In Washington state, a study shows parents are increasingly opting out of the polio vaccine. Two decades years ago, 95.4 percent of kindergarteners in Washington state were vaccinated for polio. This year, only 88.4 percent had the vaccine. That’s a lower rate than in in the African nation of Rwanda.
This is beyond disturbing, people. It’s easy to think that polio is nothing to worry about when you don’t see any victims of the disease around you. But the only reason we don’t see them any longer is precisely because of the vaccine. I know I don’t have to explain this to anybody reading my blog but this is simply too frustrating.
Clarissa's Blog 
Can’t the twerps wait until we eradicate it first? We’re getting closer to it, and after we manage it they can stop vaccinating for polio as much as they want. It’s going to be really embarrassing if the US becomes one of the few countries to still have polio, is all I’m saying.
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I actually know somebody who is a survivor (from back in the USSR before the vaccine was introduced.) I have no idea how anybody would wish this on their children.
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I know several polio survivors. The annoying fact is that if the Salk vaccine had been used, polio would probably already have been eradicated. The live virus vaccine had more profit potential, but causes an occasional case of polio itself. If I remember correctly, for the last twenty or thirty years, almost all polio cases in the U. S. have been as the result of the vaccine itself. When a live but weakened virus is used in a vaccine, on rare occasions the virus will mutate into a more dangerous form. I think this causes fewer than 10 cases per year, but it would not have happened with the dead virus vaccine developed by Dr Salk’s team.
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I live here, and the Pacific Northwest is a hotbed for vaccine denialism, because we have a toxic mixture of hippy-dippy reactionaries who think all modern medicine is unnatural and causes autism, and Christian homeschooling reactionaries who think doctors are agents of Satan. It was an uphill battle for me to get coworkers at my old job to vaccinate, which was frustrating, because they worked with many elderly people who could die or be hospitalized if exposed to even the flu.
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It’s heartbreaking that this silly denialism is depriving us of one of the greatest advances of science and civilization.
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It’s so dumb. I was really happy when CA passed really strict laws about kids needing to have all their vaccinations to attend public schools. Even in SF and silicon valley where supposedly scientifically inclined people lived had horrendous vaccination rates. What an embarrassment.
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I don’t think it’s ever OK to punish children for their parents’ idiocy. A much better solution would have been to levy enormous fines on the parents and not to prevent the completely innocent kids from getting an education.
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\ I don’t think it’s ever OK to punish children for their parents’ idiocy.
It is not about punishing anybody but about protecting other children at schools – their right to education and to life.
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Then create a separate school for the non-vaccinated. But depriving children of education – through no fault of their own, besides – is simply atrocious. It’s not a solution to anything because this policy proceeds from the exact same assumption that motivates the anti-vaxxers: namely, that children are the property of the parents with no interests and rights of their own.
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