Because it isn't that simple. If it was just a matter of my son missing 21 days of school (the incubation period) that might be entirely reasonable - but the problem is, once you have an outbreak that can become a rolling number.
Kid A gets chickenpox and infects Kid B, who 21 days later gets chickenpox and infects Kid C, who 21 days later gets chickenpox, and infects Kid D, who 21 days later gets chickenpox and infects Kid E, who 21 days later gets chickenpox and infects Kid F...
What you end up with a long term outbreak. The only way to stop that happening if you have a population with a significant number of non immunised kids is to take all of those kids out of the school for the initial incubation period. That includes kids like my son. Once the school has been chickenpox free for 21 days, and none of the kids kept out of school have got it, and you know none of the unimmunised kids have been exposed, you can let them all back in.
Keeping the immunocompromised kid at home won't stop the outbreak. If you've got 33 unimmunised kids in the school, the chances are quite high of a rolling outbreak.
You did a very good job of explaining how and why that works.
I’m sorry for the girl missing the prom, but here’s her life lesson. Choices have consequences. When you opt to not vaccinate, you are choosing the possibility of having to miss important events due to outbreaks.
This problem would be solved by not having public school. Then everybody could pay to put their kids in whatever school environment suited them.
Because of public school, we have liberty-choking restrictions on a vast majority of our population, in order to cater to various minority populations. Immunization is one area, “offensive” t-shirts are another, “inciteful” hair coloring is another, and bag lunches with peanuts are yet another.
I’m kind of surprised that no school has yet banned all non-kosher meat products, to “protect” the jewish and muslim minority population. Maybe they have. Or they could just ban all meat, so that some random vegan kid doesn’t have to deal with the possibility of getting meat mixed in with the vegetables.
Frankly, while disability is not itself funny, I do find it hilarious when I visit my kid’s high school, and there is a dedicated full-time employee, whose sole job it is to push around some poor mentally-challenged kid who clearly gets nothing out of any of the normal classes and activities at school. When they say the “average cost per kid” is $12,000, what they really mean is most normal kids costs a few thousand each, and then we spend millions meeting the requirements of the various disabilities laws, just so those few kids aren’t “left out”.
I think when it comes to diseases that are not generally life-threatening, I have to draw the line at forced vaccinations. There used to be a few “bubble kids” — I don;’t think the answer is to create a nationwide bubble so those kids don’t have to be in one alone.