There has been a sharp rise in the number of whooping cough cases in the US this year, with the number of cases expected to be the worst in five decades, although it was hoped at one time in the 1970s that it might be entirely eradicated.
It has not helped that unsubstantiated scares about the vaccinations have caused many parents to seek exemptions to their children being vaccinated. (See here for how the data was manipulated to falsely create the impression that there was a correlation between the vaccine and autism.) This tends to increase the chances of it spreading, affecting even those who have been vaccinated since the vaccine itself is not 100% effective. So even if your own child is vaccinated, it still runs a small risk of getting it from another child, and the risk of that happening increases with the number of unvaccinated children.
New York senator Charles Schumer is calling for a federal program to offer free whooping cough vaccines for everyone under 18 who have not been vaccinated.
This is a good idea that should be expanded so that all childhood vaccines are offered free to all. It seems crazy to not use every possible means to advance basic public health goals.
This^
From what I’ve read, many of the infected patients were vaccinated, but the vaccine they used is proving less effective than the old kind (source: http://news.yahoo.com/u-whooping-cough-outbreak-could-worst-half-century-051355523.html). Of course, I don’t pretend to be an expert on vaccines, except to impress women in bars. As irresponsible as the anti-vaccine crowd is, this particular epidemic may not be their fault.
As I implied in the post (not very clearly I suspect) if the vaccine were 100% effective, then the only people the non-vaccinators were putting at risk were their own children, which would be bad enough but at least confined to a subset of the population. But since it is not 100% effective, their own children’s illness gets passed on to others and so their actions are contributing to the epidemic.
When I was in grade school in Alaska in the 1970s, we, every single one of us, got our free vaccinations in school. One by one, each class would all march down to the nurses office and we would get that years shots. Plus the oral polio vaccine, and once a year we were all tested for TB.
I was shocked years later to find out that this isn’t standard operating procedure in all our schools.
In other words, there’d be fewer unvaccinated children to be disease vectors for other, weakly vaccinated children. I see your point.
And free booster shots! That’s another big issue, where the vaccine has worn off, but the person doesn’t re-up (and likely doesn’t even know that they’re now a vector).
wait a minute? free vaccinations? next thing you know you will be saying we need a system of taxpayer-funded, free-at-the-point-of-use healthcare for everyone!1!!!1!
i don’t remember seeing health care mentioned in the Constitution, just some crap about promoting the general Welfare, whatever that means.