A San Francisco station does a better job of taking pertussis seriously in its report; it says it can be deadly for infants and children.
But then it talks to a citizen.
“Hopefully people will catch it when their kids are showing symptoms and they’ll get treated right away and keep them away from other people,” said Katie Kresnak, [whose three children attend school in the district.
…
All of Kresnak’s three children have current Tdap shots, but she says other parents chose not to vaccinate.
“It’s frustrating to me, but of course people have their own reasons for doing things like that and I have to respect that, but its times like this that put other people at risk so that is a little frustrating,” said Kresnak.
No. No you really don’t have to respect that, and you shouldn’t. There is no such imperative, and in fact you shouldn’t because people have bad reasons and they are endangering their own children and other people’s.
(Ok one possible not-unreasonable motivation for not vaccinating or for delaying it is if one child had a bad reaction. We were told about one such case yesterday and that’s understandable. It’s ok to respect that, while still urging vaccination. But that’s it.)
On the whole, no it isn’t respectable, especially in cases where the parents have “researched” the matter thoroughly and come the the dumbest possible conclusion.
Thing is, those kids who shouldn’t take a vaccine for medical reasons? They are generally OK unless a lot of people start opting out for no good reason.
It is time to make parents give their kids vaccines. They are harming other people. If someone dies from whooping cough, maybe they can sue the parents who did not vaccinate their kids
karmacat:
I get what you’re saying here, but how would you be able to trace it back to a specific child?
I postedon a previous post about this: last year my child (who is fully vaccinated) got a (milder) case of whooping cough from an unvaccinated, sick child whose parents sent her to camp still coughing up a storm. My child, *though fully vaccinated*, still got very, very sick and coughed for three months–had he not been vaccinated, I believe he would have been hospitalized and maybe even died. Thanks, parents who won’t vaccinate their kids! Thank you very much! (and by thank you, I actually mean f*** you).
Hey, I respect a parents’ right to do nothing but pray over their sick kid while they lay dying from an easily preventable/treatable disease.
….NOT! Luckily, the courts have at least started coming down on the right side in these cases.
I seem to remember public schools not allowing kids to attend if they weren’t vaccinated ‘back in my day’. Then again, I grew up in the military, and we were absolutely required to be vaccinated.
Well, here’s an idea: let’s hold parents responsible for the harm they inflict on their own child. If a child gets whomping cough because the parents decided not to vaccinate, they are held responsible for the pain and suffering because they actually inflicted it on the child the same way as if they hit the child and strangled them.
I think there’s some difficulty here in the overloading of the word “respect”. You can “respect the choice” of another person in the sense that you are not going to attempt to interfere with that choice once it has been made. In that sense, for example, I “respect the choice” of parents who choose to Creationist-homeschool their kids. I don’t think it should be illegal, I’m not going to like firebomb their house or something to stop it, heh… But of course I don’t “respect” that, I think it’s awful!
In terms of vaccination, I think it ought to be required for public schools and such, but I don’t generally favor forcing people to get a medical procedure with no way of opting out of it. So in that sense I “respect the choice”, and I think a lot of people feel the same way. But because of the overloading of the word “respect”, I think sometimes people get confused, and because they feel they need to “respect the choice” in the limited sense of allowing it to happen, that they must also “respect the choice” in the broader sense of not saying what an awful terrible choice it is.
I dunno, my two cents.
@jamessweet
While I get what you are saying, when your choice actively puts others in harms way, whose rights are being infringed. If I get into my car, having not slept in 48 hours and heavily intoxicated, is it my right to do something even though it puts me at risk or am I doing something dangerous enough to be a risk to other people and should that be criminal?
Vaccination should be like taxes, something that almost everyone does to help maintain the society for the betterment of everyone. Yes, some people will be exempt. Individuals with allergies or other dangerous reactions to vaccines, shouldn’t have to get them, but if the vast majority of people are vaccinated, then they will benefit from herd immunity.
I think people who refuse to vaccinate for any reason other than legitimate medical issues, should be quarantined, just like anyone who poses a health risk to the population would be.