Lora Hubbel doesn’t get to be on the ballot this year, but it seems she’s making a difference in public health. Following her various efforts to scare South Dakotans away from vaccinations, fewer South Dakotans are getting their kids shots:
South Dakota recently lost ground and slipped behind the national rate for early-childhood immunizations, according to data presented Friday at a statewide conference.
The South Dakota goal for children aged 19 to 35 months is 80 percent. The state rate reached 76.3 percent in 2014 but dropped since then to 75.6 in 2015 and 70.4 in 2016.
The national rate meanwhile also fell to 70.7 percent in 2016 [Bob Mercer, “South Dakota Hasn’t Yet Met Immunization Goal,” Black Hills Pioneer, 2018.08.18].
Hey, at least South Dakota isn’t doing worse than the rest of the U.S.!
We also learn from Mercer a new term for anti-vaccine paranoia: vaccine hesitancy. Such a nicer, gentler term than saying, quit listening to anti-science conspiracy theories and keep your kids and everyone else healthier.
If we had a pre-natal vaccine regimen the Pro-Lifers would control a women’s right to “hesitate” and the vaccinated rate would no doubt rise.
Porter Lansing writes:
Advocates of the unalienable rights to life and liberty believe parents should generally be free to raise their children as they choose, but not to kill them.
Those on the authoritarian left believe parents should generally be free to have their offspring killed in the womb, but not to forgo vaccinations.
If you can’t see the inconsistency in the latter view, you’re probably beyond my reach.
Trust me, Kurt. I’m well beyond your reach and moving farther away. It’s not a human life until it’s born and God blesses it with a soul. Before birth, Pro-Lifers believe they can tell a woman what to do with her fetus. So telling her she must submit to vaccination is well within what they believe they can do. BTW … Do cult leaders need to register in South Dakota?
I don’t know what it will take to make it clear to people that vaccines are safe. If an unvaccinated child infects another child with measles, for example, and that child dies, perhaps an enormous and successful lawsuit against the first family? Perhaps if people see that their baseless fears can lead to financial ruin . . . ? ? ?
Porter Lansing relies on an ancient Egyptian belief that the soul (Ka) enters the body with the first breath and leaves with the last, and believes that this totally defunct religious belief should inform public policy.
Adherents to that ancient religion are usually found in the Democratic Party, for reasons as yet unexplained. And they haven’t adopted other practices such as mummifying their dead cats. Or themselves.
But no matter, it is enough for them to believe in the Ka.
Meanwhile, medical science has determined that life begins and ends with electrical activity in the brain, people have been successfully resuscitated after full cardiopulmonary arrests, and their Souls haven’t gone anywhere. Science has proved it. Additionally, everybody who has undergone a procedure with general anesthesia has stopped breathing. But they aren’t dead.
All fifty states have brain death laws, affirming the scientific definition of life.
But the adherents of that ancient religion would still have us believe that life begins and ends with respiration.
I wish they would stick to mummifying dead cats.
That’s interesting Anne. Totally irrelevant to childhood immunizations or a woman’s right to control her own body. I know you didn’t bring it up first or even 2nd.
Any religion is 100% irrelevant to laws affecting a woman’s right to control her own body.
grudznick claps for Ms. Geelsdottire. Any religion is indeed a sham.
Dangit, there goes kurt making sense while the rest of you want to beat around the bush of telling other people what to do.
The science on vaccination is indisputable. It is one of the most powerful tools that we have that prevents infectious diseases. The choice to not vaccinate not only impacts those folks, but also puts the community at risk. It is extremely dangerous not to vaccinate.
It is mind blowing that in 2018, we still have people that would believe these sort of conspiracy theories.
Allowing an armed terrorist in a crowded shopping mall is the same as refusing to inoculate your live born kid of contagious disease. Agreed Dana P, it is dangerous.
Kurt, there is no “authoritarian left” in South Dakota. My position on abortion calls for eradicating government intrusion that the authoritarian/theoractic right calls for on a private, personal decision.
The immunizations that our authoritarian-right state requires of children attending school is based on a decision that public health concerns outweigh parental rights. Compare to lice: public schools have a right to send kids with lice out the door and not let them back in until their parents have taken steps to get rid of the lice. Parents who claim the superiority of their right to raise their children the way they see fit and allow their children to carry lice around as a quick source of extra snack protein lose out to the outweighing public health concern.
Evidence of vaccine-caused illness and death is thin at best. Deaths from measles and other diseases are well-documented. Vaccinations of children from 1994 through 2013 will prevent over 21 million hospitalizations and 732,000 deaths.
Requiring vaccinations to attend public school isn’t rank authoritarianism. It’s reasonable public health policy based on the authority of science.
Anne Beal – Just so we are clear here – the OT (Old Testament) also clearly states that human life begins with the first “breath” from God into a pile of dust – that is the way GOD created it.
Perhaps your confusion comes from the fact that the author of that book of Genesis (Moses) was by his own a accord – a fully trained high priest of the Egyptian Religion, who co-opted a groups of ignorant slaves and led them off in rebellion and escape to form his own “empire”. Do you suppose perhaps some of his training/beliefs as a high priest of the Egyptian religion found their way into the Hebrew religion?
Then there’s the newer branch of Israel (also led off by a “rebel”) which has named itself Christianity (although in fact is more adherent to the teachings of Paul than of Christ and should rightly be called Paulist – or perhaps Saulist).
What a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.
BTW “life” (the eternally evolving universe) started well before any measurable human brain activity came into being as an aspect of same. It is only the collective human EGO that “sees” that “life” begins and ends with the human brain’s bio-electro conduction.
For those who doubt, I believe Richard is referring to Genesis 2:7. see e.g.,
Genesis 2:7 New International Version (NIV)