Vaccination isn’t a personal choice; it’s a choice you impose on others. NPR has an article entitled Vaccine Refusals Fueled California’s Whooping Cough Epidemic.
Apparently they tracked of whooping cough to times and places with high numbers of personal belief vaccination exemption applications:
They found that people who lived in areas with high rates of personal belief exemptions were 2 1/2 times more likely to live in a place with lots of pertussis cases.
Also, according to the story, when a community drops below a 95% vaccination rate, the community loses herd immunity and this exposes vulnerable elements of the population — infants for example — to the disease.
This sort of thing illustrates another limitation on the individual model of citizenship. For a great many issues, viewing the citizenry as nothing more or less than a bunch of discrete individuals and shaping policy accordingly is appropriate. But there are also plenty of cases where the consequences of individual choices are imposed on others in a way that the law is not equipped to address very well.
If my infant incurs thousands of dollars in medical bills to treat whooping cough because a critical mass of Oprah watching, Jenny McCarthyite antivaxxer moms decided to deprive the community of herd immunity; who do I sue?
I’ve often wondered if a lawsuit would work. Say that there are two or three families in a community that don’t vaccinate and an outbreak occurs. Might those families have liability?
My mother was a registered nurse. I was vaccinated for TB (that she had when a child and from which she recovered, one of the infrequent cases) and smallpox (not named after anyone in my family, so far as I know) and polio. When it came to whooping cough, her scientific method for protecting me was to have me wear a black ribbon around my neck until I was seven years old. I never contracted whooping cough. However, I grew fond, at a young age, of turtle neck shirts.
Call me a big government liberal, but I would be perfectly comfortable with requiring proof of vaccination or a medical waiver before a child can be used as a tax benefit for parents.
In my experience there are three main categories of anti-vaxxers: the aforementioned credulous Oprah watchers, who fall across the political spectrum; ultra-liberal hippie types (probably much of the problem in California) and the ultra-conservative.
To answer your last question, you sue the person with money – Jenny McCarthy.
Medical bills? What if your baby DIES? Ten infants died in this outbreak and I’m guessing they weren’t all the children of these anti-vax morons.
I have no patience or tolerance for such foolishness. It’s not witchcraft, it’s SCIENCE. And these people are supposed to be educated. Apparently that old saying about a little information being dangerous is all too true.
Pretty sure the rule is “sue them all and let the judge sort it out.”
Or let the insurers sort them out for you.
Saw a link to this on Kottke today: http://youtu.be/V1mwYwjel-Q
Guess he saw/heard that NPR story too.
From my understanding, if your infant dies due to a bad batch of vaccine, or a vaccine that really doesn’t work, you can’t sue anyone. Anyone know if this is true? That just like gun manufactures, vaccine manufactures have some sort of federal law on the books that prevents, or seriously limits, lawsuits?
Oh wait, looks like Big Pharma and Big Gov (FDA) doesn’t always get it right:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/22/AR2011022206008.html
So basically you ain’t suing anyone, you get to go before a tribunal, and hope they find in your favor.
Anyone who thinks humans can beat mother nature is crazy. What happens when we vaccine against so many ailments, that we breed out our natural immunity and we have a virus that comes around that we can’t vaccinate against, nor can our bodies fight in a biological ways because we vaccinated out that ability over decades, centuries?
Sort this out for me. If the majority of the population gets vaccinated, they are thereby protected from contracting the disease. If people choose not to get vaccinated, it is them and their children who get the disease. So, what’s the problem? Self-inflicted wound. Your child is vaccinated, so what’s the concern?
Oh- your objection is that others pay the cost of their choices? AND you are for ACA? And this is the limitation of individualism? Please hit me in the face with a shovel.
Well, in the case of whooping cough, infants can’t be vaccinated (has to occur later), so they are vulnerable when a non-trivial subset of the population is carrying and spreading the disease.
More generally, some of the population is bound to be vulnerable for one reason or another and the greater the number of carriers, the greater the likelihood that the vulnerable population will contract the disease.
Don’t forget, Doug: Some people can’t be vaccinated because they react to ingredient in vaccines. Ruining herd immunity in the name of Holy, Holy Freedom Uber Alles puts them at risk.
Then there is a small part of the population that is vaccinated that end permanently sick or damaged due to the vaccines side effects. I know two cases personally that the kids have suffered brain damage due to the vaccines that were given to them. In Italy a court actually ruled that MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine caused a 15 month old to get autism.
So as Spock would say, “Do the needs of the many out weight the needs of the few?” Tell that to the parents of the kids that have to raise these kids who suffer from the drugs side effects.
Vaccines have not cause autism in many years, if they ever did.
Of course you have scientific proof of this? Remember who does and funds the research, big pharma and drug companies.
To prove a point about big medicine do you think your doctor will subscribe Curcumin for depression! Wow no side effects!
Curcumin, found in the yellow Indian spice turmeric, has amazing health benefits, including elevating mood and combatting depressive symptoms as effectively as the prescription drug Prozac, suggests a recent study published in Phytotherapy Research.
Used as an herbal medicine and food for nearly 4,000 years, turmeric is a well-documented treatment for a wide range of disorders, inspiring researchers to dub it “the golden spice of life” in a scientific review. Indeed, over the past 25 years, more than 3,000 papers have explored the savory flavoring’s medicinal properties in lab tests, animal studies, and human trials.
A “safe and effective” herbal treatment for depression
In the new study, researchers conducted a clinical trial that included 60 patients with major depressive disorder (MDD). The patients were randomly divided into three groups, with one receiving 20 mg of fluoxetine (the generic form of Prozac) daily, another getting 500 mg of curcumin twice a day, and the third group receiving both treatments.
Neither the researchers nor the patients knew which treatment they were taking. After six weeks, the curcumin and fluoxetine groups had comparable improvements in mood, based on their score on a standard rating scale for depression that evaluates mood, feelings of guilt, suicidal ideation, insomnia, anxiety and other symptoms. While the group that received both therapies did even better, the difference in depression scores was not statistically significant.
“It is a novel and surprising application for this natural medicine,” study coauthor Dr. Ajay Goel, of the Baylor Research Institute and Charles A. Sammons Cancer Center, said in a statement. He adds curcumin was also used with “excellent results” in an animal study in which it was compared to both fluoxetine and imipramine (an older drug for depression).
A physician with the UNM Autism Research program told me this.
Yuo have made the positive claim, you have the burden of proof. Prove your case or be quiet.
Wow lets see can I sue everyone who smokes, over eats and doesn’t exercise. These people drive the cost of health insurance into the stratosphere. Lets see a law banning vegetable oils and force people to start using coconut, palm and peanut oil. Instead of a government subsidiary on tobacco lets give health subsidiary for people to exercise. How about a limit of how many hamburgers and fries or cigarettes a person can consume in a day. Or how about a drunken driver getting a mandatory 6 months (no appeals or lawyers to reduce the sentence) in jail. Over 26,000 people die a year in drunk driving deaths, should we ban alcohol since a small portion of the population over consumes? If your rich and connected you can even walk away with no punishment. Teddy Kennedy and one of the Simon’s wife’s comes to mind. Opp’s we are trampling on someone rights! So what 10 infants died in California? Over 30,000 people die a year due to guns. Humanity is nuts! So get drunk, beat the kids and the wife while smoking your cancer sticks, drive recklessly, and eat all the wrong foods. Don’t forget to hire a lawyer to bail your ass out and blame the government, advertisers, medical profession NRA and the other guys for your transgressions. The lawyers really need the money! ;)
Hmm can a parent sue another parent for their infant being subjected to second hand smoke?
Kind of hard to respond to all of that, but vaccines have been shown not to cause autism, but mumps, measles and rubella have caused untold human damage. The famous antivaxxer has done our society no favors with her ignorance. and that is turning into a story of great and needless human suffering. Being pretty and verbal doesn’t mean one knows anything.
By the way, you don’t have to look very far or deeply to find authoritative, research-based data on just how silly the vaccination-autism link is: http://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/autism/. Of course, you can always rely on the strange and wonderful world of crazy pseudoscience for opposing “research” viewpoints.
I think there are lots of reasons the anti-vaccine people have had some sway over parents in recent years–crackpot ideas being more easily spread due to the Internet and talk shows; lack of critical thinking skills; some people’s tendency to give unwarranted credibility to celebrities; suspicion of any requirements or orders coming from authorities; extreme individualism, and so on. I think one reason that the anti-vaccine crowd is successful with getting its ridiculous message across is that people of child-bearing age in the United States have not had to live with the dread diseases that the vaccines are designed to prevent. They did not grow up surrounded by death and disability caused by small pox, whooping cough, polio, and so on.
I know a woman who contracted polio just before the vaccine became available. She survived, but polio-related health issues have sprung up for her decades after she had the disease. I’m pretty sure she would have loved to have had the vaccine.
By the way, my mother is an R.N., and she made sure all of her five children had the vaccines that were available. Then again, she grew up during a time when the vaccines we have today were not available. She knew what it was like for children to be born into a world where vaccines did not exist. She was in nursing school when Salk’s polio vaccine was introduced. The vaccine was considered to be almost a miracle. My mother worked in public health early in her nursing career and understood the importance of it. I wish some of the anti-vaxxers could be put into a time machine and made to go back to earlier decades. Maybe then they would understand the importance of vaccines and public health.
I am not against vaccines but I do understand that when you give a drug to a large portion of the population there will be bad reactions to the drug.
The questions are all in the numbers. On the link “CDC Concerns About Autism” the following sentence pops up. “found the vaccines to be generally safe and serious adverse events following these vaccinations to be rare.” How serious are the adverse events and how rare? Are the numbers accurate? Or are they skewed by the medical community? How many adverse events are never reported or misdiagnosed? As always it’s in the numbers and good luck on suing the medical community or a drug company when things go bad.