Measles vaccinations now compulsory in Germany

[Darat]

First, that is not the linchpin of libertarianism. Non aggression is. If a set of actions did not violate non aggression but involved a person not being responsible for their actions, it is still in line with libertarianism.


Once the child is born it is an independent entity and the initial contract is satisfied if the two humans wish to form an additional contract, they can.

But "responsible for your actions" doesn't actually lead to either of our positions. There are more assumptions made to get there.

A baby is not an independent person.

 

[Darat]

The Protection-from-Infection Act states exactly who is exempt from mandatory vaccination and the reason why: only for medical reasons. Therefore, if someone is more endangered by the vaccine than is acceptable, then they have a right to be exempt. However, religion and conscience are not acceptable reasons.

"It is a question of protecting other people"

Sounds very sensible to me.

 

[Darat]

And to get back to the topic of the the thread rather than continuing to indulge Bob's fetishism. Is there any provision in the law for those very small number of babies that will have a serious problem caused by the vaccination.

 

[Rolfe]

The tweet you quoted above implies exactly that.

Small digression. Last month I was on the big independence march and as usual quite a lot of people had brought their dogs. I was patting one mutt who looked a bit moth-eaten and his owner said he was a rescue from Spain and the moth-eaten appearance was because of an allergic reaction to the compulsory rabies vaccine. The dog had come out in a nasty urticarial rash, which was still healing up.

I said, you do know he mustn't ever have another rabies vaccination, right? And you need to talk to your vet seriously about whether he should have any more vaccinations at all. I don't know if the owner had simply not taken it on board or if somehow he hadn't been told, but it seemed to be news to him. I said, look, that hair is going to grow back and you'll never know it happened and if you take him in for another vaccine and nobody has a record of what happened, he could be given a booster that might kill him. I likened it to letting a child with a known peanut allergy have a bag of peanuts. Then I saw the penny drop.

I thought, well this is a turn-up for the books, me the hard-line "vaccinate everything" proponent, but there are cases where you really mustn't, and if an animal's records don't show an allergic reaction - as might have been the case with this one as the initial reaction would have happened before the dog came to Britain - then a tragedy could easily happen. I don't know if there are any exemptions to the Pet Passport regs for an animal that can't have a rabies vaccination or whether it's just "tough luck that dog can't travel abroad again or if he does he ain't coming back", but it's something that always has to be taken into account.

 

[dudalb]

Another thread Bobbed.

 

[BobTheCoward]

A baby is not an independent person.

Disagree.

 

[Minoosh]

A baby is not an independent person.

Babies are stupid! They will go hungry even in a room full of delicious tinned food and plenty of can openers.

 

[Minoosh]

Another thread Bobbed.

And for some reason this doesn't bother me as much as it does other posters. There's something appealing to me about pursuing arguments into absurdity:

Disagree.

Like this.

Though I like the idea that babies are entitled to a full suite of human rights, the fact is they simply can't manage on their own. If no one takes responsibility for them they die.

Maybe by age 4 or so they can stay alive eating out of dumpsters. Or garbage cans - dumpsters would be out of reach.

 

[Minoosh]

I had to get a measles shot as one of many hoops to jump through when I got my first teaching job 9 years ago. I never had measles as a kid and though I was vaccinated it turns out that what they were using at the time was ineffective. It never caught up to me until I applied for a job with a school district at age 50. I've worked at a lot of schools since then and no other employer has ever demanded it, but the schools I've worked for all wanted immunization records for kids attending. So I kind of assumed it's already quasi-mandatory.

There must have been exemptions based on religious grounds. I had a Christian Science classmate whose father - a state supreme court judge - didn't even want his kid going to health class. I can't imagine he would have had his kid vaccinated if there was any workaround.

This is a long way to say that I was mildly surprised at the thread title, because I figured it was already basically mandatory. Though I guess not enough to assure herd immunity. When we had an outbreak about a dozen years ago the index case came from Switzerland. I had to double-check that for a news article - I thought it might be Swaziland. But no, turning down effective vaccinations turns out to be a First World phenomenon.

 

[BobTheCoward]

Though I like the idea that babies are entitled to a full suite of human rights, the fact is they simply can't manage on their own. If no one takes responsibility for them they die.

So?

 

[Minoosh]

So?

So the fact that they can't physically be responsible for themselves seems like it would be a factor in any philosophical system that places an emphasis on personal responsibility and freedom of choice.

 

[Tolls]

So?

And again, why bother?
This answer right here (again assuming we're not in some long term Poe-Land) makes the philosophy behind that answer utterly worthless.

There really is little point (beyond any interest in finding out how someone ended up with such a ****** up worldview) in pursuing it...

 

[catsmate]

And to get back to the topic of the the thread rather than continuing to indulge Bob's fetishism. Is there any provision in the law for those very small number of babies that will have a serious problem caused by the vaccination.

Yes, there's an exemption for medical issues (properly certified) such as allergies, weakened immune system et cetera.
Just no exemption for hippies and god botherers.

 

[catsmate]

And for some reason this doesn't bother me as much as it does other posters. There's something appealing to me about pursuing arguments into absurdity:

With libertarians that's around one sentence.

 

[Darat]

Yes, there's an exemption for medical issues (properly certified) such as allergies, weakened immune system et cetera.

Just no exemption for hippies and god botherers.

I worded my post badly. I was wondering if the law sets out what happens when a child does have a serious medical reaction to a vaccine. We know there will be a tiny percentage of kids that will suffer adverse reactions to vaccines and if we are making it compulsory I would like to see medical professionals and drug companies made exempt from being sued because the reaction happened.

 

[BobTheCoward]

So the fact that they can't physically be responsible for themselves seems like it would be a factor in any philosophical system that places an emphasis on personal responsibility and freedom of choice.

I have the opposite take. Emphasizing freedom choice naturally lends itself to it not being a factor if the person is actually good at it. Freedom of choice is freedom to fail.

 

[dann]

I worded my post badly. I was wondering if the law sets out what happens when a child does have a serious medical reaction to a vaccine. We know there will be a tiny percentage of kids that will suffer adverse reactions to vaccines and if we are making it compulsory I would like to see medical professionals and drug companies made exempt from being sued because the reaction happened.

I've been trying to find out how often that actually happens, but so far, I've only found this study from Spain:

Results: Of a total sample of 946 children, ranging in age from 0 to 14 years (50.8% girls, 49.1% boys), 191 non-serious suspected adverse reactions were detected, representing 19% of the vaccinated children. Reactions to the diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis acellular and Haemophilus influenzae type b (DTPa + Hib) vaccine appeared in 43.4% of cases, followed by reactions to the measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) [18.4%] and adult tetanus and diphtheria (Td) [17.8%] vaccines. The most frequent types of adverse reactions to vaccines were: injection-site oedema (12.2 per 1000 doses); pain at site of inoculation (10.3 per 1000 doses); temperature not recorded but believed by parents to be very high (4.6 per 1000 doses); and measured temperature indicating fever of 39-40.5 masculineC (4.4 per 1000 doses). Fifty-five percent (n = 21) of cases of injection-site oedema were attributed to DTPa + Hib vaccine (18.8 per 1000 doses), followed by 18.4% (n = 7) attributable to Td vaccine (112 per 1000 doses). Indeed, this latter vaccine was responsible for 43.8% (n = 14; 226 per 1000 doses) of all reported pain at the site of inoculation. MMR vaccine was linked to the occurrence of fever of 39-40.5 masculineC in 52% of cases (n = 10; 29 per 1000 doses). Two children were treated by the emergency services, but there were no deaths or hospitalisations.Incidence of adverse reactions to vaccines in a paediatric population. (PubMed, 2004)

I don't have the time to read this: No-fault compensation following adverse events attributed to vaccination: a review of international programmes (WHO, 2011)


ETA: I found this from Germany:

Im Nationalen Impfplan kann jeder nachlesen, was aus den mehr als 10 600 Verdachtsfällen wurde. 1036 Patienten oder ihre Verwandten beantragten eine Anerkennung als Impfschaden. Bewilligt wurden 169. „Das heißt, dass die Hinweise auf einen Schaden durch die Impfung überwiegen, nicht, dass tatsächlich die Impfung die Ursache ist“, sagt Stöcker. Ein Blick in den Arzneimittelatlas zeigt, dass die Zahl verschwindend gering ist. Ärzte in Deutschland rechneten im gleichen Zeitraum 211,2 Millionen Impfdosen ab.
Krank nach der Impfung (Tagesspiegel, Nov. 3, 2014)

In the National Vaccination Plan, anyone can read what happened to the more than 10,600 suspected cases. 1,036 patients or their relatives requested to be recognized as having vaccine damages. 169 were recognized. "This means that the majority are references to damages from vaccinations, not that the vaccinations actually caused them", says Stöcker. A glance at the drug atlas shows that the number is negligible. Doctors in Germany calculated that 211.2 million vaccine doses had been used in the same period (2005-2009).
Sick after being vaccinated

 

[Rolfe]

No vaccinations are compulsory for the general population in Britain at the moment. I don't know about requirements for specific occupations of course. There was a time in the 19th century when smallpox vaccination was made compulsory and you can pretty much trace the origins of the antivax movement back to that.

Earlier this year I went on a cruise for which yellow fever vaccination was compulsory. They told you in no uncertain terms that you had to have a vaccination certificate or you weren't getting on the boat. In spite of that a bunch of people showed up denying all knowledge of this requirement.

I thought maybe they would just vaccinate them there and then, because we weren't getting to the places where the vaccination was needed for about a month so it would have been OK. But it was easier than that. Apparently you can get a medical exemption if you're over 65, because over 65s have a higher incidence of adverse reactions to the vaccine. Since this was a ten-week cruise in winter, pretty much everyone on it was over 65. So they just wrote them all exemption certificates.

Actually I had my vaccination on my actual 65th birthday and the nurse at the travel clinic did offer me an exemption, followed by the immortal line, "but bear in mind mosquitoes can't read." I had the vaccination and had absolutely zero side-effects.

 

[dann]

I thought, well this is a turn-up for the books, me the hard-line "vaccinate everything" proponent, but there are cases where you really mustn't, and if an animal's records don't show an allergic reaction - as might have been the case with this one as the initial reaction would have happened before the dog came to Britain - then a tragedy could easily happen.

I wouldn't consider it a tragedy if a dog dies due to a vaccination. If a dog isn't properly vaccinated, is consequently infected with rabies, bites somebody, and that person dies, now that is a tragedy in my book.

 

[dann]

I had the vaccination and had absolutely zero side-effects.

Congratulations! (Both with the birthday and the zero side-effects.)