Posted on 08/14/2015 8:45:58 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Lotta media buzz this morning over what she said yesterday — or at least, the first part of what she said — about vaccines, but her stance on this isn’t new. She argued for some degree of parental choice back in February when BuzzFeed asked her about it. But now that she’s cracked the GOP field’s top tier, I guess the “gotcha” effort needs to begin in earnest. What better place to start than with an issue that tripped up Chris Christie and Rand Paul earlier this year?
She draws the line where most Republicans would, I imagine: The state can’t dictate to a parent over their child’s health, but that parent has no right to put other parents’ children at risk in the schoolyard.
Speaking at a town hall on Thursday in Alden, Iowa, Fiorina responded to a question from a mother of five who claimed that one of her children had an adverse reaction to a vaccination, saying “It’s always the parent’s choice.” She continued by referencing her daughter, who Fiorina said was bullied by a school nurse into vaccinating her pre-teen daughter for the Human papillomavirus, a sexually transmitted disease. “Measles is one thing…,” Fiorina said.
“When you have highly communicable diseases where you have a vaccine that’s proven, like measles or mumps, then I think a parent can make that choice, but then I think a school district is well within their rights to say, ‘I’m sorry, your child cannot then attend public school,’” Fiorina explained to reporters after the event.
“So a parent has to make that trade-off,” she continued. “I think when we’re talking about some of these more esoteric immunizations, then I think absolutely a parent should have a choice and a school district shouldn’t be able to say, ‘sorry, your kid can’t come to school’ for a disease that’s not communicable, that’s not contagious, and where there really isn’t any proof that they’re necessary at this point.”
Back in late January, when vaccinemania first broke out in political media, Josh Earnest told reporters that Obama is strongly pro-vaccine but believes “people should evaluate this for themselves,” which … puts him squarely in line with Fiorina from what I can tell. In fact, considering that 47 of the 50 states do allow unvaccinated kids to attend public school so long as their parents are claiming a religious and/or conscientious exemption from the law, Fiorina’s actually more of a pro-vaccine hardliner than most state legislatures are. (Of the three states that don’t grant exemptions, two are deep red West Virginia and Mississippi. The other is California, which eliminated its exemptions this year after some upper-class new-age liberals stopped vaccinating their kids for measles because it was “unnatural” or whatever.)
Fiorina’s compromise, letting parents make choices for their kids but then effectively quarantining those kids from schools so that immunosuppressed students aren’t put at risk, obviously isn’t perfect. An unvaccinated kid could still encounter another who can’t be vaccinated for medical reasons at the playground, at the mall, wherever. If you think society should take whatever legal measures are necessary to promote herd immunity, individual choice be damned, there shouldn’t be any room for parental oversight. That’s an easy position if you’re a liberal since you’ve already bought into far lesser mandates in the name of public health, but for someone who still cares about liberty, Fiorina’s (and Obama’s) position is probably the best you can do. As Dan Foster wrote back in February:
If you support mandatory, full-spectrum vaccination and oppose “death panels,” you’d better be able to at least gesture at a limited principle located somewhere between the two. To anticipate your reply, of course I think there is such a limiting principle, but there are plenty of tough cases. Children aren’t routinely vaccinated against anthrax, for instance, because of the level and nature of the threat. And the vaccine causes enough serious adverse reactions (to about 1 percent of recipients) that there were lawsuits and injunctions filed in response to a Clinton-era program making them mandatory for military personnel. Do you support mandatory anthrax vaccination for all kids?…
Remember, when progressives argue for coercion in health-care policy, it’s almost always under the principle that the cost of individual bad behavior is borne by society. So while a measles outbreak is a pretty clear-cut illustration of this, so too is the “obesity epidemic,” according to some.
People who care about liberty would do well to put some thought into what distinguishes one from the other.
The reason liberals get excited when Republicans equivocate, even a tiny bit, about mandatory vaccination isn’t because they fear 10 million cases of measles under President Fiorina, it’s because they’re eager to mainstream the idea that Uncle Sam should have broader powers over people’s health generally. Framing Republicans as kooks on this issue is a small way to make opposition to government diktats on health seem kooky generally. Exit question: Speaking of kooky, isn’t there another, more prominent Republican in the race whose views on vaccinations are a lot more … interesting than Fiorina’s? Weird that the media’s focused on her this morning instead of him.
Thank you to the lying Dr. who created this ridiculous “Vaccine/Autism” link and to Jenny McCarthy for creating a health problem where one didn’t exist. We didn’t have enough problems already.
Why would schools refuse to accept them? The only ones at risk would be the other students who weren’t vaccinated, whose parents have already accepted the risk by choosing not to vaccinate.
I imagine they’re saying having unvaccinated kids around each other would speed and outbreak into an epidemic.
I don’t have a dog in this fight but I also had the same question.
Aside from that, seems to me that people who are able to keep their kids out of public schools are the smart ones.
It’s very apparent that you did not live back in the 50’s during the polio epidemic like I did. It was devastating and pure horror.
The only thing that stopped it was mandatory vaccinations at school.
Go believe in your little fantasy world but a similar horror will appear on the horizon due to those who do not vaccinate.
Vaccines aren’t 100% effective. They mostly work on the “herd immunity” effect - if enough people are effectively immune, than the odds of an epidemic are negligible at most.
However, when you introduce non-vaccinated people into the “herd”, you increase the number of vectors a communicable disease gets introduced and spread to other members in the “herd”.
Other issue, I heard the other day but don’t know whether it’s true and that is that rubella contains or is developed using fetal materials.
I would think the kids could be quarantined then. Whatever disease the parents want to gamble with, the general public should not have to.
The minimal risk from vaccines is no greater than the risk the kid takes by walking out the door of their house and going anywhere. I would think the mentality that does not want their kid protected from disease also has the opposite fear of germs. Why would they want to send their kid to school?
I would be far more concerned about the indoctrination going on at the schools than about vaccinations happening at the doctor’s office.
There are two ongoing investigations. One into Merck for allegedly fudging the numbers on vaccine effectiveness and one (the link above) into the CDC for fudging the data on possible link between the MMR vax and autism, especially in black boys.
It seems Merck was given an exclusive license to manufacture the MMR vax as long as they could keep the effective rates at or above 95%. Through the years there have been several localized outbreaks in populations that are considered highly vaccinated. Of course, with an excusive license to manufacture a “required” vax on the line, there is potentially some incentive to over-report the effective rate of that vax. I am interested to see what comes out in both these cases.
I tend to agree with Carly on this one. You can’t force someone to take a medical risk, no matter how small it is, that they don’t want to in order to possibly prevent a different medical risk. And if the schools decide to not admit unvaccinated students then so be it. There are alternatives. However, I also think that students who are too sick/allergic to be vaccinated shouldn’t be in public school anyway. So, if they aren’t in the school then it doesn’t matter if, I’ll call them conscientious objectors, are in class. The vaccinated won’t be affected.
Makes sense.
No vaccine, no admission to public school.
Not that that would be a bad thing in some areas...
Re: “Why would schools refuse to accept them? The only ones at risk would be the other students who weren’t vaccinated, whose parents have already accepted the risk by choosing not to vaccinate.”
A valid point, however, if the public schools allowed unvaccinated students to enroll, however illogical it may be, I could see the school districts being sued because some kid, vaccinated or not, getting sick for whatever reason, then parents blaming the school district because they allow unvaccinated students to enroll.
Isn’t the military the same way - you have to be vaccinated because close proximity spreads diseases much more quickly, plus the exposure to foreign diseases?
Most civil war deaths among soldiers (3 out of 4) was from sickness/disease. This was not only due to unsanitary conditions, but also because you had thousands of young men thrown together who had never been exposed to many of the communicable diseases that men from the cities had already experienced. There was no such thing as vaccinations yet and so thousands died because they had no anti-bodies built up to resist.
The herd immunity concept is hypothetical - there is not sufficient data to call it a theory but it sure makes sense to me.
In California, Mississippi and West Virginia a child who has missed any of the doses of HepB vaccine will not be allowed to attend school.
In California, Mississippi and West Virginia a child who is ACTIVELY INFECTED with Hepatitis B cannot be refused admission.
Makes perfect sense.../s
In WA state, public school students are required to be vaccinated in order to attend school. (HPV is not required) Parents may choose to be exempt from vaccines but to get the exemption they must meet with a doctor about vaccines before the exemption will be granted. If an outbreak of any illness comes to the school/community, un-vaccinated students and staff will not be allowed to attend school until the outbreak is over.
Not many exemptions at my school anymore since the Doctor meeting requirement came in.
So you don’t agree with the right of an informed parent making an educated decision regarding vaccinations?
Wow, I can feel your fear. How did men survive for the last 6 thousand years with vaccines? And what does a vaccinated person have to worry about?
I suppose this is an off-hand reference to the measles outbreak that happened after the Obama administration allowed thousands of poor, uneducated and sick "children" into this country with no one checking on their health/vaccine status. Soon after, voila, measles outbreaks around the country where these people were seeded.
This had little to do with Americans and their vaccination beliefs and everything to do with an American president overstepping his bounds which caused a measles outbreak, which, I think, took a few lives. (If I am wrong about that, please correct me.)
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