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Reblogged:Capitalism Would Immunize Against Anti-Vaxxers

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Human Resources expert Suzanne Lucas explains why businessmen should encourage their employees to keep vaccinations up-to-date for themselves and their families. For example:

[W]hen an unvaccinated boy in Oregon contracted tetanus, he spent 57 days in the hospital -- and ended up with an $800,000 bill. If that were your employee on your health care plan, you wouldn't doubt why your rates were going up. [link removed]
That's an extreme example, but Lucas correctly notes that vaccination rates are down. The situation, invited by the anti-vaccination movement and its long-discredited "science", causes many other costs that can quickly add up, in the forms of lost productivity and easily-avoidable draws on benefits.

Common sense suggests that the single most effective way an employer could obviate many of these problems would be to make up to date vaccination a condition of employment, and offer incentives to employees who can prove their families are vaccinated.

But Lucas's column shows that that idea is way out the window. Just look at how current regulations make it easy for anti-vaxxers to escape the financial consequences of endangering their own health, that of those around them, and that of the their own children:
vaccination.jpg
Image by whitesession, via Pixabay, license.
And it's not just the medical costs -- you also have to consider the costs of spending time away from work. Parents, in this situation, would be eligible for leave via the Family and Medical Leave Act to take care of their sick child, and of course you would want them to feel empowered to take time to be at the hospital. But you'd also be understandably upset about having to deal with the fallout of a completely avoidable situation. [bold added]
And later:
[O]utside of a health care setting, you can't require your employees to be vaccinated. [bold added]
And it goes without saying that taking care to not employ anti-vaxxers would invite a lawsuit, although it should not.

So employers can't elect not to hire such Luddites in the first place. This exposes them to lost productivity costs and increases their health insurance costs (which ObamaCare wrongly makes impossible for many firms to opt out of) and then they are forced to give leave, sparing such people from the consequences of their own choices -- at the cost of the more prudent employees who didn't get sick because they did get vaccinated. (Family leave is a great benefit, but it is not a right, and the government has no business forcing employers to provide benefits of any kind.)

Fortunately, there are things employers can do, as Lucas's column indicates. But long-range, the best thing we all can do to counter the anti-vaccination movement is to advocate more freedom for business owners to choose their personnel and how to compensate them.

-- CAV

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Objectivist oldtimers may remember Dr. Jane Orient.  ARI featured her prominently in the 1990s for her writing against various regulations restricting doctors, especially regarding Medicare.  She is still concerned about his, for example Medicare for Bernie.

She ialso opposes making vaccination mandatory.  See for example:
Statement on Federal Vaccine Mandates.

Two other doctors with something to say on the side of skepticism are Dr. Meryl Nass:
Missing, hidden and destroyed adverse event data. Who vaccinates?

and the lawyer Patricia Finn.  She has a website and you can look her up with a search engine and in YouTube for more.

Gus van Horn is uninformed on the subject of vaccination.  I first got interested in the subject after reading A Shot in the Dark: Why the P in the DPT Vaccination May be Hazardous to Your Child's Health, the P standing for Pertussis (whooping cough).

 

 

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A Shot in the Dark: Why the P in the DPT Vaccination May be Hazardous to Your Child's Health

Curious, the title specifies children's health. A couple I know who recently had a daughter insisted prior to the event that they wanted me and others who might be around their child, to have a Pertussis vaccination. My daughter, who is an RN thinks the DPT is a good program. The immunization is not administered to newborns. It is implemented later on in their young lives.

Does the book make a differentiation of an age that DPT is no longer considered hazardous? Or specifically the risk, if any, in an adult?

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Dr. Meryl Nass has an article on Pertussis.

Since A Shot in the Dark came out, and I think partly in response to the splash it made, the Pertussis part of DPT was changed to what they had been using in Europe for some time and it is less dangerous today.  From reading the book, the evidence of an adverse reaction to the DPT vaccine in the earlier years was a persistent, inconsolable, single pitched scream, and the cause and result was brain damage.

One thing that will stay with me after reading that book is that vaccine manufacturers cannot be trusted.

If a child is otherwise healthy, whooping cough is not a major disease.  Furthermore, should the child get whooping cough, there are better ways of treating it today.  And even yesteryear, without treatment, it almost always was not life threatening.  

 

Edited by Dupin
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Pertussis comes across as a borderline example so far, especially given the difficulty suggested in arriving at a correct diagnosis.

This article was on the Real Clear Science page today and uses the poster-child of polio to grapple with the question of how many vaccines should be given, and at what ages. The article provides some groundwork to be taken under consideration, while downplaying the anti-vaxxers.

Are Immunization Schedules Evidence-based?

 

 

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Thanks for the link.

Ten different vaccines in the first year?  The author forestalls common sense with this gem:
“For some parents, common sense tells them that this is too many, and they should be spread out. Of course, common sense also tells us the earth is flat and that the sun revolves around the earth.”
This is as much an argument as:  “Common sense tells us that eating sand is a bad diet, but then common sense also tells us that the earth is flat and the ...”

Anyone who objects to anything about vaccines the author lumps in with “anti-vaxer.”  That’s why I like the first article I linked to by Dr. Meryl Nass.  She doesn’t say she is anti-vaccination, she asks what there might be to criticize about the promoted vaccination program.

 

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The OP does make mention of anti-vaxxers. As an anti-vaxxer, are they going through the list of vaccinations and ruling out Pertussis, or abstaining from all of them on religious or personal prejudice, or are all vaccines equally suspect?

Up to this point, flu shots get lots of publicity, and while considered by the promoters to be preventative, they are not bandied as a vaccination against the flu. They are considered "trivalent" and some "quadrivalent" vaccines. Has the correct strain(s) always been anticipated accurately, and is that sufficient reason to have or abstain from participating?

Some employers see value in promoting physical activity for their employees and offer a reimbursement perk for membership in local fitness centers in exchange for proof of attendance (not just  proof of membership dues.)

Edited by dream_weaver
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