Lesson: unvaccinated people give the disease a foothold, from which even vaccinated people are at some minor risk.
I am surprised at the nearly 20% of cases found in vaccinated people, and would have guessed the number to be much lower, but this highlights the importance of not giving the disease an easy entry point via the large unvaccinated pool.
I think it’s time to think about some sort of consequence for an unvaccinated person who can be shown to have passes a disease on.
Sort of like what happens if you crash into someone and it can be shown it happened because you didn’t wear your seat belt and lost control of the car?
Well, there’s the consequence of getting the disease…
Link? How many of these were adults who actually made a decision, as opposed to kids who had no choices to make. Presumably your idea of “consequences” includes parents making the call about their kids, and that seems to complicate the legal picture, if you can believe Law & Order.
Sadly, I can see those who fail to vaccinate try to turn such consequences on people who are visiting or emigrating to this nation and didn’t/couldn’t have the vaccination.
And as is always the case, the kids are the ones getting the diseases and its the dipshitted parents making the decisions for their medical care.
My thoughts are that any doctor who panders to anti-vaccinator paretns by signing their exemption cards should have their license revoked if any of those kids gets the disease. Then they should be taken home, sealed in it and injected with 100cc of bubonic plague.
This seems like an odd view. Is it influenced by tort or libertarian philosophy?
I think vaccines should be mandatory, with consequences for disobedience. Bricker thinks any consequence should only apply if the unvaccinated becomes a “successful” carrier. Is it clear why I find this thinking to be a peculiar consequence of some starting political position?
Prescriptions for antibiotics should include the cost of monitoring to make sure you took the full course. If a random blood/urine check come back negative for the antibiotic, you get fined, go to jail, and do not collect $200.
There would be a huge hue, cry, and expense at first, but as overall transmission rates dropped the cost savings in lost productivity, fewer transmissions and happier bunnies would be much higher.
These figures are pretty much in line with what you’d expect, seeing that 1) no vaccine is 100% effective, resulting in a minority of vaccinated persons being susceptible to the disease, and 2) the fact that the vaccinated population is so very much larger than the unvaccinated one.
In some disease outbreaks, vaccinated victims outnumber unvaccinated ones simply because of this huge disproportion between vaccinated and unvaccinated. For example: say you have a group of 1000 children, 90% of whom are vaccinated against highly contagious measles. If half of the unvaccinated cohort gets measles, that’s 50 kids with the disease. If just 10% of the vaccinated group gets measles (due to immune problems or other factors), that’s still 100 sick vacicnated kids - twice as many as the unvaccinated group (a situation antivaxers exploit to claim that vaccines don’t work).
As to legal liabilitiy, I would follow with interest a lawsuit filed by parents of a child damaged by a vaccine-preventable disease (where the outbreak was started by nonvaccinated kid(s)). What I’d really enjoy seeing is antivax pediatricians called to account for their activities and pronouncements (currently in California there are two such docs busy attempting todownplay the significance of the outbreak, one of whom cared for the unvaccinated child who started an earlier measles outbreak, spreading it through the waiting room of another physician).
Rather than encouraging such lawsuits, my priority would be eliminating access to public schools and day care centers for kids left unvaccinated for “philosophical” or pseudoreligious reasons.
What sort of consequence do you propose? I personally do not think someone should be allowed to refuse an MMR vaccine unless they have proven medical indications that would make it inadvisable. But I am not sure if that’s legal. I think at the very least someone from the medical profession should not be allowed to opt out unless there are underlying medical issues. Parents who refuse vaccination for their children should be told to homeschool them.
I agree. I think that it is absolutely insane that people can opt out of vaccinating their kids without something from a licensed physician indicating that they shouldn’t be immunized.
I personally don’t want my kids attending daycare or school with a bunch of potential carriers of diseases that we should have been able to eradicate but for a bunch of whackjobs.
I’m not a immunologist or policy planner, but that doesn’t sound particularly practical. Wouldn’t that take a lot of resources and manpower? Is that even something that can be done reliably? Seems like it’d just be easier to uh, “encourage” everyone to get vaccinated.
I see it as punishment instead of prevention. I think a parent would rather not have her/his child infected in the first place rather then get some sort of cash payout after the fact. Money cannot bring back a loved one from the grave.
It might not be easier, since it would require legislation in fifty states. Federal legislation to require it seems foreclosed by Jacobson v. Massachusetts.
Unless you mean encourage some other way than “mandate.”
Right, of course…but a huge financial loss potential might prompt a Luddite to vaccinate. As you say, the idea is to incentivize the vaccination rather than compensate the family.
(And if we allowed suits for infection, that doesn’t mean only in cases where the infected person dies… I am picturing a statutory liability with an absolute defense of “here’s my proof of vaccination.”)
Measles is actually one of the world’s most contagious diseases. One of the problems with measles is that young children often cannot get vaccinated against measles. The vaccine is just not very effective in this population. Should parents be allowed to sue if it can be proven that their child got measles that can be traced to someone who deliberately refused to vaccinate?
Yes. I’m picturing it can be handled like a three-car pileup: you end up effectively suing the guy who started the collision, not the guy that hit you.
It is interesting what will change someone’s mind on this issue. The Amish unfortunately sometimes refuse vaccination. However, after a measles outbreak in Ohio, they are currently flocking to a clinic offering the shot:
Unfortunately, I think this exactly what it may take: needless outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases.