And your argument doesn’t apply to measles, which can have terrible side effects on children. If you accept the necessity for measles vaccination, the marginal cost of MMR is essentially zero.

aimai

So we blow it off, fake the forms. The authorities know the drill and are complicit in the scheme.

fcc

A national health system could have demanded and gotten such phase-out even quicker. There is no good reason why the UK gov’t didn’t. Seems like the whole ‘patient’s rights’ movement just hasn’t reached the MD’s. “We know best, you idiots comply,” approach. That attitude probably induces a bit less trust.

Abb1 and another commenter are, I think, mistaken. I wouldn’t want to subject my child, or self, to these diseases – even annual flu risks. Whooping cough lasts for months; rubella causes birth defects. Etc. The risk of vaccines is negligible and the pain brief; the risk of getting and suffering from one of these diseases is not negligible. The risk of being the carrier that infects someone with a poor immune system is horrifying.

More than 90% of both US and UK infants are being vaccinated against the same nasties: diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, polio, Hepatitis B, and haemophilus influenza. The only big difference is that in the UK kids aren’t vaccinated against chicken pox. And that’s probably only because it isn’t routinely available on the NHS.

(Both sets of figures have state/regional breakdowns which contain some interesting features, too. Eg, Londoners would appear to be noticeably more panic-stricken about MMR than the rest of the country. Odd, that.)

So, we might wonder, if governmental policy regimes are so different, why are the outcomes so similar?

Also, I have to object to stereotyping parents who refuse vaccination as hippies (in 24 in 47). My mother is a medical doctor, specialist, atheist, not a hippie by any stretch of imagination, and one of the most rational people I know – OK? As far as I remember she refused many vaccination when I was a kid. Yes, it is ‘free riding’, but as we discussed in another thread people do things for their children that could be reasonably classified as unethical all the time and it’s often socially acceptable too. It’s just the human nature.

Because the rules are pretty general its hard to opt out of the system without a huge amount of work. Americans are paranoid but lazy, fearful of the loss of their “rights” but also unwilling to buck the crowd. Without a vocal anti-immunization movement to back them most parents simply take the easier route and give the kid the vaccine.

There has been a periodic anti-vaccine movement here due to fears of thimeserol/autism but it seems to have been snuffed out or never fully gotten off the ground—I do attribute that to the power of big pharma and the interests arrayed against it, and the ambiguity of the science as well as the atomization of the parent community/american society generally.

But all this flies out the window when it comes to the HPV vaccine—there a well organized, religiously inspired, utterly loony, grassroots movement has sprung up which uses the rhetoric of children’s rights/anti-vaccine language to prevent the incorporation of a vaccine which they see as dangerous to their moral worldview that sex should potentially be punished with death.Although their main concern is not the health effects of the vaccine in question they use that language. Although their main concern is not children’s rights they use that language. Their main concern is to prevent both boys and girls from being vaccinated against potentially fatal HPV because removing one potential harmful side effect of unprotected sexual contact removes one potential rhetorical strategy for the far right sexual moralists. In other words, if they can’t tell young girls that sex leads to death, they don’t think they can make the case for abstinence before marriage.

But that goes to another point a poster made up above—that you are probably safe if everyone else is vaccinated and you aren’t, so long as you don’t travel. That is a very, very, naieve view of the world today. Diseases travel to you and your children in the form of recent unvaccinated immigrants. You don’t have to travel to some kind of slum—its not a “class issue” in the sense that your class protects you from contact with “those” people. Au contraire, class is a vector of disease since the people we routinely hire to bus our tables in restaurants, cook the food we eat outside of the home, and bathe our children at home are generally of a lower class than ourselves. The idea that we can isolate ourselves from disease by “not travelling” or by “Not interacting with other non vaccinated classes of people” is naieve.

aimai

And of course thats even setting aside the issue of new variants of diseases evolving to sidestep the vaccinations that currently exist, although presumably with existing vaccines for analogues these are only likely to be short term problems in most cases.