53 replies to this topic

[Chancellor Gunn]

See above

[Redezra]

All vaccinations are mandatory, no exceptions.

[ᗅᗺᗷᗅ]

People who don't vaccinate their children but count on the rest of our herd immunity to protect them are hypocrites and social leeches.

[Justavictim82]

I haven't given my kids all their vaccinations for a multitude of reasons which I will list here:

1) Increase in frequency and volume since I was a child more and more vaccines keep getting added to the pile for diseases that are pretty much dead in the 1st world. Not only that but there are now over 60 that are 'required' by the time kids step into public schools. Which leads me to #2

2)increase in frequency in visits and increase in frequency per visit since I was a child: My son is about to turn 6 months. On his 3 month check-up, the doctors office wanted to give him 6 different vaccinations (I count MMR as 3 different vaccines because of 3 different strains). What idiot of a human being would subject a 3 month old, who has little to no immune system, with 6 differant virus strains into their body and expect them to fight them all off? It is child endangerment no matter how you look at it.

3) They are not a sure thing Just because you are vaccinated, does not mean the disease cannot effect you or you cannot contract a mutated version of the disease. Furthermore there is still a chance that you may contract the disease when you are immunized. I am the offspring of a father who was given the Salk vaccine as a child and contracted Polio from it.

[*Anastasia]

God, why am I wading into this topic? I didn't want to, but this attitude pisses me the hell off:

People who don't vaccinate their children but count on the rest of our herd immunity to protect them are hypocrites and social leeches.

People who think it's acceptable to force people to inject substances into their bodies which are accepted to be safe on the say-so of the companies who profit off of their development, sale, and distribution are idiots. The very fact that there are innumerable lawsuits over harm caused by pharmaceuticals, especially in the US, shows that your medical regulatory system is terribly broken, and I don't feel I should be mandated to put my trust in studies which clearly have the potential to both be deliberately abused to hide adverse effects or to simply be ineffective at long-term risk analysis, especially when there is as little independent oversight as there presently is.

I'm not against vaccination per se, but I don't consider it morally acceptable to enforce it, or to tell me what I must put into my or my child's body. I don't consider the pharmaceutical companies that have millions of dollars at stake to be acceptable overseers for determining the safety or effectiveness of their own products. I don't consider 5, 10, or even 20 years to be acceptable lengths of time to determine long-term risks. And above all, I don't consider doctors to be the infallible gods they like to portend to be. 'Doctor knows best' is simply not an acceptable attitude in a modern, educated society.

Right, that's the only thing I'll say here.

[Justavictim82]

I have to agree with MvP here. I know of a lot of people from all ideologies that do not always accept a doctor's opinion (which can be wrong from time to time) but we are to just accept that vaccinations are always correct? These vaccinations, which are pushed by Big Pharmaceutical, are not inherently perfect either.

[ᗅᗺᗷᗅ]

We have loads of clinical data on their efficacy.  Childhood infectious diseases are way down as a result of near-universal vaccination.  It's one of medical science's great success stories, and it's rarely talked about, and when it is only by nitwits like Jenny McCarthy.  I feel your hatred of Big Pharma, but from a public health perspective vaccinations are the shiznit.

[Chancellor Gunn]

Justa, for some reason I do not think you know what a vaccine is in a scientific sense...

[KiWi]

Damn public poll.

Now you all know my secret.

[Redezra]

I hate that we allow people the right to choose. By choosing not to, you are threatening society, with pain and suffering up to and including death. I don't care about the threat of pharma corps, that's for my country to deal with. They specify what must be vaccinated, and with what, and we'll do it. It is the only way.

 

I dated a girl that got the mumps. The mumps. From someone who wasn't vaccinated. She was. If this other person was vaccinated, she would have had a hugely decreased chance of catching it. Not saying it's perfect, but if you should drop it if it's not one hundred percent effective, clearly nobody should use condoms.

[Thrash]

A

[Redezra]

o.O

[Locke]

Justa, for some reason I do not think you know what a vaccine is in a scientific sense...

He's not wrong, but he's not really right either. It is, for example, entirely possible to contract a weakened version of whatever you're being immunized against. But it's just that: a weakened version. Complications that would require medical attention are rare, rare enough that the benefits outweigh the risks.

And yes, it's certainly possible that a mutated strain of something you've been immunized against could come along, but that is absolutely no good reason to avoid the vaccine in the first place. With the vaccine you are protected against the most common strains of the disease, without it you are protected against none of them. Just because there might be some mutation that comes along in the future does not warrant not protecting yourself against whatever you can.

And I'm no doctor, but unless he is too I doubt either one of us is qualified to say what a 3 month old's immune system can and can't handle. We've had a lot of experience with vaccines now; if the medical community didn't have a good idea of what was good to do when, I'd be astonished.

And as for the increase in the number of vaccines used these days, that is simply because we've increased the number of things we can vaccinate against. I don't see why this is a bad thing. The reason all these diseases are dead in the first world is because we vaccinate against them, and that makes it all the more important we continue doing so. It's not like it's impossible for diseases that rarely affect first world nations to re-appear (unless they're the completely eradicated kind), and if no one's been vaccinated against it, there are going to be serious problems.

And no, I don't know why I basically tackled that in reverse order.

And I don't know why all these paragraphs start with "and" either.

Edited by Locke, 26 May 2014 - 08:49 AM.

[Redezra]

You like the word and?

[Justavictim82]

Justa, for some reason I do not think you know what a vaccine is in a scientific sense...

I am fully aware what vaccines are. To use Redezra's answer: Mumps. Mumps has a 1/1000 mortality rate in the first world. Obviously in 3rd world countries the mortality rates are higher and cases are much more frequent. I am not even anti-vaccination so stop trying to make me out to be something I am not. My problem with vaccinations is there are a lot of unnessisary shots given to children with developing immune systems. The amount has nearly doubled in the last 30 years. Do we really need a fucking chicken pox vaccine? Is Hepatitus B a scourge in the 1st world? No.

Edited by Justavictim, 26 May 2014 - 09:37 AM.

[ᗅᗺᗷᗅ]

Chicken pox vaccine is a great example, because it's relatively recent.  In Massachusetts we started requiring the chicken pox vaccine a few years ago for all children entering public school.  And now, guess what?  No one gets chicken pox any more.

 

This is the current recommended pediatric immunization schedule for the United States:

 

[Justavictim82]

Chicken pox vaccine is a great example, because it's relatively recent. In Massachusetts we started requiring the chicken pox vaccine a few years ago for all children entering public school. And now, guess what? No one gets chicken pox any more.

This is the current recommended pediatric immunization schedule for the United States:

The chicken pox vaccine is laughable. Hype and hysteria. Doctors and Big Pharm make it out to be the second coming of the Bubonic Plague. Flu shot is another. I am asthmatic so I am strongly recommended to get the flu vaccine every year and I do not. Funny, the last time I had the flu was about 15 years ago... right after the last time I received a flu shot. It is a cash grab period.

Again, I am not against vaccinations but have some common sense. Most of the diseases are significantly less fatal after age 4 (at least where modern medicine prevails) but because we live in a daycare society they are deemed unavoidable.

[ᗅᗺᗷᗅ]

Chicken pox for an adult is very dangerous.  Each years there are 10,000 or so hospitalizations from it and 100-150 deaths.  Not to mention all the days of productivity lost to caring for a sick child.  From a public health standpoint the varicella vaccine has been extremely cost effective.

 

As someone with asthma, yes, you should get the flu vaccine every year.  But the fact that you have not done so and still haven't gotten the flu is not particularly unusual.  The odds are still in your favor because you're young and otherwise healthy.  As a medical practitioner, I would still recommend you get it, but it's not a huge big deal if you don't.  For the very young, very old, and otherwise immunocompromised it's much more important.

[Locke]

I am asthmatic so I am strongly recommended to get the flu vaccine every year and I do not. Funny, the last time I had the flu was about 15 years ago... right after the last time I received a flu shot. It is a cash grab period.

Yes, there are people who don't get the flu when they don't get a flu shot, of course (especially because so many other people do get it). The reason it's suggested isn't because you'll definitely get the flu if you don't get your shot, it's because a respiratory disease on top of asthma is not going to be fun.

Again, I am not against vaccinations but have some common sense. Most of the diseases are significantly less fatal after age 4 (at least where modern medicine prevails) but because we live in a daycare society they are deemed unavoidable.

So the only time we should vaccinate against something is if it's fatal? Just because we can handle them better now doesn't make it a good idea to let them run rampant. If we're going big pharma conspiracy here, it's cheaper to do vaccinations than to treat a disease, so why would they be pushing vaccinations?

[Redezra]

Speaking of, I need my flu shot.