Vaccination exemption in CA, personal down, medical up

[Amarok]

Should leaving children in a hot car ? Not feeding them ? Be crimes ?

[bennyboy]

I think for people incompetent enough not to vaccinate children, HAVING children should be a crime. I demand forced sterilization based on simple math and logic skills and knowledge of how fucking google works.

Here's the data we have:
1) Some diseases have caused many millions of deaths, but we now have vaccines that can stop their spread.
2) ONE fucking study, now discredited, suggested that there was a link between vaccines and autism.

If these two points can be known, and the parents cannot both (a) find that information and (b) weigh the balance of threat properly, then I do not want my hard-earned tax money going to teaching their offspring how to walk and talk at the same time.

--edit--
Seriously, though. Every single vaccination thread should be exactly one post long. Someone should post something like https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/48/...Hypotheses, then everyone in the thread should instantly post. . . "Oh, thanks for link. Setting appointment with doctor right now" and the conversation should be fucking finished.

[Jackalope]

Seriously, though.  Every single vaccination thread should be exactly one post long.  Someone should post something like https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/48/...Hypotheses, then everyone in the thread should instantly post. . . "Oh, thanks for link.  Setting appointment with doctor right now" and the conversation should be fucking finished.

^^^

Seriously, I have a child on the spectrum and he gets his vaccinations on schedule every time. Junk science is junk.

I have to wonder - anti-vaxxers are afraid of the non-existent risk of autism, but aren't afraid of the very real risk of starting or being part of an outbreak of a serious, possibly fatal, communicable disease?

That's just plain irrational and ignorant.

Should irrational, ignorant beliefs be ignored when setting public health policy? You're damn right they should.

Freedom? Is turning your kid into a disease vector a right? Is this what we're defending? You don't have a right to infect other people with communicable diseases. You don't have the right to not buckle your kids up either. This is potentially *worse* because you're not just affecting your own kids.

[Silver]

Seriously, though.  Every single vaccination thread should be exactly one post long.  Someone should post something like https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/48/...Hypotheses, then everyone in the thread should instantly post. . . "Oh, thanks for link.  Setting appointment with doctor right now" and the conversation should be fucking finished.

^^^

Seriously, I have a child on the spectrum and he gets his vaccinations on schedule every time.  Junk science is junk.

I have to wonder - anti-vaxxers are afraid of the non-existent risk of autism, but aren't afraid of the very real risk of starting or being part of an outbreak of a serious, possibly fatal, communicable disease?

That's just plain irrational and ignorant.  

Should irrational, ignorant beliefs be ignored when setting public health policy?  You're damn right they should.

Freedom?  Is turning your kid into a disease vector a right?  Is this what we're defending?  You don't have a right to infect other people with communicable diseases.  You don't have the right to not buckle your kids up either.   This is potentially *worse* because you're not just affecting your own kids.

Sometimes, I wish there were two types of buttons to apply to a post.

The kudos.
And then the "winner" button, which should be applied to your post.

[Jackalope]

I just don't think not vaccinating falls under child neglect. I mean, child neglect is a form of abuse and is a criminal act.

If you don't vaccinate, and your kid gets a communicable disease and dies, or passes it on to an immunocompromised person, and they die...yes, someone be criminally culpable.

[Rev. Rye]

Or you can at least set up an arrangement where people have to be licensed to raise a child, and if a two people procreates without a license, their baby is taken by the state and goes into an adoption agency.

And yes, I do believe that refusing to vaccinate your kids from POTENTIALLY LETHAL diseases for bullshit reasons should be considered child abuse and treated accordingly.

If a people believes that people should be able to survive on no more nourishment than staring at the sun and decides to act on that belief by depriving their child of food or water (disturbingly, this a thing; it's called breatharianism), then it's still child abuse and no different from the antivaxxer, except the antivaxxers don't make bullshit claims about the basic facts of their lifestyles.

[Ravenshire]

So to clarify, you guys really think choosing not to vaccinate your child should be a criminal offense?

Do you really think allowing your kid to die of a lethal, easily preventable disease is in any meaningful way different than allowing them to starve?

[Rev. Rye]

So to clarify, you guys really think choosing not to vaccinate your child should be a criminal offense?

Do you really think allowing your kid to die of a lethal, easily preventable disease is in any meaningful way different than allowing them to starve?

I suppose for her, the difference was that in the former case, the mother seriously believes she has the best interests of the child in mind.

In practice, I don't think that really matters much. Remember the case of Candace Newmaker? She was a 10-year-old girl who died under rather disturbing circumstances. She was taken from a neglectful home, and adopted by a pediatric nurse who wanted a child of her own. But, being born into a bad family, she was very standoffish (her mother would also claim she had been acting out, but the people who knew her in life dispute this). Therapy failed to bring her out of her shell, so, in order to bring out the affectionate side of her adopted daughter, they went on an "attachment therapy" retreat in Colorado which was meant to help her bond with her birth mother.

WARNING: THE CONTENTS OF THE NEXT PARAGRAPH ARE REALLY FUCKING DISTURBING. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

There was one major exercise in the session: a "rebirthing" exercise where she was wrapped up in a blanket (to simulate a womb) and told to find her way out, which was made all the more difficult because there were four adults in the session (including her adopted mother) using whatever force they could to block her attempts at getting out (not having a womb, I highly doubt birth works that way.) At times, they pushed on Candace with a combined force that was almost ten times her weight. Candace spent a good portion of the session confused, screaming, eventually puking and shitting in the blanket. About Forty minutes into the seventy-minute session, she passed out. At the end of the seventy minutes, they found her, not breathing. Paramedics were able to restore her pulse for a few hours, but she was pronounced brain-dead the next day.

I've done quite a bit of reading on the case, especially after discovering it after its connection with phantom video game "Petscop," (Game Theorists have a video about the game with a retelling of the basic events) and the point I'm trying to make is that, all the people who did that to Candace (including her own mother, though her unreliability about her daughter's past makes me wonder) really thought they were going to make her grow as a person, and not kill her. While the transcript of the murder video (yes, it exists, but the video itself is not online) shows some abusive language directed towards her as she's slowly dying, it seems consistent with a "tough love" approach, and I highly doubt they planned to kill her. Does this mean they're not culpable? That it somehow doesn't count as abuse? In my book, no.

And it's the same thing with antivaxxer parents, the way I see it. It's really different only in the way a Black Ops mission during a war is different from biological warfare.

[bennyboy]

I just don't think not vaccinating falls under child neglect. I mean, child neglect is a form of abuse and is a criminal act.

If a parent knowingly makes a decision to neglect a child's safety, then that constitutes neglect.  If a parent refuses to seek knowledge about health issues, then that constitutes neglect.

The data with regard to vaccinations is not ambiguous.  It is not open to interpretation, and it is not a matter of opinion.  That some parents do not know this, is evidence of their unfitness to parent: they are either incapable of acting on good information, or are unwilling.


Absolutely, it's neglect, and in fact I'd say it defines the term.

[LadyForCamus]

CL, I'm curious as to why you think failing to protect your child against deadly, but preventable diseases does NOT constitute neglect. I'm not being snarky; I really want to understand how you're reasoning through this. Is it because you don't think anyone is actually going to get sick?