What do you think of Australia's vaccine policy?

[rampy]

I'm born and bred Aussie. We live in WA and kids here can't go to kindy or school
without having been vaccinated. I have a couple of British friends who were so offended that they needed to vaccinate their kids they home schooled because 'well we'll just go back to the uk' but they've stayed and now need to get their kids vaccinated because they have no friends their own age and can't go to school without vaccines.

You can't apply for child related benefits if your kid isn't vaccinated either here.

Having seen NZ have just declared a whooping cough epidemic Id say I agree with WA stance I'm honest!

Barbaric? Give your head a wobble!

I find it really disheartening how simple many responses are, assuming that anyone who isn't for mandatory vaccination is an "anti-vaxxer" who thinks vaccinations don't work.

This kind of thinking actually increased resistance to accepting the COVID vaccine among people who were themselves willing to get it, in places like Australia and Canada where it was effectively mandated.

There are three serious reasons to be wary of mandated vaccination, that don't really have much to do with their efficacy:

1. There are risks to vaccines, and there are ethical issues with requiring people to take a treatment that is risky when it has the potential to be harmful to that individual. There is lots of literature in medical ethics about this - to what extent does the good of the many outweigh risks to individuals? In liberal democracies, the bar for that has historically been set quite high.

2. Along the same lines, there are very serious ethical questions around the extent we can mandate people take medical treatments and drugs in general. The right to refuse medical treatments and drugs is very basic In our society, and the more we compromise that, the more we can, by law, be subjected to other kinds of interventions that the authorities see as useful. There are enough scandals out there of bodily autonomy being compromised in medicine, for the good of "society" that we should give us pause - things like forced sterilization, using people for tests, and so on. Also - if you compromise rights to bodily autonomy that will potentially have effects in other areas outside of purely medical issues. Again - there is a huge literature on this in both law and medical ethics.

3. It's an own goal. There are lots of organizations involved in vaccination campaigns in areas where people are suspicious and resistant, like parts of Africa. You know what doesn't work - forcing vaccination. It has the opposite effect and increases resistance to accepting vaccination. So that is not the approach groups like this take. They know it will mean people go under the radar and take other measures to avoid vaccination and it undermines trust. This is no different in western nations. Mandating vaccination makes some people feel morally superior but it doesn't really convince the people who need to be convinced, it just entrenches their opposition.

I think it is referring to the fact you don’t just get the measles vaccine it is mums and rubella etc

There is also a cocktail of chemicals that make up the vaccine

Yes, it was hugely damaging. There had actually been some rebuilding of trust toward vaccination that seemed to be occurring in the few years before COVID, after that idiot Wakefield got into it, and now it's really gone to shit again, much worse than before IMO.

The other issues is that in the US, where a lot of this comes from, they are just so interventionist. They have a very heavy vaccine schedule at very young ages compared to a lot of other places.

I agree with the policy. Anti-vaxxers have done a lot of damage in that UK. We shouldn't be having measles outbreaks.

Happy to have the odd medical exemption.

What are these religious grounds people are talking about? Which religion is against vaccination and why?

I understand somewhat on the school one, there is an increased risk with so many kids in one place. Similarish with childcare. Not sure on the child benefit - that comes in before vaccinations and something about that feels off to me. All of them though are punishing the child for their parents choices, but that one particularly to me gives me pause.

It is interesting how different countries handle the issue. Growing up in the US, I had all my jabs, and when I got into university, I didn't have access to my vaccination card - my mother had it, but had no custody & wasn't talking to me at that point - so to confirm my acceptance, I had to get many of the vaccines again. In the UK, I found out at my DDs teen boosters that one of their childhood jabs was missing and were just told for them to make an appointment for it when they are 19. Even though one of them now works in a school as an apprentice TA, no one has really cared about her vaccines.

You say 'the medical community has lost trust' etc. and 'they need to work hard to regain that trust'. This is sheer bollocks. The science of vaccination is very well established and proven.

IME, the discussions around trust has little to do with the vaccines themselves. Some of it is lack of understanding on how they and the components in them work, but a lot of this comes from the experiences elsewhere with medical professionals. There is a reason why women during pregnancy and shortly after giving birth are drawn into anti-vaxing at a significant rate. They are one of the groups most at risk for experiencing medical abuse, and are commonly blamed and dismissed for any medical abuse experienced. This transfers to the concern that if something goes wrong with the vaccines, that they will get the blame, they will get dismissed, they will once again be out of control and at the mercy of an institution that has already shown that 'do no harm' doesn't apply to them.

While it's popular on these types of threads and other media to just dismiss these people as stupid, it's rarely helpful, only further supports the dismissiveness they've already experienced, and I've yet to see it change anyone's mind. Acknowledging medical abuse, the impact it has and how it leads to legitimate concerns, where needed discussing the science and processes with respect, and offering alternatives like having the jabs at a location with more observation or alternative schedules like 1 jab at a time or greater spacing. These I've seen move people from anti-vax to catching up and willingly paying for optional vaccines.

It doesn't need to be compulsory if you are living on a secluded island.

If you want to be in touch with other people and live within society, the society have some additional rules to protect itself.
One of the protections is vaccination, which can be very very effective when high proportion of the society is vaccinated. If we want to reach that proportion, we can afford only a limited number of exceptions, and it just makes sense to allocate them based on proven medical reasons, not hurt feelings.

actually most of them don't - for example there's no porcine DNA in the flu nasal spray, it's just used in the manufacturing process. Kashrut and muslim authorities say it is fine as it's medicine.

We are in Italy, where the rules are essentially the same. We home educate, and there are so many clubs, groups and events that can be joined without needing vaccination, it seems a bit unlikely their kids cant find friends. They dont need to send their kids to school just find them friends.

Oh no, not chemicals?! Maybe it's full of things such as quercetin-3-glucoside, quercetin-3-rhamnoside, catechin, epicatechin, procyanidin, cyanidin-3-galactoside, coumaric acid, chlorogenic acid, gallic acid, and phloridzin.

Those are some of the specific compounds found in an apple.

@Annabmt

A nursing degree has no relevance on your understanding of how the biochemistry of the drugs works; you'd need to be doing a biochemistry or pharmacology to actually understand whether the additives are harmful or not. And nursing does not cover that- although you can read the effects from the info pack.

Reading ingredients doesn't really show understanding.

Yes some will have adverse reactions but statistically they are a very small percentage.

Eh - how about driving licenses? Shouldn't we all have the right to drive? The government needs to intervene when someone's autonomy and human rights infringes on some one else. I.e. unvaxx'ed people put others at risk, same as unlicensed drivers.

Why not? Chicken pox vaccine is a core vaccine in most developed countries. HPV prevents cancer.
Covid perhaps fair enough if they don't have any particular risk factors. I probably wouldn't bother with that myself but I will when I'm older.

I think it's the same here in Cayman, my kids had to be fully vaxxed before they started school.
I didn't think anything of it honestly, I think the only thing they've not been vaxxed against is Men B because we don't have it here.

Why? Picking and choosing which bits of the social contract you want to engage in seems selfish.

Same with this nonsense about mandatory Covid vaccines - they weren’t mandatory at all. You want to travel and enter certain communal spaces, then get a vaccine. If you don’t want to vaccinate, why should everyone else be put at risk through your personal decision?

Could you expand on your "careful risk assessment" please?

In which journals did you find the relevant statistics? How did differing risk profiles affect your choices for the vaccines that are available? How did you weigh / compare the risks of vaccine-related illness against the likelihood of either contracting or spreading each disease?

A "careful risk assessment" requires a broad approach that covers the above questions. YouTube and Facebook are not scientific publications.

What do you mean by “social contract” exactly?

@Annabmt I am in process of getting a nursing degree, some of them are useful, others can be extremely harmful

Can you expand on this. It’s a bit odd as basically scaremongering. I have a medical degree and have practiced for several decades and want you to tell us, in your nursing course, what they have told you is extremely harmful. You can’t just say things like that with no qualification, it’s quite disingenuous.

We are pretty lucky here where I am (Australia), in that the vast majority of our ‘native’ population (by that I mean people born and permanently living here, as opposed to indigenous by definition) have been vaccinated. The man problem I faced over the decades were blow in’s from countries where this was not standard and they passed through A&E as their first pass.

The other fact is, while there are people who genuinely cannot be vaccinated, which is fine, for those who can but are not, they are relying on herd immunity. That is parents who simply choose not to do it without cause, are relying on everyone else to keep their kids safe. That’s piss poor.

Since all medical procedures carry risks, I don't see how a vaccine - that goes into a person's body - can be 'mandated'.

If a parent wants their own child to be vaccinated to protect THAT child, they should go right ahead. And if that child is protected by said vaccine, whether others then vaccinate or not is largely irrelevant. It either protects...or it doesn't!

Vaccine damage payment schemes exist for a reason. It's for that reason it should never be mandated.

Tell me you don’t understand science without telling me you don’t understand science.

The vaccines don’t need to be tested against placebo - the placebo is not vaccinating - and look how well that’s going with measles and whooping cough outbreaks killing children.

I can’t believe how many people are so happy to give up their rights, and more importantly those of their children, to the State!

If your vaccine works, how exactly are you being 'put at risk' by those choosing not to have it? You're personally protected from your own vaccine, no?

I think Australia has got it about right.

I don't think DC should have their educations limited by a ban on state schooling during the Compulsory School Age years for the unvaccinated, but have no difficulty with providers outside CSA requiring vaccines.

Exemptions should be only for those whose doctors attest there is a medical need to avoid some/all (but they should still be required to have the ones that are not contraindicated). And for those who have recently arrived from overseas, whose GP can attest that they have embarked on a catch-up programme.

The religions which eschew all medical intervention are very few and small in number, so wouldn't make any real difference to the herd, so I'd be inclined to let that be an exemption too, but it would have to be an established religion (no Jedi Warriors of convenience) with an annual certificate of observance/attendance from a specified leader of that religion.

I have no problem with a two-tier rate of family-related benefits, because the path to access the higher level is free and available to all.

I think people should have the choice not to vaccinate, BUT I agree that children should not be allowed to to attend nursery/school without immunisation.

With rights comes responsibility and we all surely understand there needs to be some sort of idea of what behaviours help to support a functioning society.

There's always a small percentage in whom the vaccine does not "take" properly.

Plus of course concern for the most vulnerable in society (those who cannot receive eg all live vaccines tend to be those with fairy severe immune system issues)

I suppose it all boils down to whether you want there to be such a thing as society, or if you're a Thatcherite who sees instead a bunch of individuals