Is it time to consider compulsory vaccinations?

What we could do is extend the requirements for vaccination to many other programs. For example, we could require vaccination in order to get a driver's licences, or to get federal financial aid for college. I remember having to register for the draft in order to even apply for federal financial aid for college. I don't know if that is still the case.

The fact of the matter is that students have a much, much higher risk of being killed or mentally disabled by a car wreck on the way to school than they do by vaccinations.

Exactly.We can still have extremely low infection rates without a 100% rate of vaccination. What you need is a "buffer zone" of immune individuals around a susceptible individual.America, being the insane asylum that it is, will never see 100% vaccination, much less 100% immunity as you so succintly point out. What we need to do is limit the effect that nutjobs have on vaccination rates. As long as we keep herd immunity at critical mass, we can afford a few nutters foaming at the mouth.

There is some interesting epidemiology for certain subsets of the population. For example . . .

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The latest measles outbreak is in Texas, where the virus has sickened 25 people, most of whom are members or visitors of a church led by the daughter of televangelist Kenneth Copeland.

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Fifteen of the measles cases are centered around Eagle Mountain International Church in Newark, Texas, whose senior pastor, Terri Pearsons, has previously been critical of measles vaccinations.

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The outbreak was started by a visitor to the church who had recently traveled to a country where measles remains common, according to Tarrant County Public Health spokesman Al Roy.

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Those sickened by measles include nine children and six adults, ranging in age from 4 months old to 44 years old. At least 12 of those infected were not fully immunized against measles, Roy says. The other patients have no record of being vaccinated. The 4-month-old is too young to have been received the measles vaccine, which is typically given at 1, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Texas measles outbreak linked to church

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It may not be enough to look just at national numbers. You need to look at everything, right down to community groups. The example above is a perfect demonstration of what happens when you don't have a critical mass of immunized individuals between carriers and suscpetible individuals. It spreads, and it even spreads to people who may have been immunized in the past but are still slightly susceptible.In the US, stringent and unwieldly policies work about as well as squeezing wet soap. Just doesn't work. Sometimes the carrot approach works, but not always. What does work is peer pressure, and that is probably the best approach for vaccinations. Communities need to stick up for themselves and confront the anti-vax nutters when they are found, and where they are found.

Parents are not doctors or scientists. I am sure they love their children very much, but their medical opinions are pretty worthless.Study after study has found that vaccines are orders of magnitude safer than the diseases they protect against. If you were able to go back in time and see the damage that whooping cough did to children, I am sure that you would give a tongue lashing to parents that whine about vaccines maybe not being 100% safe. In the 1800's, parents would have sold their left foot for the vaccines we have today.

From an epidemiological standpoint, why are you focusing on just the vaccine? Why not ask if the boys room was painted recently, or if the family bought a new car just before the coma? There are so many other things that happened other than vaccinations, so why focus on that? The question I would have is why any connection was made in the first place. What spurned the idea that vaccines cause autism, and is there anything to that claim?

Your story reminds me of an episode our family had with my grandmother. She had been using Afrin nosespray on a daily basis for decades. She was hooked on the stuff. Over time, she developed a heart rhythm condition where her heart would race uncontrollably and her blood pressure would spike. We kept telling her that the nosespray was probably part of the problem, and she assured us that she had brought it up with the doctor, and the doctor said it was fine.Ends up, she lied to us. We had to go behind her back and talk to her doctor. That doctor gave her one of the best tongue lashings of all time. She got off the Afrin, and much of her heart problems went with it. That might be something you could do. Talk to their family doc and have him deliver the tongue lashing.

What these parents are ignoring is just how bad the disease is compared to the vaccine. The rate of encephalitis (i.e. an infection that affects the brain) for measles is 1 in 1,000. The rate of encephalitis caused by the vaccine is 1 in several million. We are talking at least 3 or 4 orders of magnitude difference between the risks of the disease and the risks related to the vaccine that prevents the disease. It really is a no brainer.CDC - Page Not Found The Page You Request Does Not Exist | The Encephalitis Society That is just one example. Edited by Taq, : No reason given.

Young children are the most vulnerable to these diseases which is why they are vaccinated at a young age. They have limited passive immunity from their mother's antibodies, but that type of immunity is not enough.Also, kids did die from the diseases at much higher rates than you think, especially whooping cough. The daughter of famous author Roald Dahl died of measles in the 1960's, as one famous example. If kids were being killed or maimed by these vaccines at rates anywhere near those seen for the diseases themselves, trust me, we would know it. It just isn't the case. While you may not have personally seen kids harmed by these diseases, there is plenty of evidence that many kids were harmed.The chicken pox vaccine is a bit iffy, though. The real benefit could be the reduction in the number of shingle cases later in life, and that data just isn't in yet and won't be for a long time. Encephalitis is one of the complications caused by measles. Vaccinations prevent children from getting measles in the first place, so they don't run the risk of getting encephalitis caused by measles. Just to make sure it is clear, 1 in 1,000 kids who get measles develop encephalitis. Only 1 in more than 1 million kids gets encephalitis from the vaccine. 1 in 1,000 or 1 in 1 million? Seems to me that the vaccine wins hands down.

Worth remembering . . ."Mumps viral infections in adolescent and adult males carry an up to 30% risk that the testes may become infected (orchitis or epididymitis), which can be quite painful; about half of these infections result in testicular atrophy, and in rare cases sterility can follow."
Mumps - Wikipedia

Anecdotal evidence on a website does not trump verified scientific studies with supporting statistical comparisons. That is the first thing people need to learn.What they need to do is talk to some old people who have experience with polio before the vaccine. Ask them about friends who were crippled by the disease. I think that would give them a new persepctive.The number of people killed by Ebola this year? It can't hold a candle to the number of children that were killed by whooping cough in a single year at the turn of the 20th century. And just look at how people are freaking out over Ebola, but won't vaccinate their child against a much graver risk. If I had a bunch of anecdotal stories from crackpots in one hand, and multiple peer reviewed scientific studies in another, guess which hand I would go with?The real question is why anyone ignores the massive amount of science demonstrating that overwhelming benefit of vaccines compared to their risk. That is a study in human psychology since the science behind the vaccines is already settled.

Those are my sentiments as well. Our society has often put medical decisions on a different level than required seat belts or a ban on drunken driving. Perhaps that view will change with time, and we will view vaccinations like we do shelter and food. We take children away from parents if they parents don't give them food, so could we say the same for vaccinations? Maybe.As you hint at, there is a part of us that has an irrational fear of things we don't understand. Government enforced medical procedures evoke a very basic fear in humans, IMHO. It is no wonder that this forms the basis for many sci fi horror films.

When we are talking about irrational fears, we are not talking about the facts. I completely agree that vaccines are many orders of magnitude safer than the infection itself. However, I know this because I have the education to understand how immunity works, have mingled with the scientific community, and know many people in the medical field. Not everyone has my knowledge or experience. Perhaps there is another option. Are you the survivor of a zombie apocalypse because you did not take the experimental government vaccine derived from alien DNA?

The real world results are hard to argue against. The recent measles outbreak at Disneyland is a perfect example. Here is the CDC report on the vaccination status of the people who were infected:"Among the 110 California patients, 49 (45%) were unvaccinated; five (5%) had 1 dose of measles-containing vaccine, seven (6%) had 2 doses, one (1%) had 3 doses, 47 (43%) had unknown or undocumented vaccination status, and one (1%) had immunoglobulin G seropositivity documented, which indicates prior vaccination or measles infection at an undetermined time."Let's say that California has a 98% vaccination rate for measles, which means that 2% of the population is unvaccinated. If 49 people who contracted the disease were unvaccinated, then that would mean about 2,500 people total were exposed to the virus in quantities necessary to cause disease (49 is 2% of 2,500). If we are really generous and lump in those with unknown vaccination status and the undervaccinated with the vaccinated, we are still sitting at 60 individuals out of the 2,450 who got measles. This means that the vaccine is 98% effective. That's pretty damn good, at least in my book.

Since I deal with the immune system on a regular basis, perhaps I can fill you in on a few facts.The antigens in a vaccine are the same exact antigens that your body would see during a real infection. The immune response to the vaccine is exactly like it would be to a real infection, with one main difference. In a real infection, the virus or bacteria keep multiplying and cause a much greater immediate response. However, the long term adaptive response is the same, if a bit weaker with vaccines because of the lower acute immune response. Again, the only difference is that the vaccine is not a multiplying virus or bacteria. Everything else is the same as far as your immune system is concerned.In the end, you have circulating antibodies that bind to the antigens found on viruses and bacteria, as well as memory B-cells that can pump out a lot more antibodies if the come into contact with that antigen again. Vaccines stimulate your naturally occurring immune response just like real infections do.What I think you are getting wrapped up in is the Naturalistic Fallacy, whereby anything man made or artificial has to be worse than what occurs in nature.And by the way, our knowledge of the immune system is a lot better than you think. In fact, I have produced lines of B-cells that spit out antibodies to specific antigens, sometimes as specific as a 10 amino acid section of a protein. I have also looked at the immune response to very real and ongoing infections through gene regulation and serum cytokine levels. To use your analogy, we can do a lot more than setting valve clearances. Weather is chaotic and dynamic, yet we can predict with ease that Seattle will have more rainfall than Phoenix on a per annum basis. The same for vaccines. For the vast majority of people (>95%), vaccines work and they work well. They produce a very predictable adaptive immune response that can protect people for decades, sometimes for a lifetime. We do it by letting nature take its course.Earlier you said something to the effect that vaccines are actively interfering with our immune system. That is as boneheaded as sending your kids out in sub-zero weather without a coat because it would be actively interfering with their body temperature. If anything, giving kids an aspirin to lower a fever is a much more drastic interference of their immune system than a vaccine is. Infections already cause autoimmune disease, such as Streptococcus causing rheumatic heart disease. The chances of developing an autoimmune response increases with the severity of infection meaning that the threat of an autoimmune response is lowered by getting a vaccine. On the flip side, some autoimmune diseases may have evolved to fight of real infections, such lupus being protective for malarial infections.Edited by Taq, : No reason given.Edited by Taq, : No reason given.Edited by Taq, : No reason given.Edited by Taq, : No reason given.