FL surgeon gen'l does NOT mandate unvaxxed kids quarantine after measles exposure!

Guatemala? Venezuela? Honduras? El Salvador? Russia (if we can believe what they report)?

Not to be political… But lots and lots of people you see on TV touting not to get any vaccines… Have been vaccinated and their children and grandchildren as well. They just don’t want you to be vaccinated… I can’t go further since this is not a political thread… Lol :syringe:

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Please do not turn this into a conversation about vaxxing. I believe there is a thread in the PF for that. As has been pointed out, the issue being discussed here is Florida’s refusal to require quarantine by families who choose not to vaccinate (for whatever reason). Thanks for your understanding.

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Sorry… My bad

Here is a thread in the politics section for vaccine politics:

https://talk.collegeconfidential.com/t/vaccine-politics-thread/3659245

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I got pertussis when I was 28 and adults may not die of it, but it was miserable. You’d wake up and try to breathe and nothing happened then you’d whoop and whoop trying to get some air and then after enough of that you’d throw up. I’m hopeful that now I’ll never get it again, but IMO it is totally worth getting the booster.

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If a person knows they did not receive the recommended vaccines, or has a good reason to believe they may not have, then checking titers (or just getting the shots known to be missing) is the right thing to do. However if a person has reason to believe they did receive the recommended vaccines, there is no reason to get titres or get boosted.

For example, sometimes a middle aged adult comes to me and says they have lost their shot record, so wants to know if this means they need titres or boosters. But they grew up in the US, their parents brought them in for regular medical care, and they attended a residential college (colleges almost always require vaccine records to enroll.) All of these are good reasons to believe they got the standard shots of the time.

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Re: MMR…I believe my son got a booster before he left for college in Boston…it was not long after the big outbreak there.

@fiftyfifty1 and yes to the college physicals.

My kids started college at the same time, but the schools required different vaccines. The one who went to Wyoming had to show proof of MMR, which had last been boosted 6 years prior (at age 12). The other went to school in Florida and I think that requirement was for Hep A & B and something else. She was born in China and had received her first sets of vaccinations in China (sure she did!) and her pediatrician didn’t believe the records or believe that the vaccines were of good quality (may not have been properly refrigerated, correct doses) so she restarted the series. The paper list all the original ones and the new ones, (so a mess!) but they didn’t care about most of the vaccines she’d had.

Can’t rely on colleges requiring students to be vaccinated.

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State colleges in Florida require proof of immunization as part of admission. I believe most if not all private schools follow suit.

I hope you didn’t think I meant that. I meant…look at your kid’s college physical record…and see what immunizations they had.

DS wanted to do some work in a school and needed proof of his most recent immunizations. We had a copy of his college physical, dated by the provider, and that sufficed. Good thing…because his medical provider office burned to the ground including ALL the medical records…and no, they hadn’t transitioned to EMR at the time.

Fortunately, in NYC at least, pediatricians report childhood immunizations to the NYC Dept. of Health. A parent (and/or student over 18) can print it out from the DOH website.

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And my daughter’s school did, but the required immunizations weren’t the same (or, IMO, complete) as for my other daughter’s school. One wanted ‘this this and this’ and the other wanted just proof of MMR. Neither cared about meningitis (I did) or chickenpox, flu shots, and other things I thought were important.

Colorado put the vaccine records on computer when my kids were about 8 or 10 yrs old. Before that, it was on the little yellow card I carried around. Then we moved to California and then to Florida. Florida required I go to the health dept to put all the records online, but they questioned some of the records. They did not just pull the colorado records but preferred the little yellow cards.

I’ve found since Covid that that state records aren’t all that accurate. I had several shots at the clinic at my PCP’s office (general shot clinics), some at PCP office, some (most) at Safeway. They don’t all always get entered.

They probably get entered but if you put one thing different - e.g., John A. Smith vs John Smith or use Pat vs Patricia they may not match up. If that could apply to you try searching both possibilities. If someone spelled your name wrong or put in the wrong birthdate you may be out of luck though.

In the first case, it may be easier just to get another booster instead of checking titers. In the second case, checking titers is sometimes done when someone is particularly concerned whether the vaccination was effective (e.g. may be required by some employers of emergency services workers or health care workers).

And now a case reported near detroit, from intl travel. Fortunately appears was not contagious while traveling. If had been, then thousands of people in the airports would have been exposed.

The person is a child, and fortunately they don’t believe anyone outside the family was exposed.

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Saw a headline that the measles outbreak is expanding in Florida. Duh. It will continue to expand until vaccination or quarantine takes place. In the olden days before the vaccine the health department did enforce quarantines, with notices posted on your house!

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This news article has some very interesting information. Aside from the fact that an 8th child now is sick in FL, it mentions an outbreak in Ohio in 2022, when 85 children, mostly unvaccinated toddlers, caught measles, and 42% had to be hospitalized! Ohio strongly urged quarantine for 21 days, but if the child were immunized immediately post-exposure, the quarantine was reduced to 72 hrs, (since they would likely develop immunity and hence not be able to spread the disease).

It’s very frustrating. The elementary school in FL where they’re having the outbreak only has 33/1067 unimmunized. All 33 will surely contract measles, since it is so highly contagious that simply walking through the same hallway less than 2 hours after a virus shedder has passed through will likely lead to infection. As long as those 33 kids whose parents are choosing that they contract measles stay home after having been exposed, the virus won’t spread. But they’re not staying home - and I bet that they’re going other places besides school! Some surely have younger sibs who attend nursery school, to which the sibs will spread it, and they’ll all pass it to others who attend their church.

Expect an explosion in local spread within a couple of weeks, outside that elementary school. And then farther and farther, all across the nation.

If there is a 42% hospitalization rate amongst those infected, how in the world will the hospitals cope? With a nearly 5% refusal rate nationwide, and as of now 100% vulnerability amongst infants approx 5-13 months old, there won’t be enough hospital beds for those who require it. It’s going to be like the height of Covid, but in the pediatric hospitals. Pity the staff. And pity the children who will suffer for their parents’ having refused to immunize them.

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We have 73 million people under 18 in the US. Let’s estimate that 3 million (around 4%) are unimmunized. Say over the next few months, half of them contract measles. So that’s 1.5 million cases. Let’s say that 40% of them require hospitalization (which is just astonishing - it didn’t used to be so virulent, but that hospitalization rate is consistent with that seen in multiple small cluster outbreaks since the advent of universal measles vaccination in the US, with significant mortality rates, too) . That’s over half a million hospitalized over the outbreak. Let’s say it happens over a 5 month period, so that maybe 100K pedi hospital beds a month required. We only have about 25K pedi hospital beds in the US; only about 5K of them are pedi ICU beds. They’re already filled with trauma, cancer, ortho, neuro, etc. How in the world are we going to manage to care for the sudden tsunami of measles pneumonia patients that we could see, if this spreads into the general anti-vax population, who tend to cluster together in homeschooling and church groups, where it will be even more efficiently spread? Even if the hospitalization rate were only 10%, or even 5%, it would overwhelm our hospitals. And the hospitalization rate in the 2022 Ohio outbreak was 42%!