UK lost measles free status

[Stressedout10]

So due to all the anti Vaxers the WHO have stripped us of our measles free status.
What next ?

No one is forcibly vaccinated.

So the poster above hasn’t forcibly vaccinated her child?

This is what happens when you make things mandatory. It’s a natural consequence of coercive measures.

What the hell has happened to your country?

You can't argue with the tin hat brigade.... if you walked into their house with Ebola or Rabies they'd be bloody furious but it's perfectly ok for them to put elderly, pregnant, immunocompromised patients and other peoples tiny babies at risk because of THEIR right to chose.

I can't even. 🙄

Thanks for the link @MissConductUS

So you have to be over 62 years old, have a blood test proving immunity, or have proper records of effective vaccination, to have 'presumed immunity'.

No-one I know in my age group / social circle (late 40 / 50s) has that.

As I said upthread, my GP practice began a MMR programme for patients in our age group (via text service), but ran out of vaccine within a day because the take-up of appointments was so high. I'll check again next week.

if you walked into their house with Ebola or Rabies they'd be bloody furious but it's perfectly ok for them to put elderly, pregnant, immunocompromised patients and other peoples tiny babies at risk because of THEIR right to chose.

You are trying to compare people who haven’t been vaccinated against reasonably common illnesses going about their daily business with people in your home with rabies?

Is it ever ok to force children to have medical procedures by physically restraining them? And if so what makes it ok? Or not ok?

Age? Value of the procedure?

Age? Value of the procedure?

These things are relevant. As children get older and can understand the risk, cost and benefit of a particular procedure, they are considered increasingly able to make decisions about healthcare for themselves. There is no hard and fast rule. Holding down an 11 year old for a non-urgent preventative treatment, I can only regard as assault.

@AutumnCrow - you're quite welcome. It's often simpler and quicker to just re vaccinate than to prove prior immunity.

What the hell has happened to your country?

The current legal balance goes back to the early 20th century when smallpox vaccination really was compulsory and the subsequent legal and social reaction to those rules.

www.npr.org/2011/04/05/135121451/how-the-pox-epidemic-changed-vaccination-rules

Since we still have regular measles outbreaks there are obviously plenty of people not getting vaccinated.

That's a fascinating piece about Little Italy @MissConductUS - public resistance vs civic duty & public health clearly goes back a long way. And I can understand the resistance then. The vaccination raids on immigrants. were brutal.

However I'm glad my current local age group of old(ish) farts are coming down heavily on the side of public health - we trust our GP surgery. No tinfoil needed here yet.

@herculepoirot2 I broadly agree with pretty much everything you've written but was curious about your stance that you wouldn't force your child to do anything they didn't want to.

Apologies as you've probably already answered this but would you allow your child to refuse something that you knew would save their life? I'm not referring to vaccinations but some specific kind of life saving treatment or a hypothetical situation where they refuse to carry out action X which means they will almost certainly lose their life. You mention the relevance of age downthread - do you think there is a minimum age at which a child should be allowed to exercise bodily autonomy?

Apologies as you've probably already answered this but would you allow your child to refuse something that you knew would save their life?

That is an incredibly difficult question for me to answer. I love my child and I would cheerfully hold them down to administer anything I thought would save their life. The question is, should the law allow this? Once my child has achieved reason and is competent to say they don’t want a treatment, it stops being my call.

Similarly, if we lived in a Lord of the Flies society and I could do anything within my physical power, there is no telling what I would do to save my child’s life. I don’t expect any parent on MN to feel they would do less.

But what is the law meant to do?

I feel the law is meant to protect my child from attempts to force her to accept substances into her body that either she, as a rational human being, doesn’t want (even if I want her to have them) or that I, as the loving parent of a child who is too young to understand, don’t want her to have.

I accept that a court can step in and declare me unfit to parent, in extreme circumstances.

I understand your point.

For me is the question is around defining what a 'rational' human being means. If someone refuses life saving treatment for their child for what appears to be a trivial reason or one 'not backed up by science' it could be argued they are not rational and so their wishes should be overridden. I believe that is the one of the arguments put forward in support of mandatory vaccinations: parents who refuse them are by definition irrational/mentally incompetent, ergo the decision must be taken out of their hands.

When it comes to children, well I know very intelligent 14-16 year olds who are able to reason competently and I know children in the same age bracket who I'd consider quite immature for their age and not capable of making a sensible decision. But that is my subjective opinion of course.

For me is the question is around defining what a 'rational' human being means. If someone refuses life saving treatment for their child for what appears to be a trivial reason or one 'not backed up by science' it could be argued they are not rational and so their wishes should be overridden.

I referred to a child’s rationality because someone asked me at what age a child should expect to have their wishes respected. The same test doesn’t apply to an adult; they have autonomy whether or not they are “rational” as you would see that. We all have different priorities and beliefs and no one adult gets to decide for another that theirs are “irrational”. This isn’t One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Parents do have the right to make medical choices on behalf of young children. However, the law begins to side with the child more and more as the child gets older, not because they have passed some arbitrary test of “rationality”, with the standards defined by others, but because they are old enough to have reached a level of rationality that we naturally attribute to all adults in matters of their own health.

It isn’t black and white with children, but again, a child of 11 being held down and forcibly injected so that she can go to school? I can’t get on board with that.

It's a dangerous road to go down if you want parents declared irrational/mentally incompetent because they won't force injections on them as decreed by the government!
I think that declaring people to be mentally incompetent is and should remain a very difficult thing to do, since it is open to huge abuse once a government starts using it to force submission of the population.

I think that declaring people to be mentally incompetent is and should remain a very difficult thing to do, since it is open to huge abuse once a government starts using it to force submission of the population.

And it is, rightly, very hard. “Competence” isn’t defined by agreement with others on specific issues. It is defined by the ability to make decisions. You can be as wrong as you like about the facts. Nobody has the right to declare you mentally incompetent because you disagree with them.

The case for “lack of capacity” involves:

To give informed consent, the individual concerned must have adequate reasoning faculties and be in possession of all relevant facts. Impairments to reasoning and judgment that may prevent informed consent include basic intellectual or emotional immaturity, high levels of stress such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or a severe intellectual disability, severe mental disorder, intoxication, severe sleep deprivation, Alzheimer's disease, or being in a coma.

Adequate reasoning facilities doesn’t mean they see the same facts as you and reach the same conclusions as you. It means generally speaking, are they capable of rational thought?

We live in a globalist country, you need to get used to dealing with diseases that we eradicated. Add anti vaxers to the interconnection of the globe where many people come in to this country now from countries with poor levels of health and what exactly does anyone expect to happen? I expect more, London has already become TB capital after we eradicated TB many decades ago!

I think it's fair to set parameters for people who move to different countries. So I would expect to have to vaccinate my children against chicken pox if I was to move to the USA and wanted to enrol them in school (even though that particular vaccine isn't one carried out in the UK). Likewise I think it's fair to make vaccination a condition of entry into the UK, since no one has to live in another country and it isn't fair to expose the population to illnesses which may have been eradicated here.

Likewise I think it's fair to make vaccination a condition of entry into the UK, since no one has to live in another country and it isn't fair to expose the population to illnesses which may have been eradicated here.

I agree with this for general immigration, not for refugees, who may have no documents pertaining to their identity, let alone their vaccination status.

I wouldn't ask this of refugees either - they've got enough on their plate.

Several medical professionals in the U.K. have repeatedly stated that the fall in vaccination rates has more to do with under-funding and poor admin as a result of the split of public health to local authorities rather than a fall in public confidence....Newspaper articles now consistently blame any increase in measles on anti-vaxxers whilst ignoring the socio-economic factors that contribute to the situation.

@Eastie77 You've made some really interesting points here, that I hadn't considered before.