To suggest immunisations should be a legal requirement?

[rednailsredheart]

Look at it like this:

Wearing seatbelts it purely a safety issue. It's also a legal requirement in the UK to protect car passengers.

So why is immunisation not a legal requirement?

Likewise, drinking and driving is a criminal offence, due to the danger to the passengers and other drivers/people around you.

But deliberately choosing to let your child become a carrier of a totally preventable disease, infecting people around them (including those too young for immunisations), is totally fine? If someone doesn't vaccinate their child, then the child subsequently becomes gravely ill, why aren't the parents charged with neglect?

Makes me think of this article

ONION

Yeah no, let's definitely allow the government to withold education and benefits from us unless we do exactly as they say.

I can't see a problem with that at all.

It wouldn't be 'interesting' if someone decided to sue another parent due to their baby catching measles off of their unvaccinated child, it would a very sad indictment of how litigious society has become. It would be thrown out of court but, suspending disbelief, I'd shudder at the idea of this brave new world where everyone sued each other for catching viruses. People who are ill are not mobile dirty bombs, illness is a fact of life.

OstentatiousBreastfeeder

Yeah no, let's definitely allow the government to withold education and benefits from us unless we do exactly as they say.

We already do. What's your point ?

I think all under 16s who get pregnant should have compulsory abortions since they cannot bring children into the world....

more than two children per household should be illegal, with forced sterilisation after the birth of the second. if you're unfortunate enough to have twins second time around he second born of them should be denied an education. unless of course you vow to vaccinate him in which case he'll get a free pass.

it's a very slippery slope to make any kind of medical procedure compulsory. where would it end?

You can't say "it's my choice to have an immunisation" in one breath and then "but it's not my fault that hundreds of people have ended up in hospital and two people are now permanently disabled through direct consequence of my selfishness and idiocy".

Yes you can.

In a society where autonomy is one of the principles of medical ethics, people with capacity are allowed to make decisions about invasive medical procedures carried out on their own bodies even if they are poor decisions and even if those poor decisions lead to serious consequences. Autonomy is for those involved in healthcare is the overriding ethical principle used to guide decision making within this setting, as it should be imo.

OP you are arguing using one of the other principles of medical ethics, that of justice, how decisions affect other people. It's an interesting academic debate I suppose, and yes other posters are agreeing with your position, but you need to consider the long term consequences to our society of such a decision. You don't think its a rather dangerous path to be going down, giving up autonomy?

My youngest was hospitalised with chicken pox at 18mo.

So how come that vaccine is not part of the regular programme in the UK but it is elsewhere? Who decides what is in and what isn't?

So the law is passed that we all must be vaccinated, who decides what vaccines we need? We don't get the chicken pox vaccine and people start dying from it, does someone get prosecuted then?

Ok, so how many people have been killed by vaccines? And how many by measles etc?
Fwiw, I wasn't vaccinated due to allergies. I've had measles, mumps, rubella or German measles as it was called all those years ago and they were awful. You can choose not to vaccinate your kids but then you risk 'choosing' to put them through a horrendous illness.
Darnitnev, I won't be pissing off as you so rudely suggest. All about being liberal until someone disagrees with you, aren't you?

Oh, so you are changing your position from legal requirement to social responsibility?

Well those are two quite separate things aren't they?

This just became another mn vaccination thread.

'Leper style colonies for the unvaccinated Wannabe? Maybe just bells round their necks and making them walk around shouting 'unclean, unclean' .

YANBU

Only a very small number of children have allergies or serious health problems which prevent vaccination and of course they should be exempt.

Sadly because people are stupid enough to believe scare stories, some diseases such as TB which had almost disappeared are now back and putting the NHS under further strain.

It always amuses me to see people freaking out (dystopian futures and all) about social policies that in other countries are routinely and calmly followed, not really any big deal.

I don't think legally requiring everyone to have them is the way to go, but I think requiring certain vaccinations for attending school is reasonable as long as you allow exemptions for medical reasons.

I didn't really understand the anti-vax argument, people made some very good points in my thread www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/2261409-Can-somebody-please-explain-the-anti-vax-argument-to-me

Personally, I think mums need to be given more information on vaccines. I was advised to get the whooping cough vaccine but wasn't actually aware until the nurse told me that it's actually to give my unborn baby immunity.

LurkingHusband good point.

You'd have thought people would balk at the idea of yet more terms and conditions being imposed upon us, especially medical ones. Yet I've seen this debate played out so many times and a huge proportion of people seem so willing to hand over any remaining freedoms we have.

Government know what's best. Don't question them.

Choice.

It is the most important thing we have and the one thing we don't even realise we are giving away.

When we moved to Switzerland 5 years ago DD was not MMR vaccinated. I was advised to get it done pretty quickly before we left the UK as we would probably find ourselves in the situation of not finding a Dr willing to take her on as a patient in Switzerland.

Drs were apparently not taking on patients who were not vaccinated as they didn't want unvaccinated DCs sat in their waiting rooms potentially infecting other DCs. Reluctantly we had her MMR vaccinated. Now i look back and think what a loon i was to initially refuse her MMR vaccination.

"So how come the chicken pox vaccine is not part of the regular programme in the UK but it is elsewhere? Who decides what is in and what isn't?"

Cost-benefit analyis by medical bods, as far as I know. I think one of the reasons it's not routine here is that exposure to wild chicken pox can prevent older people who've already had wild chicken pox from getting shingles, and obviously They concluded that the risk to the population from people getting chicken pox wasn't so great that it should permit a possible rise in shingles cases/be worth the expense of adding the vaccine to the regular list of shots. They deal with the issue in the US, Japan, and other countries where chicken pox vaccine is routine by offering a "booster" vaccine to the over-60s.

I got the vaccine for my kids privately anyway.

ketchup the reason TB is on the rise is due to immigration - nothing to do with vaccines in this country

My (unvaccinated) child caught mumps a few years ago.

She was one of the last in her year at school to get it - it swept through the setting (reception and early years on one site) like wildfire, with everybody saying 'gosh, it's just like mumps, but it can't be, my dc has been vaccinated'. So, no one went to the doctor, no one got tested.

Until my dc got it. I took her to the doctor. And suggested it was mumps, only to be dismissed. I persisted, and eventually (mumPs notifiable, so wtf the doctor was doing trying not to test is beyond me, unless it was to do with saving statistics) the doctor swabbed her and sent off the sample for testing. Sure enough, it was mumps.

I repeat, she was one of the last in her year to come down with it - she almost certainly caught it off a vaccinated child (I have no idea how many children in her year are vaccinated/unvaccinated, but statistically, most will be vaccinated) given that it was spreading across her setting over a period of a couple of months. She was off school as soon as she showed signs of being unwell, and stayed off school, unlike the majority of her peers, who missed a couple of days at most despite having the same illness. It was not being wilfully spread about by my dd (and yes, I do know about incubation periods, before any bright spark pipes up)

A child who is unvaccinated is not automatically a carrier of several communicable diseases.

Any law which tried to make vaccinations compulsory would have to have several get-out clauses. The situation would not be vastly different from what it is now.

Interestingly, just this week new vaccine compensation legislation has been passed to cover damage caused by rotavirus and flu vaccinations.

There is plenty of evidence that vaccination has caused injury.

You cannot impose something on people which could be dangerous. It has to be personal choice. The herd immunity argument does not hold water - you want me to vaccinate my child and therefore expose him to possible risk, to support your immune-suppressed child. But if my child is the one injured by the vaccine you won't help me. Social responsibility works both ways. Except that it doesn't.

At the moment if someone is going to impose medical treatment on you they have to go to court and argue their case for it. That's the way it should be.

YABU and my son has been vaccinated.

yes, yes, a dangerous path, a slippery slope. I guess that explains those fascist dictatorships in Australia and Slovenia.

There will always be tension between public health and individual autonomy. For example, in epidemics you may have to limit people's freedom of movement, right to privacy, etc. The problem is that today because these diseases are so rare, we tend to think of vaccination as an individual health issue when it is really a public health issue.

"Oh do piss off with your actual capitalised science.

This is not a debate about the pros and cons of vaccination. What the OP is suggestion is a scenario where we give up autonomy of our own and our children's bodies. I was going to say I'm suprised that so few posters on this thread have spotted that, but given the pitiful deterioration in reasoning skills and intellect on MN I'm not really.

Really? People really think it's OK to let the government decide what gets injected it our own bodies, and we would deny children education if they don't comply.

Jesus wept."

Yes. This. Absolutely.

Especially the pitiful deterioration in reasoning skills and intellect.

Some really thuggish, thick opinions being expressed quite gleefully now.

Yeah, the social responsibility argument is utter horseshit.

Where's the social responsibility to my (non-MMR) vaccine damaged child?

Nowhere.

And i was even told this week, when waiting on news of whether my child's secondary education has been agreed, that I couldn't expect to keep the placement and provision already outlined in the statement, as 'there isn't a bottomless pit of money'. So, I don't even have the right to expect a suitable education for my child, apparently, let alone anything else, and yet posters want to preach about social responsibility?

Don't make me laugh.

To whoever said bodily autonomy has nothing to do with money your just wrong. It has everything to do with money! In this country we have the NHS we can make choices on our autonomy because the state provides services for free. Many other countries don't provide that service and 1000's of children suffer. Also to not bring other countries In to this as "it's not fair" is a farcical thing to say. With an increased rate of geographical mobility 1000's of people travel from country to country( including this one) lots of country's require jabs before entering for YOUR safety as well as others. It's a very relevant issue. For some people it's excusable to not be vaccinated they may have a serious medical issue or may of come from a country that didn't provide that service. However if you can access a service and there's no issue why not.

The NHS website say they don't offer the chicken pox vaccine because there is a concern it could see an increase in shingles in adults (because of the loss of the immunity boost when coming into contact with chicken pox in children). So children catching the normally mild pox provide herd immunity for adults against shingles. People with low/no immunity can have the chicken pox vaccine on the NHS.

We need to give people information rather than compel them to do things. At the baby clinic I took my youngest too there was a young Mum who'd been put of vaccines by some of the people around her. She said she wasn't vaccinating because she'd rather be 'safe than sorry'. The only time she'd ever seen measles or mumps were very, very, very mild cases. Once she was educated (politely and not with a snooty 'you should do as your told' that the HV tried) that my Grandmother lost 8 of her 13 children to measles and another lady's son was infertile due to mumps she realised that the 'better safe than sorry' route WAS the vaccines. A lot of people have forgotten/don't know that these diseases are fatal because they only know a few people who've ever had them and they've been 'fine'.

Also if you go down the the compulsory route who decides what is medically acceptable and what isn't? The two doctors at my surgery couldn't even agree if my youngest should have more vaccinations after a reaction to the first set. So if the one doctor is the person who signs off on exemption says my child must have vaccinations, but another doctor tells me my child shouldn't I'm supposed to ignore those concerns?

Compulsion is a slippery slope imo. You can't just allow a government to legally compel you to any medical procedure for you or your child.