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Because there's certain thresholds needed to maintain herd immunity. The more people that choose to forgo vaccinations, the more herd immunity breaks down, the more diseases that have been largely eradicated find reservoirs to create a foothold in. The more these diseases infect people and end up killing the most vulnerable among us.
If you're healthy and have no medical reasoning for not being vaccinated, then you have no good reason for not being vaccinated.
Most people voluntarily get vaccinated. There's really no need to do way with exemptions.
In many ways, it is a luxury to be able to have this discussion at all.
Having spent time in West Africa covering the Ebola outbreak, I saw how people hoped, wished and prayed for a vaccine -- to no avail.
On the other hand, the measles vaccine is readily available, and yet vaccination rates in certain areas of the United States are similar to the refugee camps I have visited in Haiti, Pakistan and Jordan.
Yes, parents have a choice in this country. It is a choice that so many others around the world will never have.
Of course I vaccinated my children. Didn't think twice. Not a big fan of the measles or mumps or rubella -- to name a few very preventable diseases.
And here is where I may lapse for a moment -- into opinion. The anti-vaccination argument is often snugly wrapped in the "I love my kids" sentiment. And, I find it, well, a little insulting.
To suggest that anyone who vaccinates their kids doesn't love them is a whole new level of lunacy. But here is the fact of the matter, for me.
It's not just because I love my kids that I vaccinated them -- it's because I love your kids as well.
Most people voluntarily get vaccinated. There's really no need to do way with exemptions.
There wasn't, until recently when people started buying into crackpot conspiracy theories promoted by celebrities with no medical backgrounds and disgraced former doctors who falsified studies to try and pad their own bottom line down the road. Now we are seeing a resurgence of diseases such as measles and whooping cough. Back in 2000, there wasn't a single recognized case of measles in the U.S., since then, every year the number of cases has been increasing steadily and vaccination rates have been decreasing.
Except nobody is being forced to take Gardasil. The law requires that parents follow the basic immunization schedule for their kids when they are little, MMR....etc. But don't let that get in the way of your conspiratorial and fact-free rant.
The governor of Texas, Rick Perry, issued an executive order adding Gardasil to the state's required vaccination list . . "
"Perry's decision was later criticized on September 12, 2011 by fellow presidential candidates Ron Paul and Michele Bachmann during the Republican Party presidential debate as being an overreach of state power in a decision properly left to parents."
"Sometimes, I feel like we're practicing in the 1950s," paediatrician Dr. Eric Ball told the New York Times. He works in area of Orange County where up to 60 per cent of pre-schoolers are not vaccinated. "It's very frustrating. It's hard to see a kid suffer for something that's entirely preventable," he said.
Roald Dahl, whose young daughter died from complications arising from measles, once said it was "almost a crime to allow your child to go unimmunised".
No issues with this, as I said in the other thread, with diseases that were once eradicated coming back in full force, people are just about fed up with entertaining the paranoid delusions of a scientifically ignorant and illiterate minority. These people don't seem to see the light until their decisions come back to bite them in the ass.
You'll see laws like this popping up more and more, here and the U.S. and abroad. The new law in California is all but guaranteed to pass. In France there's criminal penalties for parents who aren't providing certain vaccines to their kids, in many other countries, you simply aren't allowed to attend school period.
It's a public health and a public safety issue that was never a problem in the past until some airhead celebrities and politicians decided to make it their new cause du jour.
It was inevitable after the Disneyland outbreak. Seems to me that pretty much was the tipping point for laxity on this issue.
Don't want to vaccinate your kids - fine, don't.
Just don't expect to be able to freely expose them to anyone else.
Perfectly reasonable as far as I am concerned.
The governor of Texas, Rick Perry, issued an executive order adding Gardasil to the state's required vaccination list . . "
"Perry's decision was later criticized on September 12, 2011 by fellow presidential candidates Ron Paul and Michele Bachmann during the Republican Party presidential debate as being an overreach of state power in a decision properly left to parents."
Notice how it was never actually enacted. The Legislature basically overruled him, democracy at work.
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