I hope your five pounds of hairspray and makeup catch on fire the next time you smoke one of the cigarettes you reek of. Why you are a receptionist at the Adams County Health Department, I can only attribute to the total incompetence of Adams County in general. I think that you, personally, are the reason why Colorado has the worst rate of childhood immunizations in the nation. People have to deal with you and decide “Fuck it-- I’m just going to tell the school it’s against my religion to immunize my kid.” That and the fact that it takes half a day of calling clueless government idiots to even find out where the shot clinic is and what it’s hours are, before they have to come down and deal with your nasty, rude, ignorant ass.
Sincerely,
the mother of the kid you wouldn’t immunize because I didn’t have his shot record, even though no one told me I needed and the health department in the next county never required that I have it.
Are there potential health hazards if a child receives an immunization more than once? If so, the clerk was doing the right thing by refusing to immunize your child without any record of previous immunizations. If not, then yeah, kinda stupid to refuse to immunize.
Well, for one thing, she was rude and snotty the SECOND I walked in the door, before I said a thing. Also, it would be nice if someone had FRIGGIN TOLD ME that I needed the shot record BEFORE I GOT THERE. I called and did a pre-registration thing, and they didn’t mention it. The Health department in Jefferson County, where we used to live, did not require that. In fact, if I didn’t have a copy, they could provide me with one! Why can’t Adams county do that?
Probably because they didn’t give the immunizations and thus don’t have records of them, and they don’t have access to another county’s records. That would be my guess, anyway.
Ummm. Generally speaking it’s the parent’s responsibility to have the shot records, unless they’re going to the same Pediatrician, and can have reasonable expectations that the originals are at the pediatrician’s office.
Regardless of a parent’s reason for not getting their child immunized, once that child is in school the parent is essentially relying on the fact that the rest of the parents are getting teh other children immunized to protect their own child from epidemics of easily communicable potentially quite serious diseases.
This can be tolerated in small numbers, the system can tolerate it. However, when more and more parents start doing it, the system that protects everyone starts breaking down and we get outbreaks of disease that take hold in schools or daycares and can spread to younger siblings and vulnerable members of the population such as the elderly and the immunosuppressed. This is not a good thing. The number of non-immunized people the system can tolerate depends on the disease.
IANAdoctor, but I am an epidemiologist. For further information, look in any epidemiology text about immunizations and “herd immunity.”
Sorry for the factual hijack. I now return you to your previous pitting.
Regardless of whether you knew you needed to have your previous immunization records, there’s no excuse for driving off a mom who wants to get her child immunized! That’s not what those of us who know what we’re doing in Public Health want to accomplish at all! A letter to the director of the clinic or the county Public Health director would not be out of line.