I'm just going to make this the new vaccination thread

it looks like California is trying to close the religious exemption loophole.

Bill removing California vaccine exemptions approved by key Senate panel
PATRICK MCGREEVY

Spoiler

Calif. bill forcing most parents to vaccinate children clears first hurdle

The measure by Democratic Sens. Richard Pan of Sacramento and Ben Allen of Santa Monica would eliminate the option of parents to exempt their children from vaccinations based on a “personal belief,” meaning the only waiver available would be for medical reasons.

“While this bill won’t reach everyone, it will increase everyone’s safety against preventable diseases," Allen told the committee Wednesday. "We think we've struck a fair balance here that provides more options to parents who are concerned about not vaccinating their children."

Sen. Connie Leyva (D-Chino) voted against the bill, which was approved by a vote of 7-2. "I just still have a concern it will not go far enough to help a two-income family who can't home-school their child or a single, working parent."

More than a hundred opponents of the bill, many wearing red shirts, packed the committee hearing Wednesday and many said afterward they would continue their opposition as the bill heads to Judiciary Committee.

“I am shocked and disappointed,” said Tina Kimmel, an opponent who said she is a former research scientist with the Department of Public Health.

More than 13,500 California kindergarten students have waivers due to their parents' personal beliefs, including 2,764 based on religious beliefs, state health statistics show.

The measure was introduced partly in response to a measles outbreak that began at Disneyland and eventually infected 131 California residents as well as at least 26 people in seven other states, Canada and Mexico.

However, many parents and their children testified against the measure last week, saying they didn't believe vaccines were safe and worried that the bill would deprive young people of the right to an education. Committee members including Chairwoman Carol Liu (D-La Cañada-Flintridge) had voiced similar concerns last week.

Since then, Pan and Allen changed their bill to broaden an exemption for home-schooled children by deleting reference to students having to be members of the same household or family. That would allow multiple families to join in home-schooling their children and also receive the vaccination exemption.

Another change would add an exemption for students enrolled in an independent study program run by a public school system.

Pan did not agree to an amendment proposed by some committee members that would have still allowed exemptions from vaccines on religious grounds.

“Religious exemptions are vulnerable to abuse and indeed are abused by people whose reasons for not vaccinating are not religious,” said Shannan Martinez, a spokeswoman for Pan.

Liu voted for the measure even though she said it "has a long way to go" to fully address her concerns. Among the two Republican members of the committee, Sen. Sharon Runner of Lancaster opposed the bill and Sen Andy Vidak of Hanford voted for the measure.

At a press conference Tuesday with polio victims, Pan said he believed the amendments, to be approved next week, address the major concerns of members of the Education Committee on the issue of home-schooling.

“Let’s not forget there are children who cannot be immunized. These children deserve protection. They need to be safe," Pan said

 

I thought this was a good story
Learning the Hard Way: My Journey from #AntiVaxx to Science
APRIL 8, 2015

Spoiler

The Hills Family in healthier days.

Written by Tara Hills

I’m writing this from quarantine, the irony of which isn’t lost on me. Emotionally I’m a bit raw. Mentally a bit taxed. Physically I’m fine. All seven of my unvaccinated children have whooping cough, and the kicker is that they may have given it to my five month old niece, too young to be fully vaccinated.

We’d had a games night at our house in March, my brother-in-law had a full-blown cold, so when the kids started with a dry cough a few days later I didn’t think much of it. But a week after the symptoms started the kids weren’t improving, in fact they were getting worse. And the cough. No one had a runny nose or sneezing but they all had the same unproductive cough. Between coughing fits they were fine.

Then a few days later at midnight I snapped. My youngest three children were coughing so hard they would gag or vomit. I’d never seen anything like this before. Watching our youngest struggle with this choking cough, bringing up clear, stringy mucus – I had heard of this before somewhere. My mom said I had it when I was a kid. I snapped into ‘something is WRONG’ mode.

I jumped on Google to type in “child cough.” My kids had all but one symptom of pertussis, none of them had the characteristic “whoop.” But they had everything else.

We had vaccinated our first three children on an alternative schedule and our youngest four weren’t vaccinated at all. We stopped because we were scared and didn’t know who to trust. Was the medical community just paid off puppets of a Big Pharma-Government-Media conspiracy? Were these vaccines even necessary in this day and age? Were we unwittingly doing greater harm than help to our beloved children? So much smoke must mean a fire so we defaulted to the ‘do nothing and hope nothing bad happens’ position.

For years relatives tried to persuade us to reconsider through emails and links, but this only irritated us and made us defensive. Secretly, I hoped I would find the proof I needed to hold the course, but deep down I was resigned to only find endless conflicting arguments that never resolved anything. No matter if we vaccinated or not, I thought, it would be nothing more than a coin toss with horrible risks either way.

When the Disneyland measles outbreakhappened my husband and I agreed to take a new look and weigh the evidence on both sides. A friend suggested I write out my questions so we could tackle them one by one. Just getting it out on paper helped so much. I only ended up with a handful of questions. But more potent than my questions were my biases.

I just didn’t trust civic government, the medical community, the pharmaceutical industry, and people in general. By default, I had excluded all research available from any major, reputable organization. Could all the in-house, independent, peer-reviewed clinical trials, research papers and studies across the globe ALL be flawed, corrupt and untrustworthy?

The final shift came when I connected the dots between a small, but real measles outbreak in my personal circles this time last year. But for the grace of God, our family was one step from contracting measles in our mostly under-or-unvaccinated 7 kids. Maybe we could have weathered that storm unscathed in personal quarantine. But in the 4 highly contagious days before any symptoms show we easily could have passed on our infection to my sister’s toddlers or her 34-week-old son in the NICU.

When I connected the dates for everyone involved it chilled me to the bone. I looked again at the science and evidence for community immunity and found myself gripped with a very real sense of personal and social responsibility before God and man. The time had come to make a more fully informed decision than we did 6 years ago. I sat down with our family doctor and we put together a catch-up vaccination schedule for our children.

That schedule that was supposed to start the week after I found myself in the waiting room of the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO) with my 10-month-old son, waiting to confirm if he had whooping cough.

I said before that the irony isn’t lost on me that I’m writing this from quarantine. For six years we were frozen in fear from vaccines, and now we are frozen because of the disease. My oldest two are getting better, the youngest four are getting worse and fast. Ottawa Public Health has been so helpful and communicative, trying to get us the help we need while keeping the community safe. We are under quarantine and starting antibiotics. Tonight, the baby started ‘whooping’. I did the right thing going to the hospital when I did. I can only hope this painfully honest sharing will help others.

I am not looking forward to any gloating or shame as this ‘defection’ from the antivaxx camp goes public, but, this isn’t a popularity contest. Right now my family is living the consequences of misinformation and fear. I understand that families in our community may be mad at us for putting their kids at risk. I want them to know that we tried our best to protect our kids when we were afraid of vaccination and we are doing our best now, for everyone’s sake, by getting them up to date. We can’t take it back … but we can learn from this and help others the same way we have been helped.

Vaccination is a serious decision about our personal and public health that can’t be made out of fear, capitulation or following any crowd. No one was more surprised than us to find solid answers that actually laid our fears to rest. I am confident that anyone with questions can find answers. I would only advise them to check your biases, sources and calendar: Time waits for no parent.

 

What if trusting Jenny McCarthy over thousands of scientists was their best?

 

Rubella Eliminated from the Americas, Thanks to MMR Vaccine

Spoiler

First we wiped out smallpox in North and South America. Then we rid the Americas of polio. Now, for the third time, the Americas are the first region in the world to eliminate yet another disease through vaccines: rubella.

After 15 years of a widespread vaccination campaign with the MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine, the Pan American Health Organization and the World Health Organization announced yesterdaythat rubella no longer circulates in the Americas. The only way a person could catch it is if they are visiting another country or if it is imported into a North, Central or South American country.

After the return of measles due to pockets of vaccine refusals throughout the U.S., it’s about time we heard some good news about vaccines and their ability to eliminate a previous threat to children’s lives. And in the wake of yet another study showing no link between the MMR and autism spectrum disorders, there’s a certain irony to the fact that the only clearly established cause of autism – congenital rubella syndrome – is actually prevented by the MMR vaccine.

Rubella, also known as German measles, was previously among a pregnant woman’s greatest fears. Although it’s generally a mild disease in children and young adults, the virus wreaks the most damage when a pregnant woman catches it because the virus can cross the placenta to the fetus, increasing the risk for congenital rubella syndrome.

Congenital rubella syndrome can cause miscarriage or stillbirth, but even the infants who survive are likely to have birth defects, heart problems, blindness, deafness, brain damage, bone and growth problems, intellectual disability or damage to the liver and spleen.

The only way to prevent congenital rubella syndrome is for a pregnant woman to have immunity to the disease. The only way to develop that immunity – unless she has had rubella herself – is with the MMR vaccine, developed by Dr. Maurice Hillman in 1969, just a few years after the last major rubella outbreak in the U.S.

The 1964-65 epidemic resulted in 11,000 miscarriages and stillbirths and 20,000 births with congenital rubella syndrome. Outside the U.S., as recently as 1997, more than 158,000 rubella cases were reported in Latin America and the Caribbean. An estimated 16,000 to 20,000 newborns were born with congenital rubella syndrome every year in those countries before widespread vaccination.

To achieve elimination, there must be no evidence of endemic transmission – an infected person in the country passing it on to another person – for at least three years. When the Expert Committee for Measles and Rubella Elimination in the Americas met last week, they concluded that no cases had occurred for five consecutive years. The last endemic case occurred in Argentina in 2009. The investigation required review of 165 million records and 1.3 million checks in communities, reported The New York Times.

While definitely a success, this milestone does not mean rubella is never a threat to babies born in the Americas. Across the world, 120,000 children continue to be born with severe birth defects from the disease, including 43 cases of congenital rubella syndrome from among Japan’s 15,000 cases of rubella in 2013. If a case is imported into an area of the U.S. with low immunization coverage, it could spark another outbreak here.

 

What about chemicals designed to kill herb.burdette? He's an herb, but he can also be a pest.