Miscellanea Agnostica

The anti-vaccine movement, about which I’ve blogged before, has found a new demographic to exploit — healthcare workers in New York state — and a new vaccine to bellyache about — the H1N1 (aka “swine flu”) vaccine that will be released soon (as the CBS News Taking Liberties blog reports):

Health care workers are planning to take to the streets Tuesday at a rally in front of the Albany, N.Y. state capitol to protest mandatory vaccination.

The rally is intended to call for “freedom of choice in vaccination and health care” and to protest mandatory vaccination for influenza and the H1N1 swine flu. “This vaccine has not been clinically tested to the same degree as the regular flu vaccine,” Tara Accavallo, a registered nurse on Long Island, told Newsday. “If something happens to me, if I get seriously injured from this vaccine, who’s going to help me?”

Well, of course the H1N1 vaccine hasn’t had the decades of testing that the conventional flu vaccine has. It never will have that amount of testing until more decades have passed; if the vaccine is never released until that length of time has passed, any chance to arrest H1N1 will have been lost. They may as well never develop an H1N1 vaccine, if this is the standard that must be met. Of course this is foolish … and of course healthcare workers know it. The report continues:

State Health Commissioner Richard Daines, who is probably feeling a bit of political pressure after deciding that the Empire State will go where no other state has, released a lengthy open letter last week that concludes: “We, as health care workers, owe it to our patients and to society in general to demonstrate our confidence in those scientific standards. Even more importantly, we should reconfirm our noble commitment to the tradition of putting patients’ interests first by supporting the mandatory influenza vaccination requirement.”

What should be noted, too, is that New York state … and the metro NYC area … were “hotbeds” of H1N1 occurrence in the US. Containing this virus in New York is much more important, and will have a greater effect on transmission around the country, than elsewhere.

Next related item:

Outside the realm of healthcare workers in New York state, the irrationality surrounding vaccines has hit new highs, and has led to truly strange, if not utterly dangerous, things like “swine flu parties” (as reported by US News & World Report):

[Question:] I’ve heard that some parents are throwing “swine flu parties” for their kids with the intent of exposing them to the virus now, while it’s mild, so that kids have enough immunity to fight the virus off. Is this a good idea?

[Answer by] Judith Palfrey, M.D.: While parents want to protect their children from infections, exposing them to illness is not a prudent practice. I asked Dr. Thomas Sandora, the director of infection control at Children’s Hospital in Boston, to give his advice. Here’s what he had to say:

“Swine flu parties are a dangerous gamble and a big mistake. The novel H1N1 influenza virus is predicted to be the predominant circulating strain of flu in the country this winter. It is true that infection with an influenza virus can produce immunity to that strain—that’s the principle by which vaccination works. However, catching this novel H1N1 flu virus can be extremely dangerous. …

“The idea of parties designed to expose children to infections is not new—in the past, some people have hosted ‘chicken pox parties’ in an attempt to expose their children to varicella, often with the goal of avoiding vaccination. But chicken pox can also have fatal complications, so it’s a huge gamble. In my opinion, intentionally exposing your child to a potentially fatal infection is never a risk worth taking.”

I’d never heard of “swine flu parties” before and have no idea how common they are. For all I know they’re just an urban legend that no one actually takes a chance on. But if they are happening, all I can say is — in the words of G’Kar on Babylon 5 (episode “Revelations”) — “Weep for the future; weep for us all.” Because we’ll have fallen into a chasm of irrationality out of which we may never be able to climb.

Tags: anti-vaccine, antivaccine, H1N1, h1n1 vaccine, healthcare, mandatory vaccination, new york, new york state, new york state health care commissioner, richard daines, tara accavallo, vaccination, vaccine, vaccine scare, weep for the future

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 at 12:11 pm and is filed under Fuzzy Thinking, General, Metaphysics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.