The Coalition of the Swilling

Remember a few years ago when the governor of Texas was trying to force 9-year-old girls to get vaccinated for HPV? Just call it the "Just In Case She Turns Into A Slut Act of 2006". At the same time a otherwise sane Republican in FL was trying to do the same thing. He was also a doctor, so who knows how much jack he was getting from Merck.

When I was in the Guard flu shots were mandatory, but then so was a lot of other stuff. I went ten years without a flu shot until my VA doc talked me into getting one last month.

This is coming from a state that also won't allow you to put gasoline in your car without professional help.

I'm just worried that my math is off on the risk bit. But even if it is by a bit it seems to me that the flu shot is not offering much in the way of benefits...except to its manufacturers.

When I was in the Guard flu shots were mandatory

Like Skyler and me in the Marines. Don't think for two seconds I wasn't worried about what kind of weird ass bio research was being pumped into my arm, courtesy of a mandatory "flu" shot. I managed to avoid about half of them, thank God.

Fascists.

While I think the HPV vaccaine is a good addition to the standard requirements, I'm not sure about this flu vaccine. It would be an annual requirement and I'm not sure about the benefits.

You might be able to argue for it, though, if there was convicing evidence that kids are significantly responsible for spreading the flu, even if they aren't dying from it. They get it in class, bring it home and give it to grandpa, who gives it to the entire senior center, etc. etc. etc.

Yeah, THS. I still get nervous around needles based on those days. I never got so sick as when we regularly got pumped up with vaccines back then.

Sis, there was already so much beer in your veins that whatever bugs the researchers came up with didn't have a chance.

Spider, your daughter might not be a slut, but she might marry someone who was, or who had been with someone who was. HPV is an insidious disease with permanent consequences. If I had daughters, I would seriously consider getting them vaccinated. (And Bill and I are agreeing! Black is white! Up is down! Dogs and cats living together!)

I can't get a flu shot because I've had horrible reactions to them, but I always get them for the boys, mainly because my FIL has compromised lung capacity, and getting the flu for him would probably be fatal.

Lisa, it's not the governor's role to label my daughter a slut and to assess her liability for this type of disease. It is not spread through public behavior, there is no public interest involved at all*.

I might decide that the risk is sufficient to have her protected by such a vaccine, but that is the decision of me and my wife, not a governor.

* -Unless we continue on the road towards more complete socialism, in which case every private action becomes a public matter. But that's not going to happen unless we elect a man to office that endorses socialism and wants to require every citizen to donate their time to society and redistribute wealth . . . oh, wait. Never mind.

I agree that it shouldn't be a mandatory vaccine (not that ANY of them are mandatory anyway, you can always opt out). That's not the argument I was trying to make.

How are you defining "public behavior"? The unfortunate fact is that teenage boys may/most probably will canoodle much more than girls, as Lisa points out.

Canoodling is decidedly a private endeavor. It involves no public funding, nor is it typically done in the streets.

Yeah, I always hated getting those mandatory vaccinations in the military, especially the ones where they wouldn't tell you what it was for. Thank God I was able to avoid the anthrax series.

Mandatory vaccinations for non-routine childhood diseases strikes me as a cash cow for the pharmaceutical companies. And I do not consider flu to be a "routine childhood disease", given that every year produces a new strain, and hence a new vaccine.

There's a million different flu viruses.This is
insane.The establishment(a word from the sixties)
is out of control.It's all over,except the shouting.
The wackos have won.The only answer is to make a
law if you work for a city(government,fire or police)you must live in that city and can fired by
committee elected on a local level of one thousand voters.Otherwise the government is an occupation
force ,like the Nazi's in Vichy France.Most cops live in the suburbs and come to work to shoot
city dwellers and go home to the suburbs.These
people probably send their kids charter or Rabbical schools.

Thanks for posting this. The rally was organized by the New Jersey Coalition for Vaccination Choice, by the way. You can visit their website to learn about their efforts to get a conscientious belief exemption to mandatory vaccination in New Jersey. http://njvaccinationchoice.org

Presumably, creating a larger set of immune children would help to reduce flu contagion and deaths overall, probably also to the elderly (shouldn't we make them get one, too?)

Also, I'm pretty sure that the flu shot can't give you the flu.

Even then, I think it's a pretty stupid idea.

The flu shot often gives you a very mild version of the flu, that's how it works.

uBp14Y