Posted on 02/04/2015 11:01:19 AM PST by Kaslin
This week, controversy broke out over whether state governments have the power to require parents to have their children vaccinated. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, no stranger to compelling his citizens to stay off the roads during blizzards, announced that he had some sympathy for the anti-vaccination position: "I also understand that parents need to have some measure of choice in things as well. So that's the balance the government has to decide." Kentucky Senator Rand Paul doubled down on Christie's remarks, stating, "I have heard of many tragic cases of walking, talking, normal children who wound up with profound mental orders after vaccines. ...The state doesn't own your children."
Christie and Paul aren't the only politicians sympathizing with anti-vaccination fanatics; in 2008, then-Senator Barack Obama repeated widely debunked claims of links between autism and vaccination. Skepticism of vaccination crosses party lines, unfortunately -- although the most organized anti-vaccination resistance comes from the New Agey left in places like Santa Monica and Marin County, who worry more about infinitesimal amounts of formaldehyde in vaccines than about death by polio.
Unsurprisingly, older Americans believe that children should be vaccinated against diseases like measles, mumps and whopping cough, by a 73 percent to 21 percent margin. Americans 18-29, by contrast, believe by a 43 percent to 42 percent plurality that government should not mandate such vaccinations.
That's because young people don't remember a time when such diseases claimed lives. They don't remember a time when the vast majority of Americans weren't vaccinated. Older people do. Many of them lost loved ones to polio and measles and mumps and rubella. In 1952, over 3,000 Americans died of polio and well over 21,000 were left with mild or severe paralysis. Thanks to Dr. Jonas Salk's vaccine, there have been zero cases of natural polio in the United States since 1979.
The same is true of measles. According to Dr. Mark Papania of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 90 percent of Americans suffered from the measles by age 15 before widespread vaccination beginning in 1962. From 1956 to 1960, he reports, "an average of 542,000 cases were reported annually." That included 450 deaths per year, as well as 150,000 cases of respiratory complications and 4,000 cases of consequent encephalitis per year, many of which resulted in later death. Then mandatory vaccination kicked in. Until a major upswing in 2014, we averaged less than 100 cases of measles per year in the United States since 2000.
The point of mandatory vaccinations is not merely to protect those who are vaccinated. When it comes to measles, mumps and rubella, for example, children cannot be vaccinated until 1 year of age. The only way to prevent them from getting diseases is to ensure that those who surround them do not have those diseases. The same is true for children with diseases like leukemia, as well as pregnant women. Herd immunity is designed to protect third parties.
But Americans have short memories and enormous confidence in junk science. Parents will ignore vaccinations but ensure that their kids are stocked up with the latest homeopathic remedies, Kabbalah bracelets and crystals. St. John's wort, red string and crystals all existed before 1962. They didn't stop the measles. Vaccination did.
That doesn't mean that all vaccinations should be compulsory, of course. There are certain diseases that can only be transmitted by behavior, like HPV. There are others that are too varied for effective herd vaccination, like the flu shot. But when it comes to measles and mumps and rubella and polio, your right to be free of vaccination -- and your right to be a dope with the health of your child because you believe Jenny McCarthy's idiocy -- ends where my child's right to live begins.
Okay. But what makes you think vaccination rates are going to decline?
If someone would have asked me that before this Administration, I might have said yes.
If someone asked me if I believed the HIGH MILITARY BRASS took their oath to our Country seriously and would defend this Country, (before this Administration), I would have said yes.
With this Administration, despite the good honest people working in the Govt., the top Administration appointed hacks only serve this Administration’s agenda. Period.
No. It's not the same. The pro-death crowd won't even call it a child. To them it's a fetus.
You think you have the "right" to expose your child to that kind of danger? You're no better than an abortionist.
Someone else's children are none of your business nor are they the states. Your point is based on pure emotion.
I never thought that I'd see so many "conservatives" embrace It Takes A Village. The MSM really has stampeded people and you're one of them.
Dear Ben,
You fell for the leftist trap. The fact of the matter is that this current measles outbreak IS NOT the result of the views of the few “anti-vaccinator” people. It IS the result of the unmonitored influx of the poorest, third world, diseased, illiterate children that poured across our border over the last year.
The fact that the GOP is falling for this trap is proof that they have no interest in securing the border and screening for diseases.....
Whenever you get into mandated medical procedures for civilians you enter a very obtuse and sensitive subject with tons of nuance.
Once they start mandating vaccines for the good of the people, how far is it till they start mandating abortion, sterilization, euthanasia. Topics that politics has already broached and even some judicial action has taken place.
What we Don’t know is, that’s a problem. Are the people coming over Illegally Vaccinated? We don’t know and they are allowed to attend school without any documentation. That is a problem.
I didn't see them saying this about the latin american enterovirus D-68 that's been imported and killing children. How many have died from measles in the last week? Hm?
Although OPV is safe and effective, in extremely rare cases (approx. 1 in every 2.7 million first doses of the vaccine) the live attenuated vaccine virus in OPV can cause paralysis. In some cases it is believed that this vaccine-associated paralytic polio (VAPP) may be triggered by immune deficiency. The extremely low risk of VAPP is well known and accepted by most public health programmes in the world because without OPV, hundreds of thousands of children would be crippled every year.
Excellent point. Once you are vaccinated against the measles and mumps or have had them you are immune and can not get them again
My son got a vaccination while in the Marine Corps that almost killed him. I cried and prayed as I followed the ambulance taking him to have a heart transplant when he was only 20 years old. Fortunately he didn’t have the heart transplant at that time. Later on he has had more incidents related to his heart including his heart stopping while in the hospital. He was flown by air ambulance helicopter to another hospital where they implanted a pacemaker/cardioverter/defibrillator that he will live with for the rest of his life due to that vaccination.
We are all missing the obvious. If 91% of US population is vaccinated that leaves only 9% not vaccinated. Figure in those of us who had the disease as children then very few are NOT immune.
No doubt the initial case in CA was brought into this country by a tourist. ONLY those not vaccinated were in danger: other tourist, undocumented who were not vaccinated when they came to this country and scattered families (Amish, and other sects who do not believe in vaccination)
Who are coming down with the disease? Who is spreading it? Does it have a relationship with the thousands of young people 0 invited into he country last summer? How is it traveling so quickly?
Her eleven year old contracted varicella, then Reyes syndrome. He was dead within two weeks.
I had chickenpox when I was two years old. I've had nerve damage all my life because of it, including two shingles outbreaks. Had the vaccination existed in the 1950's my mother would not have ever exposed me to the pain I've known as a result because of the rabid beliefs of some ridiculous anti-science cult.
You have no "right" to harm your children.
Be prepared to dodge the asinine, irrelevant, immature, condemnadons of your point of view which, of course as all intelligent people know, is 100% correct.
I don’t know what they do now. My youngest started college last year. All my kids had the oral polio. I got whatever in my childhood. I do remember the pain of the smallpox shot at school. We all lined up and watched everyone before us rubbing their arm and looking not too happy.
I didn’t get a Flu shot this season - do I qualify as an “anti-vaccine fanatic”?
You have no “right” to harm your children.
Children of God for Life’s list of vaccines containing aborted baby: http://www.cogforlife.org/vaccineListOrigFormat.pdf
Spoken like a true abortionist. Thanks for making my point.
You have no "right" to harm any other person, and you have no "right" to neglect your children.
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