NYT: Fear of Vaccines Goes Viral
In an interview with NPR last month about her new book, “On Immunity: An Inoculation,” the author Eula Biss presented the idea that vaccinating your children on schedule was now seen as “an extreme position.”
New York State and city have strict immunization requirements, which have been further strengthened over the past two years. It is not possible here, as it is in California, to obtain a philosophically based exemption from those rules for your child. In January, the city health department decreed that all enrolled children from 6 months old through age 5, whether attending public or private schools, had to receive a flu shot before Dec. 31. Parents, though, can recuse their children from vaccination protocols with religious exemptions, which are relatively uncomplicated to obtain.
And certainly some exploitation of that loophole is exercised. Amanda Uhry, who runs a consultancy called Manhattan Private School Advisors, which, as its name suggests, helps parents through the private-school application process, said she recently turned down a half-dozen clients when she discovered that they were opposed to vaccination. For a long while she had never inquired about the issue, but a few years ago, a child she was working with missed his kindergarten interview because of whooping cough, which left her stunned.
“I thought, Whooping cough? Who gets whooping cough anymore?” she said. The episode compelled her to start asking about vaccination early on. “No application to any school asks, ‘Are you an anti-vaxxer?’ but these schools want to keep the anti-vaxxers out.” So, she said, “I ask people and if they get into the whole anti-vaxxer deal, I say, ‘Fine, we can’t work with you.’ ” You’re not, as she put it, “going to Horace Mann like this.”
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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/nyregion/fear-of-vaccines-goes-viral.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&smid=tw-nytimesscience&_r=0
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