Catholic Teaching and Immunization Policy

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PetraG said:
I did not say vaccinations ought to be mandatory. I said that it is a sensible choice for most people because the risk to everyone generally is far lower with a very high vaccination rate than without one. The method still works if some patients are not vaccinated, provided the fraction is not too high, or if some fraction of people who get the vaccination don’t personally mount an immulogic response (as is usually the case).
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Thank you for clarifying your position. It’s interesting that herd immunity thresholds are based on product quality. The better the product performs, the lower the threshold. When the product under-performs, the non-users get blamed. What a great business model!
PetraG said:
Not wanting unvaccinated children in daycare is reasonable. They bite each other; they scratch each other. There is a reason to consider them a risk for spreading communicable diseases.
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Do you consider it reasonable that the law requires them to admit children who are Hep B+?
 
Norway has been mentioned in this thread several times. Norway does not have mandatory vaccinations. I can’t put in links, (new member) but a search for “Norway mandates vaccines?” turned up the government web-site that provides a list of vaccines and includes the quote below.
Vaccination in Norway is not compulsory.
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The schedule in Norway is not identical to the schedule in the US although there is a fair amount of overlap.

The rate of autism in Norway is lower than in the US. Again, as a new member, I can’t post the link. The article title is “Difference Across Counties in the Registered Prevalence of Autism”
In the age group 6 – 12 years, nationwide prevalence amounted to 0.6 % for autism spectrum disorders,
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That was in the period 2008-11.

Sorry to jump in so late in a well-established conversation.
 
blackforest said:
Thank you for clarifying your position. It’s interesting that herd immunity thresholds are based on product quality. The better the product performs, the lower the threshold. When the product under-performs, the non-users get blamed. What a great business model!

Do you consider it reasonable that the law requires them to admit children who are Hep B+?
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The alternative to not admitting children who are HepB+ is giving them a bell and asking them to yell “unclean! unclean!” as they make their way through life. They’re infected–they cannot undo that. Some may have had a vaccine but did not have an immune system that could make use of it to protect their bodies. People who have refused a vaccination aren’t in that predicament. They can still try to get a vaccination that could protect both themselves and others. They simply choose not to. That’s their choice, but since they’re choosing not to get vaccinated, it is only fair that other people can also choose not to have their children in contact with them. They are in the situation they are in by choice.

I don’t know why you consider vaccinations a “product” or think that public health officials are out to “blame” people because medical researchers don’t have a vaccination that elicits an effective immunological response 100% of the time. Do you think researchers have a “business model” by which they really don’t care how effective their vaccinations are?

What exactly do you want public health officials to do?

I’ll just let you have the last say, because this is going to become the thread that will not die.
 
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At the time the studies were done in Denmark, the rate of autism in that country was much lower than in the US.

If the lower rate was due to ineffective methods of diagnosis and statistical analysis, it undermines the conclusions of the studies, which counted the number of cases of autism and drew conclusions from increases in the rate.

If the lower rate was due to other factors, not applicable to other countries (differing genetics, for example), then these studies are not the firm answer to either the thimerosal or MMR questions which has been claimed.

Curious.
 
a child who is not infected is not infectious.

a child who is infected could be infectious, but only in certain situations.

I’m not following your reasoning…unless you consider the children of people who refuse vaccines automatically unclean and therefore they should be shut out from human society. Bells?
 
PetraG said:
I’ll just let you have the last say, because this is going to become the thread that will not die.
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Ethical vaccine policy-making and decision-making is an important and passionate topic to a lot of us, so the thread is long. I apologize if I’ve engaged you for too long. God bless!
 
blackforest said:
Ethical vaccine policy-making and decision-making is an important and passionate topic to a lot of us, so the thread is long. I apologize if I’ve engaged you for too long. God bless!
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You are right, it is. I just have other duties that I’m neglecting and not such a great persuasive ability as I like to flatter myself into thinking I have, LOL. Sometimes, it is just time to let the conversation go on without me!!
 
Not a doctor, but I am a scientist. The big red flag here is that is was an anonymous survey where 39%! of respondents had unvaccinated children. The validity of the data can’t be confirmed. There could have been an orchestrated attempt by anti vaxxers to affect the results.

I’m not saying don’t continue to research vaccine safety, just that I’m not regretting the flu vaccine I got earlier based on this 🙂

 
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Any given child is more likely to survive the vaccine than the disease, excepting those with certain extreme medical complications. Not vaccinating your child is vastly more likely to harm them than vaccinating them.
 
The ingredients in question have never been in the vaccines that have remained in question, and ALL thimerosal was removed from childhood vaccines years ago. Babies were exposed to more mercury in utero via fish consumption than they have ever been exposed to in vaccines.
 
Erikaspirit16 said:
A good slide presentation on measles by the CDC–

https://www.cdc.gov/measles/downloads/MeaslesDataAndStatsSlideSet.pdf

p. 3: 1985 had 1.2 MILLION deaths worldwide from measles. By 2016 this number was <100,000; an estimated 20.4 MILLION lives saved, and deaths were reduced 84%.

p. 4: before 1963, in the US there were 48,000 hospitalizations from measles; 4,000 developed encephalitis; and there were 450-500 deaths a year.

You tell me: Does the vaccine work? Is it worth the small risk of a reaction to get the vaccine?
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The problem we’re seeing now is 99% of people against vaccines actually aren’t old enough (they’re my age - mid forties - or younger) to remember when “childhood diseases” weren’t just nuisances, they killed people. Lots of people . And in some cases it’s as though they don’t believe that death by measles, and mumps, or polio is possible in the modern era.
 
I’ve posted this before, but it’s worth posting again:

http://sites.nationalacademies.org/DBASSE/CPOP/DBASSE_080393#deaths-from-all-causes

It’s an international study of death rates in the US vs. 16 other developed countries. The beauty of it is that you can keep clicking deeper and deeper until you reach very specific causes of death. It’s well worth at least 10 minutes browsing around the data. The US ranks at the or near the bottom in virtually every category and virtually every cause of death. It seems to me that anyone living in the US has to ask themselves why they rank at the bottom if they’re paying twice as much (or more) for health care on a per capita basis.

Nothing about vaccines specifically, but there is a category “childhood cluster” of diseases. The US is 4th from the bottom…
 
That’s old news, though. We’ve known that for decades.

I’m interested in the primary cause of death as otitis media, though.
 
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This is very hard to quantify, but I’d welcome any attempt. If my choices were a typical course of childhood chicken pox versus anaphylactic shock, I’d go with the former. If it came down to soreness at the injection site versus symptomatic, iron-lung polio, I’d go with the latter. The risk-benefit equation isn’t black and white; it’s too complex to leave up to the State.
 
Here’s the problem with varicella.

Kids don’t get chicken pox anymore - not like we did, anyway - because of the vaccine. We treated it as a benign disease as kids, but it’s actually not.

In an adult, chicken pox often goes to the airway and kills. The lesions line the bronchioles of the lungs, the airway swells, and people die from it. And yes, this happens. There’s only a couple of meds that work against the virus, and they’re not always effective against varicella because that’s not the herpes virus they were designed to treat. I believe we have other choices now, but they’re not always readily available, and insurance won’t always cover them.

(If someone thinks privatized health insurance means health care isn’t rationed, I can challenge that assumption. There are things that go on behind the closed doors of hospital ethics committee meetings that would probably shock them, and explain part of my return to the military.)
 
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Actually, it’s not - as an adult. It can kill. And getting it while pregnant isn’t advised either. It’s droplet spread, and you can infect for several days before you know you have it.

Did you read the entire context of what I said?

Why do you think we vaccinate against it?
 
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