34 Comments

You're not a cop, so not immune?

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No shots, no public school, no exceptions -- and I bet most private schools would follow suit. And forget about summer camp.

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If you could prove causation, definitely yes.

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"Animal kidney cells"? WTF other idiocies are in that book?

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You could sew certain patches to their clothes, for easy identification!

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Chickenpox, mumps and red measles -- I had all of them as a kid, the first two concurrently with my twin sister. We had the bad luck of being born about a decade before the MMR vaccine became available. I don't remember much about the first one (chickenpox), other than being told at the time that I had it. My parents said that the mumps made the two of us <i>very</i> sick, which I sort of vaguely remember. I remember that we both cried a lot, especially at night, and that experiencing the disease was no day at the beach.

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Kids <i>hate</i> getting shots because they genuinely do hurt. (Injections in general are more painful for children than they are for adults.) But the discomfort of a vaccination isn't anything compared to the pain of being sick.

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I've been accused of showing autocratic tendencies at times. Is that a related condition?

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big difference between allowing kids to be exposed to mild, wild germs sitting on your kitchen counter and exposing them to pandemic efficient machines that are designed to spread quickly and kill the victim only after they have infected anyone within arms reach.

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Hell, my wife took our first kid to a pox party in 1992. Second kid was able to get the vaccine, so did.

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I got to teach the dreaded "Orgo". You could have cut the paranoia with a knife. We handed out one "D", to a guy who not only cheated, but cheated stupidly and lazily and in a manner that showed how little he really knew. (At that particular high-falutin' institution, an "F" would vanish from his transcript as if it had never happened, so we figured the "D" was the real kiss of death.) He wisely chose not to take it up with the dean's office.

I imagine he went on to make a pile of money on Wall Street.

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The vax wasn't out in the wild until 1995, believe it or else.

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Or the cause of the downswing in IQs?

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Not enough Polio left to do the job. Maybe a TB epidemic?

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Oh, that was totally science-based -- signology, you know.

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I can sorta understand the "my kid gets sick, it'll make 'em tougher" mindset, as stupid and retrograde as it is. But as an individual with a compromised immune system the last thing I need are these jamokes mucking things up by saying "my rights overrule your rights".

You don't want your kid vaccinated? Fine. Here's a plastic bubble for them to live in.

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