This article gives the reason why the vaccination rate is highest in West Virginia and Mississippi. Those are the only two states that have a medical exemptions only policy for vaccinations. No personal or religious exemption.
To me, this is a totally un-American way of thinking. If people had thought this way in the 1940’s, we’d all be posting in German now.
As for the Whole Foods connection, I think there is a point. One of my biggest beef with Whole Foods is that it sells all kinds of (in my educated opinion) fraudulent “health supplements” and other entirely useless products. The same sort of person who buys these products is, again in my opinion, the sort of person who may not vaccinate. At least one sort.
@Hunt
“To me, this is a totally un-American way of thinking. If people had thought this way in the 1940’s, we’d all be posting in German now.”
Except, of course, for the large contingent whose families would have been exterminated (!) - No more CC discussions on good campus Hillels.
If measles get wide spread people will vaccinate their kids. The question would be, how wide spread should it get before that happens? Some may already have begun to vaccinate their kids in Orange county.
I just don’t understand people at all. Even if they thought they were no danger to other people’s children, don’t anti-vaxxers worry about their own? My brothers both got chicken pox as teens, and were in the hospital for a week. My oldest brother nearly died. Whooping cough, TETANUS for God’s sake — aren’t they afraid for their own children?
"As for the Whole Foods connection, I think there is a point. One of my biggest beef with Whole Foods is that it sells all kinds of (in my educated opinion) fraudulent “health supplements” and other entirely useless products. The same sort of person who buys these products is, again in my opinion, the sort of person who may not vaccinate. "
Exactly. There are those who buy at Whole Foods because they like the selection, like to eat organic, like the “status” of going to WF, etc. but who also believe in medical science and don’t hesitate to take their doctors’ advice. There is also a strand of people – primarily women, and often women who define themselves solely or primarily through being mothers vs their own accomplishments – who have elevated the act of motherhood to an all-consuming status where certain markers are necessary to join their cool girl club (breastfeeding for years on end, attachment parenting, homebirth, eating fully organic, slings instead of strollers, not vaccinating, homeschooling, etc.) - and while these women are typically (though not always) well-to-do, they aren’t exactly the AP-Biology-AP-Chemistry-and-off-to-MIT sort, and they get a lot of their status through telling “authority” to bugger off, which is where a lot of their stands come from.
Please note I am not saying there is anything wrong with any of those other practices - hey, do what you like, your kid and your life, no skin off my back if you eat organic or use a sling or co-sleep - but the anti-vax one is the one that affects other people. (I’d also postulate the homebirth one affects other people when you dump your homebirth-gone-bad on people like my husband who have to clean up your mess in the ER, but that’s another debate altogether.)
Not to derail this discussion, but folks who opt out for “natural” remedies could be in for a big surprise! Reposting a link by ohiopublic from the Diet and Exercise thread:
No. Read some of those articles. For healthy kids, the chances of a vaccine may well be higher than any risks of the diseases for their children DUE TO THE HERD PROTECTION now in place. So, if you read the stats, you are protecting your child while risking other children and people who are not as healthy and have immune system problems.
It’s not just the childhood vaccines. I know many, over the years, too many, elderly who died due to pneumonia and other complications that they got from someone who was not flu vaccinated, caught it and passed it on to them. It’s often a dirty secret that grandma was “killed” by grandkids. My very close friend has this situation. One of the nasty flus made their way into the family —the young people did ot get their flu shots. They did ok with the flu, but Grandma with Altzheimers who did not get out a whole lot got it too and she died as the complications led to pneumonia Not something discussed openly. Same with another friend and her aunt. Yes, the aunt was 90+, but she did get that flu from her niece’s little one who did not get the flu shot, and the whole bunch got sick, but not terribly so, but the old lady died.
I know one of the very few young healthy people deaths from swine flu. Friend of son. He didn’t get a flu shot, got swine flu, died of it, healthy as he was. Went to his service. A fluke, and to be perfectly frank, in that case, someone who took that risk of not getting that flu shot got the full brunt of the ramifications of that decision instead of getting the usual mild case a healthy person would get, but might pass it to someone in fragile health who dies.
There isn’t much one can do if people don’t vaccinate their kids. Justice would be that those very kids would be the ones to get the diseases and die, but that isn’t what happened. I’ve seen bragging how these unvaccinated kids got the measles, chicken pox, etc and it wasn’t so bad after all. Never mind that the strain somehow made its way into the onco floor where it was killing people. THey do not care. They care so much more for thier kids’ odds that it doesn’t matter to them. You can’t argue with such people.
@Pizzagirl - I agree in general, but I take offense at this “they aren’t exactly the AP-Biology-AP-Chemistry-and-off-to-MIT sort” because:
In fact, I and a lot of my MIT alum friends do indeed practice parts of “Attachment Parenting” based on real science such as the work of Dr. Meredith Small at Cornell (about primate juvenile phases). I would say that co-sleeping [safely, and particularly for older infants/toddlers], breast-feeding, and baby-wearing are supported by anthropological science and epidemiology. [I understand that reasons like smoking and poor follow-through on safety are reasons that doctors do not encourage co-sleeping universally for public health in this country.]
I think home-birth is a whole other issue, and not germane here. It was not for me, for many reasons. And I do eschew the kind of motherhood-worship that I think you’re alluding to, as it is often highly anti-feminist. (For example, and I say this as someone who breast-fed each kid for years, the statement that “bf is free” is essentially anti-feminist because it completely devalues the value of the woman’s labor.)
And, none of my close friends, MIT or not, would ever consider refraining from these vaccines. So the categories here are not so cut-and-dried.
ETA - I have no idea why half of my post turned out italicized. Sorry!
Taking supplements doesn’t hurt anyone else though. It’s the magical thinking behind some people taking some things and not getting vaccines that is the problem.
My dr. wants me to take 10000 iu of Vitamin D every day for MS. My MIL takes turmeric and it’s helped her arthritis. My lactose intolerant D takes that nasty liquid stuff that is full of microbes of some sort and it’s helped her digestion.
Several years ago the same D developed a rare drug reaction to an antibiotic and one of her teachers suggested her taking milk thistle as a liver cleanse to speed up the healing (she was facing months of migraines). I got it for her but she only took it for a couple of weeks and it was inconclusive. I threw it out years later and then read that when the DC area had a rash of people poisoning themselves accidentally by eating mushrooms in their yard (it was a very rainy autumn), the doctors at GU hospital gave them something with milk thistle to help reduce the toxicity in their liver! Pretty surprising.
It’s best to just avoid those mushrooms. They were kind of an amanita muscaria (sp?) or death’s cap mushroom but instead of being red with white spots they were white with difficult to see white spots.
For those who haven’t seen it before, a video on the dangers of DHMO, a chemical found in vaccines, but also in our food supply:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi3erdgVVTw
In our state my understanding is that they changed the law so that you still need to go to your pediatrician for education and to sign off on any exemption so that you can’t just claim your own personal belief without the office visit. Not as stringent as I would like but better than it was.
Two close friends of mine from years back when we were having our babies and raising our little ones were adament about having home births. They were educated women and they had their facts. Being the numbers person I had to agree with them that the chances of having a whole host of issues that happen with hospital births were greater than the much smaller chances of problems at a home birth when the pregnancy is a healthy one. The problem is the severity of those problems when they happen, the lower chances of addressing them, and that mortality figures in there.
One of them lost a baby while she was being helicoptered from the local hospital that did not have the level 3 PICU needed to the downtown hospital that did Only ten minutes for the flight, but hours to make the decision leading up to it and that baby died. Chances were very good had the birth occurred at the top level woman’s hospital with accommodation right there to address the issues, the child could have lived and thrived. She gets to live with that decision.
What seemed to be a minor complication lead to Cerebral Palsey in a child during home birth. Very similar case happened at the local hospital, but there was recourse not availabe when one uses a midwife in your home No tracking, no medical evidence, no moment one can pinpoint when intervention was needed. That one is less clear cut, but there was a drought of oxygen for a while.
It took those tragedies for them to understand living htose risks.
Kids with life threatening conditions tend to go Disney World for their Wish trips. Frightening that there are unvaccinated kids running around there, but that appears to be the case. To add to that number because it doesn’t raise the chances significantly for a given child is selfishness and the “if everyone did” test doesn’t hold at all. But these people do not care.
As for wondering how many kids are not vaccinated, one year in our elementary school, it was 20% including my kid. I know because the health nurse told me. I knew who most of them were too.
In California, the vaccination rates are higher in poor areas than wealthier areas. I think some parents, having an education, a college degree, think that they are as able as those who have been to medical school to read Dr. Google. It’s the ‘a little bit of education’ is a bad thing. A poor uneducated person will take the advice of the doctor knowing what they don’t know. A more educated person thinks they know just as much or more than their doctor.
Dr. Jack Wolfson, the Arizona cardiologist who won’t vaccinate his two young sons had the following comments to CNN about potentially exposing a child with leukemia to diseases like measles and polio:
And if his own child died? Would that be enough for him to change his mind? This anti-vaccine attitude is in complete opposition to any idea that, as compassionate people/people of faith/global citizens/patriotic Americans (pick your group(s)), we all have the responsibility to look beyond our own noses and care about the people around us. The remaining members of the Greatest Generation must be shaking their heads in dismay.
This guy’s a total clown. In his interview about the Jacks family, he even questioned why the Jacks’ were taking their immunocompromised child out into society, to a health clinic where she was having a blood draw in the wake of her last chemo treatment.
D went to private school here in Pasadena. I can remember chatting with a parent of a 2nd grader on the advantages of a private education and he, a professor of physics at Cal Tech, was emphatic about sending his kid to a school that required vaccinations. I remember that conversation because at that point in my life I was naive and thought that all schools(apart from those in some bizarre religious compounds)required vaccinations. In fact the idea that one would choose not to vaccinate was beyond me. And then H started working in Hollywood. Science? (not so much)
The best medicine to assist the fight to get kids vaccinated is education and information on a personal level. Rinse and repeat. Over and over. Don’t make it political. (this is really starting to urk me in the media today) Don’t make it elite or not elite. Make it factual and personal.
The other side will do the same. But slowly and eventually, hopefully more parents will come over to the “vaccinate” side.