Is there any good reason not to mandate national vaccination?

[lew_cody]

I came across a reference to the following 2011 article from the Canadian Medical Association Journal:
http://www.cmaj.ca/content/183/16/E1167

I like Slovenia’s approach. It’s pretty close to mandatory national vaccination, but allows some leeway for legitimate medical concerns. Exemptions based on religious or personal beliefs are not allowed. (The article focuses on children, so there’s no discussion of how Slovenia deals with unvaccinated adults – if there are very many.)

[Budget_Player_Cadet]

@kanicbird

When I hear a pro-vax augment it seems like the common pattern is to express strong emotion (you are putting me, my children and all of society and the entire human race at risk), and usually citeless argunemts, also claiming it’s common sense that these things are safe everyone knows it.

While the anti-vax crowd takes a different tactic, usually related to ‘don’t take my word for it, here is a cite (www.some web site.com), and here is another (www. some other web site.whatever)’.

The pattern does not seem to match up to how it should be, which calls into question why this issue is different.

Even if the anti-vax crowd has somehow achieved this masterpiece of social manipulation, it would still be incumbent for the pro-vax crowd to reacquire the scientific high ground in debate to regain credibility as opposed to appealing to emotion.

The reason the pro-vax “argument” on sites like this amounts to “it’s safe because we say so” is because, for the most part, there aren’t people here who deny it. It’s like with evolution - if we’re talking about how best to teach it, we don’t spend a lot of time establishing the premises (that evolution is currently the singular viable scientific theory that explains the diversity of species) unless someone shows up who doubts that. If it’s just a bunch of people who accept the scientific consensus, why spend a lot of time rehashing the evidence? Especially when a quick google search can be ohsohelpful (assuming one has slightly more of a bullshit filter than Jenny McCarthy). But if you want evidence, check out that last link. It’s a fairly long list of large-scale peer-reviewed studies specifically addressing the safety of vaccines. The issue has been done to death, and if you think that the anti-vaxxers have the evidence on their side, then you ned to take a closer look, because last I checked, the total list of studies showing any significant harm from vaccines was pretty close to empty.

[kanicbird]

@LavenderBlue

You don’t read a lot of anti-vax material, do you?

:dubious:

No, I usually listen to the emotion. I find it’s a great indicator of the motivation.

[Czarcasm]

@kanicbird

No, I usually listen to the emotion. I find it’s a great indicator of the motivation.

So providing you with factual links does absolutely no good?

[kanicbird]

@Czarcasm

So providing you with factual links does absolutely no good?

How does one judge if it is factual? I certainly am not going to run my own double blind study.

[Budget_Player_Cadet]

@kanicbird

How does one judge if it is factual? I certainly am not going to run my own double blind study.

…What is this even supposed to mean?

[LavenderBlue]

@kanicbird

How does one judge if it is factual? I certainly am not going to run my own double blind study.

So if showed you whale to – a site devoted to all sorts of other nonsense besides anti-vax nuttery including holocaust denial – you would find it no more credible than the CDC?

:dubious:

[Guinastasia]

“Forget it Jake, it’s Kanicbird-town.”

@Bone

I agree that as more people refuse vaccinations herd immunity is reduced. My comment was in response to **LavenderBlue **who stated that not getting vaccinated was choosing disease for other people. That’s not accurate.

Are you not making that choice for your own children? My grandmother had a brother who died from pertussis when he was only three. I’m guessing had a vaccine been available at the time, my great-grandmother would’ve jumped at the chance. Or Gene Tierney, who contracted rubella from a fan who escaped from quarantine to meet her. Tierney herself didn’t suffer all that much, but she was pregnant at the time, and as a result, her daughter was born severely mentally retarded.

It’s already been established that parents can be held responsible if they fail to get treatment for certain medical issues their children might have. Parents have been prosecuted (and convicted) if they neglected or chose not to persue treatment for a child with cancer. (For religious reasons, or because they decided to follow so-called “alternative medicine”, faith healing, etc.) It happens every single day. Parents are definitely limited when it comes to making medical decisions for their children. They HAVE lost custody in many cases.
And yes, by not getting vaccinated, you ARE swinging your fist around at peoples’ noses. The more people who get vaccinated, the less we have to worry about those who are unable to do so.

When your rights start to infringe on my rights, that’s where they end.

[Jackmannii]

@kanicbird

To that those people who were vaccinated seem to be of the opinion that they accepted some sort of ‘penalty’ for the betterment of all, but they would perhaps have been better off personally if they did not.

What is this “penalty” of which you speak?

My penalty for growing up in a world with few vaccines for childhood diseases was contracting measles and mumps (very sick for 1-2 weeks), as well as chickenpox and rubella (not as bad, but no fun either). Fortunately there were no permanent complications.

I fail to see how I was “better off personally” by contracting these ailments.

[crowmanyclouds]

@kanicbird

… it would still be incumbent for the pro-vax crowd to reacquire the scientific high ground in debate to regain credibility …

This,

@kanicbird

How does one judge if it is factual? I certainly am not going to run my own double blind study.

would be exactly why trying to reacquire the scientific high ground in debate, a high ground that’s been held in reality for hundreds of years, would be absolutely pointless.

(Knowing your views of how this medicine stuff actually works,

@kanicbird

{…} all healing is from love (and Love is God & God heals), not from the ‘active ingredient’. {…} The problem with medical practice of double blind studies is that love, which is the real healer, is not accounted for {…}

anyone engaging you on this subject is wasting their fucking time. :()

@Czarcasm

Before debating science and evidence with kanicbird, read this:

@kanicbird

Mothers chicken soup has been known by many to be a cure for so many illnesses, including the common cold. What the cure is is not in the chemical compounds but the Love flowing from the mother to the child who is acceptive to that Love and trusts his mother. Love is what cures, Love is God and God is Spirit, so Love is Spirit, something science does not want to deal with.

When scientists get their hands on this, they analyze the chemical compounds, and remove the Love from the mother as far as possible by double blind studies, and remove the acceptance of Love and trust from the child. Then no surprise they find nothing. Or if they do find something they insist that the soup has to contain a certain compound to work, or be made a certain way. This insistence of a certain way, repeatable results, is in religion called legalism. Legalism manifests itself in Christianity in insistence of certain prayers, or rituals or the use of a certain version of the Bible. Science is no different, and they take it to a whole other level. Love does not work this way, Love is accepting and not demanding.

What about pharmaceuticals that do work. God has His one church everywhere, people who Love others. They work for pharmaceutical companies, and the Love of God flows through them into the medicine, which the person takes. That person may block healing, which is the flow of Love, from prayer or chicken soup, but is open to healing from a medicine, but as has been proven, even placebos can deliver healing.

It’s not the compounds but the belief that healing must come through compounds that limit people’s ability to heal only through compounds. Once freed from that you can heal from many sources of Love.

and walk away.

CMC fnord!

[Rachellelogram]

@kanicbird

OK, even if so does there not seem to be some emotion to the pro-vac- crowd? Even expressed here. Would emotion, could emotion cloud judgement?

You do realize you have yet to advocate a single reason not to vaccinate, right? You’re using logical and rhetorical fallacies to attempt to debunk the centuries of science behind vaccinations, and doing a *very *poor job of it.

When come back, bring good argument.

[Bricker]

@Bridget_Burke

Thalidomide did little damage in the USA because of government testing. Frances Oldham Kelsey, MD, held the line for the FDA, despite serious drug company pressure. She refused to approve the drug. Eventually, news from Europe indicated she was right…

Side note: she continued her work for the FDA until retiring at age 90, and will turn 100 this year.

[panache45]

@WhyNot

If the vaccines work, why would the vaccinated kids & teachers be in danger from those who haven’t been vaccinated??

This is pretty much my position, as well as Darwin’s.

The non-vaccinated kids will pass diseases around among their non-vaccinated families, friends and classmates. Perhaps some of them will die, including some whose stupidity may be genetic.

Nobody else has anything to worry about.

[WhyNot]

[QUOTE=some antivaxxer WhyNot quotes]
If the vaccines work, why would the vaccinated kids & teachers be in danger from those who haven’t been vaccinated??
[/QUOTE]

@panache45

This is pretty much my position, as well as Darwin’s.

I actually respect this position. I respect it because it’s a perfectly logical position when you don’t know how vaccination works. It’s logically consistent if one assumes that vaccination is 100% effective and if one assumes that those who are vaccinated cannot transmit the disease to others. So I like this because it’s the reasoning of a logical person with good critical thinking skills who is misinformed.

Unfortunately, neither of these assumptions are true. We do a terrible job of teaching how vaccination works, so that’s not your fault. But there were two posts on a thread here on the SDMB that I think address this issue and a related issue very well. Once you’ve read them, your position should change. So, buckle your seatbelt and pour another cup of coffee, we’re about to shift your brain!

@WhyNot

@Uber_the_Goober

Understood, accepted, got it.

So it’s really a question of whether or not I *care *that evolution will actually be working the way that it should…

Those born with immunity, or able to immunize themselves, don’t die. The rest, do.

No, you still don’t got it.

You get a vaccination. Yay! It will reduce the chances that you’ll get the disease. Reduce. Not eliminate. Reduce.

So then I get vaccinated. Yay! It will reduce the chances that I’ll get the disease or that I’ll pass it to you. Reduce, not eliminate.

So now **curlcoat **doesn’t get vaccinated. She goes to Germany and gets measles, but before she gets symptoms, we pass her in the produce section and she coughs on us.

Ooops! We’ve only reduced, not eliminated, our risk of catching it from her. Like most people that have been vaccinated, I don’t get it, nor do I pass it on to you.

You aren’t so lucky. Your vaccine reduced, but didn’t eliminate your chances of catching it. You got it, and you’re dead. Or meningitis or pneumonia or hepatitis (all potential complications of measles, more common in adults than children) or if you’re really lucky, you just miss two weeks of work and income feeling like crap.

That’s herd immunity in a nutshell. Vaccines are effective, but not quite 100% effective. Add up a bunch of not-quite-100% effectives, and some of us who were vaccinated *will *get sick, just like some number of people will get pregnant each year despite using 98% effective birth control pills.

And this one, which finally helped me understand something that has always bothered me: most people in many vaccine preventable disease outbreaks are vaccinated…but that is *not *an indication of vaccine ineffectiveness. (Blew my mind, this one did. Spoiler alert: math did it.)

@Andy_L

Yeah. When you get vaccinated, you directly reduce your chance of catching a disease if you’re exposed to it. When other people get vaccinated, it indirectly reduces your chance of getting a disease because it reduces the chance that you get exposed. Obviously, reducing your chance of getting exposed and reducing the chance of catching the disease if exposed, is really good news.

While we’re dealing with common vaccine misconceptions, here’s an interesting one. Suppose there’s a vaccine that is 90% effective in preventing disease, and 50% of the population gets the vaccine. In a population of 1000 people in which everyone is exposed, 500 people get the vaccine, and of those only 50 people get the disease, while all 500 of the unvaccinated people get the disease. So in the 1000 person population, only 550 get the disease.

Now raise the percentage of people who get the vaccine to 90%. 900 people get the vaccine, and out of them 90 people get the disease, while all 100 unvaccinated people get the disease. Only 190 people get the disease, but notice that almost half of them are vaccinated. This doesn’t mean that the vaccine isn’t working - it means that most people are vaccinated.

It can get even more confusing - when vaccine uptake gets to 95%, 950 people get vaccinated, and of them, 95 people get the disease; meanwhile only 50 unvaccinated people get the disease. Now the majority of 145 people who got the disease were vaccinated - but again this is because the vast majority of everybody was vaccinated. A clearer way to express this is that even though the unvaccinated make up only 5% of the population, they made up over 30% of the people who caught the disease.

I hope these two posts help you to understand why “you protect yours, and it doesn’t matter what I do with mine” doesn’t work in the real world, where vaccines aren’t 100% effective, and even the vaccinated can get and spread the disease - just not as frequently as the unvaccinated.

Keeping vaccine preventable illness at bay relies on a certain percentage of people being vaccinated so that enough of us are immune that the viruses don’t have a lot of places to live. The percent varies by disease, but 94% is about right. We can have 6% of our population to go unvaccinated without greatly raising the risk of an epidemic. Most of those “slots” are already taken up by legitimate medical reasons not to vaccinate - like egg allergies, impaired immune systems, family history of severe reaction to a vaccination - or by those who get vaccinated but their body doesn’t form immunity. There are very few “slots” left for religious/philosophical/just can’t be bothered objectors. Every person who decides to exempt themselves from the pool of vaccinated folks moves us closer to the line where not enough of us are vaccinated to keep the viruses at bay.

[kanicbird]

@Budget_Player_Cadet

…What is this even supposed to mean?

To the multiple comments, this is just one of many.

Before I accept ‘proof’ from someone should I determine if they are capable of obtaining such proof objectively? If I find that they are not capable of that then what good is the proof they submit? It would be just a illogical waste of my time and my energy.

So before looking at proof, I look towards motivation, or if you prefer emotional health of the person. As one might try to judge the mental competence and make a determination if they can even have a valid point in a argument, I do the same with their emotional health, what emotions does this invoke in that person, and does that produce a rational state of mind, or are they just talking out of emotion.

Going further in this and looking into what I see as the spiritual, the emotional state they are in I take as the’ spirit’ they are operating under.

In this I detect a strong spirit of anger, frustration and self righteousness to name a few. To test this I throw out a hypothetical example which logically is a argument for allowing some people not to get vaccinated if they don’t wish too. I set the parameters that would cause no harm to the population or society.

Yet the emotionally invested pro-vax’ers seem not to even want to consider it. Not even a ’ well if this was the case, then yes people should be allowed to not get vaccinated’. So it does show to me that they are emotionally so invested in this that they will not listen to reason.

This issue for some reason to produce a very strong emotional response from those who should be touting facts instead. It is very odd that the ones who seem to be touting, if not facts, at least cites, always seem to be the anti-vax’ers. So I guess I am trying to understand why this is and the emotional investment of the pro-vax’ers before I care to look at cties from either side.

[WhyNot]

@kanicbird

In this I detect a strong spirit of anger, frustration and self righteousness to name a few. To test this I throw out a hypothetical example which logically is a argument for allowing some people not to get vaccinated if they don’t wish too. I set the parameters that would cause no harm to the population or society.

… So I guess I am trying to understand why this is and the emotional investment of the pro-vax’ers before I care to look at cties from either side.

I do not believe that there is such a possible hypothetical. All scenarios involving a person not getting vaccinated will increase harm to the population by raising the risk of outbreak or epidemic. Even those completely easy, completely medically based objections still raise the community’s risk. We can accept that increase in Community risk because the individual’s risk from getting vaccinated is so much higher than average. It’s the balancing of risk and benefit to both population and individual that allowed doctors to set vaccination goals under 100%.

So you say you’ve set up a hypothetical where not getting vaccinated doesn’t harm the population. I have to say I don’t remember ever seeing that, but I’m interested. Would you care to share it here? I’ll give it a look.

[Doctor_Why_Bother]

Double post. Never mind.

[Doctor_Why_Bother]

@kanicbird

Yet the emotionally invested pro-vax’ers seem not to even want to consider it. Not even a ’ well if this was the case, then yes people should be allowed to not get vaccinated’. So it does show to me that they are emotionally so invested in this that they will not listen to reason.

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that you haven’t talked to many anti-vaxxers online before. Tell you what, head on over to www.naturalnews.com and check out the general tenor of the comments on ANY vaccination article you find there and compare it to the tone of conversation here. If you’re so big on dispassionate objectivity, you’ll be forced to conclude that the pro-vaccination side still wins. Not only do we have all the facts, but we’re far calmer than our counterparts.

[Doctor_Why_Bother]

P.S. - If you’re feeling particularly brave, try making a pro-vaccine post on the next anti-vax article they publish. You’ll be called a scumbag shill for Big pHARMa by about half a dozen posters before the day is out. I guarantee it. It’s happened to me a bunch of times.

[Jackmannii]

Columbus, Ohio is currently experiencing a mumps outbreak that began on the O.S.U. campus. Over a hundred people affected so far, a couple cases of deafness suspected to be due to mumps, and a couple unfortunate males with testicular swelling (sterility can be the result of mumps-related orchitis).

Nice cartoon in the morning paper.