Fuck you, anti-vaxxers

[gfish]

10 infants dead in California whooping cough outbreak

Science keeps babies alive. Until your alternate system can beat its record, I really, really don't want to hear about it.

Comments

[ladymondegreen.livejournal.com]

Geez, talk about non-consensual choices.

Those poor kids.

[sistawendy.livejournal.com]

If somebody wants to win a Darwin award, that's their business. Darwin awards by proxy, though, are wrong. Very wrong.

[spiritdancer]

Yep. That's part of why I got my pertussis booster (along with tetanus and pneumonia vaccine) before I left the hospital when Michael was born.

On the veterinary side, it's called herd immunity - the higher the percentage of immune (vaccinated) individuals, the less likely you are to see a preventable disease.

[porysski.livejournal.com]

I've always heard it referred to as herd immunity in humans, too.

[spiritdancer]

I suspect using "herd immunity" goes back to the veterinarians. IIRC, something like "community resistance" is used for people (since they don't usually run in herds :))

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

I've always heard it called herd immunity in humans, too -- but I was a microbiologist; I'm guessing doctors and people with a sense of PR might use better terminology than epidemiologists.

[tithonium.livejournal.com]

IIRC, it's particularly important wrt infants. They can't /get/ immunizations for a bunch of things - I think whooping cough is one of them. So they /have/ to depend on herd immunity to protect them from it. Choosing not to get immunized is NOT an individual choice.

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

It's a type of externality problem. By not getting your kids immunized you raise the risk of other kids dying horribly of a preventable disease. But the kicker is you do lower the risk of your kids dying from complications from the vaccine -- which *does* happen, although at a much lower rate than the anti-vaccination crowd thinks.
Of course, if your kid gets the disease for which s/he wasn't vaccinated, there's a roughly 1000 times higher of permanent damage as an after-effect of disease than of vaccination. But *if* herd immunity is high, it's a rational tactic to dump the risk on other people's children.

[ilmarinen.livejournal.com]

Rational, but not moral.

[lunar--angel.livejournal.com]

If I'm reading this correctly, a large portion of the problem is vaccinations that have worn off. Until reading this, it would not have occurred to me to re-up my pertussis vaccine. So it's not all the crazy non-vaccination types...