Posted on 01/08/2015 9:52:16 PM PST by blueplum
At least nine people – including two unvaccinated Riverside County siblings – contracted measles after visiting Disneyland Resort in mid-December, state health officials said Wednesday. Public health officials are also investigating three additional cases of suspected measles, which is highly contagious, and a spokesman with the department said it would not be surprising to see more cases. All 12 reported visiting Disneyland or Disney California Adventure between Dec. 15 and Dec. 20. {snip} Of the nine confirmed cases linked to Disneyland, only one was vaccinated, according to the state Department of Public Health.
(Excerpt) Read more at pe.com ...
So, if you get measles, you are now a “victim?”
Is that the same for when you catch the “common cold?”
Typical hospital TV show - this scenario is played out on many of them: the mother who won’t vaccinate, the child who catches an illness, and the doctor who gets to make an example of parents who refuse vaccinations.
Meanwhile, has a hospital TV show ever featured a child who becomes seriously ill from a vaccination shot? Because in real life, they sometimes do.
FTR, I’m not anti-vaccine, but there are potential complications, and not vaccinating is not the same as refusing medical care for an illness.
Thanks Illegals!
Exactly. I’m Sure this has nothing to do with our porous borders. Nothing to see here, move along... Racism, Koch brothers, etc.
They aren't all liberals. I've run into several right here on Free Republic.
They've all memorized the same anti-vax propaganda. And when I call them out on it, when I tell them how to fact-check for themselves, they get VERY upset.
One woman even tried to deny that her concern was about autism. She claimed that she KNOWS vaccines don't cause autism, but she won't vaccinate her kids because of the OTHER brain damage that vaccines cause.
Ironically, measles and many of the other vaccine-preventable diseases *do* cause neurological damage. But the idiots who fall for anti-vax propaganda would rather endanger their kids' health and lives in favor of being pseudo-afraid of some bogeyman. Somehow, the real dangers don't concern them as much as the pretend risks.
The side-effects of vaccines are quite well-known. Usually, they consist of some swelling and redness at the injection site (which really mean that the immune system kicked into high gear to fight the disease). About 1 out of 3,000 who receive the MMR vaccine has a seizure, and less than 1 in a million have an allergic reaction. The CDC also says that more severe effects have been reported, which tells me that some anti-vax kooks submitted stories to VAERS, which could not be substantiated.
If you contrast the mild effects of MMR vaccine to the very real effects of measles--which includes brain damage, a 1 to 3 chance of death per thousand cases, and a delayed encephalitis that kills another 1 per thousand up to a decade after apparently recovering--it is clear that no effect of the vaccination is even comparable in severity to the disease.
The voluminous packet of clinical trials data that pharmaceutical companies must submit to the FDA details every adverse effect that occurred during the trials--even if they are NOT related to the vaccine. Thus, a child who gets hit and killed by a car the day after vaccination is listed as a "severe adverse event" even though the accident has no relation to the vaccine.
FTR, I’m not anti-vaccine, but there are potential complications, and not vaccinating is not the same as refusing medical care for an illness.
Every anti-vax website and activist says the exact same thing. They insist on an impossible level of safety, while trying to convince you that the real possibility of death or permanent impairment from the preventable disease is negligible.
Keep in mind that most of the anti-vax lunatics are extreme far-left activists. And the far-left has an almost universal and often-stated desire to decimate, if not eradicate, the human race. So, the next time you see an anti-vaxxer poo-pooing the dangers of deadly diseases while trying to invoke panic over the extremely safe vaccines that prevent those diseases--ask yourself, what is their real agenda?
I can guarantee you that protecting your kids' health is NOT at the top of their list.
So, as a parent, you must weigh the very low risk associated with the shot against the very low risk of contracting the disease in the first place (and then the low risk of becoming dangerously ill with it). Then you make the choice you believe is best for your child.
My own children received only the required vaccination shots. Other parents choose every available vaccination, whereas others choose not to vaccinate at all. The parents I know who choose not to vaccinate are absolutely concerned about their children's health and welfare, whether other people agree with them or not.
“They aren’t all liberals. I’ve run into several right here on Free Republic.”
Yes. I’ve seen them too.
Perhaps they aren’t liberal, but they aren’t conservative.
Thanks for the ping!
case increase to 12, and involve patients in the city of Pasadena, in Orange, Riverside, and San Diego Counties as well as Alameda County (Alameda is in the San Fran bay area)
What anti-vaxxers display is an utter incomprehension of risk assessment and mathematics, as well as lack of critical thinking ability. Real risk assessment tells you that the chance of getting a serious reaction from the vaccine is far smaller than the chance of serious complications from the disease it prevents.
We do not naturally have a small risk of being exposed to these diseases. The only reason the risk is so small is that we have very good vaccine coverage. Take that away—throw too many idiot anti-vaxxers into the mix—and we lose that. We see the effects of anti-vax kookery whenever a measles (polio, pertussis, etc.) outbreak occurs. In the not-so-distant past, outbreaks like that occurred so frequently that they weren’t even newsworthy.
Keep in mind that the vaccine side effects are caused by the pathogen component of the vaccine. Thus, whatever those effects are, they mimic what would be seen with the disease, except far less severe.
The parents who choose not to vaccinate their children don’t just endanger their own children. They endanger OTHER children. Babies die of pertussis because some older child who was never vaccinated and has asymptomatic pertussis comes too close to the baby before it is old enough to be vaccinated. They also endanger people with weak immune systems, who absolutely depend on herd immunity to protect them from disease.
I don’t care how much anti-vaxxers profess to care about their children’s health—the bottom line is that they sure choose a dangerous and irresponsible way to show it. In addition, I think it is way too easy to get “religious” exemptions. Either such exemptions should not be legal, or the parents claiming such should have to produce a letter printed on letterhead stationery signed by a genuine pastor/imam/rabbi/whatever from a recognized religious institution (e.g., not some fly-by-night cult).
exDemMom - I think you should drop the “ex” from your screenname.
I’m glad you mentioned pertussis.
Not long ago, I asked my Doc for a tetanus booster (lot of rusty wire around here) and mixed in was a pertussis vaccine. Not because I had small children at home, but because I could come in contact with small children. Sounded fair. ‘For the kids’, right?
Healthy kids may ride out measles pretty well; but pregnant women and the elderly won’t. Places like shopping malls and amusement parks seem to have a pretty equal mix of ages.
Since adults are encouraged to get vaccines ‘to protect the kids’ I’m a little confused as to why parents of kids don’t reciprocate and vaccinate their children against communicable diseases. Unless children live inside a spacesuit, it’s a given they would have contact with the pregnant and elderly, and, in the case of measles, with catastrophic results to the unborn and immunocompromised.
I guess it’s a dilemna - does the risk of vaccine side effects, which are statistically tiny, supercede the certainty of stillbirth or miscarriage of another person’s child or the death of another person’s grandpa from complications after exposure to an unvaccinated and infected child/adult? In a nation with wide open borders is being unvaccinated still an acceptable gamble?
According to ABC local news, the Disney-associated cases have almost tripled, from 7 to 19, now including an individual from Colorado Springs, CO. Of the 19, only two old enough to be vaccinated were vaccinated/partly vaccinated.
Being conservative does NOT mean you have an absolute right to endanger other people’s health or lives by your behavior or choices.
If the only people affected by refusing to take vaccines were the ones who won’t take them, that would be one thing. But their willful refusal threatens people who have NOT consented to take that risk. And they do not have that right.
Look at history: public health has always trumped individual choices. If you are contagious with a dangerous disease, you can be quarantined.
Is it liberal to refuse to allow people the right to ride a motorcycle at 70 mph on a busy sidewalk? Or to drive a car inside a mall? Or to bury land mines on your personal property? If not, then why would it be liberal to say that you can’t purposefully (and if you are anti-vax, it *is* purposeful) give dangerous diseases to other people?
The latest recommendation these days with pertussis is for a pregnant woman to get vaccinated, preferably during the 2nd trimester, so that some residual immunity will pass to the child. Also, everyone around the pregnant woman is recommended to get pertussis vaccine.
Pertussis is a terrible disease. Most older people can have pertussis and experience a mild cough. But babies and young children have horrible coughing fits and struggle to breathe; some of them do not survive. There are videos on youtube. Personally, I think that every pediatrician who encounters an anti-vax parent should require them to watch videos of babies with pertussis. Maybe add in a few videos of people who have lost or nearly lost their child from other vaccine-preventable diseases. The diseases and their dangers are real. The anti-vaxxer’s bogeymen are not.
What you wrote above makes it sound as if unvaccinated children are walking around carrying diseases all the time. Well, a child who's received a live vaccine poses a risk to people who are immunocompromised. So, there's a risk posed by children who've received live vaccines.
Furthermore, receiving a shot doesn't guarantee that a person cannot catch the disease and then spread it. Sometimes a vaccination shot is ineffective, whether because it hasn't been stored properly or because of some other reason, and the child catches the disease even though he or she received the shot. And even when someone receives an effective vaccine, he still can pick up the disease and carry it to other people (for example, Meningitis B at Princeton).
So, while vaccines might work well for the person receiving them, they're not perfect and come with no guarantees.
Plus, the value of some vaccines is debatable: The chicken pox vaccine is a good example. When I was young, many of us caught the chicken pox as children, and the vast majority of us were fine afterwards, and we had immunity which was reinforced because we were exposed to the virus again and again. Ever since the varicella vaccine, chicken pox is not as common in childhood. Now it's more common in college at an age when it's more dangerous. And, because we're not being exposed constantly to varicella, now older people who had chicken pox as children are catching chicken pox again.
Since adults are encouraged to get vaccines ‘to protect the kids’ I’m a little confused as to why parents of kids don’t reciprocate and vaccinate their children against communicable diseases.
As an adult, I've never been encouraged to get a vaccine, so I don't know what you mean there. I don't know your age, but I can tell you that, when I was young, we weren't required to receive as many shots as children today are. The number keeps increasing. I probably received a few shots as a child. My children each received between 15-17 shots before their second birthday. Nowadays, the number is even higher.
So, some parents are balking at the number of shots. And there are many other reasons. There are possible serious complications, depending on the health of the child receiving the shot. Though rare, there are people who have died after receiving a vaccination shot. So parents are weighing all of the risks into their decision-making.
One of my teens was due to receive two shots. I dutifully took him to the nearest clinic. There was a loooong needle. After the injection, he was sitting there calmly, but suddenly he passed out and began convulsing. 911 was called, but he was all right soon enough, and we turned down a ride to the hospital. Upon quizzing him, the nurses decided he hadn't eaten enough that morning. (That's all it took for that to happen - not eating very much.) Needless to say, they refused to give him another shot that day. He was forced to wait a few more weeks, and then when they did give him the next shot, they monitored him very closely. IMHO, it'd be understandable if another parent opted against further shots following that experience. So, the issue just isn't as cut-and-dry as many people believe.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.