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.
They should, and everyone else should have the right to keep the anti-vaxxer kids separated from other kids. They can grow up like the boy in the bubble.
My husband and I both had vaccines as children. So did our siblings. Though my husband’s brother was older and he got polio before that vaccine was available.
Our kid had vaccines.
Vaccines are a gift we should be thankful for. That said, I do not think the chickenpox vaccine is probably necessary. It is nice, though. But I have known no one who had it. My husband got chickenpox as an adult. I understand that put him at higher risk for shingles. But he lived through the humiliating experience just fine. He got it right after our child got it.
I do understand the issue with the use of 2 aborted fetuses for the rubella and chickenpox vaccines. (It is not an ongoing use.) An alternative can and should be offered, though it would take some time, so I understand.
Thank you for being the voice of reason. Everybody screams “anti-vaxxer” and nobody asks why. They make assumptions based on MSM blurbs. Critical thinking seems to be such a heavy burden for some people.
Unfortunately it isn’t just those two vaccines:
https://www.cogforlife.org/vaccineListOrigFormat.pdf
And it’s more than just 2 cell lines.
Having ‘gotten away with’ using the existing cell lines there’s no reason for them not to use more in the future.
It is great that your family is healthy. As long as we can make decisions based on conscience, we are free. Once we lose this freedom, we will never get it back. Soltzenitzen warned us...
Wow, SunkenCiv...amazing that man has survived since the fertile crescent without vaccines. Glad I exercise my 2nd Amendment rights...
The number of vaccines has TRIPLED since the 80’s. Most of those since the industry was indemnified in ‘86.
So you can’t compare the outcome of you and your husband, or even your children if they were vaccinated prior to the late 90’s to the schedule in force today:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-0jY7pTC-bzw/VNugUMJnEnI/AAAAAAAAKEY/fpUJjQTCqWY/s1600/VaxCDC.jpg
I am glad I do not have to make the choice today. Shame on them for doing it that way. Still, if someone murders your child and your other child needs some vital organ transplant to save his life, they are a good transplant match, would you allow the transplant to take place? On the one hand, it is coming from a murdered child. On the other hand, you didn’t murder the child and it will save the other child’s life.
Another cell line needs to be developed for the sake of conscience. But using the existing one does not, in my opinion, make the user guilty of murder.
The issue is the murder.
Abortionists murder without any legal penalties. And profit from it to boot.
There are plenty of ‘choices’ for cell lines. Have to wonder if ‘zealots’ aren’t the ones picking dead baby lines on purpose.
And then there’s this;
You have no idea what kind of contaminants are in those live virus vaccines from aborted babies. Even the manufacturers don’t know exactly what’s in there. Since they’re ‘live virus’, they can’t be sterilized in any way and any ‘viruses’ in there are necessarily included with the ones being grown for vaccines.
This goes for any live virus vaccine.
If the kids are vaccinated are they not protected? Schools are not the parents.
Can you see that vaccinations are not about religious freedom, and never have been, but about human health, and that they work? Didn’t think so.
http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=768249#
Find the (should be easily identified) inflection points in the mortality graph (the red line) indicating the introduction of particular vaccines. Pay attention to the mid 50’s (polio), mid 60’s (measles) and any other point.
And explain the presence of betaHCG in tetanus vaccines. It’s not present in the culture media.
And the particular ‘protocol’ for this tetanus vaccination program in Uganda matched the one in this study:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9083611
Where does God and freedom of conscience fit? Isn’t this precisely why our forefathers left their countries? If the technology is so great, why do we have to be coerced? And why do the drug companies (and governments) have immunity?
It wasn’t just at Disney. I seem to remember that a lot of these people were spread out over the country and that certain places experienced measles outbreaks and I thought a couple of kids had died.
Nuttery.
http://pediatrics.about.com/od/measles/a/
I didn't see any deaths associated, so you were correct about that. But, the list of measles outbreaks recently is remarkable.
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