My point wasn't that decisions about their children's health should be taken out of their hands. What I took exception to was the implication that vaccination is something that parents should be deciding upon for themselves
Did typing this result in any cognitive dissonance?
Are you serious? You took two sentences and pieced them together?There was one sentence in between the two, which was only clarifying your support for the first statement. There is a difference between expressing a nuanced view on something and supporting one statement while rejecting a paraphrase of said statement.
Again, you are distorting my position, and obfuscating the issue by referring to "vaccination" as a single issue rather than vaccinations for specific diseases. Given the possibility that illegal migrants or travelers will bring diseases long since eradicated in the United States into the country, the costs of not getting vaccinated for diseases like measles far outweigh the minute risk of having a poor reaction to the vaccine. However, if a disease almost exclusively affects certain high-risk groups whom young children are not especially likely to constitute, then I fail to see the harm in delaying the child's vaccination schedule for said disease until they can decide for themselves. Vaccinations as a precondition for entry into public facilities should be restricted to those diseases which are airborne or highly contagious, unless you think there is a high chance of kindergartners sharing their blood, semen, or IV needles with each other.
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And my point was that putting these types of public health decisions in the hands of people who largely do not know any better is potentially very hazardous. You seemed to ignore this.
And are you going to argue that blood-to-blood contact amongst school age children isn't a possibility? Or that they couldn't somehow contact the blood of an adult?
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I would think the prevention of using public facilities for those unvaccinated for risky illnesses would incentivize appropriate vaccinations, and as for the nutters, they should not pose a problem so long as they are made to either homeschool or find a private institution that caters to their ridiculousness.
I would not want to send a child to any public facility where a considerable risk of coming into contact with the blood (or worse) of an Hepatitis B-positive adult existed, regardless of whether or not they were vaccinated.