California kindergarten vaccination rates soar

Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/04/13/california-kindergarten-vaccin.html

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Dang, kind of wish my brother hadn’t blocked me on FB now. I’d have liked to see his reaction hehe.

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Now pair it with a graph of autism rates and watch all the post-facto justifications…mmmmm…

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I don’t know why it’s so satisfying, but I love seeing identifiable time lags in data sets like this.* The now discredited Wakefield paper was published in 1998 - children born that year would mostly enter kindergarten in 2003, the first year you see a decline in California kindergarten vaccination rates. Obviously there could be other factors involved too.

*saying that, I also hate that so many people risked their childrens’ well-being because of this paper.

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Wonder what brought that about?

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“soar”? Truncated Y Axes suck. We could have gotten a “wow” factor from other statistics that wouldn’t generate misleading graphs - “Percentage of unvaccinated kindergartners cut by almost two thirds in two years” would be a good one. Or better, “Percentage of unvaccinated kindergartners drops from ~8% to ~2.5%”

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Yeah, it’s a real wonder what a governmental threat will do. You do realize, I hope, that kindergarten vaccination rates in CA are soaring because the unvaccinated kids are all homeschooling because they’re not allowed to attend public classes? Doh.

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That’s a feature, not a bug. If you keep your kids unvaccinated, then keep the cute little unwitting disease vectors out of the public sphere.

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Thank goodness, wonder if those stats and the law encompass private institutions.

If you won’t vaccinate little Billy who’s perfectly healthy, then it’s reckless endangerment to let him hang out with little Bobby who’s undergoing Leukemia treatment. Or Sally who’s allergic to eggs and can’t be vaccinated.

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Interesting. My “cute little disease vectors” were consistently healthier than their allergy-ridden peers at school. In fact, we took them out and started homeschooling because of the obvious health risk from the immunodeficient. They’re adults now and still don’t get nearly as sick as their peers.

It “worked” if you look at the percent vaccinated (although although those home schoolers might indeed skew the percentages as pointed out above). But did it work in terms of reducing the number of measles cases? Don’t get me wrong, I fully support vaccination and believe the anti-vaxxers are ijits, but the conclusion seems slightly inaccurate.

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Cool epidemiology, internet rando. What was your sample size again?

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Have you never heard of asymptomatic infection?

Sure your kids individually might get sick less often than [someone in your school’s population]. But that doesn’t mean your unvaccinated children don’t put others at risk.

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No, you see “my kids never get sick” proves science wrong.

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We likely won’t have the definitive stats on how many measles outbreaks these vaccinations prevented for many years to come. It’s not just a matter of “how many now-vaccinated kids would have likely contracted measles between 2014 and today,” but “how many of those people would have likely contracted measles at some later point in their lives.

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Welcome to BoingBoing, new user! I’m sure you’ll be very happy here.

And congratulations on including almost every single known and disproven anti-vaxxer fallacy in one short post, without citing evidence and relying only on your own unverifiable and anecdotal ‘evidence’.

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I don’t think you know what “untested” means.

As for the chemistry, nobody is injecting anyone with elemental mercury in ANY quantity. Some preservatives used in vaccines contained chemical compounds that included a mercury atom, but that’s like saying “you’re feeding your children lethal SODIUM and IODINE!” to someone who prepares food with table salt.

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That’s simply not true. The CDC has pretty detailed statistics freely available. Would you like me to prove that you don’t know what you’re talking about?

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It sounds like one major common denominator to all those “children who were severely and irreparably damaged” and “SIDS babies lost” is YOU. Based on my research, simply knowing or being around you may be harmful to children.

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