Anyone who opts to not vaccinate should be quarantined and isolated before their dangerous idiocy sickens or kills....we left the Middle Ages behind - want to go back? Then live in a bubble....
10
These stupid parents should bear the entire medical cost for their children’s treatment. As far as I am concerned this should be the ONLY “pre-existing condition” that insurance companies should use. No vaccines, no insurance. County, state and federal programs shouldn’t have to pay for these costs either.
92
Time to change the laws. This wake-up call needs to be headed across the country, making vaccination mandatory for all children. The rights of the few do not outweigh the rights of the many.
13
One simple proposal to curb the spread of measles: if your child isn't vaccinated, your child doesn't attend public schools.
15
It is time to clean up the vaccines, remove toxic metals like aluminum and mercury, remove carcinogens like formaldehyde, remove human aborted fetal cells, remove animal serum, make vaccines great and test them properly. Until that day comes, anyone who has researched them properly will refuse them.
5
So, science virtually eliminated a significant disease from the United States. Then, a selfish and misguided group of parents prevented their children from receiving the readily-available vaccination. The result: the previously-eliminated disease has again taken hold. To the extent that one infected person infected 147 others through contact at a California amusement park, and one Orthodox Jew in New York City infected 64 others. And there are people who still maintain the parents who don't vaccinate their kids are not both irrationally selfish and ignorant? I'm not in favor of over-regulation, but sometimes appropriate laws are required for the public good. This is clearly such a situation.
12
Maybe parents who refuse vaccines should be reminded that most likely Helen Keller had measles as an infant.
13
So much for 'Mother knows best'. By deciding to not get the kids immunized she puts them in harms way and also brings her neighbors kids into risk.
Its a good thing that communities don1t attack their neighbors as witches and medicine men.
6
My three children are all vaccinated. But, it’s not that simple. Vaccines cause significant injury and death. Here is a recent case where the Court determined that the vaccines killed the baby. There are literally thousands more cases of death and injury.
https://ecf.cofc.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/show_public_doc?2013vv0611-73-0
Dr, Gregory Poland, the leader of Mayo’s Vaccine Research Group, and very pro-vaccine, has recently questioned the safety and efficacy of the MMR.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3905323/
2
So sad to know that a discredited British doctor, Andrew Wakefield (who had his medical license to practise revoked in the UK) is now selling his snake oil to libertarian, flat-earthers in the USA.
Who could gainsay this comment by a doctor who works for GSK (I suppose the flat-earthers will pass it over) that's well-worth a read:
" With the exception of clean water, no other health intervention rivals vaccination in its ability to save lives". Dr Thomas Breuer, chief medical officer at GSK Vaccines,
“The world is looking more towards preventative medicine and vaccination is a strong pillar of this approach,” says Dr Breuer. “Many of the products we have in development are the result of collaboration. We invite technological expertise. What we are good at as a company is the ability to run large clinical trials, scale up a vaccination candidate and respond with high-quality production in large volumes.”
But vaccine science risks becoming a victim of its own success, says Dr Breuer. In the absence of the killer diseases that vaccines prevent, we forget how devastating they can be, and risk losing sight of the importance of future innovation. Immunisation is also a critical weapon in the fight to limit the spread of antibiotic resistance, which is caused by overuse of the drugs. Vaccinating people is an effective way to prevent them getting infected in the first place with the likes of bacteria causing pneumonia – removing the need to take antibiotics.
3
@Man of Whaw
Just to update you on the situation, two government whistleblowers have now confirmed the vaccine/autism coverup. And the Wakefield study has now been exonerated in the UK high court, pharma-connected Rupert Murdoch had sent a pharma hitman after Wakefield to do a smear job. Wakefield’s findings have now been reproduced around the world.
Thanks for endangering the U.S. population, anti-vaxers. You bought into the misinformation campaign about vaccines, pushed for your right to allow your children to spread communicable diseases, and re-started a once dead epidemic of measles.
The elected officials who went along with the misinformation should at least be censured for bills allowing people not to vaccinate.
Nobody likes to be told what to do, and comply against their will. But if your actions create little angels of death and encephalitis, there are a couple options.
Hold your nose and have your kids vaccinated, or prepare to be quarantined for life. Necessities can be delivered to you, but you must always stay in your house.
That's not a great way for kids to grow up, and would cost taxpayers a lot to quarantine you, but someone has to protect the country from your irresponsibility.
6
That’s uncalled for!!! Vaccinate your children. In my time there wasn’t any vacination and I lost my hearing. I’ve seen other friends lost their hearing, sight and no hair. Get vaccinate!!! Just make sure no mercury and check health wise too.
7
As anti vaxxers send their kids to school relying on others to be vaccinated they are putting a disease loaded gun in their kids hands.
Every sneeze from an unvaccinated kid at school can fire germs and bacteria at all the other kids and teachers. Those unvaccinated kids need to be treated like they brought a weapon to school.
4
The weird thing is that at the height of the birther craze, the Northwest had one of lowest "crazy quotients" in America. More people rejected that atavistic, non-fact based, scare mongering than most parts of the country. What's next - polio? the Black Death?
3
Mississippi is far less accommodating than any of the states mentioned in this article.....and they haven't had a measles outbreak since last century.
Its too bad that Oregon, Washington, Texas and Colorado are willing to sacrifice so many children in the name of religious freedom. Religious freedom that those so inflicted will never get the chance to enjoy. What ever else they are in Mississippi, they are not stupid about vaccinating their children.
8
Can we call the experiment concluded, the consequences accurately predicted, the results definitively negative, the idea a really bad one, the practice categorically irresponsible, the concept an abject failure and go back to mandatory vaccinations for all, sans health issues?
Obviously viruses don't die out, they wait it out. With the really cute irony here of vaccinated parents not being at risk from their infected children.
9
@European American
Pharma vaccines are not safe for market, they need stiff regulation, no wonder nobody wants the vaccines.
Those parents who choose not to vaccinate their children depend on the rest of us having the vaccinations. They know epidemics would occur if nobody was vaccinated but their child, unvaccinated, can be relatively safe with the general population taking this preventive measure. Pretty selfish.
8
@Tom Neary
The viruses make you stronger, leaving you immune to various cancers. It is selfish of parents not to take the time to research what is going on and instead to fall for propaganda from the same industry who have given us the opioid crisis.
1
Like drunk or disorderly airline passengers who force unscheduled diversions, I would like to see anti-vaccine parents held financially liable for the chaos they cause in their communities.
5
@TomF
It is pharma who need yo be held accountable for causing so much asthma, epilepsy and ezcema with their vaccines. The vaccines are causing a lot more harm than good.
When can we look forward to smallpox and polio making a comeback?
We are entering a new Dark Ages.
3
@Decent Guy
Small pox eas eradicated by using quarantine, Polio turned out to be DDT poisoning
@Decent Guy
Small pox was eradicated by using quarantine, Polio turned out to be DDT poisoning
Washington state should enact legislation similar to California immediately. Children not vaccinated cannot attend public schools. There should be no exemptions for philosophical or religious beliefs. There are no excuses for running red lights or stop signs. How is vaccination different? Misinformation or ignorance is no excuse to absolve responsibility for harm to others. Public health is paramount.
13
@ Scientist
The problem with that approach is how are we to incentivise pharma into investing in safer vaccine technology if they know we are all forced to receive their current risky vaccines anyway.
We have to allow natural market forces to do there bit, that means if vaccines are too risky and in some cases causing more harm than good, we need to allow people to avoid them, then pharma will be forced to make better vaccines.
Not vaccinating a child may be an exercise of parental rights, but it’s also a violation of the rights of every immunocompromised person in the country. Nobody has the right to endanger another individual by ignoring scientific advice.
14
@Anne
Vaccines warn on the insert that the recipient should keep clear of immunocompromised for 2 weeks post vaccination, yet we are not quarantining the recently vaccinated. The reality is that an immunocompromised individual has a lot more to worry about than just the childhood viruses that pharma want us to vaccinate against, there are many more pathogens which can take them down, so certainly no reason for healthy individuals to put their own health at risk with vaccines.
1
The United States, where individuals only support government enforcement of policies when something bad happens to the individual or a loved one close to him/her.
Why universal health care is growing more and more popular.
3
@Blaise, not that I'm not a supporter of Universal health care, but having spent time in Canada, I can say that it's no guarantee that people won't be stupid. Even when its free, Canada gets regular local outbreaks of things like meningitis - particularly, but not exclusively outside large urban centres and involving those with fundamentalist views (religious, anti-government, or otherwise).
@Blaise
The majority of antivaxxers have either lost a loved one from vaccine damage, or had one of their children left disabled by a vaccine. That is why the movement is growing so fast, as the US childhood vaccine schedule is now bigger than ever before. It is just a matter of time until the numbers are so big that the vaccine industry will be taken down once and for all, with the criminals who run it brought to justice.
I've read so many articles creating hysteria about measles and promoting vaccination. But in every one of them, the majority of the population IS vaccinated. So has anyone taken the time to survey the limited number infected parties to determine how many of them have received the vaccination? Why not? What if the results showed that many or MOST of the infected folks had actually received their vaccinations? These articles always blame anit-vax contingent, but hasn't anyone ever stopped to consider that the vaccination simply isn't working?
3
The health department does report on this. Of the 50 confirmed cases in Clark County, 43 were unimmunized, 6 cases were unverified (they couldn’t provide immunization records probably) and 1 received 1 MMR vaccine.
10
The article clearly stated that Clark County has an immunization rate below the rate necessary to have herd immunity. 78-93. Exemptions should be for very few specific medical reasons. If parents of healthy children won't vaccinate, they should be legally required to isolate. No school. No shopping. No restaurant. Nowhere but their own homes.
7
@C
They have taken the time, and no, the vast majority of people infected with measles were not vaccinated. Google is your friend, give it a try:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.usnews.com/news/healthiest-communities/articles/2019-02-05/washington-measles-outbreak-hits-50-cases-as-more-states-report-infections%3fcontext=amp
2
Whether it is cancer, Parkinson’s, or autism, there is often no satisfying explanation for why certain people get diseases and others don’t. Many of these conspiracy theories or unsubstantiated claims about vaccines are simply attempts at regaining control over a situation in which one has little influence.
Unfortunately, risk is part of living and and we are not entitled to a life without hardship just because we are an intelligent species. There are still many diseases we don’t understand or have a cure for. The last thing we need is to let a misinformation campaign and blind faith undermine a tried and true solution to a once serious health problem.
7
Are you sure they aren't calling a measles party an epidemic? I mean these 30 people were all at the SAME location. I imagine the vaccinated one was the one that had to go to the hospital. This is frightening that someone is considering this an epidemic!
2
@Patrick The fact you seem to think a "measles party" is, in any way, an acceptable activity scares me terribly. It should be illegal. The parents responsible should be prosecuted for child abuse. It's 2019. not 1819. The chances of dying or becoming disabled is much greater from having the disease than from any vaccination.
8
I guess since this is a relatively easy thing to misunderstand, let me explain. When your first exposed to say, the measles for example, you are then spreading the measles to anyone that hasn’t been inoculated, in turn they are spreading the measles to anyone that hasn’t been inoculated, because of the “incubation” period, you haven’t started showing any symptoms, but you’re spreading measles to anyone that hasn’t been inoculated, so as you can see, what starts out as a small group of infected children, quickly becomes a pandemic, then an epidemic.
This is relatively easy to fix, since the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, that public health is more important than, the willfully ignorant few, everybody must be vaccinated. It seems like we as a society want to enforce certain “rights” like the right to keep and bear arms. Yet it seems like the violating my right not to be exposed to a disease that there is a safe, proven vaccination for, is overlooked or, considered unimportant. And what’s worse is, people are hiding behind religion, as a means of furthering of their anti-vaccination campaign.
Not to mention the brazen stupidity by elected officials in the State of Washington’s Legislature, is even more unbelievable, since most of them would remember getting our vaccinations at school. We brought home our permission slips, and lined up the next day to get our vaccination, Rubella, German Measles, the flu, no shots, no school, simple.
2
I had measles when I was 6 years old in 1961 and I was sicker than a dog. My children were all vaccinated and I know parents who's children are deaf due to complications with measles.
Only Public Health Doctors should be exempting children from receiving vaccines due to health reasons, the rest of the unvaccinated kids must be banned from schools, rec programs and even passports. They are vectors for catastrophic epidemics just because of their uneducated science denying parents opinions.
152
@Margaret
Emphatically agree.
My mother and her sister had measles when they were very young. Both became deaf.
To keep the numbers of unvaccinated people low enough to protect others should be our public health goal. Exemptions from vaccinating a child should be for exceptional health reasons, and not done by the child's pediatrician as a "favor" to an uneducated parent.
30
@Margaret
If we compare sickness from measles i.e. mild and short-term, against the injury from vaccine i.e. lifelong and severe, you will see that the debate is not so simple. You can not go around ‘saving’ healthy people from a natural and mild virus, but then causing lifelong disabilities far worse than the virus.
Clearly pharma have a conflict, they make more from long term disease, so measles is not profitable for the, whereas lifelong vaccine complications makes you into a customer for life, good news for shareholders.
1
@Common senseThe Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database contains information on UNVERIFIED reports of adverse events (illnesses, health problems and/or symptoms) following immunization with US-licensed vaccines. Reports are accepted from anyone and can be submitted electronically at www.vaers.hhs.gov. Also, disingenuous to not credit the success of the vaccination and hint that measles is not dangerous because no-one has died from it in the last 20 years (another unverified statement)
16
Unless unvaccinated children are kept in airtight bubbles measles will spread. What good does keeping that child out of school do when it can be spread in any public place. So what can we do to protect those who need to be protected from those who choose not to vaccinate? Those who choose not to vaccinate assert that the right to make that choice many times claim that the choice is based on a "valid" belief that vaccination may result in harm. Is that a valid basis for a decision not to vaccinate? For those of us who remember when polio was a real threat we know that a vaccination against polio did present a real risk. But that risk was very small in relation to the number protected. The decision was made to vaccinate all against polio even at the cost of harm to some because no other alternative could protect almost all and the reality that everything comes with a cost That is the reality of human life
4
Now that there’s an emergency, maybe the state will override the stupid objections of the selfish and idiotic parents and guardians who refuse to vaccinate their children and make sure all are vaccinated. These parents have injured their children. This is one time when it can be truly said that they have only themselves to blame.
22
Willfully ignorant and/or stupid.
There is a cure (no vaccine...) for stupid: education.
There is no known cure for willful ignorance.
17
@HapinOregon Well...historically, some people who get measles die.
Arrest the parents who don't vaccinate for child abuse -- their own children and the children of others unfortunate enough to be exposed to their child.
The ignorance of some people is what gave us a lunatic conman in the WH and that same ignorance is now allowing a disease to spread that was literally wiped out in the US.
14
What if it was the small pox, or polio, that we were talking about, the consequences would be much worse. These people that are so willing to risk the long term health of their children because they believe the anti-vaccination trope, should pay some sort of penalty for willfully putting their children and the public at risk. Regardless, this is an easy problem to fix, the Washington State Legislature should pull their heads out of their collective....umm...sand pits, and put the public interests above those who are either willfully ignorant, or those that hide behind religion as an excuse for not vaccinating their children.
When I was in grade school, in Seattle, in the mid 1960s, every year, at the beginning of the year, we brought home our permission slips, the next day, we would line up in the lunchroom, and they would have all the filled syringes needles covered with their white caps, neatly lined up on the tables that had been covered with the blue hospital draping, and you had to hear the crying and wailing of the kids in line in front of you, of course you put on your bravest face, to no avail. Your parents had a choice, they could either produce a Drs note saying that they had the vaccinations or that they were allergic to the ingredient(s) in the vaccination. Absent that documentation, you child wasn’t allowed into school.
Not to mention, these are probably the same people that think the earth is flat.
1
@Amanda Bonner
It is worth noting that two government scientists have now confirmed the vaccine/autism coverup, so people do need to be arrested for crimes against humanity, but it most certainly is not the parents who deserve millions in compensation for what they have been put through.
1
It is very difficult to dissuade an anti-Vaxxer as that belief has become a core part of their psychological identity. They will not let it go without direct harm to themselves or someone they live. And, sometimes not even then.
The best thing to do is ban personal and religious exemption from vaccination. Let the political chips fall where they may.
29
I wonder how the MMR fraud lawsuit is going.
2
Someone reminded me that unvaccinated children aren't just a threat to themselves. They are also a threat to children too young to become vaccinated. There are age limits on when vaccinations should be administered.
This is the definition of religious tyranny. A 6 month old child might die because some fanatic never vaccinated their 5 year old. Does that mean your child can't visit a playground until they are 16 because some faith says vaccinations are inappropriate? No one should tolerate this sort of insanity.
Religion is a right. Vaccination is mandatory.
24
If the show Law and Order were still being produced, it should have an episode in which someone is put on trial for the death of an infant who caught measles from the defendant's unvaccinated offspring, I'd vote to convict.
9
@Oriflamme That episode has been done. The mother was not convicted, I don’t believe.
3
@Oriflamme
Fix the vaccines, make them work, make them safe, then everyone will be happy
My husband is a Physician. Years ago he took a picture of a polio ward to the office to show people who didn't think it important to protect their children. He also suggested they visit old cemeteries and mark the numbers and ages of the dead children (and adults as well). Too many people today don't know history and I think they really, deep inside believe that even if something bad happens they can always go to the hospital and sort it out. The ignorance astounds me. Perhaps it will take years of perfectly preventable horrors before things change. And Jenny McCarthy owes the world a huge apology. A little contrition wouldn't hurt.
22
@lh
Many experts are now saying that what we thought were polio outbreaks was in fact DDT poisoning which has the same symptoms.
It’s beyond reason that a measles outbreak is a health crisis in the 21st century. Vaccines are effective. Period. A parent who is also an antivaxxer doesn’t have their facts straight and is just being willfully ignorant of the risks, while hypocritically dependent on the immunity of children who are inoculated. Herd mentality will only get these people so far.
12
@MissyR
We need safe vaccines, industry is refusing to invest money into making vaccines safe, until that changes, expect the antivax movement to keep growing and rightfully so.
@Pedro Sorry. They are as safe as can be made now. Perfect, no, they never will be perfectly safe. Regardless, anyone who refuses vaccination for themselves or their children for any reason but a valid medical cause put the entire public at risk. That is not acceptable. It should be illegal.
8
Naturally, you don’t add links supporting your assertion, which is a false assertion, vaccinations have been proven safe for decades. The so called “anti vaxx” movement as you call it, is a threat to public health, and until it can be scientifically proven that vaccinations are more harmful than the diseases they protect us and the public at large, should be forced to get vaccinated. The needs of the many, outweigh the needs of the willfully ignorant.
Maybe you would feel differently if London had a Bubonic Plague outbreak or a Small Pox outbreak, or Scarlet Fever. Vaccinations do not contain any live bacteria, the idea behind a vaccination is to trick the body’s autoimmune response to recognize what the Measles bacteria looks like (on a microscopic level), without getting to technical (I don’t want to overwhelm you with facts), but here, just in case you want to edify yourself.
https://www.vaccines.gov/basics/safety/index.html
https://www.healthychildren.org/English/safety-prevention/immunizations/Pages/Vaccine-Studies-Examine-the-Evidence.aspx
1
I grew up before the common vaccines were widely available and to this day I remember with complete horror the experience of contracting and suffering through measles among others.
This perspective made my support for vaccines immediate and permanent, a state of belief that I reserve for those things I don’t fully understand but readily grasp their benefit, such as how a wing makes airline travel possible, that transistors allowed computers to develop, and yes, vaccines to eradicate disease.
To those that deny the profound positive effect vaccines have made in this world, using rationales that would make a pharaoh’s physician proud, I challenge you to quit using all modern medicine. Because I wouldn’t wish suffering upon you, I will gladly supply you with all the leeches you need to heal yourself.
The option to not use vaccines is utter insanity except in very specific instances. The role of government to enforce preventable diseases with proven medical science is an example of it failing to serve the public faithfully and kowtowing before a mad minority that willfully puts everyone’s life at risk for reasons that surely can be defined as profoundly narcissistic.
16
@K. Johnson
Myself I had measles, mumps, chicken pox, whooping cough, rubella, along with hand, foot and mouth. None of it was a problem, it makes you stronger, you get time of school which is nice. These natural viruses leave you immune to a number of cancers. They also leave you with lifelong immunity, unlike vaccines.
Were the parents of these non vaccinated kids vaccinated by their parents 30-35 years earlier? How’d that turn out?
86
@Bascom Hill
Of the studies comparing vaccinated Vs unvaccinated we see that the unvaccinated are in far better health, with lower rates of asthma, eczema, epilepsy, neurological disorders, MS and much more. While they are more likely to catch childhood viruses, those are generally mild and short-term, and are known to leave protection against various cancers.
2
@Pedro - please site your sources and if they are not scientifically valid then don’t bother. As a pediatric neurologist I completely disagree with your statement regarding people being neurologically healthier (re: MS, epilepsy..) if they don’t get vaccinated.
Take epilepsy, individuals with an underlying propensity to have seizures are far more likely to have seizures when they are ill with a viral infection (like the flu). The seizures could be serious and lead to ER visits and ICU admissions. Illnesses tend to lower the seizure threshold, therefore if you can prevent them (with vaccines) it is better for the person with epilepsy.
Children with severe neurological disabilities are often in and out of the hospital this time of year because of respiratory infections (flu, RSV). These maybe minor viral URI’s to you, but to someone who can’t clear their airway this becomes a crisis. Not every illness has a vaccine, but it is the fool who does not vaccinate themselves and their child when recommended.
77
Yes, their parents likely were vaccinated, and didn't contract measles. Apparently, however, it did affect their brains, leaving them incapable of rational thought and impervious to reason.
33
I am old enough to have had the measles when I was seven. Fifty-plus years later I still remember - the darkened room to try to prevent damage to my eyesight, hallucinations from the fever, baths in cold water to try to break the fever, house calls from the doctor, confinement. Sickness and misery for two weeks for me and my parents. There was no treatment, no medicine, nothing - the disease simply ran its course.
For my parents and others of their generation, every vaccine was a blessing.
I think so, too. My daughter got every vaccination available.
25
I came down with the measles in March when I was in kindergarten. That was more than sixty years ago and the vaccine was so new that many children were not yet vaccinated. I was so sick that I missed the rest of that school year. all I remember is lying in bed day after day with the shades drawn and having my grandmother come in the afternoons to read to me and give my mother a break. My younger brother, age 3, was given the new vaccine immediately. He never came down with measles. Yes, I recovered after 3 months, but I was susceptible to various illnesses, including bronchial pneumonia, for the next couple of years (and received any preventive vaccine that became available). I wish these "caring" parents who don't vaccinate their children could realize that measles can be a very serious illness
38
Thank you to all you parents who refused to vaccinate your children because of some misbegotten, misinformed belief that vaccinations cause any number of illnesses. Your irresponsible behavior now is a health threat for hundreds of others. And where is the law in WA that could outlaw "exemption"??? Get busy and pass it!!
21
Microbes: stronger than God?
3
An unvaccinated individual faces contracting the disease. They must then recover from a serious illness with potentially debilitating complications and possible death. Worse, they serve as an efficient vector that helps speed the contagion to other unvaccinated individuals. All that weighed against a nebulous connection to autism, what's a parent to do? What if we are talking polio? small pox? It may well be that the least will bring us down. You find them under microscopes, in the air and in fluids. These tiny entities are constantly reinventing themselves. Vaccinate.
10
@richard wiesner The connection to autism is not "nebulous." It is non-existent.
The resources spent studying it over and over draw resources away from research, treatment, and support for those who have autism. I'd a million times rather have an autistic child than a dead one.
Thanks.
- the father of an autistic child
19
As I understand it there have already been multiple pediatric deaths from the Flu. Therefore I hope that everyone posting here complaining about parents that don't have their kids vaccinated have gotten their Flu vacation. Even though the Flue vaccine is not as effective as the measles vaccination it is still better than nothing.
6
parents who don't vaccinate and whose children get sick should be prosecuted for child abuse.
18
It is just plain stupid not to get your kids vaccinated these day unless you have a medical reason!
14
This does seem like the absolute ultimate last word in first-world problems: parents choosing against vaccines that desperate parents the world over would give their eyes for.
27
One way to influence the parents judgement is for the insurance companies to NOT pay for the care of an infected individual IF they were not immunized.
Deciding not to have your child immunized is parenteral malpractice. Children and the community should not have to suffer the consequences of parents willful ignorance.
18
It is shameful that WA state, home of the Gates Foundation (and my family), willfully puts its residents at risk by allowing a small but vocal minority to intimidate the legislature into allowing parents to forego vaccinations for their children. As a university biologist who has worked with schools on vaccination issues, I have interacted with several state legislators over the years. Most of them understand the public health risks of allowing unvaccinated kids in schools, but they lack the courage to stand up to intimidation from ignorant constituents. Previous proposals to eliminate personal exemptions have not even made it out of committee, much less been voted on. There is a bad convergence in this region between the ignorant conspiracy theorists and the techerati who think that because they can write computer code, they can also "hack" epidemiological literature and micro-manage their kids' disease risk. People are entitled to make foolish decisions when only they face the consequences, but they should not expect to have access to public services like schools where other kids and their families are exposed to risks they did not choose.
234
@EB Agreed. Unfortunately, ignorance is humanity’s default setting.
14
@EB. You’re saying the the right to decline participating in a medical injection is bad? You want communism, go to another country! We also have freedom of religion on the US. You have the freedom to participate in child sacrifice as your religion (acceptably sacrificing children to injury and death for the greater good) and I have a right to my Christian beliefs. If you don’t like this right, leave America, stop trying to take away American’s rights.
1
Ignorance is a scary thing; but now I see that is even more scary when someone as educated as you seem to be, is ignorant of the other side of the story. I have been reading about vaccines for seven years; I have found absolutely nothing good about them. Vaccines have never been tested as other pharmaceutical products have to be; vaccines have serious side effects that are never disclosed and even hidden from the public; even though you can request for the insert. You are insinuating that an institution or government agency should have the power to force families to do something against their will. You are asking that our civil rights, our liberties be violated; this is a preposterous proposition. If you took the time to watch and listen, you will see and hear that families that don’t vaccinate is because they have informed themselves; maybe you should too...
2
My friends, with postgraduate degrees from Stanford & Sorbonne, spent hours trying to educate me on the dangers of vaccination. There seems to be an entire ecosystem of antivaxxers out there, a closed loop where beliefs and paranoia bounce around the container of enlightened self-righteousness. Vaccination has to be mandatory and fines steep, otherwise i don;t see a way out of this.
31
The recently vaccinated are a match in a can of gasoline, as live vaccines like MMR shed, a danger to the immunocompromised.
No doctor can predict who will be harmed by vaccines, liability free products which have not been properly tested against placebo, and not tested for carcinogenicity and mutagenicity.
Medical exemptions are wholly inadequate to protect vulnerable children and adults from being permanently injured by vaccines.
2
@Chaplin They do not "shed". That is completely inaccurate.
20
@Mark
the immunocompromised are advised to avoid those recently vaccinated with live virus vaccines.
@Chaplin
Please, provide evidence for your assertions.
7
Surely it is time to enact laws that would be severe deterrents to not getting your children immunised, this is nuts.
22
@Mark Bau
Laws are needed to force pharmaceuticals to test their injections properly, we need go be measuring all kinds of health outcomes including mortality, vaccines need to be based on sound science otherwise they are a religion, not a science.
1
@Pedro Those laws are in place and have been for decades.
The science behind vaccines is exceedingly sound, and it's pure tinfoil hattery to believe otherwise.
18
Some preventable diseases are extremely serious, e.g. the zoster vaccination for older folks who had chicken pox as a child. Failure to have the vaccine can lead to very severe skin lesions and pain, and more severe complications such as blindness.
9
@Bill
Since we started vaccinating against chicken pox, the shingles rate has been on the rise, however while shingles is painful, it is not particulary dangerous, whereas the vaccine does leave long-term damage in a significant % of recipients, which is why many doctors are refusing to push it.
@Pedro As a doctor, and I am not aware of doctors in the USA not recommending this vaccine. Shingles can cause a lot of suffering, but occasionally it is very dangerous, as in the case of a patient I am aware of where the zoster was not confined to the skin, but also caused encephalitis and permanent blindness.
20
@Pedro
What are those long-term damages and what is this significant % of recipients?
6
As a Pediatric Infectious Disease physician it remains incomprehensible that parents would not vaccinate their young children. I have been practicing for over 25 years and can’t count the number of times I have diagnosed a vaccine preventable illness in a child. What is heart breaking is when I then have to turn to the parents and tell them there is nothing I can do to save their child’s life. I have lost children to measles, chicken pox, flu, pertussis, pneumococcal and heamophilus infections and even tetanus.
51
@Dawn
If the vaccines were safe and effective, the pharmaceuticals would not be afraid to perform high quality studies to prove it, but so far they have always had an excuse. That lack of confidence doesn’t look good, and with so many doctors refusing to vaccinate their own children, you can’t blame any else who decides to opt out.
Not everyone will get behind a product religiously without science to back it up.
1
@Pedro
Everything you post is demonstrably false - eg. Dr's vaccinate their kids at a rate of 97% to 100%.
The good news is that closer and closer to 100% of Pediatric Dr's are starting to dismiss families that refuse to get vaccinated.
16
@pedro
Your assumption is false. Vaccines are tested thoroughly in the US before they can be approved for use by the FDA. The have high rates of efficacy and safety. There are risks to any medicine you receive but in the case of vaccines the risk outweighs the benefits as long as you don't have a contraindication to the vaccine. This would include an underlying immune disorder or an allergy to one of the components of the vaccine to name few. Vaccines have saved millions of lives. All my children are fully vaccinated and continue to get boosters as adults that are indicated.
7
I believe many anti-vax people truly think they are doing what is right, no matter how misguided and callous to others (infants, the elderly, the immunocompromised) this may be. But what really makes me angry is that they personally attack physicians. They say that those 'pushing' vaccines are 'charlatans'. This casually demeans and expresses disdain, contempt, and hatred for an entire group of people. I worked hard and sacrificed a lot because I wanted to HELP people. Only to have my honor and integrity be personally attacked, to be accused of intentionally causing pain and suffering? If you think I am a 'charlatan' you either believe I am evil or you believe you are much, much smarter than myself and all the thousands and millions of other doctors like me. While the conspiracy theories and lack of rigorous science to support views is frustrating, the casual hatred (while often positioning themselves as the ones who 'really' care) is even more appalling.
31
Anti-vaxxers:
Let's say you arrange a carpool with another parent. That parent doesn't use seatbelts or car seats because they are convinced - in spite of all evidence to the contrary - that they are more dangerous than getting thrown clear in an accident.
Do you let your child get in that car?
41
@Mark the differences between seat belts and vaccines is that seat belts have been tested and well designed, car manufacturers understand all the science of how a seat belt works. Whereas vaccines, so-called experts admit they do not know how vaccines are working, and they also do not know how much long-term harm they are causing. We have no way of measuring to see if a vaccine is bringing a net health benefit or net harm, the industry refuses such studies. Though some independent studies have discovered that some of the vaccines in the schedule are increasing mortality rates, and for some scary reason they have yet to be removed from the schedule. Nobody seems to be bold enough to admit the mistake and remove them.
1
@Mark
National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act 1986.
get in the car, if you choose, just know where it could take you.
@Pedro Really? The polio vaccine sure seemed to work well. Just saying. Jonas Salk made it open source. Hmmm... Pedro, take another look at the evidence.
20
Don't believe in vaccinations? Go live in a land where they have no vaccinations. See how you like it.
We're putting tens of millions at risk for the sake of people as ill-informed as the maniac in the White House.
The insanity has to end, or it will end us.
25
When we had an outbreak in California, I found it interesting that much of the anti-vaccine group are in some well to do areas in the state of California. Ask these same people about global warming and they'll be the first to say that science supports the claim. Do they know that science does not depend on the subject matter? Science is science no matter the subject and the science has shown that people are better off vaccinating (protecting) their children, and others, than not.
Unfortunately it comes as no surprise that the US world ranking in healthcare and education continues it's downward trajectory. It's enough to make you sick.
19
@Pedro Vaccines are pretty much the most intensely independently studied area of pharmaceuticals, thanks to antivaxxer cranks. The problem with the antivaxxers is that NO science is EVER considered enough for them. They ask for sound research, yet reject it every time another soundly-performed, peer-reviewed study fails to support their viewpoint. Nearly a thousand studies have been performed on MMR alone, by all manner of organizations with competing goals, essentially all showing no serious side effects.
So you can ask for science all you want, but you should be willing to accept the results, even if proves you're wrong. (Again. And again. And again…)
21
@Pen Vs. Sword - Unfortunately there are science deniers on both the right and the left. They just deny the science on different issues (climate change vs. vaccines).
3
@Pedro our high infant mortality rates are not due to vaccines but to lack of prenatal care and affordable healthcare for all.
3
An almost perfect example of Darwin, in action. Unfortunately, others must also suffer. Child neglect, at the least. Child Abuse, in my opinion.
Seriously.
21
The New York Times, Nov. 29, 2018:
As Measles Surges, ‘Decades of Progress’ Are in Jeopardy
Enough said.
10
Why has The Times allowed Lucy Silverstein and her unverified junk science to take over this comments section? You are helping her to spread her dangerous ignorance.
10
Sources, please.
6
If a person with HIV infects someone knowingly, there have been cases of legal prosecution. I do not see the difference. If you do not vaccinate your children, you are knowingly exposing them to deadly diseases.
16
@La Bollila
Your argument would only make sense if the vaccines were safe, but unfortunately vaccination is a crude science and the necessary studies still haven’t been carried out. We have seen where big pharma took us with opioids, antibiotics and thalidomide, we cannot allow them to run the show. They require stiff regulation.
@Pedro
A crude science? Maybe back in the day when they dragged someone who seemed to be surviving Small Pox to your house, cut your child’s skin and rubbed some of the pus in the wound. Interestingly enough, since people knew how awful some of these diseases were they were jumping at the chance to get someone else’s pus rubbed into their skin.
I recommend that you actually talk to some scientists that work in vaccine technology. And no, they don’t all work in the pharmaceutical industry. Or you could read some of the scientific papers that are produced on this topic. It isn’t light reading, however, because this stuff is far from crude.
18
@Pedro Antibiotics have been an unmitigated success, medically speaking. It's unbridled agricultural use of them that's spoiling it for everyone.
As for thalidomide: In USA, the drug approval system worked as intended (thanks to the persistence of the FDA scientist Frances Oldham Kelsey, who refused to cave in to pressure to approve thalidomide despite insufficient testing). Thanks to this, the United States avoided the thalidomide catastrophe that befell Europe. This drug, better than anything else, proves not a failure of the FDA, but its effectiveness at doing its job.
10
IF you vaccinate you are safe from getting the disease. The only people getting sick are those not vaccinated.
7
@wedge1 This is scientifically incorrect. Vaccinated people have a very low risk when exposed compared to unvaccinated people. There is a small percentage for whom the vaccine doesn't "take", or people who have not had the necessary booster after a certain number of years.
13
@wedge1 Vaccination is not 100% effective for everone who receives it. It is expected that a certain percentage can still contract it.
This is especially true of the flu vaccine. But there are still advantages to getting one, including a reduction in severity of symptoms. I am unsure if the same holds true for measles.
7
Often, but not always. Additionally, those who opt not to vaccinate their children for “philosophical” reasons also put children who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons (immune conditions, allergies, age, etc) at risk by reducing herd immunity.
6
More fallout from the anti-science mindset that some have, choosing to believe whatever they see on social media over what doctors have told them. Yes, science is far from perfect but the odds of a correct view are better than that from someone's random opinion, just as you might get rich betting Vegas but the odds are against you.
7
@Ralph Weisheit
Until the industry performs the necessary studies, vaccination will remain little more than a pseudoscience.
1
@Pedro
They are tested and thoroughly. And Adverse event reporting provides ongoing data on literally billions of doses administered. https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/basics/test-approve.html Go peddle your dangerous lies elsewhere--or better yet, nowhere.
8
@Pedro
Which they have, but you refuse to accept them.
10
This is such a sad turn of events; knowing that we have the ability to eradicate measles makes it even worse.
Parents making irresponsible decisions that affect their innocent children and many others around them, now they’re probably asking for handouts and looking for help from their local hospitals/doctors.
Please parents, before you add to our nations health costs, think about taking the simple steps to keep your family healthy from the very start.
8
We're in a sad state when children are left antibody unprotected against virulent diseases. Maybe, parents might be helped to understand the recklessness of these beliefs by payoffs and rewards. Rumor and innuendo seems more powerful that science and truth. I guess it is popular to be uneducated, poor and ignorant notwithstanding risking death of your kids and their friends.
4
Followers of the pro-vaccine religion have been misled by PR firms and the pharma-sponsored mainstream media that vaccines are based on good science, but the unfortunate reality is that the most basic and essential vaccine studies are still not being carried out, vaccines get a special pass to market based on the assumption that they will bring an overall benefit. That is not science, it is a biased assumption, vaccines are shots in the dark. Some vaccines have been found to be reducing life expectancy, but the industry has captured the regulators, so nobody is going to clean up vaccines or make them evidence-based.
1
@Pedro - Which vaccines have been found to be reducing life expectancy? Can you answer that?
11
@Pedro It's the shocking truth that vaccines have never been studied for safety or effectiveness.
Since 2010 there have only been 3 years with over 200 measles cases reported in the US. 3 years there have been under 100. 2014 was a statistical outlier with 667 cases of measles reported to the CDC. 2018 is the next highest with a preliminary count of 372.
With 79 cases in the first month of the year we are on pace for 948.
4
Anti vaxxers choose to go against Public Safety. They have a right to choose whatever they want for their own children. They don't have a right to endanger other people. If parents won't vaccinate their kids, those children should not be allowed in public places. That includes schools. They can home school their kids. They can form their own "anti vaxxer colonies". They can take their own risks, but they don't get to say to society, "you have to live with and accept the consequences of my choices". If they don't believe in the science that says "Vaccines Don't Cause Autism", they take the risk of being responsible for infecting others. Let them believe whatever they want, but I would rather have an autistic child than a dead one. When their selfish decisions endanger the health of others and the public's health in general they need to be quarantined and financially responsible for the costs that are incurred by everyone their decision infected.
8
just because you bear a child does not .ean you own it.
you have an obligation to be responsible.
1
@Boris, there are some people, children and adults, who cannot be vaccinated because underlying medical conditions have compromised their immune systems. When large numbers of children are left unvaccinated by choice it increases the odds of an outbreak putting those who cannot be vaccinated in danger. That's why it is so important that everyone who can be vaccinated do so. That's what is meant by herd immunity. Opting out of vaccines is selfish, irresponsible, and endangers others.
14
A reader in these comments made a claim that the measles vaccine is "more dangerous" than measles itself. Let's look at the math:
There were approximately 500,000 cases a year of measles in the decade prior to the measles vaccine out of approximately 175 million. That's .2% of the population. Today that means there should be 750,000 cases of serious injury ("more dangerous than measles") per year from vaccines.
But measles mostly effects children. In 1958 there were approximately 45 million children 11 and under. Let's say 450,000 of the annual cases were to children. That is a full 1% of the child population.
By this metric, with approximately 50 million children 11 and under in the US today, there would be 500,000 cases per year of measles vaccine injury to children, approximately 2500 times higher than the average incidence of measles over the last 9 years. Given that 1 in 4 measles cases results in hospitalization, that would be 125,000 cases of severe vaccine injury PER YEAR, nation wide. NY state, with approximately 1 million kids in that age group, you would have 10,000 injuries, 2500 hospitalizations, and 10 deaths.
I challenge anyone to find the data to support this being even remotely likely.
13
@Mark
Physicians For Informed Consent have the data on their website, it is all well sourced, you will be left in no doubt that the MMR vaccine is more dangerous than the measles virus.
1
@Pedro No, we will not. One tiny group of antivaxxer physicians does not outweigh the consensus within the medical community. The percentage of doctors who don't believe in vaccines is vanishingly small.
7
Do you have a more reputable source?
2
I was born in 1955. I had the measles, "chicken pox," the mumps, and the "German" measles. Unfortunately for me, I got all of them in the summer and I lived in a house on Long Island that had no air conditioning. Each illness was excruciating. I had measles and chicken pox blisters all over my body. They were in my ears. I had a high fever. I was sick with each illness for two weeks (not the "German" measles). I was so young when I got the mumps. It happened in the middle of the night. I had it in both sides of my jaw. I tried to get to my parents' bedroom, but I was in such agony, that I couldn't crawl past the bottom of my bed. I made it that far and then cried all night. People are really messed up, that they don't get their kids vaccinated.
30
@dandnat
They have boosted your immune system and left you relisiant to a number of cancers which are far more painful and incredibly serious.
1
@Pedro Cancer is not an infectious disease. Your immune system is not involved in it. (And indeed, "cancer" isn't one disease, it's actually just a blanket term for hundreds of distinct diseases sharing only one common trait: abnormal cell growth.)
5
What are you talking about? If you're going to make a claim this bold, include at least a single reference to support it.
5
Very easy to fix problem. Do not permit unvaccinated kids to attend school unless there is a verified medical reason against vaccination.
Next problem?
10
@Jesse James
Convince Big Pharma to start making safe vaccines, but if everyone is already forced to get them Big Pharma have no incentive to fix their products.
The elephant in the room is that Big Pharma have screwed up with opioids, antibiotics and thalidomide, so let’s not let them do the same with vaccines. Stiff regulation is required and nobody can be morally forced to receive a vaccine from an industry with such an apalling track record and rotten to the core with corruption.
1
My mom was born in 1931. As a child and young adult, she knew all too well the dangers of contracting a disease like measles, or polio, or tetanus, before there were vaccines, an large scale vaccination programs. She knew of the dangers of these terrible diseases because she saw with her own eyes the damage and death that was the result. Her friends, her family members, cut down in their youth by what were then, unpreventable diseases, but which today, can be totally prevented, if everyone gets vaccinated.
We used to walk together through the rows of tombstones in our family cemetery. She would point to a little headstone for a child of three, then to another smaller headstone for that of an infant, then another... She would say to me: "that's your distant cousin, she died of diphtheria." "There lies your other cousin. He died of rubella..." I would ask her "Mom, how do you remember all of this?" She said "my mother walked me through the cemetery when I was young, and made me learn all the names, the relationships, and why they died, for all of these little children who never had a chance to grow old." "As a way of telling me how lucky I was to grow old, and remember."
That memory comes to me every time I read a story about people who refuse to vaccinate their children because of some foolish belief. They have the luxury of not vaccinating their children because, they and their mothers, were vaccinated. And lived to grow old. But they have forgotten.
39
Unfortunately, a few deaths or permanent disabilities will be the only thing that teaches the anti-vaccers. They have no experience with the bad-old-days.
10
@turbot
Most anti-vaxxers are former pro-vaxxers, but they had a child left disabled or dead by a vaccine, which changed their thinking.
1
Survival of the fittest? "I'm smart enough to realize I need to give my child their vaccines".
For all of you worried about autism - there's a link between autism (and other problems) and an older male parent.
6
The medical community is solely responsible for the anti-vax movement.
Medical professionals do not listen to people who are in their care. We know this, women know this, women of color and trans people know this.
We know that people who give birth are not listened to, are made to feel stupid when they ask questions, and have their very real concerns swatted away.
It’s no wonder then, that the movement is so vast. The power of someone saying, “I hear you, I believe your pain, let me help you,” when all you have been told is, that you are wrong, faking it, or stupid is incredible. Being listened to for the first time, becoming part of a larger and supportive community especially surrounding children is a feeling that most parents search for. That is what makes it easy to drift over from a scientific mindset to an anti-vax one.
Because the medical community doesn’t provide that to parents it doesn’f stand a chance.
Why did this happen? 15 minute office visitis, profit driven and not patient driven care.
You have to treat the whole person, and not just the symptoms. Until that happens, this community is going to continue to grow, and become louder and we may see outbreaks of other diseases as well.
@DLaB I agree with you to an extent. But I'd be very, very careful about how to word who to blame, because the blame falls pretty much solely on the finance side of healthcare. Healthcare practitioners (the actual doctors, nurses, assistants, lab technicians, etc.) want to provide excellent care. They don't like being allotted 5 minutes per patient any more than the patients do.
We absolutely should be doing something about healthcare decisions, including how doctors work, being made by anyone other than the patients and their healthcare practitioners.
2
@DLaB
You haven't explained in detail how "not listenening" results in a measels epidemic. By reading for myself, when I was a child, I learned that vaccination was a medical breakthrough.
2
My mother called me to say how horrified she was about seeing this on the news today. As a child in the 1950's, she missed four weeks of school horribly ill with measles, and nearly lost her eyesight. She was at heightened risk of dangerous complications due to already having a damaged heart from a previous bout with rheumatic fever. She cannot imagine why anyone would refuse protection from measles for their child, or inflict increased risk on others.
18
When concern arises about parenting ability, the juvenile court sets out to determine whether a child is “dependent” and therefore in need of court supervision. One of the first questions is whether the parent has kept the child up-to-date on immunizations. If not, a foster parent will quickly see to it. Why are some states accepting a lower standard of parenting from anti-vaccine folks?
12
@Mary Ann
It is the standard of science from pharmaceuticals which needs improving, they have still not carried out the most basic studies on vaccines safety, yet their marketing divisons deceive people that vaccines are based on good science.
The antivax doctors and researchers have done their research and concluded that vaccines are shots in the dark, psedoscience, not evidence-based, you have to respect that they are the ones who read the studies and came to those conclusions. Most people just read pharma-sponsored mainstream media headlines so are being easily misled by the narrative of the pro vaccine religion.
1
Hundreds of millions of citizens over the decades have been better off by being free of preventable diseases like Measles and Polio in our communities because of vaccines. For all the hundreds of millions of Americans who have been vaccinated since vaccinations became available over the last 70+ years, how many of Americans developed autism or had allergic reactions is something that would be useful to inform the general public and compare how many children developed polio, or meningitis, blindness and muscle disease prior to mass vaccination of citizens of this nation.
4
What about limiting international travel for unvaccinated people (without a medical excuse)? That could help 1) put pressure on people to vaccinate 2) limit exposure. Like, you can leave the US unvaccinated, but you can’t come back without proof of vaccination?
9
@C By law, the US cannot deny entry to its own citizens. (They can detain you until you've been positively identified as a citizen, and they can detain you for any illegal acts while entering, e.g. smuggling. But they cannot deny you entry, ultimately.)
No. You can't stop a citizen from returning to the country. But you CAN hold them if they were exposed to a disease, to see if they develop symptoms. If they do, keep them until they aren't countagious any longer. This was done during the Ebola crisis.
1
Our society appears to be regressing. Infectious diseases have been the scourge of civilization throughout history. Only in "first-world" countries like the US did this change, with advances in sanitation, vaccination, and effective antibiotics during the mid-1900s. These public health measures are difficult for younger people to appreciate in our relatively safe environment, but if trends continue (measles is only one example) and previously eradicated infections become more common, perhaps our politicians will be forced to act in the interests of the whole society.
15
This is what happens when people are ignorant about the reasons why vaccinations are necessary. Vaccines do not cause autism. But measles, mumps, chicken pox, rubella, whooping cough, and scarlet fever (although there is no vaccine for it) can have serious consequences for children and their families.
As someone born in 1958 I remember the notices given to us on an almost yearly basis about someone having mumps or measles and that we all needed to be careful. We were told to wash our hands, not share food, and to let our parents know if we felt ill. We knew, or our parents knew, of someone who had had a serious case of measles, or chicken pox, or whooping cough. We knew people who had had polio.
Not vaccinating your children because of nonsense science or because your personal beliefs/religious beliefs say otherwise is wrong. Your children have the right to grow up without worrying about having these illnesses. So do other people's children. And immunocompromised people come in all sizes and ages. So, while you can decide not to vaccinate your children, think of what else you're deciding for them when you decide that. Childhood diseases are not always mild or risk free for anyone around the child or the child.
32
Anti-Vaxxers put the health of the herd at risk.
24
Please tell us when you had your last vaccination. And when your adult friends had their last vaccination. And when in history you think that herd immunization really existed because more than 95% of the population had their shots. And why you insist on calling people who call for SAFE vaccinations anti-vax. It's an industry term used to discredit smart people who know how to read and do their own research and know things like the fact that 40 people die each year from the MMR. You knew that, right? Oh wait, you start hurling insults that are patently false before you read anything other than this NYTimes article which mentioned zero amount of data about the real and CDC acknowledged problems, injuries, and deaths caused by vaccines. Until the corporate media does a better job with the entire truth of the matter, this issue will remain and the accusations will fly. What they need is a study similar the one recently released about climate change. This will help calm nervous parents who honestly get freaked out when they hear kids die after getting the shot. And maybe NYTimes could pressure the CDC to do the safety testing they promised to do every year 25 years ago and literally have done zero times. Pro-vaccine-safety; fixed it for you.
If you will not vaccinate your children then you are in quarantine. You do not have the right to endanger the health of babies too young to have all their vaccinations or immunosuppressed people or others who for medical reasons cannot be vaccinated.
18
Here we are, the "keep government off my kid" age.
Speedy and painless death to all!
Because if government wants to save your lives, you good old boys and hippie sisters deserve to get what you want.
What I want is for my state to ban travel and shipments of food and clothing from Washington, Oregon, Texas, and Colorado. Books might be OK, I don't know...
I want citizens who travel from those places to quarantined by hazmat-suit-wearing nurses in hospital parking lots illuminated by the lights of a concerned press.
You fools want to travel down this psychotically self-destructive road and make your kids pay the price? Fine.
But if any of you gets anywhere near my daughter, I'll make you pay.
7
No unvaccinated child should be permitted to attend a public school!
27
Would these parents send kids out to ride bikes or play football without a helmet? I think not. Immunizations are like helmets for your immune system. Acquiring "natural" immunity can make kids very sick, even die. Over 100k people around the world died from measles last year. I fail to understand parents who put their kids at risk over their precious world view.
12
@Kilroy71
Helmets are well tested and based on solid science, vaccines are not, they are shots in the dark based on pseudoscience from a corrupt and rotten industry, who will profit if they make you sick and leave you dependent on drugs for life.
@Pedro
Vaccines are based on solid science. Either provide evidence for your claims, or don't make them.
1
I was not born in a first-world country, so I was not vaccinated. My immunity comes from having had the measles, mumps, and rubella as a child. I have no lasting scars or damage, thankfully, but my parents still tell me how terrifying it was to see their child so ill.
My thinking on this is that when a few bright, young, middle-class, never-been-vaccinated American women get a primary rubella infection while pregnant, this trend will die out pretty quickly. Not that I would wish that on anyone, but the only thing protecting them at this point is herd immunity.
23
Won't it be interesting when some tort lawyer decides to sue the family of an unvaccinated kid who infects another kid who has not run the full, 3-shot course of immunization (such a case has already occured). To paraphrase: the prospect of wage-garnishment and bankruptcy marvelously focuses the mind.
23
@richard cheverton
The inserts of the vaccines admit that you will shed the virus for 2 weeks post vaccination, they advise to stay away from the immunocompromised, so should the recently vaccinated be quarantined post-vaccination? Big Pharma won’t want that in case it puts you off their product.
1
So, help me to understand. Why wouldn't the sticky kids that aren't vaccinated be treated like we would any other disease carrying vector?
9
@DBridges Because not being vaccinated is not equivalent to being a disease carrying vector. Because children have human rights. We don't treat them like a rabid wild animal and put them down if they get sick. Chickens or Turkeys may be slaughtered wholesale during an epidemic of bird flu, but we don't treat humans like that.
@DBridges because it takes a while for measles symptoms to show up - so you may be spreading it and not know you have it.
1
As with most genuine mischief affecting citizens, the state legislators in the outbreak states are the culprits. State legislatures all over the country contain anti- science and ignorantly susceptible people who resist common sense.
9
Except for substantiated medical reasons, there should be no exemption from the requirement of being vaccinated against measles. When I lived in and raised my children in NYC, they could not go to school unless they had been vaccinated. That seems to me a reasonable requirement. Otherwise, ignorant people can put others, as well as their own children, at risk by refusing to have their children vaccinated. In my view, although not the view of the law, if another person dies because he or she is infected by a chilr who has not been vaccinated, the parental that child is guilty of negligent homicide.
12
@Dorothy
I would recommend you take a look at the numbers on the Physicians for Informed Consent website, they have carefully calculated the risk of measles and the risk of MMR, you will see the risk of MMR is significantly greater.
"The enablers are state legislators in those states, that have allowed themselves to be played,” he said. I fear the legislators are as scientifically illiterate as the people they represent.
16
If the infected are only the unvaccinated children, then this isn’t really a problem. Anti-vax parents are choosing to put their children at risk. Let them face the consequences alone.
1
@Boris unfortunately, it's a problem for the community. I have a 10 month old baby who is too young for the vaccine. I'm fully vaccinated and so is the rest of the family. But we worry about leaving the house with the baby until she gets her shots in 2 months. A good friend of mine has an immuno-compromised infant in day care in Clark County and is terrified.
150
@Boris unfortunately the children did not choose to put themselves at risk
8
@Boris While the majority are unvaccinated children, there are some people who don't become immune even after vaccination.
8
Science prevents you answers, or paths to an answer in the future, after more research.
Ignorance of science results in harm, such as an easily preventable measles outbreak.
3
Parents who show such disdain for public health should be incarcerated.
4
@DENOTE MORDANT
Pharma have had plenty of time to fix their vaccines, instead they have been busy getting people addicted to opioids and overusing antibiotics. It is clear who should be held accountable, and it is certainly not informed parents who have taken the time to do the research for themselves instead of being spoonfed lies and propaganda by the mainstream media.
Washington State's (and others) lenient vaccination policy is wrong, here is what it should be: no vaccination, no public school. Period.
74
@Bailey Totally doesn't work--think about the kids infected in non-school settings...and the likely fact that many of the anti-vaccers home-school.
1
@Bailey And no public transit, no playgrounds, no entertainment venues, no restaurants, no airports, no stores or malls, no parks and no visiting other people's homes without full disclosure of unvaccinated state.
10
Thanks the way it is in Ontario, Canada.
2
Pediatricians should refuse to accept any child as a patient who is not vaccinated. If these child-abusing parents insist on not giving their children the best possible care, there is no reason a doctor should help them be bad parents.
25
@FIFY
That would be deeply unethical.
There is only one thing that is more stupid than not vaccinating children:
Punish the child, because the parents are stupid.
3
@FIFY This punishes kids, puts them at risk. They didn't choose not to be vaccinated, they shouldn't suffer because of their ignorant parents.
2
Anti-vaxxers are no different from climate change deniers. They think their completely uniformed "beliefs" should take priority over mountains of indisputable science. I mean, all they have to do is point to the fact that it still snows in the winter to disprove climate change and allege that measles, polio, etc. are "fake diseases" because they've never seen anyone get them. Unfortunately this idiocy harms us all.
I fear for our future.
43
Not vaccinating their children may be akin to child abuse. There is certainly no reason to put children in unnecessary jeopardy. Would parents leave a loaded gun reachable to kids? Of course not, it would be completely irresponsible. And in this case, expose the neighborhood as well? Crazy dangerous!
26
@manfred marcus
Take a careful look at the ingredients of vaccines and you’ll hopefully see that it is the other way around.
Sadly, American kids are killed by parents' guns at a horrifying rate.
"I hope it doesn’t take a death or a real serious complication like encephalitis for people to change their minds,” about vaccination, he said.
While not wishing a child and their family death or permanent neurological damage, I suspect it will indeed take a number of such tragic events to break through the mental bubble of the flat-earth, dead-end cult of anti-vaxers.
23
@Pedro
Death from vaccines is incredibly rare to nonexistent.
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/parents/tools/parents-guide/downloads/parents-guide-part3.pdf
1
A smack on the face of President George Washington STATE's
Department of Health in Olympia, WA.
Those government employees -the bureaucrats and career employees as well as elected and selected administrators -have shamed WA state by their bad job even after good salaries and benefits including RETIREMENT benefits.
My tax dollars wasted.
What a shame!
2
@TA Last I checked DOH employees don't write legislation. That's not how any of this works.
12
@TA
Government employees have nothing to do with this. Allowing this to happen is the result of the actions of elected officials, not employees!
7
@TA
I live in the Seattle area, and I am surprised at what you wrote, because it does not at all reflect my experience, which is that health department officials at the state and local levels are knowlegable, committed, and hard working--a really valuable resource. DOH employees promote vaccination, and they are working extremely hard now to contain this epidemic. Our tax dollars at work and being well spent.
13
Pretty obvious discussion to be had here: are you a doctor? No? Then listen to the doctor. Are you listening to the doctor? Yes? Then your child won’t get measles or other archaic scour ages. Congratulations! Now you haven’t allowed a health risk to potentially hurt all our children!
10
@Drew
Yeah, my wife listened to the doctor who cautioned her against vaccines. I know another doctor who told a close friend of mine that her daughter has suffered a negative reaction to a vaccine, but the major hospital system that she worked for would not allow her to acknowledge that. They would treat the vaccine injury, but they would not report it to VIRS and they would not help my friend report it to VIRS. I do trust those doctors.
There was a time when the CDC website provided balanced information about vaccines. Sadly, that resource has been sanitized. A lot of information that highlighted the potential risks of vaccines was removed from the CDC's official canon because too many people chose not vaccinate after reading such info.
A couple of notes about doctors:
1. Thanks to the National Childhood Vaccine Act of 1986, doctors cannot be held liable for malpractice associated with vaccines and neither can the vaccine makers. Consequently, many doctors do not effective screen patients for contra-indications prior to giving the shot.
2. Doctors are under intense pressure to push vaccines whether they like them or not. Those that do not tote the party line regarding vaccines are pushed out of the practice.
1
@Drew
Remember the advice to be an empowered patient? To ask questions of medical authority? "It's your health, get involved in it!" This might be a side-effect.
I think an honest attempt to educate these folks is preferable before using a law. Nobody wants to hurt their own kids...they just think they're using best judgement, as strange as it may be...
31
@Drew
The article states that the last 20 years is when alot of people decided to become an anti-vaxxer. When I think about what was going on in our country 20 years ago to convince so many people not to get vaccinations, two things immediately came to mind. Religious objectionism, and Jenny McCarthy about 12 or 13 years ago. The first is based on a belief, have faith type of mentality, something not based on scientific evidence, and McCarthy, an actress who was steered wrong by a guy that was not truthful. Unfortunately religions and actors have too much sway when it comes to scientific evidence. I would no more have an actor perform a brain surgery on me than I would have my dog do the surgery.
I would like to see the Times taking a serious look into anti-vaxxers, how much money they make, and the general topic of the well-paid quackery we get from the “holistic medicine,” and “health food,” industry.
These are multi-billion dollar companies and corporations, raking in the cash with little or none of the studies, research, and regulation they constantly demand with regard to vaccines.
Then they do this:
https://leftbrainrightbrain.co.uk/2011/10/06/the-2011-vaccine-safety-conference-in-jamaica/
And they ARE getting kids and others hurt and killed.
18
@Robert
I would welcome that as well. What you would find is that the vast majority of us do not profit in any tangible way for insisting on our right to choose.
"These are multi-billion dollar companies and corporations, raking in the cash with little or none of the studies, research, and regulation they constantly demand with regard to vaccines." Actually, that statement describes Big Pharma.
Everyone in the FDA and CDC came out of Big Pharma and when their hitch is done as a regulator, they will return to Big Pharma in bigger an more highly-compensated roles than they held before. How is that NOT a conflict of interest? Big Pharma regulates itself, the same way Wall Street did before The Crash of 2008 and probably still does today.
Please stop parroting vaccine propaganda. Get facts. Go to the CDC website and review the vaccine pamphlets before you get a shot for your self or your kids. If you review the information provided and want to get the shot, then I believe you should have that right. But if you don't want to take the risk, then you should always have the right to say "NO".
1
My generation grew up before many vaccines were available: all children in the neighborhood got: mumps, chicken pox, measles, etc...Most uncomfortable and unpleasant though we did not hear about death, complications, or other milder side effects.
Vaccinations ease the burdens on the body, and probably limit "natural selection" - the strongest will survive.
3
I once worked with a man whose mother had rubella whole pregnant with him. The result was a life of near blindness for him; under-employed and stressed about money. I would not wish for anyone to have that experience.
That is a horrible example and it needs to be widely understood how devastating these preventable illnesses can be.
18
@June
OMG - I really hope you are being sarcastic. While you are at it, can you just confirm that gutting Obamacare and denying climate change is also a Republican strategy for cleansing the gene pool? Only the strong will survive!
3
@June
Yep, I had all of them!
I wish there had been a vaccine back then, but I got them always just a year or so before the vaccines were introduced.
Thank god we had the polio vaccine already!
4
I don't understand why the failure to vaccinate children against diseases with such extremely serious and life-compromising possible outcomes isn't regarded as child abuse? We go after parents who leave kids alone in cars or otherwise untended on the view of probabilistic harm. Here the consequences are even worse, because other kids may also be put at risk.
47
@jng
Informed consent. Go to the CDC website and review the vaccine pamphlets before you get a shot for your self or your kids. If you review the information provided and want to get the shot, then I believe you should have that right. But if you don't want to take the risk, then you should always have the right to say "NO".
I myself am not anti-vax per se. If it makes a person feel better about themselves to go get every inoculation available, then they should be able to do that. I just don't think that anyone should be legally REQUIRED to hazard the risks described on the vaccine pamphlets. Neither the medical community nor the general public (who arguably reaps the benefits of vaccines) rallies to help the vaccine-injured. If you are one of the unfortunate few, the best you can hope for is "We're very sorry for your loss."
I really want to see the medical community take responsibility for vaccines, not sweep the issues under the rug and brand people who question the safety or efficacy of vaccines as "idiots". I want to see those people who are vaccine-injured treated like heroes for sacrificing their health to gratify public hysteria. Police who die in the line of duty have memorials in their honor, but the families of people who died from the HPV vaccine (yes, that happened) have to sign confidentiality agreements to make sure that their stories are forgotten.
1
@jng I totally agree. If a parent wanted to refuse chemotherapy for their child it is very likely that child would be removed from their custody and the treatment would be given. Certainly we can all agree that the side effects from chemotherapy far outweigh any from routine vaccination. Maybe pediatricians who are mandated Child Protective Services reporters should start reporting those who refuse to vaccinate.
2
Much in the same way we don’t allow a residential property owners to build a smoke stack industries on their property (under the guise of: it’s their property and they should be able to do what they want, even if it means befouling their neighborhood). nor should we allow potential “ virus polluters” spread preventable diseases in the form of vaccine refusal.
28
My parents emigrated from a poor South American country which was one of the last in the world to have vaccines introduced to the population, en mass. My mother, in particular, recalls classmates stricken by polio when she was a child. It made a lasting impression on her to see once hale children with whom she'd played returning to school with twisted and deformed limbs. How must she have felt as a child not knowing if or when she would be next?
My parents were still children when American doctors arrived, going from town to town with vaccines to ward against smallpox, measles and polio. No one hesitated to line up! Can you imagine the relief of having these diseases effectively eradicated in your lifetime? I must send them this article and ask them how it feels to see those diseases come back.
32
I had measles as a kid (and remember how thoroughly miserable I was.) I'm 58 years old now. I wonder how immune I am 5 decades later, and how vulnerable, should there be a measles outbreak in my city. Should people like me be vaccinated? Does anyone have info about that?
3
@Laura You can ask your doctor to have a measles titer performed. If you don't have enough antibodies, you can get the vaccine.
6
@Laura The general answer is yes, but I'd recommend asking a doctor instead of the comments section of a newspaper.
6
@Laura Measles typically confers lifelong immunity, you are almost certainly NOT at risk for getting it again.
3
My daughter is 4 months old and, other than our mindfulness as to where we take her, she depends solely on heard immunity to stay safe.
To you anti-vaxers out there I get it that you want to keep your kids safe just as I do but all it takes is one errant sneeze in a public place, as much as two hours beforehand, to pass along this virus to an unprotected infant. Your choice could kill my daughter.
46
@Ray Parker
Exactly. I'm currently overseas where there is a measles outbreak occurring due to lax childhood vaccinations. It seem like every other day there is a warning that if you took this bus or that train on this date at this hour, there was someone on there with measles. Scary as to the potential impact on babies too young to be immunized, the immune-compromised etc. It's needless too; measles could have been/should have been thoroughly wiped out by now.
1
A suggestion for all of those anti-vac's out there. Take a walk in a local cemetery. It won't take you long to start seeing gravestones for children who died young before modern medicine prevented so many of those deaths at that time.
27
Under the ACA vaccinations are covered by insurance with no cost to the insured. No excuse for not vaccinating.
19
I'm personally pro-vaccine, having taken a good proportion of all that exist, but I'm hesitant to make it a legal requirement on grounds that it's supposed to be a free country. I understand the potential problem for immunocompromised people but do they have any documented cases of any of these people catching the measles? The immunocompromised must already be protecting themselves against the many maladies for which there are no vaccines and the actual number of measles cases is really tiny at least at this point. If more cases appear, more people will voluntarily vaccinate and so the actual threat will be limited.
Keeping anti-vaxers out of the public schools just adds to the numbers of voters who have no interest in public education and vote no for every bond and levy. If you want public education to get support, you need to provide service to as many voters as possible.
2
@roseberry - the whole point of vaccination is heard immunity. Essentially if people are not getting vaccinated these people will be at risk and can't leave their homes. Your phrasing suggests that it is better to hold immocompromised people hostage over people's personal freedoms? Are immocompromised people less valuable or desirable than others?? I feel like I am missing a major part of your argument. Can you expand.
16
@roseberry One could argue that in a free country no one has to be afraid of going about their daily activities for fear of contracting a potentially deadly disease that is easily preventable. Focusing on anti-vaxxers focuses on just one side of the freedom equation.
15
@roseberry The immunocompromised can't protect themselves against these disease because they are immunocompromised. They don't live in plastic bubbles after all. By and large they depend on the people around them being properly vaccinated against these diseases.
Also, while this is a free country it is a free country with limits. It's a long standing principle that no person has the absolutely right to spread disease; intentionally or not. The larger public health overrides individual rights in situations like these. This why we can prevent smokers from smoking in public places. This is why we have the ability to quarantine people who are infectious (e.g. Typhoid Mary). It's why we have drunk diving laws and why you celebratory gunfire is illegal (even in Texas). Even from a strong libertarian perspective an individuals rights to free actions end at the 'tip of my nose' as they like to say. As such, mandating vaccines is legal and ethical.
306
Parents factor all kinds of metrics when they choose a school. Standardized test results, college matriculation, per-student spending, staff ratios, etc.
It is high time that parents consider vaccination percentages as part of their school decision making process. In my area, it is the private schools that are the problem, particularly Montessori and Waldorf schools.
Any school with less that 95% vaccination rate is unacceptable.
30
You see that here too. Parents are choosing schools that are more accepting of low or no vaccination status. The reasons parents give in office are generally nonsense. Occasionally there is a good reason like a child in the family had an allergic reaction to one and the parents are scared or the child has a condition that has not been diagnosed yet so we don't know if it's advised, but mostly it boils down to distrust of the government. While this angers me on behalf of public safety it's something we need to address head-on because it's the etiology and shoving vaccines down parents throat's, only reinforces the paranoia.
34
As I noticed someone below comment on big pharma being in bed with the government. This is exactly what we need to address. It IS in bed with many government officials. And as long as it is, the government loses credibility. We can't just blame parents, we have to, as a country, take responsibility for the myriad of effects that corporate interests reflecting government policy has on the general trust of the American people. I work hard in office to help people see the logic of vaccinations, help them look at the data, and I generally get them to vaccinate on their own terms. But we need honest conversations.
5
@Co5usymost parents can't choose where their kids go to school.
4
Any child needing health care services due to measles and who has not been vaccinated should have none of the related heath care costs covered by any insurance. The population should not pay for someone's choice, you are on your own. That would begin to be fair to society.
15
@JEM
Many people are being hurt by vaccines everyday, lifelong allergies and autoimmune diseases are being induced by these jabs. It would seem only fair that pharma not be allowed to profit from the health complications their vaccines are causing, they should have to give out treatment at cost price. That way we move the goalposts, and remove any incentive for them to keep dangerous products on the market.
That is the only way that the industry will ever be forced into cleaning up their vaccines and making them into a real science, they need to be losing money for every time that a vaccine harms an individual.
On your point about insurance, vaccines cause lifelong problems (epilepsy, asthma, diabetes type 1, MS etc) which are far more expensive, a lifetime on drugs, whereas mild short-term viruses like measles and chicken pox can easily treated with cheap vitamins.
2
@Lucy Silverstein
You continue to bring up vaccine safety without providing any evidence that there is a safety problem. It is globally recognized as one of the safest, most cost-effective health programs the world has ever seen. I assume you believe it outweighs the 1 in 4 measles cases that result in hospitalization. And the 2% that result in pneumonia. and the 2 in 1000 that result in encephalitis or death. In the 1976 there were ~50 deaths from flu vaccine out of 45 million vaccinations. That was from G-B syndrome, which is now closely tracked before receiving the vaccine.
20
@Lucy Silverstein "... vaccines cause lifelong problems (epilepsy, asthma, diabetes type 1, MS, etc.) which are far more expensive..."
Can you please provide links/evidence/backing from peer-reviewed sources for these claims? Would love to see what sources you are finding this in.
27
Aside from allergies to vaccines, usually the vaccine medium and not the vaccine itself, the safety of vaccines is remarkable. Of course there are examples of unusual and rare adverse reactions, but these pale in comparison to the known complications of the illnesses vaccines can help prevent. Of course the efficacy of different vaccines is variable and depends upon the viruses mutability and how the vaccine works - influenza vaccine is much less effective than measles, for example. Arguments against vaccines are weak, poorly informed and at there root, anti-scientific. It is imperative that anti-vaccine propaganda be called what it is, an up close and personal NIMBodY-ism that takes advantage of herd immunity while spouting nonsense masquerading as speak truth to power.
As far as Nurses not getting flu vaccines because they have seen "people getting hurt" (@Lucy Silverstein), almost all of the Nurses I know who do not get vaccines do it because they are scared of needles and/or it makes their arm sore. Ouch!
14
@Chris Clark
Vaccine safety is a big problem as it is not studied in any kind of sensible way. However, there have been independent Vaxxed Vs Unvaxxed studies which have found that the vaccinated are the ones most likely to have epilepsy, asthma, eczema, peanut allergies, diabetes type 1, MS and much more.
The mild viruses which we vaccinate where only ever killing people who were already on their deathbeds, whereas vaccines are taking down perfectly healthy people, leading to a lifetime of sickness, customer for life to the industry.
The industry cannot be allowed to continue to avoid the necessary science and to use the media which they sponsor to push out their misleading information, with their pseudoscience and assumption masquerading as a science. Independent regulation is required, we need to get tough on pharma.
1
@Lucy Silverstein Where is your science? Where is your peer review? Are you a scientist? Do you know anything at all except what "people on Facebook" say?
Talk about pseudoscience!
17
@Lucy Silverstein Vaccine safety is constantly studied by both manufacturers and independent researchers.
As for 'mild diseases' only killing people on their 'deathbed' that's patently false. Last year, in the US alone, 80,000 people died from the flu. In 1980 2.6 million people died from measles worldwide - the vast majority of them being children. By 2014 that number had dropped to 74,000. Why? Because of vaccines.
How many people have been subject to a 'lifetime of sickness' because of vaccines? Just give me a number - any number - that is verifiable.
I'm positive that the numbers of lives saved from vaccines *dwarfs* whatever number you can come up with.
18
Four ideas:
1 Identify the legislators who support this nonsense and raise the devil about this before elections. A national PAC could be useful to bring in out-of-state money to defeat these people.
2 Deny all health insurance coverage both commercial and governmental for all unvaccinated people who could have been vaccinated and chose not to.
3 No public school or programs for voluntarily unvaccinated persons. No federal funding if non-compliant.
4 Lawsuits against parents who choose not to vaccinate healthy kids who could otherwise be vaccinated, and also sue the aforementioned legislators who support this non-sense. It would seem from the comments that there are enough concerned individuals to get together and hire legal representation.
21
@James
Surely it would be far better to invest the money in making vaccines safe and evidence-based, rather than continuing with a flawed science.
2
Great points!!
2
@Lucy Silverstein
They are safe and they are evidence based. I have no idea where you are getting your information but the vaccine development process is well grounded in repeatable observable science.
Keep in mind that the science of vaccination is more than 200 years old at this point. We know a *lot* about how and why it works and the optimal ways of ensuring safe delivery.
11
Any “personal exemptions” still permitted in these states should at the very least preclude entry into public schools. Those parents should be prepared to go the home school route. The idea that these parasitic parents can put others in harm’s way is ridiculous. By the way if the state of California can figure out a way to close the exemption loophole, there’s hope for these other states too.
272
@Cincin89
How about instead we make vaccines safer, so as people actually want to get them? A big investment for pharma I understand, but they seem to have plenty of money available for lobbying and marketing, so divert some of that into making safer vaccines, that way lives will be saved and less people will be seriously vaccine injured.
There are clear reasons why so many doctors and experts are not vaccinating their own children. They have done their research.
3
@Lucy Silverstein the anti-vaxxers have done their research in publications that twist scientific information to fit their anti-vax propaganda. LIving in their 21st-century bubble and never having known a time when people became severely ill from diseases we can now prevent with vaccines, they're happy to risk their children's lives as well as those of others in their arrogance. They are ill-informed and don't understand science or biology.
94
@Lucy Silverstein
Specifically how are the vaccines not safe, and what are they not doing to make them safer?
Doctors and experts do vaccinate their children.
111
That is a place where a wall could actually be usefull.
10
California's law requiring proof of vaccination for children entering kindergarten took effect in 2016 and withstood court challenges, including a claim that the law was, to quote a reporter at the hearing, a "totalitarian mandate." The law provides exemptions for medical reasons. NYT readers might recall that Robert De Niro pulled an anti-vaccine doc from the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival. The man featured was the discredited British doctor who promoted the link between autism and vaccines. I am sorry that De Niro has a child with autism, but spreading bad science will do harm to others. I think of those countries where people long to have their children vaccinated, yet health workers face dangers just trying to get to them.
16
@Lucy Silverstein
Two whistleblowers? What are their names, and what are their scientific credentials? Where are their results published? We're supposed to believe that all of the people who advocate for vaccines are dishonest, except a very few? They're all getting rich from vaccinations? Can't you come up with something better, like citations for the failures of vaccines in scientific publications?
10
@Lucy Silverstein This is so, so wrong.
- William Thompson, supposed "whistleblower":
"The fact that we found a strong statistically significant finding among black males does not mean that there was a true association between the MMR vaccine and autism-like features in this subpopulation."
"I want to be absolutely clear that I believe vaccines have saved and continue to save countless lives. I would never suggest that any parent avoid vaccinating children of any race. Vaccines prevent serious diseases, and the risks associated with their administration are vastly outweighed by their individual and societal benefits."
3
@Mark It's a truism about all statistical analyses that we cannot assume a true association. Statistical association only provides the likelihood of something occurring through chance alone in the absence of any relationship, how significant that it to the question at hand is subjective. This finding itself was weak and limited, so his recommendation for vaccination is absolutely appropriate.
It's more significant that the finding was 'left out' of the reported results. It means that a signal of a problem was deliberately ignored by the agency charged with finding and investigating such signals. This action destroys the trust of citizens in this particular agency on this particular issue.
Dr. Zimmerman's recently released affidavit shows a similar situation. Why should parents trust the public statements from the CDC regarding the safety of vaccines?
We stopped vaccinating our son at 4 years old when I noticed a reaction growing at the vaccine injection site. He was up to date before the age of 4. I brought it up the growing reaction to our Pediatrician. The Pediatrician said that the reaction was in normal range and that if he did not stay current on vaccinations, she would not treat him.
Since our son had developed typically until the age of 2, then started to regress in speech, I decided to press the pause button on vaccines. I'm thankful I did because later testing proved that he was severely allergic to eggs. When we removed the eggs and other allergens from his environment, his speech progressed.
The Pediatrician should have said, “You don’t have any more boosters for 12 months, let’s order some tests and see what is going on.” Instead, she fired our son from her practice at a time when our son stopped eating all food.
I didn’t set out to be an anti-vaxxer; as our son’s Immunologist said to me, “You are anti reaction in your child.” Vaccines are an important part of modern society. Like most topics in our world today, we need to have calm, rational discussions about topics not emotional reactions in either direction.
The headline is dramatic. While the headline may be a quote from a doctor, it’ s emotional and continues to block any rational discussion on vaccines.
11
@Smith can you expand on what testing was done to identify the egg allergy? was it through your pediatrician or a third party that you sought out on your own?
4
@Smith
Thanks for sharing your story!
One of the problems we have is that pediatricians lose a lot of their bonus for everyone who doesn't vaccinate. Once they get below a certain % of vaccinated, they lose all of their bonus completely. For example, a document from Blue Cross Blue Shield a few years ago (2016) listed that 100 fully vaccinated patients was worth a $40,000 incentive.
1
@Jerp, we found an Immunologist after a family friend, a doctor, suggested there was some sort of inflammation going on and recommended an Immunologist. I don't recall the exact test, but they are commonly used by Immunologists.
I am pro-vaccine for the record. If/When our son recovers from his allergies, we will continue to vaccinate. We can't fight emotions with emotions. We need to have a science based conversation that looks at the patient and treats accordingly, not a one size fits all thought process.
9
Well-informed Trump supporters, I’m sure.
6
@James cunningham
I'd recommend you look up the presentations given at The Vaccine Safety Conference, where independent experts spilled the beans on the serious problems with the vaccine industry. The presentations are freely available online and can be found with a quick search.
Please get yourself informed, this is not a partisan issue, this is about science, we need products which are based on real science, evidence-based, but that's not what we are getting, we are being injected with pseudoscience.
Oh, you mean THIS “Safety Conference.”
https://leftbrainrightbrain.co.uk/2011/10/06/the-2011-vaccine-safety-conference-in-jamaica/
Just how much do you earn every year, pushing this drivel?
8
@Lucy Silverstein
You haven't presented any science, and your comments are evidence that you don't care about science. Where do you think that the idea for vaccination comes from?
6
This is very serious and outbreaks of this magnitude are entirely preventable if immunization rates among cohorts of kids remains sufficiently high. Some facts:
* Don't misunderstand the concept of "herd immunity;" it's not about the overall vaccination rate in your state or county. It's about the vaccination rate in your child's closest circle - about the cohort of kids in there school, on their bus or on their playground.
* Vaccines provide excellent, but not perfect immunity - that's no fault of the vaccine, it's just basic population biology. All the more reason to keep vaccination rates as high as possible. As the story illustrates, once an outbreak gets started - often starting in an un-vaccinated person - the contagious nature of the virus is so powerful that it can gain a foothold in a cohort of contacts and infect a percentage of people who were vaccinated.
* Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, a parent's decision not to vaccinate their child nonetheless puts your vaccinated child at risk. Stop letting the anti-vaxxers endanger your loved ones by using them as a shield. Remember, their freedom to swing their fist ends at your face.
19
The entire anti-vaccination movement began with one discredited study by a doctor who was disbarred from practicing medicine - and went on to make money by peddling his disproven theory. Reading these comments I'm impressed by the outrage of those who rightly believe that the rights of parents to their personal beliefs end where they harm other people and especially children. If only we could generate this much outrage in this country to combat the general anti-science ignorance (based on the same conspiracy theory thinking and ultimately personal selfishness that fuels the anti-vaccination movement) that is currently leading the country - and thus the world - into a future of catastrophic climatic change and depleted biodiversity. It is, after all, our children's future. At this rate, it may actually be a disease like measles that turns out to be the big game changer for the human race.
17
From CDC:
1958 saw the most reported cases of measles. There were 763, 094 reported cases and 552 deaths. This equates to a .07% death rate from measles.
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pubs/pinkbook/downloads/appendices/e/reported-cases.pdf
From 2008 CDC report:
“On average, 12,175 children 0 to 19 years of age died each year in the United States from an unintentional injury”
https://www.cdc.gov/safechild/child_injury_data.html
From this article: “Seventy-nine cases of measles have been reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention since the start of this year.”
Sorry, but I fail to see the “emergency”. The statistics clearly show that death by unintentional injury is a much greater risk to children than 79 cases of measles. This "emergency" strikes me as fearmongering and media/government hysteria.
4
@rfmd1
Did you miss the part about permanent neurological damage and deafness? What about children who live, but who suffered miserably in the hospital, causing high medical bills and lost wages for their parents? Death is not the only possible adverse event associated with a case of the measles.
14
@rfmd1 It is an emergency because it is one of the most contagious diseases in the world. One of the families attended a basketball game with 20,000 people while infected. It has grown from a few cases to over 70 in a couple of weeks. Care to do the math to extrapolate that over several months?
5
@Mark It can't extrapolate at that rate for very long. Even with all the exemptions, there is still a high rate of herd immunity and the majority of people who are impacted are the unvaccinated. Because non-vaccinators are a small % of the total population, we simply aren't going to get epidemics of the sort we did before vaccination. Measles outbreaks on other continents show what populations with lower vaccination rates look like.
While many children do not have severe measles, the disease causes longer term effects on their immune system. People who recently had measles are more likely to die from other infectious diseases because measles interferes with their immune responses for up to two years! So a measles vaccine protects against more than measles.
(for the research study see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4823017/ ).
17
This pharma-guided narrative is a long way from the reality of the situation. We have pharma telling us that there is a consensus that vaccines are safe, effective and necessary, but when we ask for science to prove it they refuse point blank, they say that well designed studies would be unethical. So instead we are given all kinds of poorly designed studies, performed by people with gross conflicts of interest.
Each time someone goes down with a major health issue after a vaccine, we are told "coincidence". That is how they cover-up the harm of their products; no studies allowed and assume any harm is coincidence.
The corruption and lies can no longer be tolerated, it is clear that the reason pharma are lobbying to have your health freedom taken away is so as there aren't really healthy unvaccinated people around, who don't have asthma, eczema, MS, diabetes type 1, childhood leukemia, peanut allergies etc, so as they are not there as a control in the vaccine experiment.
They want everyone vaccinated to remove the evidence that their science is not up to scratch, and given that the harm the vaccines are causing far outweighs any theoretical benefit, this equates to crimes against humanity. Pharma want the evidence of that crime covered up; they have blood on their hands and they don't want you to know about it.
2
@Lucy Silverstein
Thanks for all your comments. Isn't it insane how those who have done no independent research other than reading the mainline news have the nerve to call us the ignorant ones?
There is a reason certain facts never make it into articles like these and why anyone interested in digging deeper has to work very hard. Unbiased Information is buried beneath agenda and agenda has something far greater than public health in mind. Actions like what Arizona is taking is quite a step forward. Best wishes to you.
https://tucson.com/news/local/arizona-lawmaker-all-ingredients-side-effects-must-be-disclosed-before/article_16b8ab56-eb07-51dc-b666-10ce6d15bd67.html
https://www.cnbc.com/2015/03/03/globe-newswire-public-health-officials-know-recently-vaccinated-individuals-spread-disease.html
@Lucy Silverstein
You don't know what you're talking about. How did the idea of vaccinations begin? Hint: it did't start with a pharmaceutical company. Actually studies on the effectiveness of vaccines have been done, and are being done but you seem to be too lazy to look them up.
7
I can’t believe all the statements made in comments here with only 2-3 that have provided corroborating links.
This is one of the rare areas where the extreme evangelical/orthodox/paranoid right finds fertile common ground with the extreme "natural" lifestyle paranoid left.
12
Post-modern America: Reality is only what we think and feel.
14
Most states provide the vaccination rate for the county in which you live. Check yours and any that you vacation in during the summer. I cringe at the low vaccination rate in some beach communities that have massive numbers arrive from varied geographies. The risk of spreading contagious diseases is worrisome and dangerous. Don't even get me started on nurses at major hospitals who refuse flu vaccinations.
16
@poslug
If pharma want to improve vaccine uptake then it's time for them to make safer vaccines and ones that work. Nurses in hospitals have seen how frequently people are getting hurt by vaccines, so it's logical that they would want to avoid them.
4
@Lucy Silverstein
More people have a reaction to penicillin every year than all vaccines combined.
18
@Lucy Silverstein;
"people getting hurt by vaccines"? Please provide evidence that this is true. Vaccines are safe; no one is getting "hurt" by being vaccinated. On the contrary, they save millions of lives world-wide.
25
Are children who are vaccinated safe during these outbreaks?
If so, the only ones who are at risk are the children who have not been vaccinated. Do their parents have the right to make that decision?
4
@bob The problem is that some children cannot be vaccinated. They may be immunocompromised due to cancer or other conditions and vaccines are not as effective in them. Instead, they rely on herd immunity. If enough children go unvaccinated, outbreaks like this can happen. One can argue that sadly, parents have the right to put their children at risk but not when their actions have consequences affecting others.
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@bob
vaccines have various rates of efficacy. Even vaccinated children can get the disease. The efficacy rate for MMR which prevents measles is supposedly upward of 95% but in this outbreak it has been 80% effective.
3
Two doses of the vaccine is 97% effective. 3% of those fully vaccinated can still get infected. The first dose is given at one. All children under that age are at risk. I have seen different number for the effectivity of one dose so some where between 7-15% are at risk. The second dose is generally given between 4-6 years so many kids in that age range are at risk. The second shot wasn't added until the 90s. That means a good portion of the people vaccinated are at risk because they are only partially vaccinated unless they got the second shot as an adult. People with certain medical conditions can't have vaccines. People with cancer can get their immunes wiped including any protection from previous vaccination. Measles is highly contagious and does not require close contact to spread.
So no, it is not just the anti-vaxx kids at risk.
49
The antivaxxers demand their "rights as parents" to follow the rantings of an ex-Playboy bunny and a disgraced former doctor and keep their kids safe from the supposed danger of vaccines.
In fact, they rely on the rest of us accepting the tiny risk of an adverse reaction to provide herd immunity.
They also utterly ignore the very real dangers they are forcing upon unwitting members of the public who are medically fragile. For these selfish, arrogant and ignorant people, their "rights" Trump all.
The rest of us have the right to mitigate our risks as well. If people will not vaccinate their children, those children should be forced to wear notifications whenever they are out in public to warn those they could sicken and kill to stay away.
States can regulate such notifications - a standard, required uniform, perhaps, or a large sign. Businesses should be allowed to bar them and parents of other children at playgrounds or at schools could avoid them.
There are consequences for refusing to vaccinate. Those consequences should be borne by the people making that stupid decision, not by the people they put at risk.
66
@Shar Measles can hang around in the air for about an hour after someone who is contagious has been there if it's the right type of environment (typically indoors rather than outdoors where wind moves the air). This is a policy problem that won't be solved in the style of the Scarlet Letter, I'm afraid. We all have the right to be safe in public spaces. Parents who refuse to vaccinate their children for reasons that are not medically or scientifically justified should be charged with neglect and abuse, in my personal opinion. Vaccination is not just about the individual patient; it is about protecting all of us. No child who has a compromised immune system should have to go to school with children whose parents have refused to vaccinate them on the basis that they "saw a thing on Facebook" or whatever sketchy blogs proliferate these anti-vax claims.
18
....or report said parents to Child Protective Services.
5
@Shar
Unfortunately vaccines are still kept as a pseudoscience due to pharma saying that well-designed studies would be "unethical". The reality of course is that they don't want to shoot themselves in the foot by carrying out studies which find harm in their own products, meaning that they would have to be withdrawn from market, compensation paid out, essentially another thalidomide scandal. Are McDonalds going to tell you their Big Macs are making you fat? No, and in the same way Big Pharma won't tell you their jabs are making you sick.
As you'll see, it's very simple, we have the fox guarding the hen-house, pretending to the masses that they have a solid science but nobody is ever allowed to perform real studies, and if they do the pharma mafia go after them, smear them and get them struct off.
Pharma are masters of deception, don't believe the hype.
1
So we've come to a point in time where we have to make it mandatory that children get vaccinated unless they have a doctor's note releasing them and then that note has to be verified.
It shouldn't have to be this way but people want to believe the "fake news" that they read on social media pages that your children don't need to be vaccinated.
History has proven that we do need it so lets get smart.
18
Medical, philosophical, or religious reasons? I would say more due to ignorance and false beliefs about risks of vaccination.
33
Just plain stupid. Too bad their parents were playing in the deep end of the gene pool.
4
Health insurers should have provisions in their plans that the insurance will not cover treatment for these unvaccinated children. Parents who make such destructive,harmful choices for their kids can of course, find medical care for them, and they should then bear the responsibility of paying for it. Bad choices have consequences
And why shouldn’t public schools keep unvaccinated children from enrolling or attending? Again, parents making these dangerous decisions about their children should home school them and make some effort that way to protect neighbors and others from an easily avoided disease.
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@Kathy I very much like the insurance angle. Not vaccinating increases the risk in the patient pool and treating avoidable diseases drives up the cost of insurance for everyone.
4
@Mark Thinking about this a little bit, the problem is that doesn't help the child; it does the opposite by creating a barrier to the child receiving care, putting the child at even greater risk from the parents. More effective may be tying lower insurance rates to vaccination.
4
@Kathy Should we also cancel coverage for lung cancer for smokers? Personally, I want to see universal coverage for everyone.
At what point does the greater good for the public and our nation as a whole take effect? We can legislate the mandatory vaccination of children and this should be done with exemptions only for medical reasons. To get herd immunity (which can vary with each disease) we need to be above 93% vaccination rate. So when we read about vaccination rates of 50% it is appalling and sad. We need to pay attention to science not celebrities.
26
Child vaccinations down and opioid use up, go figure.
8
Keeping children from being vaccinated for unspecified personal or philosophical reasons!?
Are the same parents vaccinated and immune from lawsuits? I sincerely hope that the children who do survive will sue the parents for neglect and child endangerment.
9
This is what happens when religion is given preference over public health and safety. This is what happens when people can “opt out” because they choose to believe anecdotal stories, opinions, and conspiracies rather than science and knowledgeable medical professionals.
There are those among us who are truly at risk when herd immunity drops — newborn babies, the elderly, those who are truly allergic to agents in the vaccines, those who have immune diseases or are taking immune destroying cancer therapies. There are even a tiny percentage of people in whom a vaccine will not provide protection even if they take it. We are putting all these lives at risk by this stupid ability to opt out of vaccinations for “religious” or “philosophical” reasons.
We vaccinate not only for our own children’s benefit. We do it for the benefit of the whole society.
In this country so many people think they should have the freedom to choose away this sort of thing. But in this case your choice can kill others. And as we can easily see with things like texting while driving, left to themselves too many people will make the wrong choice.
Vaccines are one of the most important reasons most people get to see their children live to be adults these days. Why would anyone want to flirt with going back to seeing so many children die so young?
73
@SkL I read recently that the only religion that opposes vaccines is the Dutch Reformed Church, so your annoyance at religion isn't really justified in this context.
1
@dogless_infidel The fact that the author put quotations marks around "religious" indicates that the reference was to a supposed religious objection which is really just an excuse. Your annoyance at the comment isn't really justified in this context.
7
I do not believe this is a religious issue. Ignorance yes, but I doubt religion plays a large role. My son has many acquaintances among the Orthodox Jewish communities affected in NJ and NY and there is no religious objection there, just uninformed parents.
3
Here the imbalance between individual rights and the rights of society -- that is, the larger collection of individuals with shared concerns -- comes into stark contrast.
Clearly, the rights of the individual in these cases tramples the rights of the society in which they live.
Parents who do not get their children vaccinated should be required to keep the children out of school and every other communal institution or public place. Period. They endanger us all, based on fear and willful ignorance.
If willful ignorance and resulting harm to society -- that is, the large collection of individuals who agree on shared values -- is these parents' choice, there should be significant consequences, such as quarantine.
23
@Phil Carson We agree on your first paragraph. I don't agree that we need to shun unvaccinated children and/or their parents. The 'danger' they pose others is minimal because the vaccine is effective. The harm we would do by shunning them is not trivial.
It's reasonable and effective to keep unvaccinated children out of school during outbreaks of mealses. I think it's better for our society as a whole if we welcome them back afterwards rather than never letting them attend again. It's their community that will have been hardest hit by the outbreak. Banning them from all public places at all times...that's not an effective way to improve public health.
I somehow managed to escape getting chicken pox until I was in my 30s, when I got it from my kids, in the days before a vaccine was available. I have never, ever, been as sick as I was then, with a fever of 105 for a number of days. I seriously feared I was going to die. Don’t vaccinate your kids? You are setting them up to get severely ill in the future.
80
@Been there "Don’t vaccinate your kids? You are setting them up to get severely ill in the future. " The choose not to vaccinate has it's own built in 'natural consequence'. Punishment is not an effective method of altering behavior.
Measles shots should be mandatory for the protection of children who are vaccinated.
If one chooses not to vaccinate their children, they're creating a health issue for other children.
They should keep their kids at home and teach them there.
11
These parents should be put in prison. And the legislators that approved laws that don't require vaccination. Shame, shame, shame on all of them for their selfishness.
9
What in the world did these people think was going to happen? Have you never seen a meningitis outbreak in a college dormitory? The risks in a kindergarten classroom are infinitely higher. Match in a gas can indeed.
In public economics, we call this the free rider effect. If everyone else gets a flu shot, I don't need one; no one else will have the flu. These anti-vaccination fanatics are piggy-backing every other responsible parent in the nation.
The legislators and religious leaders who encourage and enable this behavior are even worse. They either like seeing dead and deformed children or they are grinding their own ax. They'll happily tell you drinking two bottles of wine everyday is healthy if you'll just keep paying their salary.
Irresponsible. There's no other word for it. We have laws to prevent irresponsible parents from endangering their children. It's not the child's fault their parents willfully endangered their life. In other situation, the neighbors would call DYFS.
17
Kindergarten vaccination rates vary widely from school to school and town to town in King County, WA, where Seattle is located, from 50% to 99%.
Most kindergartens in Kirkland, WA are well below 70%, leaving that densely populated community highly vulnerable to outbreaks of measles, mumps, rubella, pertussis, diphtheria and other serious and highly contagious disease.
This pocketing of anti-vaxxers suggests to me that parents influence other parents more than doctors.
I discovered the hard way that immunity to pertussis declines with age for those vaccinated in childhood. It took me months of terrible coughing to recover after contracting pertussis from a preschooler on a plane.
Ignorance and fear are dangerous to all of us.
129
@Look Ahead
The decline of pertussis vaccine over time is why new parents and new grandparents who will be around a newborn are urged to get a Tdap shot. https://www.cdc.gov/pertussis/vaccines.html?CDC_AA_refVal=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cdc.gov%2Ffeatures%2Fpertussis%2Findex.html
12
@Look Ahead I picked up Pertussis at the playground as an adult. Worst 100 days of my life. Several whooping spells left me thinking I was about to die. Thankfully my baby had been vaccinated just 2 week before I got sick. My Tdap was 6 years old at the time. I'm still bitter someone was selfish not to vaccinate their own kids.
30
@Look Ahead Now if only I could get the shot minus the Tetanus (the T) which I am allergic to. I keep asking and being told there is not way to do so. To all those parents who do not vaccinate, pertussis is not something to play with.
8
Could the states start charging parents with neglect for refusing to vaccinate their children? Not taking reasonable precautions to protect a child's health seems like neglect to me.
44
Before anyone "both sides" this issue, Clark County, Washington is a right-wing bastion in the NW, politically and religiously. These aren't the neo-hippie stereotype of Portland. They are freeloaders avoiding income taxes in Oregon and sales taxes in Washington. Pushing for anti-gay/anti-trans initiatives in Washington state is another specialty of Clark County.
Hopefully this year the rest of Washington can outvote them in the legislature and limit vaccination exemptions.
215
@Anne That is a very broad brush stroke of Clark County, but the community in which this outbreak originated appears to more or less fall into that category.
However, it is important to note that white, well-educated, upper-middle class communities (the Dr Oz demographic is how I describe it) has a similar problem. This includes some of the wealthier neighborhoods in Seattle and the surrounding area.
12
There are also plenty of anti-vaxxers in Seattle and Bellingham who occupy the left side of the political spectrum. This is primarily a failure of science education rather than political affiliation.
11
I have no desire to “both sides” this issue either; as someone who works in healthcare in Clark County, I too am appalled by this needless crisis unleashed by the anti-vaxxers. But your broad-brush depiction of Clark County is unhelpful. If you look at electoral maps, you will see that this is actually a purple county — much less conservative than the counties just to the north of us (Cowlitz, Lewis) and many other parts of the state. There are plenty of thoughtful people living here who are are working to make this a better, more equitable place. Please do not dismiss us out of hand.
10
As a person in elementary school in the 60s I remember lining up for our vaccinations at school. If your parents didn't consent you were sent home until you could prove you had been vaccinated. I especially remember the polio sugar cube and the TB test.
110
@Paulie Parents of that era knew the impact of infectious disease. Modern parents don't know what a truly sick child looks like as a result of infectious diseases like measles, TB, polio, and even the flu. Unfortunately, outbreaks like the one in WA paint a picture of what happens when we don't take the appropriate measures to prevent the spread of acute infectious diseases.
128
@S. Reader
Those who are old enough remember all too well the lines of iron lungs in hospitals with
tiny heads protruding from the massive mechanisms that kept patients breathing.
Or the clatter of a child's leg brace striking a wooden floor. Polio was epidemic in the early fifties.
The miracle was science, not blind belief, social integration, not individual whimsy.
20
@Paulie I remember lining up at school for Polio (sugar cube) and I guess at the time they didn't have the Measles, chicken pox, or Mumps vacs...My Mother was insistent we get any and all available vacs at the time. I also remember that if someone did have the measles, or chicken pox, we spent the night there so we were "exposed" to them thereby insuring we had those things before we grew up, because if you got those three infections when you were older, you might die. Back then I never heard of anyone dying as a child from the Measles. But hey what do I know? maybe my mom didn't tell me about death from Measles back then, and now, unless It's a rare and new form of the childhood illness...You were supposed to get the Measles, it came with being a kid.
3
My daughter caught measles when she was under 12 months old - the age when the MMR vaccine is given. She had febrile seizures and got pneumonia and nearly died. It was absolutely terrifying and I wouldn't wish that on anyone. I don't understand why anyone would take a chance on their child developing this disease that is so easily avoided with a vaccine.
349
@Laurie
I'm sorry to hear that, but unfortunately the current MMR vaccine holds a bigger risk than measles itself.
It's time for the industry to make a new safer vaccine, but so far there is no sign of that.
1
@Lucy Silverstein If the current MMR vaccine held greater risks then measles itself, there would be hundreds of thousands of children suffering around the world due to the MMR vaccine. This is not the case. You are spending a lot of time pushing the anti-vaxxer case when a measles epidemic shows the result of low vaccination rates. Why is this?
71
@Lucy Silverstein
Would you care to elaborate on your claim, "the current MMR vaccine holds a bigger risk than measles itself"? Where is the evidence to prove your allegation?
A quick search (use your search engine of choice) yields this from the United States Center for Disease Control:
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/mmr/public/index.html
41
Knowing parents who refuse to vaccinate their children, it has long been apparent to me that they were content with utilizing the herd effect gained by fact that most other parents did in fact get their children vaccinated. So it has seemed to me that as they were refusing to allow immunizations due to their fears that it would endanger their child, they were content to allow other people's children to bear the brunt of it and protect their child via the herd effect. What does that say about these parents?
292
@Greenie oh that is absolutely what this entire anti-vaccine nonsense is all about, make no mistake. It simply could not exist as a philosophy, or religious belief, or whatever other nonsense these people come up with. It requires that the overwhelming majority of other people’s children get vaccinated. If everyone were to atop vaccinating their children tomorrow and these diseases made a true comeback, it is precisely these people who would be elbowing you out of the way to get their children to the front of the queue. This movement is, at its core, about “MY child is going to get all the reward and share none of the risk.” That is what these people are all about, no matter what rationalization they come up with.
69
I agree with you, and I call them " self-centered", i.e., putting their well being above that of all others.
I think of it this way. If I were king and could control the world, the safest thing I could do for my family would be to force every other person to be vaccinated, but no one in my family would be vaccinated. This way I get the benefit of herd immunity and avoid the insignificant risk associated with vaccination.
18
Exactly. 22 years ago I sat in the car in a pediatrician’s parking lot and cried before my daughter received her first vaccinations. I had read about the tiny chance of complications and I didn’t want that to happen to MY baby. Then I reminded myself we live in a SOCIETY! Everyone participates for the good of all. I taught that to my child as my parents taught me. We were lucky to be healthy and it was our responsibility to help protect those who were not as lucky.
31
It is time to make vaccination legally required for all. Only medical exceptions should be permitted, and those should be approved by public health MDs to prevent a lone quack from writing all the exceptions.
Parents who refuse to vaccinate their children for no medical reason should be held liable. They are quite literally responsible for the suffering, and sometimes death, of the most vulnerable.
I am over this nonsense. We should all be over this nonsense.
270
Confronted with the perils of contagious diseases, have parents of the unvaccinated been rushing their children to clinics asking for vaccines? Are these anti-vaxers so devout that they are willing to let their child suffer through a terrible disease? It is much easier to proclaim vaccines are dangerous when you know that herd immunity will keep your child safe from disease, even without vaccines. My bet is that these outbreaks will be the reality check that brings down this movement.
36
@Julian Irwin I think you are incorrectly assuming that these people are rational and reasonable. They are not. They don't care about facts or risk. All they care about is their own personal feelings and delusions.
6
Measles is certainly bad enough. But what other vaccinations are being 'declined'? Polio?
54
Yes - I've often wondered if polio was one of the vaccines that are refused.
4
@GWPDA We no longer vaccinate against polio in the US, but if people are refusing vaccination for their children, these children are at risk for a wide range of illnesses including measles, mumps, rubella, whooping cough, diphtheria, and chicken pox.
5
I have spent a lot of my career as an interpreter for the deaf. Many of my clients were deafened by childhood measles. This is a disease we put to bed and now is surging out of pure ignorance.
I had measles as a kid and it was miserable. Please parents, let science lead your thinking, not unsubstantiated fads.
287
It is disgraceful and irresponsible that parents rely on fear instead of science in matters about their children.
37
@mendela
It's also symptomatic of the cult of ignorance that grips the nation.
We need a better educational system, top to bottom.
1
I think it would bring home the dangers of measles if the CDC would actually publish the number of children harmed by the disease. We know it can cause neurological damage and deafness but how many children are there who actually are suffering as a result of the disease? For those parents, it's a tragedy. Why is that not at the forefront of the campaign?
27
Irresponsible parents not only put their own children at risk but the lives of the elderly, those who are immuno compromised and babies who have yet to be vaccinated.
These isn't just selfish, but criminal. These parents think their rights trump those of others in society. If you want to live this way, don't send your kids to public school, work from home and don't engage with members of the public. Otherwise, this is criminal behavior.
141
The author should note that California stopped allowing personal and belief exceptions in 2016.
117
If parents don't want to vaccinate their kids they should not be allowed into public places: schools, playgrounds, stores.
110
Vaccines are not safe for everybody . Parents don't want their child to be collateral damage . The FDA and the CDC are protecting vaccine manufactures not the public. Until vaccine clinical trials are done by and independent scientists not those working for giant pharmaceutical companies, I will not trust the safety of vaccines.
My daughter was injured by the Gardasil 9 vaccine and after reading about how those clinical trials were conducted , which were documented in the new book "The HPV vaccine on Trial: Seeking Justice for a Generation Betrayed", I have lost confidence in our regulatory agencies .
4
@df
I agree vaccines aren't safe for everybody. But the size of that population is small enough that it shouldn't matter to lawmakers.
There are certainly concerns with industry conducting its own safety trials, but there is no government infrastructure for independent testing. Anywhere. For anything. You should stop taking all medications and stop using all medical devices as well, because they are brought to market in the same way.
While your example is important to you, I don't believe these should enter the public debate because they are relatively rare. While they are certainly detrimental to those that suffer from the side effects, this doesn't compare to the number of people affected and with greater severity by the diseases in question. These personal stories are only significant because there are so few of them.
37
@df
I'm not familiar with the book. An Amazon reviewer who gave it one star seems to be familiar with th issue, the authors, and the book, and gives an extended critique. It's worth reading.
https://www.amazon.com/HPV-Vaccine-Trial-Generation-Betrayed/product-reviews/1510710809/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_hist_1?ie=UTF8&filterByStar=one_star&reviewerType=all_reviews#reviews-filter-bar
I have little faith in our drug companies or so-called regulators. However, none of that has any bearing on the effectiveness of any given vaccine.
11
@df
Vaccines may not not safe for everybody, but measles aren't safe for anybody. Before the measles vaccine was introduced, about 400 American children a year died from the disease, and many more suffered complications such as encephalitis (swelling of the brain) that can lead to convulsions and can leave the child deaf or with intellectual disability. Unless you can find 400 children a year who suffer an adverse reaction from the vaccine that is more severe than death, common sense would dictate that everybody should be vaccinated.
101
This is beyond obscene. Children who have not received their vaccinations for reasons other than medical necessity should not be allowed in school.
Not only should individual states pass laws to this effect, but the federal government should cut off federal funds to school systems that do not abide by it.
Surely, the wishes of the ignorant, selfish parents who refuse to vaccinate their children should take a back seat to the welfare of the children themselves, whether their own or others?
316
@Josh Hill
Exactly correct. Someone's right to ignorant, superstitious beliefs stops when it impacts public health and safety.
49
@Josh Hill
It should be everyone's duty to do research and not to fall for misleading headlines in the news. Anyone who has done their research will know that there are many studies showing the harm that vaccines cause, with specific vaccines being shown to increase mortality rates.
Until the day when vaccination is brought up to respectable scientific standards, fully backed up by rigorous data, the situation will stay similar to what it is now with informed individuals not wanting to risk the vaccines, as they do not trust the charlatans who are pushing them.
@Lucy Silverstein Please post links to the many studies here (assuming they were published in reputable medical journals and are 'fully backed up by rigorous data') Thank you.
32
The irresponsibility of parents that do not vaccinate their children is profound and brings into question their readiness for parenting.
There are no guarantees in parenting and each day of life can be fraught with risk. That is part of the courage it takes to be a parent. I know as I have a beautiful disabled child.
The science is easily understood and has completely changed the odds of good health for our children. I suppose these same parents dispute climate change as well?
154
@g I am quite sure that those same parents deny climate change and vote for Trump and his ilk. Who else could be so ignorant, misinformed, selfish and superstitious?