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Comment by jasonhansel | Hacker News Reader

Would you really want your baby to be delivered by anti-vaxxers?

Sure, why not? With our first kid, we were frequently confused and frustrated by the goofy baggage that various ob-gyns had. Covid vaccine hesitancy wouldn't make my top 10 concerns.

Aside from the risk they're introducing to the delivery ward, the newborns, and the recovering mothers, it also represents a lack of intelligence - which can impact other aspects of care.

I have dealt with a large number of poor quality nurses (there's a nurse shortage to the bar is low for admission), and I have a strong feeling that the bad nurses are also the anti-vax nurses.

For the people who answer "yes", this is the same as asking if you would let a builder that doesn't believe that asbestos is dangerous to build your house. Professionals that go by beliefs when the facts are readily available are not behaving like professionals.

Let their personal beliefs decide which m&m flavor they like, not medical procedures.

Do you have an asbestos litmus-test for the guy who tightens your shower taps or trims your hedges? I think you'll find yourself rapidly very short of professionals if you actually put this into practice.

they're just delivering a baby, not banning them from ever getting vaccinated

bad analogy

Would I want my newborn child to be exposed to an idiot who decided against basic common sense decisions regarding disease prevention?

No, I don't think that I would.

I hope you are ok with midwifes, then.

I would want a professional with plenty of experience. Midwife or not. Thats my only criteria.

I would prefer my child to be delivered by someone who knows how to deliver babies. I would not care about their gender, their race, their sexual proclivities. I would not who they voted for, what music they listen to, where our not they believe we land on the moon. I would not care if the hate the measles vaccine. Or are against taking a brand new vaccine. Why would I? Are you afraid what the nurse thinks will someone get absorbed by the child? I would only care that they know what they are doing, and perhaps the method they chose to do it

Nurses don't deliver babies anyway - doctors do.

Gender, race, sex preferences, or political beliefs are very different from being anti-vax.

Being anti-vax is evidence of low intelligence. So no, I would not want someone with low intelligence to handle or assist my baby's delivery.

But the most obvious reason is that they directly endanger mothers and babies in the delivery ward because unvaccinated people are more contagious and carry higher viral loads.

Having discussed with nurses dealing with vaccination, some are quite sceptical about the vaccine, due to the great amount of secondary effects they witness after the shot. The remark about "low intelligence" is quite wrong anyway: most people get vaccinated because the news told them so, not because they read through the peer-reviewed studies and concluded that it's safe.

Anyway, for a pregnant women of 30 years old with no comorbidity, the risk is very low. A mother giving birth is much more at risk of medical malpractice or general risk due to the various treatments, such as epidurals, ocytocin, episiotomy and so on, that are often not really useful but applied anyway.

Pregnancy IS a comorbidity associated with higher likelihood of complications from covid-19.

> unvaccinated people are more contagious and carry higher viral loads

Unless they've already had covid of course. In which case the situation is flipped on its head. How many nurses do you think may have already encountered covid prior to vaccines even becoming available?

If they were making the argument that they should be exempt because they tested positive for antibodies, that would be a more reasonable argument.

They are not making that argument. They are simply anti-vax.

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