I don’t think it matters much. The non vaxers I’ve met are educated and fully informed. It’s a selfish choice they’ve made and they aren’t going to budge until consequences personally hit them.
I think I had just about every childhood disease when I was a kid. Measles was the most miserable one I remember.
Praying for the kids who have it.
If scientists and medical people followed that theory that “things don’t matter because people are educated and fully informed” we’d be in even more sorry shape in this country.
They are “educated and fully informed” on the side that they buy into. Real life stories, more facts, more personal encounters can make a difference. Things that also make a difference are pediatricians, clinics, etc. that refuse to provide primary medical care to those who chose not to vaccinate their children at the risk of others.
Making it personal means that the anti-vaccine types will see it as a personal insult. Their reaction will likely be a hardening of their position.
I’ve read in several places recently that when people have extreme views on a subject, providing them with facts that refute that position simply makes them more committed to their position. I think the best bet is to educate everybody else that these folks are endangering all of us, and that we should stop enabling their nonsense with “personal belief” exemptions.
Disagree. Things become personal when you neighbor gets the measles. When you hear a story from your favorite children’s author about their terrible tragedy. When the doctor who knows you and your child best refuses to see your family in the office anymore.
Not everyone will change their mind. But some will. A % of the bandwagon has researched, scoured the internet or whatever to come up with their views. Another % just jumps on the bandwagon.
No one will be forced to get the vaccination. But, with time and energy, SOME will choose to vaccinate. Or maybe even get this one vaccination.
You can’t just toss in the towel.
As you can see, the uproar over vaccination is causing cognitive dissonance among people with anti-government attitudes. Surely, they think, there must be gold in this for us somewhere! But wait, a lot of the people who aren’t vaccinating are tree-hugging Whole Foods shoppers! And the vaccination rate is over 99% in Mississippi! But the President is urging people to get vaccinated. What to do? Well, one place of refuge is to try to find some hypocrisy among other people. Yuk yuk.
It amazes me that people somehow think doctors are all scientific, that doctors cannot have weird beliefs and so forth, given that doctors as a whole are quite human. We are brought up to think they are gods or something, and more than a few of them project that image, but there are plenty of doctors out there who are biased, who have their own beliefs and worse, use their training to give those beliefs authenticity. It is ironic, because you have doctors who rigidly stay with ideas that have been discredited (like dietary cholesterol causing heart disease, all fat being evil, etc) and who reject new ideas that turn out to be correct, and then you have doctors who go out on a whim with stuff that isn’t supported by anything but perception and myth. The fact that a doctor won’t innoculate their kids tells me they don’t take the oath “First, do no harm” seriously.
As far as the whole foods hypothesis, there are some who eat organic, who do all the other things, who probably do follow the no vaccine nonsense, following a herd of like minded people, I have met brain dead granola heads like that, and they are basically a hippy dippy version of the religious fundamentalists, clinging to illogical crap as truth and so forth and there is no reasoning with them, but to be honest, most of the people who go to whole foods will not be anti vaccine IME, though it also would depend on where the Whole Foods was located, too.
As far as the politicians, like our not so beloved governor here in NJ, this is all political posturing, they are catering to the GOP base/tea party with their anti government, supposed libertarian beliefs (funny how the libertarianism ends when it comes to social issues…), it is rooted in the whole “govn’ment off our backs” crap.
It is sad that we allow these exemptions, exemptions should only be allowed when there is a medical reason to do so, like the child’s immune system or allergy to the materials used, religious belief should not be allowed either IMO (put it this way, Jehovahs witnesses and Christian scientists have lost time and again when a child’s life is in danger and treatment conflicts with their beliefs). I am no fan of big Pharma nor do I subscribe to the theory that the medical profession and the pharm industry and the government are out for our best interests necessarily or at all, but this is ridiculous, it is playing Russian Roulette with 4 bullets in the gun.
When the unvaccinated kids get leukemia, which I have seen happen, it can be even more frightening. I remember in the days before the chicken pox vaccines, those kids who never had chicken pox, but got leukemia were at high risk when the season for chicken pox hit. I did get the vaccine for my two youngest having seen what could happen. I felt very fortunate that my son had had a very heavy duty case of chicken pox which made his chances much smaller of getting it, even as the chemo was depleting his immunities.
There were a lot of unvaccinated kids with cancer. More than not as some of the Amish, Mennonite and Hassadic familes tend to have the genetic tendencies, despite many of them not living and eating “natural”, “organic” things. Few blacks other than sickle sell in Hemo/Onc. Black kids don’t tend to get leukemia.
Saw many get vaccinations for sibling despite their prior strong stances against it when it was their own child sitting at risk, by the way. Like near 100%. Got the flu shots too Alll those principles out the window when its your risk right there. Till then, you can be all high and mighty as it’s not YOUR risk.
@ marsian-
If you look at societal attitudes as a whole these days, it shouldn’t come as a whole surprise, even religions have embraced elements of “I got mine, heck with everyone else” kind of mentality, or at the very least have remained silent in the face of such attitudes becoming mainstream societal and political thought. What is tragic is when people who refuse to vaccinate have their kid, god forbid, get sick or die from not being vaccinated, they will sue the government for not forcing them to vaccinate…
Did we immunize the 1000’s of children that just came flooding across the border? Curious that an outbreak would be in one of the State’s heavily affected by that group of kids.
dietz, it’s more likely those kids were already vaccinated than the kids they encountered in the US.
http://www.texasobserver.org/disease-threat-immigrant-children-wildly-overstated/
I gave an example how one of my kids gave more than 30 kids chicken pox because I did not catch it that morning when he went off to pre school and activities. Didn’t catch it till he was in the tub that night with his baby brother who he also infected.
All of us are fiercely protective of our children and in certain scenarios, it can be understandable. This one, nope. But others differ in their opinons and they seem to have that right. If true justice were served, their kids would pay the direct consequences.
@cptofthehouse, yes, chicken pox is another EXTREMELY contagious illness! It is MOST contagious after blisters appear, but it can infect others before producing the telltale symptoms, as your example illustrates.
A lot of the kids who contracted the measles did not get the disease necessarily from someone in Disney World, but from someone not vaccinated who did. That first contact is only the first step in these epidemics.
The folks I know who are scared to death of this outbreak are not worried about whoever brought it into DW, but those in their circles that can get the disease and pass it their children. Frankly the average healthy kid probably will be just fine with the measles. But if he gives it to the kid undergoing chemo, that’s a whole other story.
I would imagine one of the reasons, beyond better diet and overall health, that death rates and rates of serious complications from diseases like measles and chicken pox have fallen is that some of the people contracting these illnesses have been fully or partially immunized and therefore experience a milder form of the disease.
^^^True, but there is something to good nutrition, general health, and access to great medical care in the event of a complication.
Not a good enough reason not to vaccinate, though.
Most of us have some residual immunity that comes through heredity to a lot of these diseases. So when we get them, if we are not immune suppressed or otherwise weakened, most of the time, the ravages are relatively minor. Not all diseases, not all situations. That’s why when Europeans went to areas that had people who never had encountered the diseases and there was an outbreak, the consequences were terrible. I believe there are accounts of this happening through out history.
MODERATOR’S NOTE AND WARNING
DO NOT BRING EBOLA INTO THIS DISCUSSION.
Not just the Jenny McCarthy’s distrust vaccines…even our POTUS is suspicious
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/02/obama-vaccines-views-suspicious-114837.html