My head hurts. Should I stop banging it against this wall?
@Iglooo It’s great that you’ve never gotten the flu. Congratulations. It’s important to note that your children may not be so lucky, especially if they go off to the dorms.
- This year I personally knew one teen who died from the flu. Shocking but true.
- A few years ago,a friend's child died--he was in his 20s. We were on separate Coasts, him LA, me DC. The same year, while I was in a Staples, just after recovering from a bad case of the flu myself, I heard a couple talking on the other side of the aisle. They were saying how so-and-so had died from the flu. Also a young person.
Ever since, I’ve opted to always get me and my family vaccinated after that, every year.
We have enough free riders just from those who cannot get the vax. Why do we need to allow an opt out? We can force parents to not put kids in harms way in other contexts…this is not terribly invasive. I would say the odds of an adverse vax reaction do not merit the “hysteria”.
^^^The posters on this thread are really people to complain about hysteria. Of course you would say that - I dare say you have not experienced an adverse reaction.
We adopted our youngest daughter from Ukraine. She was 2. She was born exposed to syphilis and spent the first 6 months in a hospital bed. When we brought her home, our pediatrician ran a vaccine titers test against what we were told she’d been given in the orphanage. Most of the stated vaccines came back diluted or non-existent, so the doctor devised a schedule of vaccines to get her up to date. She had a gastro parasite and had been exposed to TB. She needed 9 months of medicine for the TB exposure.
We chose to pay a lot of money to get our own vaccines up to date before we traveled. We saw children in the orphanage who had polio and TB and hep a/b/c and HIV. Measles and pertussis would sweep through the orphanage. There were times when we could not visit for days because no outside people were allowed in to visit. I wish I could explain how very sad it was to see these children who did not have the option to be vaccinated living with diseases we think no longer exist. It was devastating.
We were in Ukraine for 50 days on our first trip and met and spoke with many Ukrainians. They would have loved to have access to vaccines for their children. Even at the orphanage, they used what they had. Our doctor explained that often their vaccines were expired or diluted, but they did try.
Do you often just make up statistics when you are in a discussion?
With some viruses that are airborne, you do NOT have to “interact closely” with another person to spread the virus. That’s why airborne viruses are so very contagious from distances.
I’m sure you are a smart individual and accomplished in your field of work. You are woefully uneducated about virology/microbiology/infectious diseases.
@Sue22, chicken pox is an extremely contagious airborne transmitted virus. He could have gotten it simply by being across the room from her, standing at the front door, touching nothing.
I know a few people who didn’t vaccinate their kids and they are the classic, entitled free riders. This attitude pervades every area of their lives. One of these women gets bent out of shape when someone parks in the illegal (red zone) parking spot because that’s where SHE parks. She sees the parking laws as something that OTHER people should follow to ensure SHE has a prime space.
Her attitude about vaccines is the same. So long as everyone vaccinates, why should she have to?
Only if you consider science and facts and history be absurd. Unfortunately there are some who do,
Are you freaking kidding me? We’re absurd for wanting to protect the health and lives of people?
Go take a history course. Learn about what life was like before vaccines.
Or better yet- go to parts of the world TODAY where vaccines aren’t widespread. Go look at the children suffering and dying because of lack of access to vaccines.
If I am absurd for believing in proven, scientific vaccines which save millions and millions of lives and reduces the incidence of disabilities due to (especially childhood) disease then I am wearing that label along with selfish.
If I am absurd for not wanting someone else’s stupidity to kill me, then I am DARN PROUD to be absurd and selfish. I’ll add that to the long list of things that anti-vaxxers have called me. I don’t care as long as no one calls me “dead.”
There are scientific studies on both sides… history on both sides… unfortunately there are some who insist it’s my way or the highway…
So, if you ran the world, would you be in favor of a 100% unvaccinated population? Is that what you think the wisest public health decision would be?
Or, more precisely, would you be okay with a world in which 100% of people were unvaccinated?
Please expand on this. We know that pre-vaccine era, millions of people died in epidemics of contagious disease. Millions upon millions upon millions. Has history shown us millions upon millions of deaths from vaccines?
This is the kind of argument that people often make – quite appropriately – in political and philosophical discussions. It’s the way we were trained to think and express ourselves in our democratic society.
But science is not a democracy. That can be a difficult concept to accept. We’re so used to the expectation that all viewpoints need to be heard and treated with respect that it can be hard to shift our thinking into a sphere where this is not appropriate.
When it comes to science, decisions need to be made based on hard facts and the preponderance of research evidence, not on an egalitarian ideal of giving equal weight to both sides of a question.
@Iglooo wrote “This is where we could use some stats and let cool heads prevail”, and @CharlotteLetter wrote “There are scientific studies on both sides”.
Really? I mean, really really?
First off, @Iglooo, it’s all I can do to resist putting a Let Me Google That For You link here, because that’s is quite literally all you need to do—open up Google, and type in reasonable search terms. If you want to be more sure of good science than simple googling may give you, go to the [CDC’s website](http://www.cdc.gov/)—they have a search box at the top of their page. Type in *vaccines/i and you’ll get a metric ton of results to read through. Excellent—request solved.
As for your claim, @CharlotteLetter, I’m simply going to ask that you do something similar to remedy your apparent lack of knowledge. In addition, it might be worth you learning that saying that there are scientific studies on both sides of an issue is a vacuous claim—of course there are scientific studies on both sides of any question dealing with human subjects, because that is the nature of such studies. I mean, even if nothing else, sampling issues nearly guarantee that a small but real proportion of all studies will be wrong. However, when the vast majority (and I do mean the vast majority) of studies agree, that allows us to recognize those by-chance-wrong studies as wrong. Clinging to their existence as proof the picture is muddled betrays a deep, deep misunderstanding of the way scientific studies work, I’m afraid.
We have the history of both sides- we have literally millennia of recorded history pre-vaccine and we have several decades of history post-vaccines.
This is such a ridiculous argument. I can’t believe we’re still arguing about this in 2016. This is one of the reasons I moved from being a public health professional to being a historian. I just don’t have the patience.
@Marian, you said that SO MUCH BETTER than I did. Those are the words I was looking for, but which did not reveal themselves to me. 
This is one of those false equivalence arguments which are so popular in some quarters now. And, as romani points out, vivid evidence of the dangers of cutting education funding and turning public schools over to ideologues.
@CharlotteLetter Please cite a scientifically valid study showing that the dangers of vaccinating are anywhere close to the dangers of not vaccinating.
“The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.” Neil deGrasse Tyson
Or this one:
“A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” Max Planck