My main concern here is not with one particular vaccine or another. It's with the anti-vaccination movement in general. The arguments against vaccination are based on bogus science that has been thoroughly debunked. Withholding vaccination from children places them at risk of enormous suffering. There have been several recent mini-epidemics of measles in the past few years due to failure to vaccinate. I'd hate to see polio return to this country.
"Immune disorders" being an issue, of course, becaue of AIDS. But if that's the case, why do we give the immunizations to very young children and immunize people with a vaccine where the immunity wears off instead of letting them take their chances as children to get the real disease, which confers lifetime immunity, and then vaccinate anyone who doesn't get it as a child as an adult? And let's not forget that 10%-15% of the vaccinations don't actually stop Chicken Pox, either.
Plus, zoster, which can be extremely unpleasant, occurs in people who have had chicken pox.
Sure, but how many 40 and 50 year-olds are checking up on their vaccinations and are getting booster shots for Chicken Pox, which they need with the vaccine, and what happens when they get Chicken Pox, instead, as an adult because they weren't immune? Or what if they just don't have immunity because the vaccine didn't take?
As for the HPV vaccine, the main purpose of this vaccine is to prevent cervical cancer in women. If most women are vaccinated it's hard to argue that vaccinating boys adds much value, especially considering the very high cost of the vaccine. Although I expect the FDA to soon approve vaccinating boys it's arguably not cost effective
As the original studies that showed the link between HPV and cervical cancer demonstrated, promiscuous men are the primary reason why there is so much HPV and how women get it. The argument for vaccinating boys is to stop the spread to unvaccinated women because no vaccine is 100%. If they are going to mandate it for girls, then they should mandate it for boys using the same "herd immunity" argument used to justify the other mandates. If it's only for personal protection, then any and all vaccines should be a matter of personal choice since that choice only affects the person taking or not taking the vaccine. If it's a mandate, it should be a mandate for everyone, just like Rubella (mainly a danger to pregnant women, not men) and Chicken Pox or Mumps (male sterility).
My main concern here is not with one particular vaccine or another. It's with the anti-vaccination movement in general.
And I'm not opposed to vaccination in principle. My kids have had most of theirs. I'm opposed to a government mandate telling parents what to do with their children and with vaccine companies who don't seem to care what the consumers think or want becaues they have the force of a government mandate behind them. It's the mandate that scares a lot of people, makes it difficult to opt out of a few vaccinations, or (most importantly) makes it difficult for parents to wait until their children are older and past the point where Autism and other problems set in to vaccinate their children.
The arguments against vaccination are based on bogus science that has been thoroughly debunked.
If the government weren't so intent on forcing parents to vaccinate their children as young infants, before things like autism become apparent, then manybe nobody would be blaming the vaccines in the first place. And maybe if parents were free to wait until their chilren were 4 or 5 and could give their kids separate Measles, Mumps, and Rubella vaccines, there would be less aniety and the connection would be broken. It's government policy that forced a schedule of MMR vaccines that coincides with the onset of obvious Autism symptoms and it would be a lot easier to show a connection or lack of connection if there was more flexibility in the vaccination schedule. The schedule created the correlation, which people see as causation.
But even then, the anti vaccination crowd have served a valuable purpose by getting the mercury out of childhood vaccines and by asking questions that should be asked about he safety of mixing and matching certain vaccines and about the cumulative effects as opposed to individual effects. People should always be allowed to raise questions like that.
Withholding vaccination from children places them at risk of enormous suffering. There have been several recent mini-epidemics of measles in the past few years due to failure to vaccinate. I'd hate to see polio return to this country.
Sure, but by defending every vaccine like Chicken Pox or HPV as if it were Polio or Small Pox undermines that argument because people know that Chicken Pox isn't like Polio and the idea of a "Chicken Pox epidemic" doesn't frighten people and the possibility of a bad epidemic of Chicken Pox is made worse by the vaccine because unless adults get boosters, they can lose their immunity while those who have had the disease as children (becoming more rare) will be immune for life.