And a new one opened, with a disclaimer that they won’t tolerate any suggestion or advice about shipping infectious articles anywhere.
What gets me is that most of these people are terrified at the idea of their ‘healthy, happy unvaccinated children’ being exposed to vaccinated children who might ‘shed’ disease from their vaccines onto them, but they’ll happily accept a lollipop from some random stranger on the internet, whose name they don’t even know. Typical level of logic, but still…
I was looking at that claim about the chicken pox vaccine. I could only find one article about it (Internal Medicine-the site appears to be down right now), and that was pretty recent.
Even if the claim that inoculated people are “shedding” virus is true, the odds appear to be low for it mattering to anyone in the area. And yet, they’ll happily expose their kids to that lollipop, and random numbers of people who come in contact with the biohazard as it is shipped through the mail.
I can’t quite grasp the reasoning here, and I suspect it’s because there isn’t any.
Part of my job is installing fairly large computer systems for banks and their branches so I have a rough idea how much a system should cost for the task needed.
Yeah I know California is a big state and would have like the 8th largest economy in the world if it was a separate country but still.
I’m having a hard time figuring out how a few new mainframes/servers and computer networks to run only the judicial system in California could possibly costs this much money.
Even if every employee was bought a new high end PC at their cubicle (which would be stupid) instead of a thin client setup for example.
Oh well, government at it’s finest.
Edit: On further reading this cost is only associated with the record keeping portion of the judiciary in California which makes this even a bigger scandal.
Did you mean to post that post in this thread?
I’m putting gravitycrash’s post in for hijack of the year.
This whole thing smells like someone is screwing with us. Someone create a hoax facebook page and everyone goes nuts.
I have not seen evidence that shingles is on the increase in the U.S. (or other countries) due to the use of chickenpox vaccine, if one controls for the fact that there is an increase in the aging population, which is most susceptible to shingles. Apart from that, the use of shingles vaccine is expected to damp down any potential increase due to less frequent exposure to kids sick with chickenpox (which boosts immunity in adults who’ve already had chickenpox, but of course could be deadly to the immunosuppressed, including cancer patients on chemotherapy and those getting steroids for a variety of serious illnesses).
For someone who is not an antivaxer, it doesn’t make sense to repeatedly use pejorative adjectives like “shrill and indignant” to describe people who are disgusted by parents who reject vaccination, in favor of accepting potential pathogens from strangers through the mail to infect their children.
Obviously mailing infectious material is criminally stupid. “Pox parties” in a country that has decided to make vaccination a national policy is also pretty dumb.
People who are on the side of science, however, need to be remarkably calm, objective, and even handed in exactly the way that anti-vaxxers are not. And this means acknowledging that in the case of the chickenpox vaccines there are currently some unknowns in terms of public health. Some of the reactions in this thread, especially early on, seem pretty blindly knee-jerk to me. Not that they aren’t right, but we gotta be the bigger man in this fight, which means we gotta lay off the name calling and theatrics and keep bring the focus resolutely on reality over rhetoric.
And if that’s the case, it’s another example of Poe’s Law.
I’ve seen a lot of good points raised, plus some deserved contempt. While it may not have been your intent, focusing solely on the latter reeks of tone troll.
People have perpetuated some actual inaccuracies in this thread that can only give fuel to the anti-vax crowd. For example, we cannot state definitively that the chickenpox vaccine prevents shingles later in life. It’s only been given since 1995, and that just isn’t enough time to have meaningful information about long term public health results. Indeed, scenarios where it increases shingles cases are entirely plausible as the effects of the vaccine could possibly wear off- and in some cases are documented to do so- without the booster effect of occasional low-level exposure to chicken pox in the wild, which would leave adults actually more susceptible to dangerous shingles. The shingles vaccine only prevents 51% of cases. That’s a lot, but not enough to call the case closed.
Maybe in ten years we will be able to state objectively that that universal chicken pox vaccination leads to reduced shingles incidents in the long run. But we cannot say this now. It is not documented, and it is far from a sure thing. We are still studying this, using the best scientific techniques available, and we are hoping for the best. That’s what we can say.
When we use inaccurate information or say things that are not backed up by science because it supports our point, we are just as guilty as they are. We need to be the ones who always have science on our side, even when it’s not handing us an easy and clear point on a platter. We need to be the ones that truly, completely, understand what we are saying. What I saw here was a bit of talking out of our ass, and when we talk out of our ass, they feel okay talking out of their ass and the whole thing gets ugly. We give them footholds to use to attack us with. Why would we do this?
Statements like this:
don’t help the cause and don’t contribute towards fighting ignorance.
Most parents grew up around the time when a chicken pox vaccine wasn’t available. It was not uncommon for parents to schedule chicken pox parties in order to expose their children at a time where it was not as inconvenient for them to catch it, for example over summer break. Cultural inertia is not a sign of the impending apocalypse, or evil parenting.
Having one poster suggest that the chickenpox vaccine will prevent shingles later on is hardly justification to swoop in and call posters in this thread “shrill” three separate times in one post.
Apparently you missed LavenderBlue’s post #12 a bit further on that discussed (with an appropriate citation) the tremendous reduction in severe varicella disease and death thanks to the vaccine, or all the other sober, evidence-based posts LavenderBlue has made in other vaccination threads. She, like I and many other pro-immunization posters on the Dope and other sites which host discussions on vaccine-related issues, occasionally get sufficiently fed up with antivax nonsense to make snarky comments about people who put their kids and the rest of us at risk. Cherry-picking these remarks to scold us is the hallmark of the tone troll.
I’ve been engaged in a lot of online discussions about vaccine effectiveness and safety. Commonly someone will drop in not to follow up on the tens or hundreds of posts civilly and rationally defending the need for vaccines, but instead will single out a sprinkling of insults to declare that incivility is doing dreadful damage to the pro-vaccination cause.
In my view, the selective reader who gets so outraged about the alleged lack of pro-vaccination civility (and is deaf to the constant outpouring of insults, threats and censorship that are commonplace among antivaxers) has already made up his/her mind and is not reachable by common sense and evidence.
Your comments on the uncertain evidence for long-term protection against shingles by the chickenpox vaccine and the limited efficacy of the shingles vaccine are a welcome basis for discussion. I would note however that 1) not having perfect vaccines is not a good reason to make use of them, and 2) the sort of parents who host “chickenpox parties” and think mailing pathogens to each other is a great idea, are typically not motivated by rational concerns like the possibility that using chickenpox vaccine will temporarily increase risk of shingles in Grandma if she doesn’t get the shingles vaccine. These are generally people who have fallen hard for the “vaccines are BAD!” mantra and who minimize the risk of “natural” vaccine-preventable diseases.
Okay, well counting conservatively I saw four posts saying that the chickenpox vaccine lowers incidence of shingles. If an anti-vax thread had four clear cases of people saying something not supported by science (and I’d assume it’d be a lot more than that, obviously) then it would hurt their credibility. Why should we hurt our credibility with ignorance and lies when we actually do have science on our side? It just doesn’t make sense, and makes us look pretty knee-jerk. We don’t need that! We are right!
Really? Is this really necessary or helpful? All stuff like this does is pull the debate away from objectivity and reality, and creates space for ignorance to feel righteous rather than just wrong.
What debate? This is a pit thread to express frustration at the anti-vax crowd. It’s ok to have a place to vent with hyperbole, especially when faced with this nonsense on a frequent basis.
I did a search for Pox Parties on Facebook.
There were a LOT of pages, although most of them seem to have disappeared since yesterday.
A search right now yields the following Pages or Groups:
Find a Pox Party Near You (197 members)
Pox Party USA (49 likes)
Chicken Pox Party (two of these, one seems to be a musical group?) (17 likes for the non-musical group)
Find a Pox Party in the Gulf South (21 members)
Pox Party at <deleted> (9 confirmed attendees)
Sadly, I don’t think it’s a person or small group of people “screwing with us”. There really are people out there doing this.
I don’t have a real issue with pox parties, per se, although I think the vaccine is a better idea since even if you get chicken pox from it, it’s a mild case as opposed to the who-know-what-you’ll-get with a pox party.
But sending stuff through the mail? Right Out. And if people are using the Facebook groups and pages to arrange this, then it needs to stop.
The bit I want to know is- after these people have exposed their children, do they then keep them isolated until the illness has passed?
No?
Chicken pox has an incubation period of between 10 and 21 days- and infected people are infectious for a day before they develop the tell-tale rash.
If these kids are deliberately exposed by their parents, and then allowed to wander about shedding virus until the rash develops- these parents are beyond irresponsible.
Apparently, “shrill” is this generation’s “hysterical” for dismissing women’s statements. That’s the second time I’ve seen it used in the past several days as a contemptuous attempt to ignore the content of posts in favor of criticizing tone.
I can’t find a single news item with a local report of a pox party and I can’t anyone being arrested for exposing their children to chicken pox. It is pegging my BS detector.
(bolding added)
Why on earth would you expect to see arrest records for people exposing their children to chicken pox? It isn’t illegal!
Stupid beyond all reason, but not illegal.
Kids are pretty much parental property in America. Check the lovely abuse threads popping out all over the place here for additional interest if you want. If nothing gets officially done when parents beat on their kids with household objects to the point of drawing blood or breaking bones, why would you think that knowingly trying to give them diseases would trigger any sort of police action?
Hell, even trying to give them something WORSE like rubella isn’t illegal.