Amid measles outbreak, New York ends nonmedical exemptions for vaccines

[conuly]

About time, too. It's bad enough to play around with your own child's safety, but it's reprehensible when you're risking your neighbors' children.

Comments

[thewayne]

I had my measles immunization in my third year of life and had the measles in my fifth.

Yeah. Important stuff. I need to get another MMR, should've done it this week. My immunologist said it's OK. I'm part of the age cohort that the MMR was a very weak strain and adults should get it re-done.

[cactuswatcher]

I'm old enough to have had measles, mumps and rubella. None of them were any fun. I was seriously ill from measles and we were well aware, at the time, the others posed serious risks to people at certain times of life.

I wish I knew the secret to get people to give up their superstitions about vaccines.

[delight]

I'm so proud of my people. I was grinning ear to ear when I heard. WE DID GOOD, TEAM. I also knew people involved in the new rent control laws, but I was way more intimately involved with this one.

[ioplokon]

Unfortunately, since we've done that in California, certain Drs have been writing medical exceptions for basically no reason; so it's not the end and there needs to be time spent investigating & enforcing.

[conuly]

And if you try to close that loophole people say "Well, some people have valid medical excuses that wouldn't be covered by the law", which is true as far as it goes, but we wouldn't need to tighten up the laws if people would stop trying to game the system!

[redbird]

Definite progress: that makes five states, up from only two a few years ago. I should see if anyone is working on this here in Massachusetts. I just took a look, and there's a bill in the Massachusetts legislature, with both my reps cosponsoring. (Anyone else from Massachusetts: it's bill HD.4284, introduced by Andres Vargas.)

[ayebydan]

Absolutely. It is that or keep your offspring away from any events that may have anyone who cannot be vaccinated, aka, love in your home and leave us alone.

[ayebydan]

To add to this, my mum nearly died from rubella under 1 in the 60s. Her diabetic sister lived in quarantine the whole time in fear it would pass between them, her hoping her sister survived. It was so traumatic. I cannot understand families who do this to their kids deliberately.

[silveradept]

That makes good sense. I'm surprised there aren't more states that have gotten rid of the nonmedical exemptions, given that this is very definitely a public health issue.