Needles are scary.
Sen. Jim Tomes has introduced SB 18 which requires schools to send every student’s parent, every year, a notice of the student’s right to not to receive immunizations or related testing if the parent objects on religious grounds or if a physician certifies that such immunizations might be detrimental to the student’s health.
This one is a twofer: an additional burden on schools and a sop to the antivaxxers. The administrative burden is unnecessary. If skipping vaccinations is such a core tenet of your religious belief that you’re willing to put the rest of the community at additional risk to honor those beliefs, you won’t need reminding of your options by the public school system.
At the heart of my complaint is my skepticism about whether we should allow exemptions to vaccinations based on religious objections. There is some risk to the individual from any vaccination. But that risk is outweighed by the benefit to the community and the individual him or herself. However, the calculation potentially changes if everyone else in the community gets vaccinated. If everyone else in the community is vaccinated, the individual can skip the risk to him or herself by not getting vaccinated without a lot of risk of getting sick because everyone else has been vaccinated and won’t be a vector for that particular illness. The individual is protected by the herd immunity of the community. That’s a free-rider problem. It’s not a big deal if there are only a few free riders.
There are cases where a person’s particular medical condition makes their personal risk from vaccination unacceptably high and letting them ride for free on the rest of the community’s immunity is the sensible approach. If there are only a few outliers who are claiming a religious exemption, you can skip them too in order to avoid the emotional turmoil of offending their religious sensibilities. But that only works if their numbers are small. Sen. Tomes is choosing a policy that will inevitably increase those numbers. In addition to hurting the community, this policy will ultimately harm those with the most deeply held religious beliefs on the issue. Because, as more people get sick, the less tenable a religious exemption will be. Once you hit an inflection point, you just say public health concerns don’t permit a religious exemption of any kind. You’d do away with the people using religious concerns as a pretext to enjoy the benefits of a free rider, but you’d also sweep up the very devout few who we’re able to accommodate under the present system.
Seems like a notice of how many children in your child’s class have skipped vaccination should also be required.
Sure, it’s your business if you don’t want your kids to get vaccinated. But it’s also my business because you’re putting my child at an increased risk.
+1 to Joe’s comment.
Anybody got a handy guide as to where the various holy scriptures say something like, “thou shalt not be vaccinated”? I know it won’t say that exactly, or even remotely close to it, but I’m looking for the passages religious anti-vax types are citing.
Thanks in advance, and I hope 2018 is a good year for all of you, even the trolls.
The Illinois Dept. of Education lists all the schools and the percent of students who have been vaccinated. Most public schools have very high vaccination rates. The lowest are in parochial, primarily Protestant, schools that seem to be begging for a deadly outbreak. Herd immunity is virtually nonexistent. its just a matter of time before we read a headline stating that dozens, even hundreds, of children are dying or dead from an illness that could have been easily prevented. “I told you so” will be the unsaid but prominent message. . Events such as these tend to be wake up experiences for the ideologically pure.
The elephant in the living room is the question, “Do unvaccinated children have lower prevalence of autism?” The answer, in short, is NO. A “study” published in the middle of 2017, which was identical to a paper that was withdrawn for lots of good reasons in 2016, has been thoroughly debunked in case you are confronted with a true believer. If you are interested, snopes.com has a really good discussion. This law will only bring out the misinformed, fearful and ideological individuals and could lead to very high numbers of unprotected children and some true disasters. Teddy Roosevelt said that Americans do not learn from experience. They learn from catastrophe.