Happy π day! May all your infinite series converge.
My Insider content this week included a post on Danny Salazar, Kendall Graveman, and others from a Cleveland/Oakland spring tilt, and a draft blog post on Kolby Allard, Lucas Herbert, and Kyle Molnar. My weekly Klawchat transcript is up.
My latest boardgame review over at Paste covered the Kennerspiel des Jahres-nominated strategy game Rococo, where players run haberdasher/dressmaking firms in a game that combines deckbuilding, resource management, and worker placement mechanics.
And now, this week’s links…
- If you’re interested in eating parakeet, muskrat, or pigeon, head to Amsterdam, where the The Kitchen Of The Unwanted Animal food truck serves up all kinds of non-traditional meats, including a horse burger called the My Little Pony.
- A study published in Molecular and Cellular Oncology found that oleocanthol, a phenol compound found in extra virgin olive oil, killed cancer cells by breaking down their membranes, yet left neighboring non-cancer cells alone.
- The New Jersey Senate is moving to tighten the “religious exemptions” to vaccination requirements. These exemptions are bogus, unenforceable, and unnecessary even under the First Amendment (you retain the option to home-school your children if you’re still too ignorant to vaccinate). My only issue with this piece is that the writer, Susan Livio, didn’t qualify or question the claim of one mother who said her child was injured by a vaccine – and Livio got huffy with me on Twitter when I pointed this lack of verification (kind of a big deal in journalism) out.
- More vaccine stuff: A strong overview of the scientific evidence that vaccines do not (and can not) cause autism, passed along by former big leaguer Chuckie Fick.
- The evolutionary case for how man ate his way to “world dominance.”
- This Man Legislates, a new Tumblr dedicated to elected officials who saw or do horrible things – racist/sexist remarks, spousal abuse, giving away an adopted child to a man who later molested her. You know, the kind of behavior we’ve come to expect from the people who write our laws.
- A famous Hillary Clinton quote was never actually uttered by the former First Lady; it’s from Erin Gloria Ryan, writing about Hillary for Jezebel in 2012. (And her main point, that a woman’s looks should not be part of any discussion of her policies or her suitability for office, remains true no matter who said it.)
First off, as a teacher of preschool-aged students (who has a non-vaccinated student in class (and a newborn at home!!!)), I agree wholeheartedly that every person who can be vaccinated should be vaccinated. However, I worry about enforcement mechanisms. My school is independent, so we can turn people away for a host of reasons. But public schools ought to take all comers. Denying a child an education because of the idiocy of his parents seems wrong. Jailing the parents is no better. So how do we enforce a vaccine mandate with more teeth that doesn’t unfairly punish the children of anti-vaxers? Other ideas have included denying public assistance (e.g., SNAP), but that is no better. Fines? Denying access to non-essential goverment/state/public accommodations (e.g., parks, libraries) seems reasonable… But takes us towards an impractical, “Papers, please,” situation. Allowing private businesses to discriminate seems reasonable but now we’re just shifting the enforcement burden away from the state.
So, I agree with the idea but am flummoxed as to how to enforce it without further harming children.
Ultimately, it’s about protecting the children whose parents play by the rules. The choice is denying the (non-medically exempted) non-vaccinated children a public education against denying every other child the right to learn in a healthy environment. I think you’ll find a number of parents will grumble and get their kids vaccinated if the alternative is having to pay for thirteen years of private schooling. Many won’t, but some will.
Kevin is spot-on here. The Supreme Court ruled during a measles outbreak in ~1979 in Philly that the state can compel vaccinations, so I don’t even see how there’s a question on that matter. But to the broader point, why should public schools have to take all comers *without conditions*? Should a high school be forced to take a student who’s been convicted of a violent crime? The schools can and should impose conditions on students (and parents, by extension) when the conditions involve the safety and health of other students.
Have the school nurse provide vaccinations. If you enroll your student in the school, and don’t have vaccination records, the school nurse will pull students during the first few weeks of school to vaccinate them.
Again, I agree with the goal of vaccinating all children who don’t qualify for legitimate medical exclusions. I just wonder how we enforce it. Sure, we can mass a mandate, but what do we do to if/when parents disobey it?
Denying them access to public school is probably the least-bad option, but it is not without its drawbacks, chiefly that it doubles down on harm done to the children: not only are they non-vaccinated and at greater risk of acquiring the diseases in question, but now they are being denied an education. And limiting the ban to public schools doesn’t really alleviate the issue; if students can attend private schools, the problem persists.
Analogizing unvaccinated children to students convicted of crimes is wrong on a number of levels, primarily because those children are still entitled to an education, it may just occur in a different venue. So if we are going to run with that analogy, we’d still need to provide unvaccinated children an education as opposed to leaving their parents on their own to homeschool them. Additionally, unvaccinated children are themselves victims. And while children who commit crimes might potentially be victims in their own right — and their agency can be legitimately question, they do typically exercise greater authority over the ‘threat’ they pose than unvaccinated children do.
And the idea of the school nurse administering vaccines without parent authorization is also a very uncomfortable proposition.
If providing unvaccinated children with in-home tutors is the best solution we can come up with to enforce the mandate, I can probably get on board with that. I just think we can and probably should seek other remedies that do not exacerbate the harm done to the children.