Reporting Of Child Vaccine Status In New Hampshire To Become Voluntary For Dumb Parents
Reporting Of Child Vaccine Status In New Hampshire To Become Voluntary For Dumb Parents
Live free or die from whooping cough!
After consulting our broker, we have a new financial strategy: sell all our shares of Trump Media Group stock and invest the proceeds in iron lung futures.
Also we’re staying the fuck out of New Hampshire for the foreseeable future, thanks to the state’s legislature and its wingnut contingent –- which is to say, the vast majority of it –- and the bill it recently passed that removes a requirement of parents to show proof their kids have gotten polio and measles vaccines when enrolling in childcare.
What could possibly go wrong here, Franklin Delano Roosevelt cries from beyond the grave.
The bill would make New Hampshire the first state in America to have such a law, presumably as overcompensation for losing its first-in-the-nation status for presidential primaries recently. Now, apparently, the state legislature is out for revenge.
New Hampshire’s move comes just a month after the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that the total number of cases of reported measles cases had already surpassed the total number reported for all of last year. So clearly what the nation needs is for as many states as possible to stomp on the accelerator.
The rise in vaccine hesitancy has been ongoing for better than a decade thanks to the discredited idea that the childhood MMR vaccine that helps prevent measles and polio can cause autism in children. New Hampshire’s schools have not been (ahem) immune from this trend:
The target for what epidemiologists call “herd immunity” for measles is a 95% vaccination rate.
But the level of MMR vaccination reported by New Hampshire child care centers has dropped below that rate in all but two counties, according to the most recent data collected by the state Division of Public Health Services.
Statewide, the rate for MMR vaccination at child care centers for the 2023-24 school year is 92.6%. That’s down from 95% the previous two school years, when most counties reached or exceeded the 95% goal.
Seems bad! In addition to only two counties meeting the target rate this year, three counties were below 91 percent for the year. Which is much too low.
Naturally, this has health officials and epidemiologists in New Hampshire, a state that has not had a resident diagnosed with measles since 2011, clutching their heads in dismay:
“It’s one of the most contagious diseases that we have to deal with in public health and in the medical community,” Chan said. “Even a single case of measles, even a single introduction, has the ability to spread very easily to other people who are not vaccinated, and that can set up an outbreak that can be very difficult and costly to control.”
Oh sure, they said that about the coronavirus too, and look at how that worked o- … wait, never mind.
“It’s easy to dismiss something when it hasn’t been a big issue,” Pragani said. “But if vaccine rates decline, then it’s very possible that we’ll start seeing these things again.”
Remember when the Supreme Court tossed out a chunk of the Voting Rights Act on the specious conclusion that because the VRA was working in ensuring access to the ballot for minorities, it was no longer needed? And then within literally hours, certain states started passing new laws to restrict ballot access for minorities? This vaccine decision reminds us of that, only for crippling diseases instead of voting rights.
One of the bill’s Republican sponsors, Rep. Ross Berry of Manchester, dismissed concerns by saying that the bill is only eliminating a “needless paperwork requirement” for childcare centers, of which there are 700 or so in the state. Berry says the requirement to actually get the vaccine remains in place, though how that requirement would actually be enforceable if a parent doesn’t have to prove their kid has the MMR vaccine is, to put it mildly, unclear.
Would it surprise you to learn that Berry, when he’s not pushing bills in the state legislature to roll back 75 years of public health, runs a childcare center? It wouldn’t? You must be a regular here.
The bill is now in the state Senate, but hope for killing it appears to lie with Governor Chris Sununu, who has a mixed record as far as public health is concerned, having in the past signed a few pro-public health bills and then following it up by killing a few others. He has not said one way or the other how he’s leaning on this one.
Well, Sununu has sent mixed signals on his support for the democracy-killing Donald Trump, why wouldn’t he be wishy-washy about a people-killing disease? About the only difference is that only one of those two killers overdoes it with the bronzer.
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I'm an old. So old that MMR vax didn't exist when I was a kid. In fact the only vax that I could have were for polio and smallpox. So I had all those childhood illnesses. Measles left me hearing-impaired. That shizz is for life. And it only gets worse as I get older.
Measles can kill. It can lead to encephalitis. It can leave people blind. Measles has consequences. It is also highly contagious.
What irks me the most about these mo-rons is that they've never seen the disaster that these childhood illnesses can wreak because you can bet their parents vaccinated them.
Grrr.
With measles on the rise in Florida because of the idiocy of the so-called surgeon general (also referred to as a QUACK), let's hope and pray that infantile paralysis, or even the other major killers of children do not come back - unless of course, parents in those states enjoy playing vaccine Russian Roulette with their children's lives. Perhaps pictures like the one posted here should be on billboards across the US advertising what the lack of vaccination for polio did to those of my generation and before. This is not a matter of religious preference, it is a LIFE and DEATH business. These diseases kill, maim, sterilize, and debilitate people. Vaccinations save lives. Get them.