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.
The only recent ‘measles death’ was the woman who was severaly immunocompromised, on immune suppressants for some sort of medical condition, and apparently contracted measles in the hospital or clinic. It wasn’t immediately obvious she had measles when she died. I’m not aware if any information about the strain of measles she had has been released.
Read the article here:
Those of us who didn’t have measles will be getting another measles booster (mmr, no single measles vaccine is available) sooner rather than later. And likely those who did actually have measles as well if they don’t have any antibodies in a titer.
I’m surprised everyone thinks this is about the children’s schedule. 90% of kids have had every single shot on the schedule and on time too. This whole ‘mandating’ argument is to get people up to speed on the idea that adults need to be up to date on whatever is on ‘the schedule’ for them as well. Or be unable to work or possibly even visit an MD for a checkup. One of the reasons big pharma was so in love with obamacare is the potential for government to mandate vaccines and other medications. Roll up your sleeve now, save time later, there are 200+ vaccines in the pipeline.
That 1/3 of the vaccines were ‘contaminated’ with a known sterilant?
Or that the WHO would be ‘up to that’ to control the population of an African nation?
Yeah, our forefathers left their countries to avoid being vaccinated. Ass.
The technology works, and btw, a vaccine can’t introduce an IUD.
People fled Britain and Germany for North America because they could get land, escape many taxes, and avoid getting killed by local thugs in the employ of the local landed gentry or by the monarch’s army.
No, that there is anything to the idea that the chemical would result in human infertility.
Good luck trying to talk sense to the anti-vax loon crowd.
They're so wound up on Internet Truths that they're actually proud of their child negligence.
Did you fail to read the pubmed link?
That was the whole POINT of that exercise. The HCG is bound to the tetanus toxin.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?linkname=pubmed_pubmed&from_uid=9083611
‘They’ have been working on just such a ‘vaccine against babies’ for 30+ years.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8078917
“A vaccine that prevents pregnancy in women.”
We report here results of clinical trials on a birth control vaccine, consisting of a heterospecies dimer of the beta subunit of human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) associated noncovalently with the alpha subunit of ovine luteinizing hormone and conjugated to tetanus and diphtheria toxoids as carriers, that induces antibodies of high avidity (K(a) approximately 10(10) M-1) against hCG. Fertile women exposed to conception over 1224 cycles recorded only one pregnancy at antibody titers of > 50 ng/ml (hCG bioneutralization capacity). The antibody response declines with time; fertility was regained when titers fell to < 35 ng/ml. This study presents evidence of the feasibility of a vaccine for control of human fertility.
Lots more like that one too.
Wow, that’s really a remarkably irrelevant study — the story here is, there’s a bunch of anti-vaxxers pretending that there’s an anti-fertility campaign going on in Africa, and pretend they’ve got a smoking gun. They don’t.
Irrelevant?
The study used tetanus vaccine with the toxoid bound covalently to betaHCG and induced sterility in the women who got it.
Oddly enough, the tetanus vaccines in the Kenyan ‘outreach’ were contaminated, 1/3 of them, with betaHCG.
Total coincidence I’m sure.
The difference in the protocol with the Kenyan campaign was the dosage and timing of the ‘tetanus vaccine’. Kenyan women got 4 or 5 doses of the vaccine spread out over several months just like in the study to prevent conception, unlike the traditional tetanus shot which is given only once.
And the anti-vaxers in question were Kenyan doctors who adminster the vaccine program there. Hardly anti-vaxxers. They got suspicious when the single shot tetanus vaccine turned into a 4 or 5 shot ‘protocol’ never done before.
And neonatal tetanus, supposedly the target of the campaign in Kenya, is so far down the list of risks it nearly falls off entirely. And yet millions were spent on this campaign. In spite of the near universal lack of sanitary human waste disposal or clean drinking water. Priorities...priorities...if you’re a population control nutjob like the WHO.
Then schools should not have the right to use the $10,000 for general education and the parents should get a voucher to go elsewhere.
In California and Mississippi and West Virginia the only ‘elsewhere’ to go is home. And California is working on eliminating that ‘exemption’ right now.
Califonria is the example of what happens when you get one socialist party control.
Notice it tells people what to do.
And there’s lots of research being done on ‘antifertility’ vaccines.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?linkname=pubmed_pubmed&from_uid=26160491
And truthfully, you’ll never know precisely what’s in any vaccine you or your children get.
Again, it is about the kids who swarmed over our border who have NOT had all of the shots that our U.S. kids have had.
Excellent question and one I've thought about for years..
That was an excuse.
Most of the people who got measles from the Disney outbreak were adults.
Most kids have had all their shots. Adults on the other hand...:
http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/hcp/imz/adult.html
This is where the money will come. Once people accept the idea that vaccines can be mandated to receive government services if you’re a kid, adults will be next.
pure horror.
Aren't you being a little bit melodramatic? With that being said, just what percent of the population is that? Certainly not negligible enough to even mention..........
I caught it in the Army from my roommate and was quarantined for 10 days. I'M A SURVIVOR!!!!!
Good for you. It is rough when you are an adult. I have to say my husband took it quite well. He looked like he had leprosy. I was very glad I had it as a kid.
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