Should vaccinations be required by law?

[BunsenBurner]

<p>WA state immunization form that parents of students attending public schools have to fill out allows exemptions for valid reasons with one caveat: if there is an outbreak, the exempt kids will not be allowed to come to school or participate in any school -related activities. Very fair.
<a href=“http://www.doh.wa.gov/cfh/Immunize/documents/certifexemption.pdf[/url]”>http://www.doh.wa.gov/cfh/Immunize/documents/certifexemption.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>

Parent/Guardian Notice: “I certify that the information provided here is correct and verifiable. I understand that if there is an outbreak of a vaccine-preventable disease my child has not been fully immunized against (as indicated above, for medical, personal/philosophical or religious reasons), my child may be at risk for disease and can be excluded from school, child care or preschool until the outbreak is over.”

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[Emaheevul07]

<p>^That happened at our high school my senior year. Someone had mumps and the unvaccinated kids weren’t allowed to come to school, though nobody was actually going through classrooms collecting the kids that hadn’t been so I am not sure how they enforced it.</p>

[HImom]

<p>It is one more thing that schools have to keep track of IF they are put in the role of having to enforce keeping kids out who haven’t been vaccinated if there is an active outbreak. It is really something the kids & parents have to figure out & do for themselves if they want to keep from getting infected rather than putting the onus for protecting the child on the school or others.</p>

<p>I like that the school has the authority to ban the kid from school but not if the school must do so to protect the child.</p>

[Hunt]

<p>

Any kid, even a totally healthy kid, could be carrying some kind of bug which could seriously harm someone whose immune system is suppressed. Going to school with a sniffle could kill that kid too.</p>

<p>Besides, no vaccine is 100% effective, and the CP vaccine is particularly poor as vaccines go, its protection drops as the years go by, so severely that now you need a booster after only 5 years.

These are reasons to keep the unvaccinated kids out, not reasons to let them in. I think the kids who are unvaccinated by choice should not be allowed to endanger the ones who are unvaccinated by necessity.</p>

[Hanna]

<p>“Most if not all states provide for religious or medical exemption from vaccinations, and many allow them for personal beliefs or philosophies.”</p>

<p>Yes, the government can choose not to use the full extent of its power. But I was responding to a post suggesting that the government MUST allow such exemptions. No, it doesn’t have to. The current state of the law allows a government to impose vaccination laws on everyone without regard to religious/philosophical opposition.</p>

[Hunt]

<p>Hanna, I suspect that the courts might rule that the state couldn’t require vaccinations for those with religious objections, but that they could exclude unvaccinated kids from public school.</p>

[Hanna]

<p>In practice, courts’ choices depend on the degree of the danger. Rightly or wrongly, most people don’t perceive measles to be a severe threat. Some infants do die during outbreaks, but it’s rare. Polio, though, was a whole different story. Polio scared the daylights out of people. In the forties and fifties, everyone knew a child who’d died or was permanently disabled. Furthermore, it was most contagious in the summer, when kids were out of school anyway. If we have polio, or some other contagious plague like smallpox or Ebola, sweeping through the U.S. population, I don’t think states will issue religious exemptions.</p>

<p>I’d argue that an unvaccinated child poses a much greater threat to public safety than some dude taking peyote in church, and the peyote guys lost. At any rate, if the threat gets high enough, the state will usually act. For example, states currently let Christian scientists refuse to take their kids to the doctor, but if a kid gets appendicitis, the state will forcibly treat the child. The risk is just too high for it to tolerate.</p>

[LongPrime]

<p>Flash: Vancouver WA.
7 month girl exposed to measles in a visitation to India, discovered to have measles in a doctors clinic. A passing hs student accompanying family member at same clinic becomes exposed, and attended Vancouver Christian HS, now confirmed to have measles. Twelve students at this HS are not vaccinated (reason unknown) and now are told not to come to school until incubation period is over in two weeks. No mention if this is a quarantine.</p>

[moonchild]

<p>And then one wonders why one would take an infant to India in the first place.
You can’t legislate against all stupidity.</p>

[LongPrime]

<p>I imagine that almost all US children under the age of 12 months are not immunized for measles; If you take the recommendation of taxpayers & fee-dollars-at-work and the AAPM</p>

[ucbalumnus]

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@moonchild

And then one wonders why one would take an infant to India in the first place.

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<p>Perhaps the family has relatives there and it is easier for the US-based family to visit India than for the India-based family to visit the US (visas, money, etc.)?</p>

[LongPrime]

<p>very young children often do not have a well developed immune system.
Then sometimes, a young child has too good of an immune system, especially when breast fed and the immune system defeats the vaccination. </p>

<p>update:
9 students at this school are unvaccinated.
3 students have partial vaccinations.
The teenager with measles in the infectious stage, visited a 7-11.</p>

<p>County expects more measles among the unvaccinated.</p>