and later [cited] cases he’d heard of where healthy children “wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines.”

  140. says

    Glenn Beck is frothing at the mouth.

    Last year, when Glenn Beck learned that outbreaks of diseases like whooping cough and measles were on the rise due to an increasing number of parents who are refusing to have their children vaccinated, he reacted by literally standing up and applauding those parents.

    […] Beck returned to the topic today […] While asserting that nobody wants children to get measles, Beck asserted that “there’s something happening” with the measles vaccine and the rise of children being diagnosed with forms of autism that should make people cautious about getting their children vaccinated.

    “God gave me a brain. God gave me personal choice and responsibility for those choices,” he said. “I’m going to say no to those vaccines because I’ve done my homework.”

    Beck then went on to declare that people who oppose vaccines are now being persecuted, just as Galileo was persecuted by the Catholic Church. […]

    Right Wing Watch link.

  141. says

    Pat Robertson is also foaming at the mouth:

    […] “I’m sure that there’s some serious consequences to measles and perhaps vaccinations is the answer, but I don’t think any parent should be forced by the government to vaccinate,” he said. “There was a vaccination against polio and I know the mother of a friend contracted polio from the vaccine, so all vaccines are not benign. But, so far, this one about whooping cough and diphtheria and measles has been very effective and I think it was a good thing to do, but the problem is, natural immunity is a pretty good thing and if you have some of these diseases when you’re a kid you have immunity the rest of your life.”

    Robertson linked his criticisms of vaccine mandates to water fluoridation: “I just think that we’ve got to be careful that we fall for these nostrums, you know, you have to put fluoride in all of the water because it will cut down on cavities. But what does fluoride do to people? We don’t know some of the consequences, we don’t have all of the knowledge we need and we should be very careful not to force people to do stuff that they earnestly feel they shouldn’t do.”

    Link.

  142. says

    Laura Ingraham is also frothing at the mouth.

    […] During her radio show, Ingraham went on to claim that measles is “not generally a deadly disease” — ignoring the fact that “measles is one of the leading causes of death among young children” worldwide — and to baselessly speculate that undocumented immigrants were to blame for spreading infectious diseases such as measles and TB in the U.S.

    ABC News hired Ingraham as a contributor in April 2014, despite her long history of inflammatory and misinformed rhetoric.

    Media Matters link.

  143. odin says

    Polio has not been eradicated. Variola has. Polio was pretty close to being eradicated, then some bright sparks seized on the idea that immunisation was a tool of the West to spread disease, rather than prevent it. (‘course, it’s not like western governments have given anyone good reason not to think so.) This is widespread enough in Pakistan that various Taliban-affiliated groups fight against WHO-backed attempts to inoculate people.

    I find it rather remarkable how the similarity between the US religious right and their favourite boogeyman keeps going right into fields you really wouldn’t expect.

  144. says

    More Republican politicians froth at the mouth:

    […] Wisconsin Congressman Sean Duffy shared his perspective on whether parents should vaccinate their children.

    “For me, I want that to be my choice as a parent,” the Republican congressman said, “and you know what? I know my kids best. I know what morals and values are right for my children and I think we should not have an oppressive state telling us what to do.” […]

    “I think a lot of parents who are smart, well-read — they’re the ones who are choosing not to vaccinate. And oftentimes, those who may not be as well-read — they are vaccinating. So to say you just have a bunch of crackpots who are choosing not to do this to their children, I just don’t think that’s actually true.” […]

    Perhaps the most amusing reaction of them all came from Donald Trump, who said he’s “totally pro-vaccine” and he also believe vaccines can cause “horrible autism.” (In reality, there is literally zero evidence linking vaccines and autism. Why the strange reality-show host maintains both beliefs at the same time is unclear.) […]

    Donald Trump is still contemplating another run for president of the USA.

  145. What a Maroon, oblivious says

    Glenn Beck frothing (via Lynna),
    God gave me a brain.
    I hope god gave him a decent warranty.

  146. Ichthyic says

    amphiox flailz:

    This is the last thing I am ever going to say on this forum regarding the question of mandatory vaccination for the general public, as a general policy.

    good, because you’re just embarrassing yourself, and otherwise I rather like your commentary.

    If the government suddenly mandated that you HAD to do or allow something done to your children that you SINCERELY believe is harmful to your children, how would you react?

    you seem to not want to actually pay any attention at all to the fact that it actually was EXACTLY THIS WAY for quite a long time.

    were you complaining about it then? why not?

    because you didn’t even notice… because it was working just fine.

    your arguments fall flat, are little more than straw herrings, to coin a phrase.

    I’m very glad you are providing a perspective that is… unique.

  147. Amphiox says

    I guess I’m not actually completely done.

    Most of the campaign to eradicate polio was done through voluntary vaccination. As for the parts done by mandatory vaccination, its a case by case basis. If the same outcome could have been achieved with a voluntary vaccination program instead of a mandatory one, then using a mandatory vaccination program instead would have been immoral. The ends does not justify the means. Just because it turned out for the best in the end doesn’t change anything. IF you could have done the same thing with less coercive means, choosing the more coercive method instead was an immoral choice.

    In those situations where a voluntary vaccination program was simply not possible (the target population not being educated enough to fully understand and participate in a voluntary program, for example), and the threat from polio severe enough, then a mandatory vaccination program WAS acceptable, in that case.

    The whole screed of Amphiox can be read as “parents own their children, they can do whatever the fuck they want with them.

    No it doesn’t, you fucking dishonest hypocrite. Straw-manning other people’s arguments is the lowest of the lowest tricks of the creationists and MRAs. You should know from my commenting history that on other threads I have argued vociferously AGAINST the idea that parents have the right to “do whatever the fuck they want” with their children. My “screed” has nothing to do with what parents “can” do, it is about using your human empathy to understand what they will do, and how that impacts on the practicality of enforcing a mandatory program on them and actually having that mandatory program work for the goal of increasing herd immunity. A program that cannot be enforced with a reasonable expenditure of resources, no matter how righteously it might be motivated, is a useless program, and should not be implemented.

    And this WILL be my final word, promise.

    No human being has the right to violate the bodily autonomy of another human being for his or her own benefit without the informed consent of the first human.

    You cannot compel, without their consent a human being to risk of bodily harm, no matter how small that risk, for the benefit of another human being.

    Do these statements sound familiar? They damn well should, because they came up in multiple other threads on other issues, and the agreement with them on those threads was near universal. Indeed, some of the most vociferous supporters of mandatory vaccination used those statements in their own arguments, almost verbatim.

    If you’re justifying mandatory vaccination on the grounds of herd immunity and protection of other children, how is that NOT subjecting one child to risk of bodily harm without their consent for the benefit of another? Whether the parents are the ones withholding consent or not is irrelevant. In either case the child did not consent to be subject to the risk for the sake of improving herd immunity and benefiting another. And the fact that the child in most cases CANNOT so consent doubly prohibits you from using herd immunity and benefit to other children as a justification for mandatory vaccination.

    And it doesn’t matter how small the risk is, or how great the benefit. You are not entitled to tell someone else what is or is not an acceptable risk of bodily harm for them, personally. The smallness of the risk and the greatness of the benefit are only ever valid arguments for convincing someone to participate voluntarily. It is NEVER a valid argument for compelling someone against their will with a mandatory program.

    Herd immunity and benefit to others is not and never can be, a justification for a mandatory vaccination program. It is a powerful justification for a voluntary vaccination program, but never a mandatory one.

    Only individual benefit can be a viable justification for a mandatory vaccination program. In this case if you can demonstrate that mandatory vaccination provides a measurable superior benefit to the best available voluntary program, then you have justified your mandatory vaccination program. But if you cannot, then the voluntary program should be preferred.

    That has been my position from the start. You have to justify a mandatory vaccination program by demonstrating with evidence that the best available voluntary program you can implement cannot achieve the result you want, and a mandatory one can. If you cannot demonstrate either of those conditions, then a voluntary vaccination program should be preferred.

    I fail to see how that can in any way be controversial, unless you dishonestly straw-man my position.

  148. Ichthyic says

    I guess I’m not actually completely done.

    *sigh*

    Most of the campaign to eradicate polio was done through voluntary vaccination.

    irrelevant, given that for over 30 years, it wasn’t. also irrelevant because at the time, people were regularly being horribly affected by the disease, thus making them JUMP at the chance to get vaccinated. with you logic, we should allow people to die from stupidity for a few generations… then they’ll jump at the chance to get vaccinated again. that makes you a monster.

    No human being has the right to violate the bodily autonomy of another human being for his or her own benefit without the informed consent of the first human.

    you’re strawmanning your own argument. impressive. what if it’s for the other person’s benefit? what if it’s for the other person’s benefit, the person doing the “violating”, and even the benefit of everyone else around them?

    you argument really boils down to:

    Laws? who needs em!

    seriously, that’s where you’re at, whether you choose to recognize the ridiculous corner you have painted yourself into or not.

    sad.

  149. says

    Amphiox

    No human being has the right to violate the bodily autonomy of another human being for his or her own benefit without the informed consent of the first human.

    So you’re categorically against not just childhood vaccinations but all medical care whatsoever on persons below the age of consent? That’s actually an even more evil position than the one you’ve blatantly been taking this whole thread.

  150. PatrickG says

    I fail to see how that can in any way be controversial, unless you dishonestly straw-man my position.

    Since you have yet to outline what a truly successful voluntary program would look like in the current age, of course it’s bloody well controversial.

    You cannot compel, without their consent a human being to risk of bodily harm, no matter how small that risk, for the benefit of another human being.

    Missing from this statement, as applied to all the abortion threads (e.g. violinists requiring kidneys), is the fact that in this case, the benefit is also to the child. Y’know, by offering them a chance to not suffer from preventable diseases?

    Allowing children to not be vaccinated is a risk of bodily harm. You are directly arguing that we must minimize the harm of “hard solid objects” and “foreign substances” by allowing the risk of contracting potentially deadly diseases.

    You have to justify a mandatory vaccination program by demonstrating with evidence that the best available voluntary program you can implement cannot achieve the result you want, and a mandatory one can. If you cannot demonstrate either of those conditions, then a voluntary vaccination program should be preferred.

    It is not a straw-man to notice that you are being wildly inconsistent in your own arguments. You apparently believe that vaccinating children — without their consent — can not only be done, but can be justified. Everything else just boils down to how many infected people you consider appropriate to satisfy yourself that no undue coercion was involved.

    Appears you draw that line out a lot further than most.

  151. Ichthyic says

    Allowing children to not be vaccinated is a risk of bodily harm. You are directly arguing that we must minimize the harm of “hard solid objects” and “foreign substances” by allowing the risk of contracting potentially deadly diseases.

    I swear, the jargon being tossed about keeps making me think of “precious bodily fluids” and making me wonder about Birchers.

  152. PatrickG says

    Just using the lingo at hand. :P Though, to be accurate, Amphiox used the construct “hard foreign object”, not “hard solid object”.

    O-P-E

  153. militantagnostic says

    No human being has the right to violate the bodily autonomy of another human being for his or her own benefit without the informed consent of the first human.

    This would appear to rule out any use of force in self-defence without obtaining your assailant’s permission.*

    *I am thinking of a situation where fleeing is not an option, so don’t straw man me as supporting “stand your ground” bullshit.

  154. says

    Oh Amphiox, so many words, so little substance. And now we won’t be getting all those answers you’re unwilling to give.

    Just to recap:
    “It’s about consent”
    Your argument here seems to be a, shall we say, Gish trott (cause it’s really not a gallop, though you get points for trying with the loooooooong comments and the caps).
    You acknowledge yourself that children cannot give informed consent. I think we can all agree on that. A baby at 8 weeks understands “boob” or “bottle”. “Imunology”, not so much. This means that you’re either:
    -against vaccination until the child is able to give informed consent
    -agree that somebody else needs to make that decision
    In the former case there’s nothing left to argue. In the latter case the question is why you think that parents are so much more suitable to make that decision in the actual best interest of the child given all the evidence we have to the contrary than the government.

    “vaccination is the sure risk, contracting the disease is only a potential risk”
    You’re right. To a certain level. The risk of getting measles in the USA is very low. Thanks to vaccines. With the current outbreaks, the risk of getting measles seems to be about a 1 in a million chance, the same risk as you have for a serious adverse reaction. Only that of course one is per year and the other one is in your lifetime.

    “You cannot force somebody to take a risk for the benefit of others”
    This ignores completely the benefit to the individual. There’s no herd immunity for Tetanus. Nobody vaccinates against Tetanus for the benefit of poor sick grandpa. You vaccinate to keep yourself safe. Same with diseases that rely on herd immunity: As long as the disease is not erradicated, you vaccinate to keep yourself safe. Once it’s been erradicated, you stop vaccinating. That’s why my sister has the scars on her upper left arm from mandatory (how horrible!) smallpox vaccination and I haven’t.
    Also, again: Low risk of getting the disease is due to people around you vaccinating. Welcome to society, where your decisions have an impact on others. That’s how we justify seatbelt and helmet laws: You require society to take care of you in case of an accident, you put on a seatbelt. You benefit from people around you vaccinating so your chances of getting a disease are low (direct benefit to you!), society can ask you to do your part, too.

  155. call me mark says

    I’ve not seen anyone else deal with the point that Amphiox raises in #34, claiming that anti-vaxxers “will easily find sympathetic unscrupulous healthcare professionals or others who can forge vaccination status documents.”

    So we send in stooges to ask for forged documents, and if the health professionals say yes, they get reported, and hopefully struck off.

  156. Saad says

    Amphiox,

    If you’re justifying mandatory vaccination on the grounds of herd immunity and protection of other children, how is that NOT subjecting one child to risk of bodily harm without their consent for the benefit of another? Whether the parents are the ones withholding consent or not is irrelevant. In either case the child did not consent to be subject to the risk for the sake of improving herd immunity and benefiting another. And the fact that the child in most cases CANNOT so consent doubly prohibits you from using herd immunity and benefit to other children as a justification for mandatory vaccination.

    I’m justifying mandatory vaccination on the grounds of both herd immunity and the immunity of the child being mandatory vaccinated. I give a shit about each child not getting measles or polio or any other easily preventable disease.

    Second:

    You’re pretending to care about the child who will suffer from rare vaccine adverse events. Now tell me how voluntary vaccination saves that child from those side effects? Go ahead. I’m all ears.

    Parents who refuse to vaccinate their child don’t do it because they have secret knowledge about the child’s body and know that they’ll have a side effect while the entire medical community sits oblivious to this magical knowledge. They refuse to vaccinate because they’re ignorant (at best).

    You’re contradicting yourself. You say vaccination shouldn’t be forced because there’s a child out there who will have an adverse event and then you say you support vaccination and you support persuading people to vaccinate their children.

    Which is it? Pick one.

  157. Saad says

    Your complaint about the consent of the child is of course crap. How the fuck is a baby going to consent to any medical procedure? Healthcare professionals know what’s better for the child so that’s what should be done. Stop and think for a second before posting such nonsense.

    And this WILL be my final word, promise.

    Why? You’re not bothering us. We’re calling you out on your stupid ideas.

    What a bullshit tactic to pull. I get to talk shit and just leave. Why don’t you stick your fingers in your ears too while you’re at it?

  158. says

    Even disregarding the herd immunity aspect for the sake of argument, denying vaccination for the benefit of the child is medical neglect, akin to faith head assholes allowing their own children to suffer and die of treatable and preventable diseases. I assume no one here would object to CPS intervening aggressively in those cases, violating consent/bodily autonomy to save the child, and prosecuting the parents for their crimes regardless of their “sincerely held” beliefs.*

    Like our (formerly uncontroversial) mandatory vaccination policies, criminalizing medical neglect—and that’s what withholding vaccines is, medical neglect— actually works to prevent harm to children. E.g. Oregon’s Followers of Christ, a congregation of 1,200 people: 18 children died over 10 years from curable diseases; 26 times the usual infant mortality rate. (“And it wasn’t just children: followers’ wives were dying in childbirth at 900 times the usual rate. One died of a type of infection that hadn’t killed anyone in America since 1910.”) Then Oregon eliminated religious shield defenses for “murder by abuse, murder by neglect, first and second degree manslaughter and criminal mistreatment.” For the next five years, not a single Follower of Christ died from medical neglect. Truly a miracle!

    *”Sincerely held” though objectively false and harmful religious beliefs are the underpinning for the atrocity that is the Hobby Lobby Supreme Court decision. If you’re going to hang your hat on “sincerely held” but objectively false and harmful, well…that’s some fine company you’ve got there: five right-wing SCOTUS judges.

  159. PatrickG says

    Mark, #175:

    I’ve not seen anyone else deal with the point that Amphiox raises in #34, claiming that anti-vaxxers “will easily find sympathetic unscrupulous healthcare professionals or others who can forge vaccination status documents.”

    Specious, and I believe fairly covered under the whole topic of the previously existing mandatory programs.

    The whole point of mandatory programs is that enforcement is an option, unlike a voluntary program. You also do kind of get the point that if we make the program mandatory, we remove the exceptions that exist for spurious religious* and “holistic” woo beliefs, right?

    We also have state models — some even still exist! — in which vaccinations are required for public and private schools. They’ve worked in the past, they can work again. I agree that some thought will need to be put into how to handle

    I refer you to the existing legal processes surrounding the revolutionary new concepts called fraud, reckless endangerment, and unlicensed medical practice. Lawyers could probably be more specific, but hey, it’s their job to know the proper terms. It’s why we have a legal system.

    Nobody’s saying it’s necessarily going to be easy to roll back the compromises that led us into this debacle. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t need to be done. If we’re going to concede that we can’t do this because the woo/psuedo-religious* objections have already won, well, we’re basically fucked anyway, aren’t we?

    (And yes, yes, the Nazis are coming/police state/Big Government/Big Pharma/Neptunians are out for our brain stems. Pshaw.)

    * Spurious/pseudo-religious introduced here because frankly almost no religions in America claimed this as a tenet of their faith until extremely recently. Amazing how divine revelation can come from fraudulent doctors and Jenny McCarthy.

  160. PatrickG says

    Grr, dangling sentence fragment:

    I agree that some thought will need to be put into how to handle the newly emergent homeschooling movement, but this is an obstacle, not an insurmountable barrier.

  161. Amphiox says

    Yikes.

    Do you ever wake up in the morning and wonder what the hell you were doing the previous day?

    At this point I think I need to sincerely apologize to everyone I accused of intellectual dishonesty upthread. When everyone is interpreting your arguments in the same direction is more likely to be because you are failing to convey them properly, or your original position itself was incoherent to begin with.

    I think I was emotionally triggered by something in the early part of the conversation and went irrational for a while.

    For the record I am actually in support of most existing mandatory vaccination programs (all the ones that I am actually aware of. As a physician I participate in one such mandatory program), precisely because in their planning stages they took into account the issues with the proper level of enforcement and whether or not a voluntary program would have worked instead, and went ahead with the mandatory program only after doing the due diligence on these points. My initial objections were directed at the hypothetical scenario of instituting a mandatory program without doing that initial due diligence.

    As I believe many have pointed out, doing so is pretty routine for all proposed mandatory programs, if for no other reason than that voluntary programs are usually cheaper to administer than mandatory ones.

    Some of you will doubtless point out how silly it is to get into a big argument over the issue given the above. You would likely be right.

    Now, I have a very good used shovel for sale. And does anyone have some rope?

  162. says

    Thank you, Amphiox. I was troubled by this thread. I find you an insightful commenter, and I kept parsing what you were saying wondering if I were missing something.

  163. PatrickG says

    I think I was emotionally triggered by something in the early part of the conversation and went irrational for a while.

    Good thing that never happens to me! Ahem.

    P.S. I’ll take the shovel off your hands, my last one got lost somewhere near the molten core of the Earth.

  164. Ichthyic says

    The whole point of mandatory programs is that enforcement is an option, unlike a voluntary program.

    that’s actually a good point I had not previously considered.

  165. PatrickG says

    Ichthyic: We’ll see. I’d have to track down some background information to be sure, but as I recall Brown originally proposed and signed the personal-belief exemption compromise because the anti-vaxxers were just brutally annoying. Just shut them up already and make them go away! Besides, what could the harm really be?

    To be fair, it’s not like people were screaming about this precise outcome in every possible forum. Definitely a case of Nobody Could Have Predicted!

  166. PatrickG says

    A good paper, btw, comparing waiver programs across states. In an utterly unsurprising result, states with more permissive waiver standards saw more waivers granted.

    Interestingly (as in, I wasn’t aware of this), the new compromise law appears to be having some effect already (Source: LA Times):

    Statewide, the rate of vaccine waivers for kindergartners entering school in the fall declined to 2.5% in 2014 from 3.1% in 2013. Bigger declines were seen in districts with some of the larger vaccine exemption rates.

    In the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District, the rate fell from 14.8% to 11.5%; Capistrano Unified in south Orange County declined from 9.5% to 8.6%; Beverly Hills Unified declined from 11.9% to 5%; and Laguna Beach Unified declined from 15.1% to 2%, according to The Times’ analysis.

    It’s not clear from the article how the vaccination rates for people outside the kindergarten entry pool have been affected.

    I ran across a study recently that claimed religious exemptions had spiked somewhat after the new (only moderately more restrictive) personal-belief exemption rules took effect in 2013. Can’t seem to track it down now, of course, but this was the basis for my scorn for Divine Relevation on the basis of recent events aboe.

  167. PatrickG says

    Oh, and for those suffering from low blood pressure, have a read here:

    “There is absolutely no reason to get the shot,” said Crystal McDonald, whose 16-year-old daughter was one of 66 students sent home from Palm Desert High School for the next two weeks because they did not have full measles immunizations.

    After researching the issue and reading information from a national anti-vaccine group, Ms. McDonald said she and her husband, a chiropractor, decided to raise their four children without vaccines. She said they ate well and had never been to the doctor, and she insisted that her daughter was healthier than many classmates. But when the school sent her home with a letter, Ms. McDonald’s daughter was so concerned about missing two weeks of Advanced Placement classes that she suggested simply getting a measles inoculation.

    “I said, ‘No, absolutely not,’ “ Ms. McDonald said. “I said, ‘I’d rather you miss an entire semester than you get the shot.’

    So he’s a chiropractor. I’ll just bet she sells healing crystals. Seems like a good combo!

    Members of the anti-vaccine movement said the public backlash had terrified many parents. “People are now afraid they’re going to be jailed,” said Barbara Loe Fisher, the president of the National Vaccine Information Center, a clearinghouse for resisters. “I can’t believe what I’m seeing. It’s gotten so out of hand, and it’s gotten so vicious.”

    Cry me a fucking river, Barbara Loe Fisher. The fuck is WRONG with these people?

    (To be fair, most of the article dances just shy of calling these people fucking idiots.)

  168. call me mark says

    PatrickG at 179: You seem to be violently agreeing with me. I may not have expressed myself very well, given that you seem to have read my comment as meaning the opposite of what I intended.

  169. anat says

    Melody Torcolacci at Queen’s University, Ontario is teaching anti-vax views as part of a Health 102 class. See here. Argh!

  170. anat says

    Also, here you can find the percentage of students with vaccination exemptions in any school in Washington state, based on 2011-2012 data.

    If you look at Seattle schools, the picture is as follows: Seattle Waldorf School ‘leads’ with 39.8% of the students exempt. Followed by the Home School Resource Center with 34.4%. Many other ‘alternative’, democratic, experimental and otherwise ‘hippie’ schools tend to also have high rates of exemptions. But plenty of more ‘mainstream schools have exemption rates of 8-12%.

    And in my town there is one ‘alternative’ K-8 with some 25% of the students exempt. Except this alternative school consists of several rooms within a regular elementary school whose exemption rate is 7.6%. The 2 student populations intermingle in the corridors and on the playground. The relatively low exemption rate for the elementary school is misleading.

  171. howardhershey says

    At the end of his spin about ‘voluntary’ vaccines, Rand Paul said something even more stupid: “The state does not own your children. Parents own the children.” Neither parents nor state “own” any citizen (at least in constitutional principle since the Civil War). Parents do have *responsibility* for their children. But the state also has *responsibilities* toward your (and my) children. Especially when the parents, through ignorance, stupidity (not the same as ignorance), hatred, or malignancy do not exercise proper *responsibility* for their children or other’s children. That is the reason why we, acting collectively as the state, can take away children from particularly irresponsible parents and can insist that certain things are, in fact, actual responsibilities that parents must legally provide to their children. Ask any deadbeat dad (or mom) or any child abuser. One can argue about how much and which things should be legally-mandated parental responsibilities that the state can insist on. But mandatory vaccination, at least under conditions that lead to herd immunity for most children, clearly meets that criteria of ‘state interest in the welfare of the children of that state’.

  172. PatrickG says

    @ call me mark, 190: Yes, violent agreement. Sorry, my comment was meant to expand on your brief statement, but I can easily see how it could be misconstrued. Meant to say the original point in #34 was specious, not yours.