If I had been asked if Chicken Pox was “right for my family” I probably would have said no like I do to whole milk and lawn chemicals. Unfortunately I wasn’t asked if I wanted Chicken Pox because we got them before the vaccine became available. I remember lying on the bathroom floor crying while covered from head to toe in oozing blisters. That didn’t feel “right for me”.
These people are crazy.
LOL scout. True that.
Could Ms. McDonald’s teenage daughter get vaccinated on her own without a parent’s approval? It seems to me that if she could get an abortion without her parent’s knowledge, then she should be able to get vaccinated. After all, it is her body. (I do not want to get into an abortion discussion, I am just curious.)
We have a friends whose 12 year old daughter has brain cancer, she had surgery to remove most of the tumor and is currently getting chemo. She had her vaccinations but now has no immunity. She is currently in the hospital because she caught a cold. She is one of the reasons people should vaccinate their kids. As her mom put it if she gets this sick from a cold I can’t imagine what would happen if she got measles.
@silverlady just like with abortion, it depends on the state. As far as I know, the laws only apply to the HPV vaccine because that is the one that caused parents to flip out. I’m actually not sure whether or not the D could get her other immunizations.
I seem to recall getting the flu vaccine when I was 16 without parental consent but I could be mistaken.
ETA: It seems like the answer is no from my googling (so take it with a grain of salt) with the exception of the above mentioned HPV vaccine. Even if there is no explicit law against it, I would guess that the vast majority of medical practioners wouldn’t do it for fear of lawsuits (this is solely a guess though). I wonder if new laws will start being introduced that allow kids with dumb parents to get vaccines over their parents’ objections just like they are able to contraception, etc in certain states.
Unfortunately, I fear that there will be some children of anti-vaccinators who will die because of their parents foolishness
I am glad to hear there are some pediatricians who are starting to refuse to have any children in their practice who aren’t vaccinated.
I know an extremely brilliant women who has a PHD in neuropsychology whose son is autistic. She believes 100% that it was caused by being vaccinated. I had no idea she felt that way until one day the topic came up. She began to tell me all the research she has been reading for years, blah, blah, blah and how I didn’t know anything. I decided not to waste another minute arguing with her. I was never going to convince her. Sadly, it’s the same with the anti’v’s. They will never be convinced.
I usually avoid vaccine discussions like the plague. The debates go back and forth and back and forth and on and on, few people seem to change their mind, and mostly the conversations get ugly. This is not to say there’s not a legitimate reason to have them by any means, the vaccinations or the discussions. I just try to avoid particularly contentious topics as much as possible. This is to keep myself in a frame of mind to do something positive rather than get bogged down where I feel my knowledge is limited and arguments so often surface.
I think, based on my limited knowledge, that new medical products coming to market need to go through enough testing on minority groups to ensure they are safe for them. One size does not fit all when it comes to health. There can be financial incentive to get a product to market quickly, but that doesn’t mean it’s always what should happen or that it should happen at all.
If a vaccine has been around a long time, has gone through testing on this group, that group, and the other group, and has been shown to not have negative side effects that are extremely problematic, it might be easier to convince people to get vaccinated by letting them know this. I don’t know if it would make a difference, I can only guess. Also, I think it may well be too easy to automatically, out of habit or routine or feeling sense of urgency for the general population, emphasize to individuals that they must be vaccinated without thinking twice, when in some cases it might be unsafe for someone due to a health condition or another factor such as discussed above. Doctors need to be well-educated on negative side effects and who they affect. Enough time needs to be spent with patients knowing their medical history to make determinations that are appropriate for them. Tailor the message to the person or population who is hearing it. Doing this requires enough knowledge, for one thing, for the studies to have been conducted.
@DeborahT - you know, I can see your point, and if it were minority groups [e.g. those who had been victimized by various eugenics or other stuff in the past] then I could see the need for that kind of tailored education. My sense of the anti-vaxxers this time around is that it is generally affluent White parents who are just really misinformed and have a kind of magical thinking about disease and what is “natural”.
I loved what @greenwitch said about how we don’t have to be victims of famine/war/plague now, and indeed, “natural” does not always lead to optimal outcomes. Most people who think about situations like plague imagine themselves as the strong, healthy, survivors unlike the rest of us bozos. Magical thinking…
p.s. I talked to my friend the other day and her 8yo daughter is, as of this year, now fully vaccinated. So I guess sometimes friendship with gentle logic can prevail.
I’m not a magical thinker, but I have been acquainted with people who had unusual health situations so I think about that.
I work in eugenics and intergenerational trauma. I totally get that.
The people opting out are NOT the people who were affected by eugenics. It’s upper class, educated whites.
(Sorry- x-posted with fretful)
What vaccine that is currently in use has not been adequately tested on minorities? Here is a list of the newest vaccines to be released to market http://www.immunize.org/newreleases/ and information on the available vaccines http://www.vaccines.gov/ IIRC the most recent wide scale vaccine release is for HPV, to prevent cervical, anal and related cancers. Medications and vaccines go through years and years of stringent testing, and many have been widely in use overseas or in nearby nations like Canada before being made available in the US. The likelihood of some unforeseen reaction in a minority population is probably miniscule. And, if, for example, we faced another ebola scare and the risk somehow became high for some for potential exposure, I am guessing that if the ebola vaccine that is, for example, being tested in Canada became available on an emergency, compassionate use basis to high risk populations like the healthcare workers, many would probably consider taking it, even it it hadn’t been yet completely vetted in US studies.
Well, the thing about public health is that decisions have to be made for the “herd” - it happens that vaccines are also good for the individual in almost every case as well.
Let’s say that a given pregnant woman’s husband will beat her up if he learns she had an HIV test. It’s still best public health practice to give pregnant women HIV tests. It’s even the best public health decision to give that woman an HIV test.
Also, with respect specifically to vaccines, the “unusual health situations” like a kid getting chemotherapy - are exactly the reason that everyone else needs to get vaccinated.
I understand that for non-scientific people the idea of the “government” injecting something into you that you don’t exactly understand, can be scary. But I fail to see how anyone could ignore all the information that is literally right there (ingredients, published scientific research, etc.) and make claims that it’s “unknown” what might happen from getting a vaccine.
Steps back out. Not my area of expertise at all. Read an article on why people like me should be interested so I gave it some interest. I’m not suddenly gong to be an expert. 
Logic is not what’s going to be most convincing to a great many people. Having been heard and knowing their concerns were taken into consideration, that matters to people. It doesn’t always happen in medicine.
So many ways to respond to that… LOL…
It is unfortunate that there are parents whose perfectly healthy kid turned into an autistic kid just after getting a shot but it has happened and it’s not going to help anything to call them stupid all day.
Now you see why I stay out of conversations on controversial topics about which I know very little.
More power to those who have it in them to take on big issues. Too big for me.
@jym626 - I think what @DeborahT is trying to say is that some people have a viscerally negative reaction to bossy doctors who don’t have a great bedside manner, which let’s face it, used to be a lot more acceptable in the US medical community until very recently.
This kind of medicine has been loudly rejected in say, the past 30 years, by two general groups and their advocates - underrepresented minorities who still have very legitimate beefs (for instance AA rates of death from breast cancer) - and then also those who are extremely privileged and just don’t feel the need to kowtow to any authority.
I would say, again, these current anti-vaxxers are generally from groups that are very privileged, often very educated and very “insider”. I don’t think this is like resistance to routine episiotomy in urban hospitals, among advocates for minority women, for instance.
Somehow the anti-vaxxer stance has gotten entangled with lots of natural and/or attachment parenting practices. We are very attachment, pro-breastfeeding, etc. in my family, but we also have several doctors including infectious disease specialists and epidemiologists, so those issues were never entangled for us.
So I could see how a new mom could start out being resistant to any “establishment” kind of parenting or over-medicalizing when, you know, she writes her birth plan and so forth. But what I’m not getting is, why does such a person become so incredibly resistant to actual data?
@marie1234 - but didn’t the kid “become” autistic right after the parent crossed the street? Right after the kid learned how to walk? Right after eating Cheerios? Isn’t there some way to educate people about the “post hoc” fallacy? I also have a problem with people refusing to learn because learning something new “makes them feel stupid”. Learning something new should ideally make everyone less ignorant. All of us have our blind spots and should be willing to feel a bit ignorant as we learn new things without it breaking us emotionally.