Hepatitis, Diphtheria, Rubella...Each year millions of children are vaccinated in order to prevent potentially fatal illnesses like these. But should schools be able to mandate vaccines? Some parents see them as vital lifesavers, but others fear serious or perhaps even debilitating risks. How much authority should schools have in determining your child’s health?
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Should Schools Require That Children Be Vaccinated?
The Individual DOES MATTER
When my nephew received his first flu shot, his face swelled up and his throat swelled closed. It turned out he was allergic to eggs, which are used in flu vaccines. How simple it would have been to test him first and avoid a life-threatening reaction!
Until vaccines are administered with more regard for the individual, they should not be mandated. Children should be screened for allergies and predisposition to certain side effects and then given only the vaccines which will limit dangerous reactions. Until then, parents retain the right to make those decisions for their children.
- crunchymom October 20, 2008 1:21PM
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Cost Prohibitions
Let's step back and examine the economics of your proposal, however. The fact of the matter is that it would NOT have been trivial to "test him first." Allergy panels cost money and time, and when you distribute that across the entire population of a nation like the United States, that adds up to a prohibitive barrier to vaccination. You make medical decisions based not on what you do not know, but on what you do. Nobody knows that he has an allergy to anything until he has an allergic reaction. It's unfortunate that your nephew was in a minority group that had a reaction to that particular vaccination, but the fact remains that he's not dead, he was treated effectively, and the majority of other individuals will not experience that specific reaction, either because they have complete information already (you're not clear on whether your nephew already knew he was allergic to eggs and his parents failed to inform the administering professional or whether this was the first incidence of such a reaction) or because they're not in the right group.
- Brian Seiler
October 21, 2008 10:52AM
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Oh good, well as long as he's not dead...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/22/AR2005102200042.html
This is a Washington Post report on how rare complications from the flu are and how ineffective the flu vaccine is at truly curbing those risks, including how flu-related deaths in the elderly have remained steady over the last two decades even though the number of older people getting the flu vaccine each year has increased dramatically.
You are right, I left some parts out. They didn't know he had that allergy until he had that reaction. Then, when he turned 12 months old (just one month later), the doctor tried to give him the MMR, which contains eggs, and the doctor was well aware of the reactions and subsequent allergu testing that had been done. His mother asked if it had eggs in it and the doctor said he didn't even know. She made him check and sure enough, there it is.
This happened to my son, as well. He is allergic to dairy, and his doctor still tried to give him the DTaP. Ingredients and potential allergens are not included on the information sheets that the CDC gives to doctors to pass out to patients, and those sheets are generally given AFTER the vaccine is administered so parents can look out for a limited number of typical reactions.
If many legislators have their way, there will be no exceptions, even medical ones. Dr. Paul Offit, a very vocal proponent of vaccines (and a patent holder of vaccines - how convenient) and author of a vaccine guide for parents, is a pusher of this agenda. So, my son and nephew would still have to get those vaccines or else be barred from attending school.
Meanwhile, the vaccine is considered ON THE PACKAGE INSERT to be about 70% effective, if scientists happened to accurately predict which flu strains would be the most problematic in any given year. For people over 65, it is estimated at 30-40%, again if the right strains were predicted. Side effects of the vaccine include asthma and Guillain-Barre Syndrome, which is temporary paralysis.
Last year over 3,000 negative reactions to the flu vaccine (including 29 deaths) were actually reported to the government (estimates are that for every reaction reported, ten are not reported).
It's too expensive to test people for reactions before they get a vaccine when it isn't your child in the hospital.
Forcing parents to inject their children with a moderately effective vaccine every year is vile. No one should be able to force anyone else to participate in any medicaly treatment, let alone one as unpredictable and of limited benefit as the flu vaccine.
- crunchymom October 23, 2008 7:07PM
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Odd...
Flu shots are mandatory.
- SocialistBetty
January 6, 2009 1:33AM
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Ach.
Crap.
Flu shots are mandatory??????
- SocialistBetty
January 6, 2009 1:31PM
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A low amount
Deaths from Flu vaccine is roughly 1 in 10,476,712
negative reactions (with the estimated 10 unreported negative reactions 33,000) is roughly 1 in 9,200.
Negative reactions is an ambiguous term since more serious negative reactions are probably mixed in with minor reactions.
While being a parent of a child who suffers any type of negative reaction from a vaccine is surely a terrible and frightening situation. However, most people do not suffer any negative reaction. The variations the human body presents to us really does prohibit testing because the test creators would be constantly trying to catch up to the constant variation that each new person presents. In other words, a test that would have helped your child would fail to help another family's child. How would we learn that? Unfortunately, the hard way.
It's like many allergic reactions, many are learned the hard way. I have a sister and a nephew are also very allergic. But we had to learn each one (they have various allergies) one by one.
My sympathies are with you, but I would encourage you not to inflate your particular experience to mean that doctors don't care or that all vaccines are bad.
Personally, I have never taken or had my own daughter take a vaccine for the flu. The flu is a pain but it's no TB or other serious sickness that most of our vaccines treat. The other part of this though, is that neither I nor my daughters are allergic to practically anything. Funny how the genetics on this issue came out so different between my sister and I.
I posted those completely unscientific numbers above (I took your numbers and calculated them against the population of our country) to show that it is a statistical minority who suffer adverse effects. When we consider how many people died of the various diseases before we had vaccines to treat them, you will see the numbers were terribly negative.
Just consider measles, a disease that vaccines have practically eradicated here in the US, however, the World Health Organization reported that in 2007 "there were 197 000 measles deaths globally - nearly 540 deaths every day or 22 deaths every hour." This figure is a world wide estimate. The point is, a very simple and cheap vaccine can change this situation dramatically. Unfortunately, we are a long way from a vaccine that has a zero chance of negative effects.
- mangueken
March 3, 2009 10:53PM
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Deaths from INfluenza A
Each year millions of people contract Influenza A and approximately 100,000 to 200,000 people DIE from this infection, globally. They tend to be immuno-compromised, very young or old. While the prediction of RNA mutations making up the current season's flu is difficult to predict, you can be sure that the death toll would be substantially higher in a non-vaccinating environment .
- Citizen Deux
May 6, 2009 2:09PM
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