[...] posted an item earlier this week, pegged to a story on Slate, about how non-vaccinated children can have a potentially negative [...]

I don’t understand why we can have nut free schools in larger districts but we can’t have vaccine mandatory schools? My districts has over 10 elementary schools. Why can’t one or two of them be designated immunosuppressed schools and require proof of vaccination? Those students whose parents didn’t vaccinate them can send them to different school in the district.

Amen, Lisa. I think that it should be requirement for kids in school to be vaccinated. Non-vaccinators make my blood boil. I know a few, and I’m seriously considering not seeing them this winter especially because they won’t do it. I’m pregnant, so my immune system is depressed; I’ll soon have a newborn; and my elder son has respiratory issues and last year developed pneumonia twice and was in the ER four times. I seriously wonder about the reasoning skills of non-vaxers.

Thanks to the blogger for this post, by the way. I don’t know if it would change any non-vaxer’s mind if they knew that their kid endangered others who CAN’T be vaccinated, but I think that they should at least be required to know that. I’m all for the guilt eating away at them, bit by bit. (That’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, but not totally.)

Cheers to Jeanne and all the comments!

I seriously doubt that this will change the mind of non-vaxxers. Either they just won’t care about other kids or they will say that herd immunity does not exist and it is just a ploy by the government. In the end, the final argument for them always seems to be that the government/”big pharma” is in conspiracy, and all of the data showing vaccines are good is faked. For someone scientific this is extremely irritating, as you can never really convince someone who believes this.

Like ChiLaura, these people really make my blood boil.

btw, if anyone is interested, there is an excellent front-page article in the current issue of Wired magazine about how dangerous the anti-vaccination movement is. I was so pleased to see something in the media that was so articulate concerning this issue.

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/10/ff_waronscience

Manjari, it doesn’t even have to be all or even most of us refusing to vaccinate to have a problem. If 20-25% of kids aren’t vaccinated, that is enough for an epidemic.

Plumb – that kid would be another example of someone who needs to be protected by the herd immunity.

That’s my take as well jeanne, just wanted to make sure I wasn’t completely off-base in that assumption (and its why I get so vocal about those in the healthcare community who don’t do the flu shot! I can’t get the darn thing…I am not going to be happy if I spend any amount of time around healthcare folks in a hospital setting for an unrelated reason). And ChiLaura – that’s true, but I’ve actually seen a case where a small child was vaccinated and wound up with pertussis. That said, she had a very, very, very, VERY mild case of it. Could we say that she’d have had that same mild case if she’d not been vaxed? I don’t know that we can, unfortunately. We had a small multitude of cases of measles in the community I grew up in…basically a non-vaxer somehow got the disease, and managed to find a glitch/hole in the immunization schedule in many local kids (it had been administered too early, apparently). As a young tween on the receiving end of a few booster shots and (parentally common sense administered, not gov’t mandated) quarantine, I really wanted to find out who the culprit was and give his/her parents a good shake.