Education Is The Key: Utah And Other States Find Vaccine Refusal Rates Climbing; Both Sides Cite Education
As the new school year is upon us, more and more stories are coming out about vaccinations and the kids whose parents refuse to get them vaccinated prior to starting class.
Many parents cite reasons ranging from religious objections, to health objections–for instance if a child has an allergy that could be triggered by a vaccine–and also personal objections. These can be anything from a belief that vaccines are harmful to simply objecting to being forced to pay for them, further fattening the coffers of the Big Pharma giants as well as the Federal government in the form of royalties paid on vaccines.
But there are some strange rumblings about, in the volatile world of vaccines and the controversy they engender. In California for instance, a judge recently refused to block a mandatory child vaccination law that would eliminate the personal and religious beliefs exemption for opting out of vaccinations. This bit of heavy-handedness has raised the hackles of many people who are anti-vaccine–as well as some who were previously on the fence about them, and thus may have had the unintended consequence of creating more opposition to vaccinations–certainly to mandatory vaccinations.
In Utah, another hotbed of anti-vaccine sentiment, and where there is no such law mandating vaccines as there is in California, the number of children who are attending schools unvaccinated has reached nearly 5 percent. This is a staggering figure when you consider the weight that the pro-vaccine argument has behind it in the form of the CDC, the AMA, and the local, state and federal governments all browbeating parents into getting their children shots.
But of those 4.6 percent of children whose families have refused to get them vaccinated, 95 percent listed their reasons for refusing as “personal.” For many families this means seeking out their own information on vaccines and the problems that can arise and have arisen when people are given them.
Japan, for instance, currently does not recommend the HPV vaccine for instance, due to an alarming rate of young girls and women who were stricken by debilitating symptoms shortly after being vaccinates with it. In Colombia protests against government recalcitrance on resolving the same HPV issue affecting thousands of girls are ongoing.
For many parents, that’s plenty to turn them away from the vaccination roundabout.
“My parents educated themselves on it, chose not to vaccinate me, I chose not to vaccinate my kids,” said one Utah parent, Jared St. Clair in a Fox31now interview. “We made that decision based on the best information we could find.”
In Utah, anyway, the number of refuseniks seem to be climbing. It will be interesting to see how California’s law plays out. Lawmakers’ tactics there may well backfire.
Send an email to the campaigns of each of the four major presidential candidates demanding that they support our inalienable right to Informed Consent, even for vaccines. Do that here: http://tinyurl.com/VaxFreeChoice
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http://fox13now.com/2016/08/25/nearly-5-of-utah-students-opted-out-of-vaccination-both-sides-of-debate-tout-education/