Yesterday Miguel posted this:
Last night I saw this:
A 6-year-old boy from Oregon, who never received any vaccines, spent nearly two months in a hospital, racking up more than $800,000 in medical bills after contracting tetanus from a cut on his forehead.
His 2017 case was the first in the state for pediatric tetanus in more than 30 years, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a report Thursday.
According to the report, the unidentified boy was playing on a farm when he suffered a forehead laceration. His wound was cleaned and sutured at home but nearly a week later he began suffering from jaw clenching and involuntary muscle spasms.
He also developed opisthotonus, or the arching of the neck and back.
The child’s parents contacted paramedics when he began to have trouble breathing and he was airlifted to a tertiary pediatric medical center.
At the hospital, he showed more signs of tetanus and was eventually diagnosed. His condition quickly worsened: He developed a high fever and more severe muscle spasms.
According to the report, the boy spent 57 days in the hospital, 47 of them in the intensive care unit, and his inpatient care bills amounted to $811,929.
The boy had never received any vaccines and despite his near-death experience, his family declined any further vaccines once he was discharged. He was given one of the five recommended doses of DTaP.
I feel bad for this kid.
Fuck his stupid parents.
Make sure your kids get their damn shots.
How are the parents not being charged with child endangerment?
I get your point, but let’s also look at the other side of the argument here, not the conspiracy theory side, but the real other side:
https://hub.jhu.edu/2016/05/03/medical-errors-third-leading-cause-of-death/
Analyzing medical death rate data over an eight-year period, Johns Hopkins patient safety experts have calculated that more than 250,000 deaths per year are due to medical error in the U.S. Their figure, published May 3 in The BMJ, surpasses the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s third leading cause of death—respiratory disease, which kills close to 150,000 people per year.
How many people die every year in the US from illnesses that can be prevented with vaccination? Is it even tabulated? I’ve read that most children who die of the flu are not vaccinated, there are some 10s of thousands right there.
Perhaps we can come up with good numbers and actually have something to look at.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/spotlights/children-flu-deaths.htm
of course you can also get vaccines at clinics rather than hospitals, so I guess the argument isn’t that important. 🙂
I call such people “Luddites”. That, and dumbasses.
I am old enough to remember when Polio was a thing. Friends in school suffered from it, and some people spent their lives in an iron lung, unable to breathe on their own. When the Salk and later Sabin vaccines became available, our parents made sure we were vaccinated. Yeah, there were some negative reactions, and some people were infected by the weakened virus in the oral vaccine. The numbers were minuscule compared to those who were infected before the vaccines were available. Today Polio is virtually unknown except in remote locations without access to modern medicine.
Parents should have the right to refuse vaccination for their children, but it should be an informed decision with the risks both pro and con understood. Also society has the right, if not the obligation to protect the larger population by requiring children or adults to be vaccinated prior to participating in certain group activities.