
Parents at centre of measles outbreak didn't vaccinate children - stygiansonic
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/father-vancouver-measles-outbreak-1.5022891
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masonic
Vietnam has largely refused to acknowledge their measles epidemic for over 5
years, and even official vaccination recommendations are weak (1 dose).

[https://www.rfa.org/english/news/vietnam/measles-04232014175...](https://www.rfa.org/english/news/vietnam/measles-04232014175218.html)

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HarryHirsch
To use the verbiage from the article: there's a mountain of scientific
evidence linking measles and increased mortality in infants, the very elderly
and the immunocompromised, such as people undergoing chemotherapy, people with
an organ transplant or people with AIDS. Why not argue like this when the
topic of vaccination comes up?

Same with rubella. Who cares if some stupid parents' kid comes down with
rubella? The problem is that the pregnant woman nearby whose vaccination
didn't take might get it and deliver a child with severe neurological
impairments!

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rscho
For that argument to work, people need to change their focus from individual
to social welfare.

The current political direction in pretty much all first world countries
pushes in the exact opposite way. Hence the return of preventable disease.

That's the real question. Should we allow people a choice or establish
dictatorship in important social issues? And who will decide what's worthy of
consideration?

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komali2
If the community decides a community law together, is that dictatorship? I
feel like no.

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hndamien
Should the community have the right to decide what is put into my body? I'm
pro-vaccination, but this line of reason leads to some pretty disturbing
places.

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komali2
Yes, absolutely. It should be allowed to determine what vaccinations are
required to be a member of that community. Maybe one day you can get a vaccine
without an injection, would that be less disturbing?

It only disturbs me if you aren't allowed to leave if you disagree.

Vaccines are good for humanity. Handwringing around body rights or religion or
something don't make any impression at all on me.

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hndamien
Being allowed to leave makes a big difference. However, not voluntarily
choosing to be part of that community also makes a difference. Also, most
vaccinations occur at the behest of the guardian and not the individual (which
is entirely appropriate). For example, say you (and your guardian) were born
into a community (a religious state for example) that believed circumcision
was required to be a citizen due to its effectiveness warding off disease. You
believe it is ok for the state actor to force everybody to be circumcised so
long as when the time comes, there is an option to leave the country?

The only way I see this as being reasonable is if there is a country that they
can go to, and there is no cost incurred the process.

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komali2
Your example is false equivalence - circumcision is harmful, vaccines are not.

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hndamien
It isn’t a false equivalence since they both violate body rights. You cannot
say that all vaccines are not harmful because you cannot speak for future
injections. Many people actually believe circumcision isn’t harmful, and the
belief is what matters.

The WHO actually has a page specifically for dealing with adverse effects of
vaccinations. [http://vaccine-safety-training.org/immunization-error-
relate...](http://vaccine-safety-training.org/immunization-error-related-
reaction.html)

Then you have cases like Thalidomide that were medical tragedies, although not
vaccine related, we conducted with the best of medical intention.

The question is not are vaccines statistically beneficial (they are).

It is not, does medicine have a 100% hit rate at not causing adverse effects
(it doesn’t and that is ok).

The question is, are you violating somebodies body rights by forcing them to
undergo a potentially harmful procedure without their consent. Yes, you would
be. This is why we don’t force this today.

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komali2
I never argued for it to be forced - I argued that it would be necessary for
inclusion in a community.

~~~
hndamien
You defended "Should we allow people a choice or establish dictatorship in
important social issues?" with the caveat "if a community decides" its not a
dictatorship. That is implying, the community gets to decide violation of
somebody's body rights else they must leave the community (regardless of
whether or not they chose to be part of it, and if there was any cost to
leaving.)

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lolc
The success story of vaccination means that people don't know the symptoms of
these crippling diseases anymore. Even the hospital had trouble identifying
the disease. Parents worry about vaccination shots because they don't know
what it means to lose relatives to those diseases. The good news in this case
was that the interviewed parent acknowledged his ignorance. He didn't try to
spin it as if the children benefitted from his mistake.

We live very sheltered lifes but we can't know it. Tracking all that is being
done to protect us is now beyond individual understanding. We have to trust
the experts. And some people end up trusting sham experts.

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julianlam
> "We worried 10-12 years ago because there was a lot of debate around the MMR
> vaccine," said Bilodeau. "Doctors were coming out with research connecting
> the MMR vaccine with autism. So we were a little concerned."

No, there were no doctors (neither singular nor plural) coming out with
research connecting the MMR vaccine with autism. Just one very misinformed
celebrity.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
Well there was, Andrew Wakefield with his fraudulent study, until he was
struck off in the UK. So he moved to the US to carry on the lies.

~~~
emmanuel_1234
And some more in the French speaking side of the internet, which they
apparently belong to.

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RubberSoul
This story reminds me of this recent NPR interview with an anthropologist on
vaccine hesitancy [0]. The upshot of the research is that "skepticism of
vaccines [is] 'socially cultivated.'" Many of the people refusing vaccines are
intelligent and well-educated, but they end up trusting bad information for a
variety of reasons.

Hopefully this parent and others in his community are now receiving better
information. It's not mentioned below, but when I heard this interview it was
longer and made the point that vaccine hesitant parents need to be approached
with respect; the more confrontational the approach, the more defensive people
with anti-vaccine views will become.

[0]: [https://www.npr.org/sections/health-
shots/2019/02/13/6944497...](https://www.npr.org/sections/health-
shots/2019/02/13/694449743/medical-anthropologist-explores-vaccine-hesitancy)

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darpa_escapee
Charge them with inciting an entirely preventable epidemic.

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simonblack
Anti-vaxxers could be accurately considered to be retrospective Darwin Awards
contestants.

Doing their best to remove those genes that they have already contributed to
the human gene pool.

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mattnewport
Presumably if there was an "outbreak" they weren't the only parents not to
vaccinate their children. The article doesn't really elaborate on that.

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masonic
The kids caught measles in Vietnam. They were the importing vector.

~~~
mattnewport
But an outbreak implies other children caught measles (the article suggests
other children at their school) so they also weren't vaccinated presumably.

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aiyodev
No. The vaccine is only 97% effective. If you’re vaccinated you can still
contract the disease.

~~~
mattnewport
That would still prevent an "outbreak" if all the other kids were vaccinated.

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buchanan
Measles has a "90% secondary infection rate in susceptible domestic contacts".
So, its likely that his brothers were infected as well. That leaves five
others.

With the mentioned "97% vaccination success rate under ideal conditions", the
fact that they were mixing around in school (and those they infected as well),
it does not seem a stretch.

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dmurray
The HN title for this is one of those headlines that makes no sense: the
opposite would be more of a news story.

The full headline, at least for me, is "Father at centre of measles outbreak
didn't vaccinate children due to autism fears".

