People who don't vaccinate their children need to be made fun of. ⇒
16 February 2009, early evening
This is a post from my link log: If you click the title of this post you will be taken the web page I am discussing.
16 February 2009, early evening
This is a post from my link log: If you click the title of this post you will be taken the web page I am discussing.
one step for public health!
by roshi on February 16 2009, 10:46 pm #
The dude’s wife commented. Stuff like this must make doctors crazy.
by ramanan on February 17 2009, 11:04 am #
what do you think about flu shots? While I would always vaccinate myself (and my children if I were to have any) for everything that is mandatory, I’m not so sure I would for flu shots.
Why are flu shots offered for free but are not mandatory? I never once went for my flu shots and my doctor has not given me any definitive answers on this.
What gives?
by tiff on February 17 2009, 12:29 pm #
I don’t get flu shots either. I don’t think i’m in a group that is in danger of dying from the flu though. Generally I avoid unnecessary medical procedures. They probably aren’t mandatory because they aren’t 100% effective and they don’t last a long time. I don’t think the parallels are quite the same.
by ramanan on February 17 2009, 1:42 pm #
My thoughts exactly. Then why are we funding flu shots indiscriminately?
Parents who don’t vaccinate their kids are definitely problematic. But public health policies are equally so. Example: Gardasil? it’s marketed to prevent cervical cancer when really it only prevents certain strains of HPV that causes cervical cancer. Who stands to benefit the most from mandatory vaccination of adolescent girls? I would think that Gardasil and Chickenpox vaccines are not parallel examples, either.
Please allow me to rant: most vaccinations have good scientific bases because their research was conducted prior to the boom of pharmaceutical companies and drug patents. But I think many people become skeptical when pharmaceutical gets involved in the marketing of vaccines. I think that means that public health officials need to work harder to provide independent sources to justify public funding of a vaccine.
Unfortunately, the fear of being seen as irrational is preventing people from engaging in meaningful debates about the merits of new vaccinations.
by tiff on February 17 2009, 3:34 pm #
Then why are we funding flu shots indiscriminately?
Because it probably costs the government more to treat some 60 year old who is hospitalized because of the Flu than it costs to give that same 60 year old a flu shot. I’m betting that in aggregate, the government saves money encouraging people to get flu shots than it does in treating the flu.
Who stands to benefit the most from mandatory vaccination of adolescent girls?
The girls who don’t end up with cervical cancer?
Assuming government regulatory bodies are doing their job, then drugs that end up on the market should be safe. I don’t think the standards applied to drug companies has gone down in recent years. Drug companies don’t just get to put whatever they want on the market. These things are tested. (And the drug is considered a cancer drug because it prevents a cause of cancer in women. It would be a prophylactic vaccine, I think. They aren’t just trying to be sneaky.)
The only people I’ve heard complaining about HPV are crazy people from the Canadian Action Party. And social conservatives who think it’ll lead to more sex. Every doctor I know seems to think it’s A-OK, but they’re only doctors.
by ramanan on February 17 2009, 4:36 pm #
Also, was in a rush, so last comment isn’t supposed to sound as obnoxious as it does.
by ramanan on February 17 2009, 4:51 pm #
I don’t believe in flu shots unless you’re in the “elderly” demographic with a compromised immune system.
The flu strains are random and just because you get the shot doesn’t mean you won’t get a flu (there are so many strains, after all).
People who refuse to immunize their children don’t realize that they’ve been the ones who have helped the return of measles and mumps (diseases we hadn’t seen in the school system for decades).
When they tell me that their kids have never had a shot and “they’re perfectly fine” I feel like slapping them in the head.
Yeah, they’ve been fine because most the other children have had their shots.
Convenience shots like Chicken Pox and the flu shot I wouldn’t bother with. It’s not a deadly disease and it builds the immune system.
by radmila on February 17 2009, 5:29 pm #
I think you misread me re: pharmaceutical’s influence on Gardasil drug approval. I don’t dispute the vaccine’s safety, but I do dispute the significance of its contribution. And perhaps that’s why you’re responding as if I am one of those parents refusing to vaccinate their kids for illegitimate reasons. The only people you’ve heard from who complain about Gardasil apparently doesn’t include me, and I think I am quite reasonable as compared to those driven by social conservatism or by whatever ideologies underlying the Canada Action Party.
I don’t doubt that Gardasil works on cutting some HPV, which inevitably causes some cervical cancer. (taken from the HPV Ontario site: The HPV vaccine is close to 100 per cent effective in protecting against four types of high-risk HPV strains, two of which are responsible for about 70 per cent of cervical cancers. The other two are responsible for about 90 per cent of genital warts.) My limited understanding about Gardasil comes from some student work I read (so I may be wrong). But Gardasil is the only two available HPV vaccines available on the market, and the only one approved by Health Canada. So if you ask me, I think there’s a bit of a monopoly here in terms of pricing. The HPV Ontario website suggests that each dose costs $400 (but another 2007 paper I read suggests that it only costs $117 million dollars over three years for administering the doses).
I just feel that this particular vaccine’s contribution is perhaps overstated given its cost. And because anyone who opposes Gardasil risks sounding impassionate and irrational (what? you mean you would rather let women die of cervical cancer?), the public debate on this issue is effectively non-existence.
Isn’t there something in our health care system that has more dire need of funding and kills just as many people? (wait time in ER?) Maybe there isn’t. I don’t know. But I don’t think there was even a discussion about it.
I’m sure there wasn’t very much discussion when measles vaccination was introduced. But maybe because I live in a different age, I wish for more discussion. I don’t think that makes me crazy or unreasonable.
Anyway, point taken. here’s the government’s website on HPV vaccine http://hpvontario.ca/about.html
by tiff on February 18 2009, 12:28 am #
But I don’t think there was even a discussion about it.
I’m willing to bet there was lots of discussion about this. You are probably right about the government not asking for your opinion or my opinion on this, though. Government policy is dictated by people who have studied health, politics, etc, and not by random people who don’t know much about these topics. The Canadian Women’s Health Network has a report on Gardasil. They seem to agree with your assesment of things. Presumably there are reports like this from other groups, with differing opinions. The Ministry of Health probably looks at them all and decides what to do. Ideally, Gardasil has little influence on how this decision is made. It’s possible the people in the Ministry of Health are dumbasses, but i’d like to think they are on the ball.
Also, it sounds like people were against vaccines in the 40s too. Someone in the thread mentions that their dad had smallpox because his grandparents didn’t want him vaccinated. So I don’t think objections to vaccinations are a new thing.
by ramanan on February 18 2009, 9:23 am #
Also, Chicken Pox is harmless (more or less) for children, but really bad if you catch it as an adult, or worse still if you are pregnant. So one could probably make the case that trying to eradicate it via vaccination would be a good thing. Unless we breed a new super-chicken-pox that destroys us all. Apparently children get the chicken pox vaccine the same time they are given their measles, mumps, rubella vaccine. (Or they can, anyway.)
(There are a few stories in the thread about women being sequestered away from children while they were pregnant back in the day because of fears of measles, etc. And for Chicken Pox, there is this story in particular.)
by ramanan on February 18 2009, 10:23 am #
Another good comment, which touches on Tiff’s concerns.
by ramanan on February 20 2009, 10:31 am #