We Need Mandatory Vaccination Now.

 Mandatory Vaccination

Courtesy of Cartoons By Kristin

Death threats, outbreaks, denial and pseudoscience

Introduction

High rates of vaccination are important for a safe, happy and healthy society. When these decisions are left up to personal choice, however, misinformation, emotions, and misled opinions abound.

Providing facts and studies is not enough anymore. Too many people distrust science and don’t possess the ability to understand it, or simply don’t believe the experts. This has lead to a drop in vaccination rates and consequently, outbreaks. I recommend mandatory vaccination as the right course of action.

Mandatory does not mean forced. There is still a choice. If the mandates suggested here are upsetting to you, the solution is easy; vaccinate your children. I’m proposing that vaccination becomes mandatory for those seeking to enrol their children into

1. Public School
2. Daycare/Kindergarten facilities
3. Doctor and hospital admission

Full immunisation should be required for every person eligible. The only exemptions should be for true medical contraindications. If you don’t want to vaccinate because of some made up excuse, too bad. If you or your child has had severe reactions to vaccines in the past, from allergies, then you would be exempt. If you or your child are going through cancer treatment or are unable to be vaccinated due to a compromised immune system, you are exempt. If you have to shop around for a religion to say you that you can’t be vaccinated, then tough, you are not exempt. If you want to expose your community to infectious, preventable diseases because you don’t understand or believe in facts and reality, then you miss out.

Worldwide compulsory vaccination is what eradicated smallpox. We can do the same for Measles, Polio, HPV, and the other “harmless” diseases that the pro-disease crowd want to bring back.

Mandatory Vaccination

Vaccines need to be made mandatory. Mandatory vaccines does not mean police breaking down your door to jab your child at 2am. Mandatory is not forced. Mandatory means there are certain conditions you have to meet to be eligible to do certain things.

My recommendations are

1. School entry
2. Kindergarten/daycare
3. Doctor and hospital admissions

These are all at risk areas that lead to outbreaks if infected people spread their infections.

1. & 2. Public School & Kindergarten Facilities

If you want your child to go to school, they should have to be fully up to date. School and preschool-aged children are at the highest risk of infection and complications from VPDs (Vaccine Preventable Diseases). School entry should be denied for those that are not fully vaccinated. No cherry-picking and shopping around, these are required vaccines for a reason.

Italy has recently implemented this measure, along with a number of other European countries. This was in response to their vaccination rate dropping to below 80%. The WHO recommended rate is 95%, for herd immunity. If the rate is held this high for a period long enough, then the disease will not be able to spread and will be eradicated. Dr. Lance O’Sullivan has also given his support for “No Jab, No School”.

Daycare facilities are full of at-risk individuals. A number of these children are too young to be fully vaccinated against certain diseases. It’s the responsibility of the parents to make sure their children are up to date, for the good of the community. But when it’s presented as a personal choice, then, of course, some of these parents will have been presented with misinformation and decided they shouldn’t vaccinate. This presents problems.

Personal choice is the wrong way to go about this. This should not be left up to opinion. Science is not a democracy. You don’t get to pick and choose what you believe, science doesn’t care. Diseases don’t care.  

Leaving these decisions up to the individual parent is not fair on everyone. It’s not the choice of the parent that their child is born with a compromised immune system, or is too young to be vaccinated, or has cancer and is susceptible to infection. The responsible thing to do is protect everyone that can be.

3. Doctor and hospital admission

Now, the one that most people seem to have the biggest problem with is the doctor and hospital admission. Those who deny vaccines do so while denying years and years of research and evidence. Now, you may be screaming at your screen by this point, something along the lines of “I’ve done my research!”, “You want research, I’ll give you research!!!!”. We’re talking about real research, published, peer-reviewed and proven research. We do not mean Googling “Vaccines is bad because (x)”. Vaccines are the most highly tested and regulated medication on the planet. If you don’t trust or accept or even believe this evidence, then why would you believe anything else the experts tell you? Why would you accept a plaster (band-aid), antibiotics or painkillers, or anything else a doctor or nurse would provide you with? If you don’t have a problem with everything else in medicine, maybe you should start questioning these feelings.

Perhaps comparing vaccines to painkillers and plasters is a false equivalence? I would agree. You aren’t going to put your neighbour’s child at risk if you don’t take paracetamol for a headache. Timmy, who’s too young to be vaccinated yet, isn’t going to be put at risk because you believe that bandaids are part of a Big Pharma plot for world domination and population control. Vaccines, on the other hand, do work this way. How many children have to die because of an adult’s conspiracy theory? If Big Pharma want to take your money, vaccines are not the best way to do it. The best way for Big Pharma to make money would be for everyone to get sick. $800,000 USD to treat an unvaccinated child for tetanus? Even after nearly losing their child to preventable illness, the parents still refuse to vaccinate. Or $30 for the vaccine that would have prevented it? If you don’t trust doctors, why take advantage of their service? Meggy Doodle, or Nurse Doodle on Facebook, said it brilliantly, here.

If you want to claim that Big Pharma is making everyone sick with vaccines, I would love to see proof of that. The proof, however, is in the pudding. Smallpox eradicated, measles under control until the vaccination rate dips too low, polio eradicated from everywhere except three countries, until the vaccination rate dips too low.

Vaccines work. This is part of the reason why people think the diseases aren’t that bad. They aren’t commonplace anymore. Polio was once part of the human experience, so was Measles and Chickenpox. They are not benign or harmless diseases. This explains and shows the results of these diseases, from an earlier blog,  here.

The other part of going to the doctor or the hospital, aside from the cherry-picking irony, is that you could be potentially putting a lot of people at risk. People who are sick visit the doctor, or go to the hospital. Some of these people may be at risk, and if you bring your child in that should have been vaccinated, you could potentially be spreading deadly diseases around, to people that had no choice in whether you vaccinated your child or not.
You're wasting the time of the doctors, nurses and everyone else if you're not going to accept medical science enough to protect those around you.

Exemptions

At the moment, parents can easily decline vaccination. The only responsibility on the school or daycare facility is to keep a register of the status of each child. If the parents feel that they don't want to vaccinate, then there are no repercussions there, other than exposing your child to potentially life-threatening diseases of course. Their child can still attend school and use the health service as the parent chooses to. The graphic to the left shows the alarming rate of unvaccinated people in each region. 84% for the West Coast is just unacceptable.

Exemption should only be for true medical contraindications. These are currently pregnancy, immunocompromised, or severe allergies to egg or gelatine. If you are allergic to certain ingredients in a vaccine, talk to your doctor, as there are usually other options. The MTHFR gene mutation has nothing to do with vaccines. Stop pretending it does.
Exemptions mean that individual is no longer protected by vaccines, and now relies on herd immunity, the responsibility of the family, friends and everyone in their community to be protected for them. Herd immunity is a proven concept. Just because one child had a reaction, or can't be vaccinated, doesn't mean the rest of your children will be the same. This individual needs everyone to be vaccinated that can be vaccinated. They should now be the loudest advocate for vaccination.

Facts and Studies Don't Work

Facts and studies don’t work. A new study, on top of the myriad of studies that showed no link between autism and vaccines, have had antivaxers crying foul. Claims such as “Paid for by Big Pharma”, or all the way to “I don’t believe it.” How do you combat that kind of ignorance and conspiracy level thinking? Well, the DHBs of New Zealand are recommending using the science and facts to sway parents. This is something people have tried to do since the beginning of vaccination. It’s not working. When you have people say that they simply don’t believe science, then facts are never going to work.

Emotions, misinformation and propaganda are the order of the day here. Facebook antivaxers like Larry Cook and Kate Tietje are whipping up the propaganda machine by pushing back against supposed “censorship” in social media lately. YouTube, Pinterest, Etsy, Amazon, and Facebook have implemented some level of control over the antivax fear machine. None of it could be classed as censorship or infraction of free speech, as these are private companies and are not the government. This is the pushback to bringing back nearly eradicated diseases, spread by misinformation campaigns on social media.

I’m not saying that social media is the cause of this, no. In fact, a recent study has found that the level of conspiracy theories has stayed roughly the same over the past 100 years or so. Social media, however, is helping to spread this misinformation. It’s allowing these people to meet others like them, adding fuel to the rubbish fire, bouncing their fringe, lunatic ideas off each other, and ultimately recruiting others through fear. Social media is also used to coordinate attacks against doctors who promote vaccination. Doctors in the past have had theirs and their families’ details posted online, called doxing, and then harassed by antivaxers, or even had death threats, and assaulted in public.

Not only doctors are targeted either. Families who have recently had children die, from various reasons are set upon by antivaxers. Children who die of the flu, or other preventable diseases are blamed or told they must be lying. Parents are sent death threats because they advocate for vaccination. These attacks are coordinated through these groups. Erin Costello from the pro-vaccine, anti-woo page, “What’s the Harm?” recently talked to CNN about this problem.

Mandatory vaccination is the only way to combat this dangerous mess. Mandatory vaccination, full immunisation for school entry. If you want to send your kid to school, get them immunised. If your immediate reaction to this is to think “forced”, think again. Forced is different from mandatory. What’s happening in Pakistan is forced immunisation. This is the right move in my view, anyway. They’re trying to eradicate polio, while an extreme religious group makes claims that the vaccines are a tool of the West to control them. It sounds like antivaxers are the same, no matter where they’re from.

Throwing facts in the face of someone who doesn’t trust, or even believe, facts or reality is never going to work. Maybe a long term solution could be to provide better education in schools, maybe a basic course on vaccines, how they’re made, how they’re tested etc. Maybe this will work, maybe it won’t. We already teach the basics of the scientific method in school, yet so many fail to understand it.

Vaccines are the most tested of all medicines. The studies and safety trials are all public. Nothing is secret here. In fact, in desperate irony, antivaxers use these inserts against pro-vaccine advocates as proof that they are dangerous. The inserts are details of everything that was reported during a vaccine trial, including car crashes, broken limbs, gunshot wounds, stubbed toes, colds, or suicides. These are not caused by the vaccine. Adverse events are different from side effects. Here's a useful resource that explains in more detail what the inserts are and why antivaxers seem to get them wrong.

Herd immunity needs to be at least 95% for a sustained amount of time to eradicate infectious diseases like measles. 83% is unacceptable. Herd immunity is also denied by antivaxers, claiming it’s a myth. Studies, facts and science aplenty are available for the public to view. Anybody who has ever tried to counter or debunk an antivaxer online knows how useless it is to present studies to them. They either don’t read it, don’t understand it or claim it’s “Big Pharma propaganda”.

We're currently living through a fact-resistant time. Conspiracy theorists of all kind, from antivaxers to flat earthers, refuse to accept the evidence. Even a study funded by antivaxers, which failed to find a link between autism and vaccines, was unsuccessful. This is still not enough to quell the cries of “Big Pharma funded research”. Where do we go from here, if no evidence is going to change their minds?

Persecution of Antivaxers

Something you may have noticed if you’ve ever come across an antivaxer or two online, is that they love to play victim. Sickeningly, they have likened the “censorship” of the antivax movement to the holocaust. Or claimed that they are an oppressed minority group who need to be shown respect. After the Christchurch terrorist attacks, one particular numbskull actually said just that. I would say that the antivaxers here are much more like the terrorists. Misguided, terrible, ugly views that lead to deaths of innocent people. Believing they are right and everyone who doesn’t believe them are wrong. They sound more like terrorists than victims to me.

This particular so and so as well, which you will see from antivaxers all the time. “My money is on hw [sic] was recently vaccinated”. This was a comment on a live video of Jacinda Ardern at a press conference for the Christchurch terrorist attacks. When someone does something horrific, they are there to ask about vaccines. It’s amazing how fast and how well they can make everything about them.

When Facebook went down for most of the day, they all fell apart, thinking they were being censored. The week leading up to this, there were a lot of articles around explaining how "They" (Facebook) were going to crack down on misinformation. This was especially delicious, as they were posting on Facebook, about not being able to post on Facebook. However, it was not antivaxers alone that had limited access to Facebook. Millions of people across Facebook and Instagram were affected. Still, that didn’t stop the little narcissists from going to town. Check out a few of those posts here.

Erin, from a New Zealand anti-vaccine group called WAVES NZ (Warning About Vaccine Expectations), brought vaccines into the Christchurch terror attacks as well. Nigel Latta had recently said in the media that antivaxers are like “the flat-earthers of medicine”, which is an interview I highly recommend watching. This comment (left) was on Nigel's post, talking about the psychology behind the aftermath of a terrorist attack.

Antivaxers do not deserve a platform.

Outbreaks

Outbreaks are spreading. Pockets of measles are spreading across different parts of the country, resulting in hospitalisations. This is happening because the rates of vaccination are too low. This is basic, proven science. Antivaxers like to say it's the vaccinated spreading the illness, which is ludicrous if you stop to think about it for more than a second. Vaccination is responsible for the drop in Measles cases worldwide, not the cause of the illness.

If vaccines were the cause of Measles, then we would have an extremely serious epidemic of millions of infected, much earlier than this, rather than small pockets. Measles is an extremely infectious, airborne virus, which can remain in a vacated room for hours, still able to infect people after the infected individual has left.

Mandatory vaccination can keep the immunisation rate high enough to prevent these outbreaks occurring.

Conclusion

Hardline antivaxers' voices are getting louder. They are unaffected by facts, studies, reason or logic that flies in the face of their beliefs or ideologies. Our voices need to be louder. We need to start demanding mandatory vaccination for the greater good of our whole country and the wider community, worldwide.
Outbreaks are spreading. We need to push back. Mandatory measures have worked in other countries and can here too. The choice of vaccinating needs to be removed. We need to step in and do something before these diseases become common again.