CDC reports highest childhood vaccine exemption rate ever in the U.S.
CDC reports highest childhood vaccine exemption rate ever in the U.S.
Forty states saw rises in parents citing religious or other personal concerns for not vaccinating their young children.
Forty states saw rises in parents citing religious or other personal concerns for not vaccinating their young children.
The number of kids whose caregivers are opting them out of routine childhood vaccines has reached an all-time high, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Thursday, potentially leaving hundreds of thousands of children unprotected against preventable diseases like measles and whooping cough.
The report did not dive into the reasons for the increase, but experts said the findings clearly reflect Americans' growing unease about medicine in general.
"There is a rising distrust in the health care system," said Dr. Amna Husain, a pediatrician in private practice in North Carolina, as well as a spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics. Vaccine exemptions "have unfortunately trended upward with it."
Nature is wrong.
A species CAN regress.
Kinda odd to think technology, the thing meant to propel us further, has a lot of uses to hold some people (a lot) back
The idea that evolution is always progress is incorrect.
It's more like a random walk where adaptable changes are more likely to continue and maladaptive changes are more likely to die out.
But we live in a society where we artificially keep maladaptive humans alive to reproduce, and even tend to have them reproduce at a higher rate than the members of society that are most adaptable.
In theory this could be an issue if we were going to depend on adaptive changes to human biological and environmental developments for continued success.
In reality, it's not going to matter as within a generation we're going to have effectively infinitely scalable AI which is more adaptable than the average human and will offset the growth in maladaptive humans relative to adaptable.
Which will still not matter, as within a century the various debts we as a species are taking on will likely have inescapable consequences that doom us all, at best our cultural legacy living on with the continuation of AI that is adaptable to the environmental hellscape we leave behind.
Non-random survival of randomly varying replicators, according to Richard Dawkins.
People misunderstanding evolution constantly always confused the shit out of me lmfao.
Of course species regress. It's how extinctions happen lmfao. Also 95% of evolution is what women of the species think looks good enough to bang. Sometimes that means you mean drown when it rains lmfao. Looking at all of you snub nosed monkeys and traumatic enseminators.
I think it is just evolution in action with kids unfortunately paying the price. There are many parental Darwin awards being readied.
Social regression is necessary for genetic evolution. Some of us will not make it to find out.
They warned about these people back in the 1930s and we didn't listen.
Religious exemptions need to be banned outright throughout the United States.
Actively withholding your child from receiving vaccines should be grounds for losing custody.
The first amendment protects them here. However, it does not automatically grant them access to government services such as school and welfare. Our focus shouldn't be so narrow that we forget to protect the people who children are incapable of being vaccinated. So denying these people access to school or government facilities is always an option we should look into.
The first amendment protects them here.
That depends on the court, and on how broadly the relevant rule is written. It's a hell of a claim to say that my religion must exempt me from laws that apply to others, and that's exactly the sort of claim being advanced when we say that our religion requires us to not do [things that our religion says nothing about].
A relevant precedent, in Jacobson v. Massachusetts, reached in 1905 regarding the constitutionality of compulsory vaccination law, held that individual liberty is not absolute and that the public interest can justify narrowly subjecting it to the authority of the state. (note that this ruling was narrowly about public health authority and its enforceability, and the stakes of the dispute were that if Jacobson didn't want to be vaccinated, he would be made to pay a fine and nowhere was child custody ever questioned)
The Court held that "in every well ordered society charged with the duty of conserving the safety of its members the rights of the individual in respect of his liberty may at times, under the pressure of great dangers, be subjected to such restraint, to be enforced by reasonable regulations, as the safety of the general public may demand" and that "[r]eal liberty for all could not exist under the operation of a principle which recognizes the right of each individual person to use his own [liberty], whether in respect of his person or his property, regardless of the injury that may be done to others."
Personally I agree there shouldn't be religious exemptions on vaccines, that the only cases that justify non-vaccinated kids attending schools would be medical justifications, not religious ones. Allowing non-medical people to carve unscientific loopholes in best public health praxis because they feel like Jesus or Cthulu (neither of whom said to not get vaccines) wouldn't want that basically means, if you extend that reasoning to its logical end, that when I say I have a religion and I tell you it means that law cannot apply to me or else it violates 1A, that no law can be consistently made to apply to anyone. ...and when it can't be made to apply to everyone equally, expect it to be applied, forcefully, to people of the wrong faith, or of the wrong race, or of the wrong caste.
A lot of these anti-vaxxers would be fine with not educating their kids.
OTOH, a bunch of them would just want to educate them at some sort of vaccine-free school or something, which they would presume would get government money. As long as they don't get money....
Vaccine exemptions should not exist at all unless a physician (MD or DO, not a naturopath or chiropractor) cites a reason why the vaccine should not be administered.
There are many unscrupulous MD/DOs that will happily compromise their morals for a quick buck. In my opinion they should lose their license, but it usually takes a while and they can do a lot of damage before then.
You can't keep the determined from self harm. All you can do is hope a few roadblocks will deter the half-hearted.
You missed a few letters there
Shit, you're right. Edited.
What are we to do when a parent brings in a paper covered with Bible verses?
The sad reality is you can get away with saying whatever stupid bullshit you want as long as you add “because God says so” at the end of the sentence. It’s the ultimate thought terminating cliche.
Wait shamans are calling themselves physicians now?
Another pandemic, let's goooo!
nooooOOOOOO
It can't possibly have any relationship to morons like Florida's Surgeon General citing bogus claims and vaccine efficacy denialism could it?
Those bogus claims weren't stupid, they were malicious.
However you classify them, they are deadly to many people.
There is a rising distrust in the health care system
I blame all the bullshit fees and tests that hospitals, pharmacy companies, and medical insurance companies have joined forces to do to milk more money out of ppl. Ever since the health care system started to chase profits instead of caring for people, this distrust was bound to happen.
People know that the health care system is trying to make money off of you, not take care of you. So they don't know which medical advice to trust and which medical advice was given in order to make money.
This.
It is easy, and justified to blame Trump for being anti-vax to have gotten as mainstream as it has…
… but that was only able to gain traction in the first place because people are being offered the choice between healing and going broke.
At some level, conscious or not, this is the masses rebelling against a system that has actively harmed them.
Unfortunately, the outlet for this rebellion actively harms them and is decidedly not in their best interests. It’s going to take at least a generation to rebuild that trust, and our medical system is going to fight tooth and nail to keep that trust ruined in the name of maximum profits,
That's the only way I can sympathize with anyone who decides not to vax their children. I still do but I can understand the reason not to for this reason. I personally don't think it's gotten as far as to be detrimental to my health to still trust the vaxxines but I can see it becoming like that one day. It's amazing how evil and complicit people will become in the face of making more money.
This study won't answer the question of if this applies to other countries, but I expect it would. Covid sure brought a lot of anti vax people into the limelight. Yet none of the issues you mentioned are a problem in my country. That's all free (except for the hospital parking).
I do distrust them to properly submit claims to my insurer. Otherwise I don't have a lot of issues with providers. They may be prone to order "unnecessary" tests but I genuinely think that comes from a desire to actually help people [without regard for their finances].
Big pharma can absolutely choke on its own shit however.
I hate these articles that give no contextual numbers. What was the exemption rate before? The article doesn’t bother to tell us.
I remember how I felt about antivaxxers a decade ago. Drove me crazy, people making bad sweeping decisions based on gut feeling and fear instead of trying to understand the medicine and how it benefited them. I often tried pretty hard to convince the ones I knew personally to reconsider.
Nowadays I just try not to get yelled at for my opinions while I watch things fall apart.
I feel bad for the immunocompromised and the children who can’t make their own choices. I don’t feel bad for the nutbag parents who will see their children suffer with preventable diseases. I’ll even likely chuckle when I hear of a death.
This is a self correcting problem....the stupidest will fall to give their offspring the chance procreate.
I wish it were that simple.
With fewer people vaccinated, herd immunity is weakened. As I understand it, this means even vaccinated children will come into contact more frequently with infected people, thereby increasing the chance that even vaccinated people get sick.
Not only that, but more disease spreading means more chance that the disease could mutate and render our current vaccines ineffective.
Imagine if a vaccine resistant polio or measles started spreading. Sure, you're vaccinated against the diseases, but the virus just laughs as it sidesteps your protections and infects you anyway. People refusing vaccines* endanger all of us.
* The exception to this rule are people who refuse for legitimate medical reasons. For example, if they are allergic to the vaccine components or have immune system issues. They should be able to legitimately refuse and the rest of us would protect them with our immunity.
Herd immunity doesn't exist until a high enough percentage of the population is inoculated, so if you can't realistically hit that threshold it's worthless to the community to try and get as many people as you can.
Also, herd immunity only works when the vaccine prevents you from transmitting the disease to others in the first place.
I know this article is about vaccination in general, but many people are going to view it especially in the context of the covid pandemic—so it's important to note out that the covid vaccine does not satisfy either of the above requirements. Whatever the value may be of achieving herd immunity in any other case, it unequivocally does not apply to covid. I'm not implying that you were saying it did, btw, just advising people—especially the vehement, single-minded detractors and defenders both—not to treat vaccines as if they're all the same.
And they'll take a lot of vulnerable people with them in the process.
Religious extremist (to the point of not accept vaccines at least) potentially extinguishing is so Darwinistic...
If only they didn't spread diseases to others, that would be true, but they are also going to kill a lot of innocent people this way.
This. If it doesn't spread then it can't mutate. Vaccines for things like smallpox are highly effective but they're not 100% and as the disease mutates the effectiveness goes down.
To be fair my child's daycare asked for papers from the doctor every time they went, often enough it was forgotten, and you could just sign saying the child's exempt to not have to deal with the papers.
There is a rising distrust in the health care system
Given the situation that would be expected
93% according to the article.