Anti-vaccination stronghold in NC hit with worst chickenpox outbreak in 20 years
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
People in the third world, with vastly inferior education systems, understand the importance of vaccinations and are lining up to get them. So the idea that people in the first world are deliberately turning them down just blows my dad’s mind. In my view a sign of some serious cultural decay that this is happening. Some combination of declining trust in core institutions and a rise in pernicious individualism.
People in developed countries are not confronted in the same way by fatal childhood diseases and have the luxury to ignore the consequences of avoiding vaccinations, thanks to advanced healthcare and to the herd protection provided by the majority of responsible parents who vaccinate their children.
I remember reading some papers and articles on this and how it kind of hacks the minds of people by playing to base insecurities. Critical thought is not really a natural state of humans, so it can be very easy to subvert.
They can't be physically or economically coerced by a government because of the religious exemption, so far that's the law of the land as the Supreme Court conservative shift gave us the Hobby Lobby case. So there's nothing to do about it legally in the near term, short of something so horrific that even the conservative court reverses itself somehow.
But I wonder to what degree insurers and businesses could affect the decision making: if you're not immunized, we won't cover your hospitalization; and refuse to hire people who's immunizations aren't up to date.
I've been an employer, and if I'm the one paying for a majority of health care premiums, I'd absolutely be on board with discriminating in hiring people who think immunizations are some b.s. conspiracy. That sort of paranoia is a hiring risk even aside from the loss of herd immunity.
Can this also apply for alcohol drinking, unhealthy food habits, lack of exercise?
Some companies insurers offer this sort of test to their employees for a health insurance "rebate" if you are deemed healthy.
You can't do this in the United States ... because of Obamacare. Obamacare's prohibition on discriminating on pre-existing conditions allows health insurance companies to consider exactly five factors: tier (level of coverage), age, location, single or family, and whether you smoke cigarettes. All other factors are illegal. Prior to Obamacare, it was legal for companies to charge unvaccinated individuals more and inidivudals who exercised less.
Source: https://www.healthcare.gov/how-plans-set-your-premiums/
> Christian Science selectively rejects various forms of medical care including vaccination.[14][15] The Congregation of Universal Wisdom, a religion based on belief in chiropractic spinal adjustments and Universal Intelligence, forbids vaccinations
If an animal is used at any process in production, some Buddhists will argue it goes against the precepts. Some vaccines are grown in chicken eggs so there's some basis for arguing the manufacturing process takes a life.
As far as I know, those are the only remotely valid claims that vaccines violate a religion's beliefs aside from Christian Science.
> Since its introduction in 1995, the varicella vaccine has resulted in a decrease in the number of cases and complications from the disease.
It has arrested the slide in vaccinations, and in fact increased the vaccination rate by a few percent.
We also have strongly endured that groups like the Australian Vaccination Network are curtailed. They are now called the Australian Vaccination-risks Network, by court order after a statutory body the NSW HCCC pursued them.
You don’t need to make vaccines mandatory, you just need to have consequences for those who refuse; and you need to go after groups who peddle in lies.
https://beta.health.gov.au/file/1126/download?token=nF1qzHkN
A responsbility approach would be a health insurance on third parties.
http://freakonomics.com/2013/10/23/what-makes-people-do-what... gives a well-known account of how monetary incentives don't always work, in that case with late fees for parents who are tardy picking up their children from day care.
> The picture that emerged from this experiment, co-authored with Aldo Rustichini, was that parents had a whole set of non-financial incentives for being on time – incentives that were completely incompatible with money. Like, for example, avoiding the guilt of inconveniencing the day care workers. As soon as parents had the option to pay a small fine and avoid that guilt, they took it en masse.
Which is fine, you dont need 100% vaccination rate to get herd immunity. The value of the last people getting a vax is low.
Bear in mind people already pay a price but refusing to get vaccinated in time.
Also, i would be very surprised to find that the solution to "hold-outs" would be forcefully doing it to them, in almost any scenario.
It could get worse.
My example was to point out that your statement "Normally you gotta persuade people or pay them for the inconvenience to get them to do something for you." might be true - "normally" - but is certainly not universal.
My point again is to argue that your statements along the lines "What better way to persuade than to pay for it" is not obviously true. It may also be that mandatory vaccination policies are not a good solution. However, that doesn't make your proposed change any better.
France might be an interesting case: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-00660-y.
> My point again is to argue that your statements along the lines "What better way to persuade than to pay for it" is not obviously true
We'll see when someone tries it.
"In the early 1990s, an average of 4 million people got varicella, 10,500 to 13,000 were hospitalized (range, 8,000 to 18,000), and 100 to 150 died each year."
https://vaccine-schedule.ecdc.europa.eu/Scheduler/ByDisease?...
There are 600,000 cases every year just in the UK, but the Washington Post doesn't even bother mentioning that there is a disagreement between national health organizations about the cost benefit trade-off of vaccinating against chickenpox.
Everyone got chicken pox decades ago, it was expected. No one cared. Why does anyone care now?
Or at least that is the story we have all been told. I know personally at least 3 elderly people that have had shingles (or do right now) that had chicken pox as kids.
http://www.nfid.org/publications/factsheets/varicellaadult.p...
Getting chickenpox on purpose is not as good or better than getting vaccinated for it.
https://www.nhs.uk/common-health-questions/childrens-health/...
They do vaccinate pregnant women who never got chickenpox and people with weakened immune system, though.
https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/immunization...
Please read up on diseases before you try to infect your children with them.
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/hcp/acip-recs/index.html
It is an ACIP recommended vaccine for at least a decade, which means all state Mediciad recipients can get it for free or for a low cost co-pay. There is no good reason why any child is getting chickenpox today.
10 years for a vaccine against a generally mild week long childhood rash is not really enough time or importance to enter the general public consciousness and it's not really a sin to get your kids infected with it. You're judging billions of people with your own ignorance of their lives.
Indeed, this thread is how I learned there is a vaccine for it.
Since childhood infection was near universal, adults could easily take care of the children since none of them would likely get a new and potentially dangerous infection and for the children they got a week out of school and an itchy rash about as bad as a run-in with poison ivy -- another very common childhood right-of-passage in my part of the world.
The vaccine simply didn't exist and wasn't in common use until I was well into CDC "dangerous" territory, but I had already had the pox by then anyways.
Another anecdote, I have an adult uncle who didn't get Chickenpox as a child and ended up with it in his 30s, spent a spell in the hospital and had a very very rough time. I remember the discussions about it with my Grandmother where she was chastised for not having had him infected as a child properly.
The connection between Chickenpox and the Shingles wasn't even really understood until the late 50s or 60s and I don't believe it really started entering popular consciousness as a related disease until at least the late 80s though it was widely known as being a disease of the elderly. My guess is that most people still don't know that there even is a vaccine for it.
Point is, there are literally billions of people who've been through the childhood Chickenpox event, and it was the social norm until very recently to purposely infect your kids with the pox because there wasn't really much alternative and it was considered to be the safer practice.
Now that there is a safe vaccine, the better choice is vaccination because
1. Varicella is almost always mild in children, but in rare cases it can be dangerous (and these rare cases are more frequent and more severe of adverse reactions to the vaccine), and
2. Vaccination reduces the chances of hepes zoster (shingles) in old age, in comparison to having chickenpox.
Most adults having children now may not even know the vaccine exists and just assume their children will have to go through a week of the pox to get them immunity.