Senator and doctor Rand Paul condemns mandatory vaccines amid measles outbreak - Polidicks

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/03/05/rand-paul-mandatory-vaccines-measles-1240542 Sen. Rand Paul on Tuesday railed against government-mandated vaccines, suggesting they infringe on personal rights, during a congressional hearing on immunizations' role in protecting the public from preventable diseases like the current measles outbreak sweeping parts of the country. Paul (R-Ky.), a doctor, said he and his children are vaccinated and that he believes the benefits of vaccines outweigh the risks. "But I still do not favor giving up on liberty for a false sense of security," Paul said during the Senate health committee hearing, where he was the only lawmaker to raise doubts over vaccinations. Paul, who made similar comments during his 2016 presidential bid, argued that vaccines aren't always effective — pointing to the seasonal influenza vaccines that protect only against certain strands — and said it is "wrong to say there are no risks to vaccines," drawing applause from anti-vaccination advocates attending the hearing. Paul's comments were quickly rebuked by his Republican colleague and a fellow doctor, Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who said he knew patients who needed liver transplants because they avoided vaccinations. He and other witnesses pointed out that communities become vulnerable to preventable infections when not enough people have been vaccinated, a concept known as herd immunity.

Dipshit.

Rand Paul is a public health hazard

“Vaccines only stop certain strands therefore we shouldn’t use them” what a fucking stupid argument

Rand Paul hasn't solved all of America's problems therefore he should not be given food or shelter from anyone. What do you mean that's not fair Mr. Paul?

Paul, who made similar comments during his 2016 presidential bid, argued that antibiotics aren't always effective — pointing to narrow-spectrum antibiotics that treat only certain infections — and said it is "wrong to say there are no risks to antibiotics," drawing applause from pro-disease advocates attending the hearing Literally the same logic, yet for some reason anybody who would even try to make this argument would get shot down by everybody immediately.

seems fair when your world view revolves around simple solutions to everything.

Trump has shown that 1/3 of humanity is too dumb to accept anything but simple solutions.

I guess they give doctor's licenses to just anybody anymore.

There's got to be some kind of stupid conspiracy here. Has there been some kind of massive fake push for anti-vaccines from some hostile country? And it's just clicking with the right kind of stupid person? Are the people in charge getting paid a lot or blackmailed to push this shit? It just doesn't add up.

Russia has been confirmed pushing both pro and anti-vaccination content to divide people.

Russia realized they can't destroy us with war, so they're killing us from the inside out. Impressive.

Rand Paul is occasionally reasonable but this is stupid. Libertarianism is supposed to be about freedom as long as it doesn't infringe on others' freedom. I am pretty sure measles killing you counts as affecting freedom.

A very simple test to prove vaccines work. A person with a rabies vaccine and an anti-vaccine nutter are each bitten by a rabid animal. The person who's still alive six months down the line is correct.

Source?

Very optimistic estimate. They way I see it politics probably everywhere are dominated by people who claim they have simple solutions for problems nobody might have any sort of solutions to.

Excuse me but how is stabbing children and pumping goop into them not a violation of the NAP? It's about as evil as non-toll roads, mate.

I mean I have a hard time disagreeing that mandatory vaccines infringe on personal liberty - barring non-vaccinated kids (if they are physically able to be vaccinated) from public schooling would work around this issue, but sadly includes personal costs to those non-vaccinated kids just because their parents are idiots. I don't think mandatory vaccines are really needed to attain adequate coverage, though, large scale information campaigns and integrating vaccines as a part of starting in school should be enough. Beyond that, measles is not a fun disease by any means, but it is also very rarely fatal (0.1-0.2% of cases) in the Western world. Increasing coverage of the influenza vaccine (by making it free or whatever), would probably save more lives and be more cost-effective.

sorry, what the fuck is a pro-disease advocate. jesus christ it's like those people who think looking at the sun is good for you.

People who think getting sick as a child makes them stronger basically. Give your children a bunch of preventable diseases to give them hyper immune systems, or maybe kill them.

They always have been. The cold war never ended, it just got even colder. Can't burn a man's house down? Freeze him to death.

When your team is called "pro-disease" its at that point you should realize you are being an evil idiot.

1: Clearly, not having mandatory vaccines is NOT enough, because we're having outbreaks of diseases thought to be totally eradicated in America thanks to anti-vax. 2: The flu shot is one of the few rare cases where the vaccine isn't truly effective. It's total guesswork whether or not the strain they choose is the correct one. Atop that, the Flu isn't exactly the world's most dangerous disease. The vast majority of us can beat the flu with little more than some OJ and bedrest. If you wanna push people to get shots, try some shots that are a bit more reliable and protect from more dangerous diseases, like, say, idunno, the MMR vaccine...

I think the underlying argument was that 'it's not worth taking a vaccine that doesn't cover everything, because of the risks of a vaccine, i.e. the negative effects' without any evidence for whatever risks there should be with vaccines. So yeah, still a completely dumb argument when there's nothing to back it.

Having an outbreak of a disease "thought to be eradicated" (let's ignore that the technical term would be "eliminated") does not mean it's necessarily justified to force medical treatment on everyone. MMR coverage in the US remains pretty high (in the low-mid 90's), and there really aren't many cases of measles per year. https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/185359/2d188333-f847-4d1f-b02b-7336e1a27304/image.png Keep in mind that the mortality rate is around 0.1-0.2%. It's true that the flu shot doesn't protect you against all strains, but you clearly don't know what you're talking about. Influenza is a deadly disease, especially in the elderly population, but we literally had two - otherwise healthy - 30-40 year olds in our ICU last week because of it (ignoring that many of the other older patients also had it), and two 20-year olds died from it recently here in Denmark as well. When it comes to the US, well: As it does for the numbers of flu cases, doctor’s visits and hospitalizations, CDC also estimates deaths in the United States using mathematical modeling. CDC estimates that from 2010-2011 to 2013-2014, influenza-associated deaths in the United States ranged from a low of 12,000 (during 2011-2012) to a high of 56,000 (during 2012-2013). Summary of the 2017 So between a high of 667 measles cases in 2014 (with a mortality rate of 0.1-0.2%) and a disease that costs literally tens of thousands of lives (and many more hospitalizations) ever year, the more dangerous one is the former? Even with the flu shots flaws, and the fact that those who die from the flu are usually the elderly, you would have to vaccinate many more people with the MMR vaccine to save one life compared to the flu, simply because measles - even in the non-vaccinated population - is rare, and deaths are even more rare. That is of course because many people are already vaccinated, meaning that disease has a hard time spreading - maintaining that coverage is essential, but expanding it is less so. Mandatory vaccines and medical interventions in general need to be justified in the extreme. Taking away agency from parents, however stupid they are, shouldn't be taken lightly.

If they want to get sick, so be it. The top antivax argument that vaccines cause autism is wrong anyway - it's EMF but whatever

It's not just them that are going to get sick though, that's the issue. If only anti-vax people got disease, it'd be a different story but there are people who cannot get vaccinated, allergic to vaccines in a way.

I've seen your argumentation that the end all be all solution is education on several topics around the forum. While I ultimately agree in the importance of education, I still take issue with anytime you make that argument. As an educator and medical professional in training however, I feel compelled to finally respond to this line of thinking on this particular issue. So with my biases listed, forgive me if this comes off particularly aggressive, I am only trying to give my 2 cents. Education is critical to the long term viability of any policy decision, and should always be accounted, budgeted, and accommodated for. However any long term solution has to be married with a short term solution or else in this case, and I say this with as little emotion I can muster, people will needlessly die. Our standard of western healthcare was not obtained by simply educating doctors, nurses, and hospital workers about the importance of washing their hands and just expecting them to change their habits overnight. Our standard of food quality is not regulated by educating feedlots and slaughter plants in appropriate animal handling and trusting they comply. Better public education is not a panacea that fixes everything and anything, especially in an age where people can so easily find some hack that supports their worldview on the internet. Public education is a massive social engineering effort that takes at least a generation to take effect even for the tiniest, common sense things like smoking. I think your standpoint and your argument about influenza being more dangerous than the measles showcases just how much you take our current situation for granted. The only reason you can make such argumentation is the amount of effort that public servants, health professionals, and teachers have put into educating populace. That you can make a relatively nuanced argument speaks for how far we have come. Imagine pulling some schmuck off the streets of New York in the early 1900's and asking his or her opinion on Typhoid Mary. At this point, I feel it's very difficult to expand education on vaccines more without it edging on the border of indoctrination. And that influenza is more dangerous than measles might be true from a purely statistical standpoint. Yes more people die from complications of the flu in the us than measles each year. But that's because the flu is really fucking hard to develop a vaccine for, we already have an incredibly effective measles vaccine, and we have the good fortune to live in nations that have effectively deployed this vaccine to minimize the damage it can cause. In a neck to neck race between the unvaccinated, measles is more contagious than the flu, much more severe than the flu, and much more deadly than the flu. The effective herd immunity for measles requires a successfully vaccinated population of 95%, and room to exempt oneself from the vaccination only erodes at this very precious resource. The only reason we are afforded the luxury of having this argument is because of the incredibly successful measures that have already been put in place, and we shouldn't take for granted that these measures that take very active effort to maintain. As a final point I understand your standpoint is not just "vaccines bad" so I'm not going to talk to you nor label you as an just some anti-vaxxer. But let me be very upfront that your viewpoint is not nuanced and does not rise above our brow-beating, freedom-hating, stick-em-all-let-god-sort-out-his-own approach of the others in this thread. All because you're arguing that the solution is more education not more legislation doesn't make you enlightened, it makes you naive.

Pre-post edit: I've included what I originally wrote below, because that seems more intellectually honest. After writing all that, I've gathered that vaccines are "mandatory" in the US already - just with exemptions for something so vague as "personal beliefs" (which would make them "non-mandatory" imo, but I digress). As I'm not from the US, I wasn't exactly clear on how the current vaccination program works, and I thus assumed that Rand Paul was arguing against introducing a new mandatory (that is, a 100% forced, no-exceptions program) rather than arguing that the current program is somehow infringing on personal liberty. The news article doesn't make that clear, but I could've done more research myself, so I apologise for that. Feel free to read what I originally wrote, and I'll stand by that additional flu shots would probably be more effective in preventing deaths than expanding measles vaccine coverage from ~92% to a 100%, even though that point is kind of moot now. Original post: I'm a medical student myself. I haven't seen a paper comparing the NNTs of additional measles or flu vaccines in the US, the NNT for the flu shot is around 71 (http://www.thennt.com/nnt/vaccines-preventing-influenza-healthy-individuals/). About 4 million children are born each year, so let's say around 3.8m of those get vaccinated for measles (that's assuming 95% coverage, assuming less would give us a higher NNT). Let's also assume a high number of measles cases in a given year, 300 - that would give us an NNT of around 666. That's assuming higher than current coverage, and a high amount of measles cases. Obviously the NNT wouldn't be constant, as herd immunity would kick in, but I digress. Now feel free to argue that measles is 10 times as dangerous as the flu - I haven't personally seen a patient with measles, and I'm simply going off what I can find, statistically, about death rates and complications. I'm ready to be taught something. What you can't do, however, is assume that foregoing mandatory (and I'm gonna assume this means "forced", but feel free to correct me if that's really not what we're talking about here) measles vaccines going forward will necessarily lower the vaccine coverage in the US. My stance is that measles in a population with >90% vaccine coverage is less worthy of attention than influenza that has, albeit with a flawed vaccine, around 40-50% coverage. How can you seriously argue, from a stance of rational pharmacology, that expanding coverage in a disease where literally less than one person dies a year in the US, is more important than preventing a disease that kills so, so many more? What's important isn't how effective the vaccine itself is at preventing disease, it literally is how many vaccines we have to hand out to prevent one case of the disease - that is, a function of both effectiveness and prevalence. Analogy time: If you could pick between two super powers, being either a 100% impervious to plane crashes or randomly survive 1/3rd of the car crashes you otherwise wouldn't, which power would you pick? Obviously the latter, because car crashes are much more common. I'll remind you that I literally proposed making vaccines a requirement for attending public schooling as the first thing in my first post. I'm in favour of doing a lot of things to maintain, and hopefully expand coverage, but personally I feel that overriding parental authority is very, very harsh step that really should be reserved for the most serious of situations. I literally never said anything resembling that vaccines are bad, if you're even humouring that idea, maybe your reading comprehension is lacking. Just for you: MMR vaccine = good MMR Vaccine coverage should be a 100% People who are afraid of getting autistic kids because of vaccines = retards Mandatory MMR vaccine = not necessarily justified, currently Patient autonomy is paramount, and to a lesser extent, so is parents' right to decide themselves what's best for their kids.

It's not crazy to suggest that allowing the government to forcibly inject people with something -- giving them that power -- might not be a good idea for the future. It's not really about the vaccines, guys. Bad precedents usually get set with good intentions.