Why?

[osodecanela]

We're in a measles epidemic in this state and in this country. Why?

Fact: Safe and effective vaccine with extremely rare contraindications. Have I ever seen a significant problem with it? No. Not in 35 years of medical practice, nor the four years of school prior. How many doses of this vaccine have I given or prescribed in that time? Thousands.

Fact: Transmission rate of the virus - 90%. If an active case of measles is brought into my waiting room, 90% of the people susceptible to the infection will become infected.

Fact: This vaccine has been available since 1963, which incidentally was the year I was given it.

Fact: Despite the public exhortations of folks like celebrity anti-vaxer Jenny McCarthy (who admitted publicly she got her degree in epidemiology from the University of Google), the main study linking autism to the MMR vaccine not only was discredited, its data had been falsified and the physician who authored it lost his license to practice.

I'm struggling with the clash between personal choice and individual responsibility. A parent who chooses not to vaccinate their child to me is not a caring parent, but either misinformed, or just plain irresponsible. It puts not the parent at risk, but the child and further, given the highly contagious nature of the virus, the community at risk. Before anyone out there says, "but wait, how is the community at risk, if other parents HAVE vaccinated their kids?" Babies. Infants aren't vaccinated for measles until one year of age. The infant population is protected by the having everyone else in their environment vaccinated and immune and therefore unable to carry the disease to anyone non-immune.

Comments

[matrixmann]

You know what? Inside all this discussion overseas about vaccinating and not vaccinating because it may cause personality disorders - have these people ever asked themselves how much unknown chemistry they take in by the food they eat daily?
Their daily meals are more filled with chemistry nobody knows about what this is going to cause, and they mess about a small tiny moment in their lives?

[osodecanela.livejournal.com]

The question of what our diets do for and to us is a question we ignore at our own peril - as a celiac patient only diagnosed 16 months ago, this concept strikes very close to home. My psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis are in remission now that I've removed all the gluten/wheat, barley and rye from my diet.

[matrixmann]

If consuming headlessly - what most US residents will do, as anywhere else -, it is daily poison. I don't see why this is so much less considered a concern, but instead a few small injections as a child get talked about like the consequences of Contergan (thalidomide).
Human life takes quite a few decades, so you're going to eat a lot, those few injections don't occupy that much of you lifetime, not as much as eating food.
By the way, how many people had been vaccinated since it had been discovered and how many people of them developed some kind of sickness that could be directly associated to the vaccination and nothing else?
If anyone wants to complain what vaccinations are made of, if they're more harmful than promised, they should better hand their complaints over to the pharmaceutical companies, what they think to sell as a "vaccination" to the customers, instead of trying to turn them into a personal confession.

[allanh.livejournal.com]

I'll be blunt: The two politicians who recently argued that vaccination was a choice and shouldn't be mandatory...both have families who are fully vaccinated. Hypocrites, both.

I'll be even blunter: Until a bunch of antivaxxers' kids start dying, they're going to refuse to vaccinate their children to show their defiance of government authority.

[osodecanela.livejournal.com]

A politician who believes vaccines should be a choice, can choose to vaccinate their own children or themselves or not. Advocating that its the person's decision doesn't make them a hypocrite, as much as I disagree that it should be a choice, rather than a mandate. Not acknowledging that it's an issue of PUBLIC Health, with ramifications and consequences that go well beyond the individual who goes unprotected, is irresponsible and flouts the reason that we actually have a government and regulations for the common good. For that public stance of choice, they engender both my disgust and enmity.

With regard to anti-vax parents and to be just this side of crass, I'd like to nominate the parents of any child that dies or is severely damaged as a result of the measles for a Darwin award. While I feel for the children injured unnecessarily, having those parents removed from the gene pool by their own stupid inaction, in my mind is Mother Nature adding some chlorine to the gene pool.

[furrbear.livejournal.com]

I had both rubella and measles early before the age of 4 or 5, and wide-spread vaccination. I later got both vaccinations for the boost in immunity.

I CANNOT believe that the laws requiring vaccinations before entering school were ever relaxed.

Measles, mumps, diphtheria,... all on the comeback trail with outbreaks around the country. I've wondered in FB posts when will polio make its inevitable comeback to the US?

How many children must needlessly die or suffer horrible complications from these entirely preventable diseases before parents and legislators wake up and begin to require responsible childhood vaccinations again. It's a matter of personal AND public health.

[osodecanela.livejournal.com]

I'm a bit older than you and I grew up with kids who had suffered polio. I had German Measles in the '64 epidemic, I personally know several men who lost their fertility due to the mumps. Unlike many of the parent who've chosen not to vaccinate their kids, these diseases aren't hypothetical risks; they were part of my personal experience. I have a tiny modicum of sympathy for their ignorance. (Note I said tiny.) However, not educating themselves appropriately when they have accepted the responsibility of being parents, angers me more than I can describe.

By the way, I've had 5 cases of whooping cough in my office within the past year.

[furr-a-bruin.livejournal.com]

My mother was born in 1922; she not only saw kids she knew get polio and other diseases now preventable with vaccines - she saw it happen to more kids in her career as a primary-grades schoolteacher. As you might imagine, she had ZERO patience with anyone avoiding vaccines, unless the child had a valid medical reason for not being vaccinated - allergy to the vaccine, immune dysfunction, etc.

I'm at the point of saying FUCK "personal choice" - unless the kid has a medically certified reason as above to not be vaccinated, they either get the shots as scheduled - or the parents get to homeschool their little germ-wagons. Period, full stop, ZERO exceptions. (And you know what? That's pretty much how it is in Mississippi and West Virginia. Mississippi, for all the lists it winds up at the bottom of, has the HIGHEST vaccination rate in the country.)

It's just sick that within my lifetime we conquered smallpox, wiped a host of diseases out of the developed world and were making steady progress elsewhere - only to have these fuckwits bring them back. I can only imagine that part of the reason is that this generation of "parents" haven't personally seen the horrors these vaccine-preventable illnesses can produce.

I think this is an excellent article on the subject: http://www.skepticalob.com/2015/01/what-everyone-gets-wrong-about-anti-vaccine-parents.html