
How to Get Vaccinated Without Parental Consent - sahin-boydas
https://www.wikihow.com/Get-Vaccinated-Without-Parental-Consent
======
scoutt
> Schedule the date for a Friday...

I always try to schedule my (and family and pets') operations or procedures on
the first business days of the week: if something goes wrong I want the
availability of every specialist around, and not having to wait until Monday
in some hospital bed because the needed doctor/laboratory/operator doesn't
work on weekends (at least in Italy, if you are not in life-threatening
conditions, they make you wait).

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exabrial
I can't believe this is even a thing. How did we get here? Is it lack of
compassionate care? Lack of statistical and biology education?

~~~
sansnomme
I will just link to my previous comment:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21799204](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21799204)

The barrier of entry to biology is artificially high due to all sorts of
reasons, mostly regulatory. Biohacking is often frowned upon on the federal
level and the equipment is expensive. Even with stuff like OpenTrons, we are
talking about several magnitudes higher costs than e.g. Arduino and a
breadboard kit. What exists of open biology is often tied up with drug
culture, both the legal and illegal variety. The latter needs no explanation
and the former is stuff like Four Thieves Vinegar that tries to break the FDA-
endorsed establishment. It is an embarrassment to the field that what exists
of amateur biology mostly stands in the shadow of illegitimacy.

The pioneer of Crispr application in humans has just been thrown into jail and
vilified in the press. Most of the scientific community, while not publicly
praising, are silently in agreement with the decision. The few condemnations
comes from bioengineers, your classic biologists are more than happy to play
the "wait and see" game. Nobody is willing to actually engage with society at
large with regards to the issue. There is no Space X, there is no Google in
biology. Your established pharmaceutical companies are more than happy to play
gatekeeper and rent-seek instead of shattering regulatory capture. They are
not interested in pushing back the state, they would rather play the revolving
door game. How many "prominent" biologists have you heard of whom built a
single company that achieved unicorn status? Look at the biology
"entrepreneurs". Classic academia-private partnerships. There is no fresh
blood, no vision, no Tesla. More public relations effort is being put into
"immortality tech" companies like Ambrosia and Calico than existing state of
the art technologies. Apparently it is more "publicly acceptable" to inject
young people's blood into your veins to live longer than to perform an
experimental procedure on infants to potentially cure HIV.

Your average university graduate with a degree in the sciences can finish
their biology component through memorization. This is the way the current
system is structured and it is not likely to change soon. The talent in
biology that does not go to medical school is being lost to software
engineering. It is easier to make money in ad-tech than trying to cure cancer.
Why bother working in the field when "shipping" can take decades because of
red tape and experiments on non-human mamallian animals are tightly-regulated
till almost the point of uselessness? Agriculture gets more leeway with
animals on an unimaginably large scale and magnitude than your average
university lab. Lab-on-chips and organoids are great for press releases and
glossy magazine covers, but they are far from production-quality. Even lab-
grown meat is not production-quality yet. The mush you get isn't even worth
putting into meatballs, forget lab-grown filet mignons. The current tech is
essentially the same old rehash on plant protein, bean curd/tofu has been used
to make vegetarian meat substitutes in places like Asia for centuries.
Impossible food made it "hip". To translate it into HN-speak: Impossible Foods
to vegetarian meat is what Docker is to BSD jails. The tech community is able
to reason through the costs and benefits of backdoors in encryption, but when
it comes to animal rights there is nothing but emotional-fueled hysteria about
perceived abuse and mistreatment. The next time a family member suffers in
hospital from an incurable disease, just remember the donation you made to the
local animal rights campaign helped hinder biological research and development
by decades. Let's hope the animals' "thoughts and prayers" are with you. After
all, they certainly are conscious enough to benefit from legal protections and
funding.

You lament about the state of public biological understanding? Talk to the
powers that be. How many people believe in free energy and try to put it into
practice? Perpetual motion machines are easily debunked. You don't see rampant
exploitation of the ignorant and vulnerable by free energy believers on the
same scale as the anti-vaccination movement. The same can't be said for
biology. How many craft beer brewers actually understand what goes on inside?
The next time you go to your local bar, ask around. That will give a pretty
clear idea of what is the current level of biology education.

Edit: why the downvotes? If biology makes you uncomfortable, then take time to
learn it. After all, isn't this the infamous HN response to a lot of problems?
"Learn to code"?

~~~
Konnstann
The "pioneer of Crispr" got 3 years for endangering human lives, which is
pretty much a slap on the wrist. I would've done more, and I'm one of those
"bioengineers" you talk about. Unsanctioned human experimentation isn't
something we should applaud.

As for animal experiments, they are not nearly as difficult to get going as
people think, SOPs for mice take a month on average to get approved in my
experience. The vast majority of my dislike towards animal testing lies in the
realm of cosmetics, not animals, and I'm sure most people would agree. Even
so, the trend in research now is to move away from traditional animal models
to organ-on-chips, simulations, and other human substitute models.

Finally, Biology is SLOW. You haven't seen a "unicorn" because an MVP for a
biotech company in therapeutics is 10 years away from when it starts needing
funding, in a lot of cases. There are very few options for series A-B funds to
fill the gap between seed and revenue stages for biotech startups, which is
why licensing and partnerships between researchers and industry are the
predominant options seen today, alongside the traditional NIH/DARPA/NSF funds.

Maybe I'm biased because of my location (huge Biotech hub) and affiliations,
but anytime I read complaints about biotech and medicine from software devs it
reads like ignorance from people who are used to "moving fast and breaking
things".

~~~
sansnomme
And there it is. The first assumption is that my background is in CS and not
biology, that I do not understand the nature of your deeply mysterious arts.
You yourself hang out on HN, I hope the irony isn't lost. This whole attitude
is exactly why there is no decent seed funding for biology. Too conservative,
too risk-adverse. The ivory tower knows best. The obsession with "better to
die from cancer than from an untested treatment". It took decades for Right to
Try to become reality and still there is tremendous opposition. Let's leave
the orphan drug rent-seeking to private equity funds. Individual researchers
should "know their place" and thrive only in the generosity and largesse of
pharmaceutical giants. It is no wonder people are losing faith in the
biological sciences. When computing is bringing breakthrough after
breakthroughs, what has biology given us? Some new materials? Marginally
improved treatments? How many magnitude level improvements have you seen?
Where is my iPhone? Where are my VR goggles? Most if not all improvements are
slow incremental gains built on the blood, sweat, and tears of poorly-paid
phds who will be lucky to get paid 6 figures after graduation. It is easy to
"look back on the decade" and pat yourself on the back, celebrating the oh-so-
vast gains. The gains in biology hardly holds a candle to how much computing
has advanced. The field of electronics has gotten cheaper than ever. Yet in
biology, just how many people do you think have access to say, cryogenic
electron microscopy? This isn't on Stanford light source level of difficulty,
but there has been no effort at all to democratise the technology. Your ML
researchers have access to ASICs for computing mere months after they get
designed, both actual hardware and in the cloud. Tons of funding and
development being put into improving developer user experience. Can you say
the same for biology? The amount of "data processing" for a cryo microscope is
trivial by modern cloud standards. Where are the Raspberry Pis, the Arduinos,
of biology? Where are the cheap microscopy equipment clones? Because there is
no market. There is no demand for biology.

~~~
Konnstann
Looking at computing vs biology as two fields is disingenuous, given that
computing hasn't been around long enough to stagnate, although looking at ML
research it is slowing down significantly. Computing is slowing down
advancement as well, with silicon-based systems reaching their limit.

What has biotech given us? Cheap portable HIV testing for developing
countries, non-invasive targeted treatment of various cancers, (Magnitude
level). If you don't see gains in the bioengineering space you aren't looking
hard enough, and you also aren't taking into account the FDA scrutinizing new
technologies and treatments before they are released into the wild.

The assumption is you don't have a bio background because you have no idea why
progress is slow. I'm wondering what kind of bio background you do have where
time isn't an issue. Sure I can spin up a bunch of GPUs on demand to train my
image classifier, but what I'm training it on is months of experiments run
non-stop, and that's with a relatively quick animal model.

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roca
"You're allowed to tell lies to protect your health and safety" is a
surprisingly dogmatic moral statement in what is otherwise fairly cautious
advice for general consumption.

As a Christian I don't think that's always true, and as an atheist I would
have rejected it too. Do the majority of people actually think it's always
true?

~~~
wishinghand
> You're allowed to tell lies to protect your health and safety

That's like a basic survival instinct. It transcends morality. I'd tell people
that Jesus really was the son of a god if it meant living to see another day.
I'd tell people other lies in order to guarantee I receive life saving drugs.

~~~
Smithalicious
If you say that survival instincts transcend morality you're also saying that
self-sacrifice is never a moral requirement, which at the very least is a
controversial statement, not a given.

~~~
onelivesleft
The suggestion that self-sacrifice is ever a moral requirement is a pretty
controversial statement. Self-sacrifice for a moral reason is almost always
seen as laudable, but necessary?

I feel like the weighting of your statement is off (wrt being controversial);
not sacrificing yourself is the norm, and not immoral, while taking the option
to sacrifice yourself is noble. As opposed to "Yeah, that guy ran back into
the building to try to save the last kid from the fire. It's a shame he died,
but he was just doing what was morally required so doesn't deserve any
adulation".

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DanBC
In England (and probably the rest of the UK) you do not need a parent's
consent to get vaccinated.

If you are 16 years old or older you can consent to get[1] medical treatment,
and your parents are not involved.

You visit your GP. If you are 15 years old or younger your GP will test your
capacity to make this decision. This is called "Gillick Competency". If you
are competent to make the decision you will get the vaccinations you need.
Your GP will want to involve your parent, but will not tell them without your
permission. There are some safe-guarding duties, so your GP may, in rare
situations, have to make a referral for your safety.

[https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/consent-to-
treatment/children/](https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/consent-to-
treatment/children/)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gillick_competence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gillick_competence)

[1] It's a bit confusing for people who are 17 years old or younger. They can
consent to get treatment, but cannot decline to get life-saving treatment.
That decision will be made for them, by the courts if needed. Their views will
be taken into account.

~~~
tsukikage
Bear in mind that in the UK, the NHS implicitly creates the expectation that
easily available medical options will be restricted to the realm of the
vaguely sane and actually beneficial to health.

Menawhile we still don't let kids decide to e.g. have tattoos.

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b3lvedere
Know what to say if they do find out somehow: "I'm autistic. I can't be turned
autistic twice. But I could die of polio, and I'd really rather not."

I wonder if that would really work.

