Not quite anti-vaxxers

[kengr]

fayanora commented the other day about the folks who are protesting a bill in the Oregon Legislature that would remove all non-medical exemptions for vaccination.

Some of them *may* be anti-vaxxers. But their stated stance is that the state shouldn't be interering with the right of parents to make medical decisions for their children.

Sounds nice. But that ship sailed *long* ago. It's well established that the state can file *criminal* charges against the parents if they fail to get proper treatment for their child's medical conditions or illness and the child takes serious damage or dies as a result.

So parental authority regarding this (and a number of other things) has limits. Fairly sharp ones.

Children have certain rights *regardless* of their parents wishes on the matter. Not nearly enough in my not-so-humble opinion, but still.

And failing to vaccinate your child doesn't merely endanger them. It also endangers every other person they come in contact with who hasn't been vaccinated.

And in the case of folks with legit medical exemptions, *they* are rather likely to get serious complications or even *die* if they get a disease from your unvaccinated child.

That's because most of the legit reasons for not getting vaccinated amount to "their immune system is badly compromised" Which means that the *actual* disease will do terrible things to them.

The other legit reasons are things like allergies to something the vaccine is made with (which is why there are alternative vaccines for some diseases)

*your* decisions about *your* child have consequences for other people. *Serious* consequences.

Being part of a society sometimes means that you have to go along with things you don't like/want because the consequences of letting you have your way harm others.

I don't know about Oregon, but at least *some* states with such laws will allow you to home school your unvaccinated kid.

As I've said before, maybe they should set up seperate schools for the willfully unvaccinated. Of course getting the kids to/from those schools without exposing other kids is a problem...

Comments

[conuly]

Hear, hear.

[elf]

All 50 states have some allowance for homeschooling; anti-vax people could homeschool. Specific academic and bureaucratic requirements vary wildly.

There is no need for the state to provide a school where the teachers and other staff members are at higher risk because the parents don't believe in medical science.

I can understand a lot of the anti-vax motivations. The medical system does lie to people. All the time. Especially poor people. And it ignores their concerns, and it especially ignores women's pain - there is no reason a young mother should believe a doctor who says, "nothing bad will happen to your kid if he gets X procedure," because a dozen doctors have already told her, "nothing bad will happen to you if you get X procedure," only she had worse cramps for four months or she still gets nausea when she stands up too quickly or she was actually hospitalized and the emergency room staff said she's lucky to be alive, because the doctor insisted she just had a headache and it would go away by morning.

So of course a good number of them don't trust doctors who say, "your kid NEEEEDS this to be healthy." And they have even less trust when the message shifts to, "maybe your kid doesn't, but these other kids do," because she has enough stress in taking care of one kid; she can't be responsible for the health of the whole neighborhood.

So she panicks, and tries to find who's telling the truth about what will help her child. And no amount of people in lab coats yelling at her is going to convince her that they're right and she's wrong.

End result of this is likely to be: a small uptick in homeschooling (but not much, because you need energy, time, and money to pull that off); a much larger set who get vaccinations over their parents' screaming objections, with a small number of lawsuits filed about rights violations - they won't go anywhere, but they'll be a nuisance - and a small number of forged vaccination claims.

There is no state official document for vaccination cards. Every doctor's office, every clinic, has their own. I started using the "refuse to do vax" records at school when my kids were about 11 and 8 - they'd been vaccinated, but I'd lost the cards, and that was three doctors ago (Ah, the joys of going on and off welfare's medical assistance) and I had no way to get access to their records.

How you can tell this is a whiny-brat game of "you can't tell me what to do!" and not an actual idealogical objection to vaccines: They're making noise instead of quietly handing around forged vax cards.

When teenagers want to go drinking, they don't hold protests in front of bars; they get fake IDs.