Jess Brownsberger intended to vaccinate her baby, just like her parents had done with her.
Then the Tennessee mother saw how her daughter — who was born with a heart defect — experienced body rashes following some newborn shots. A rash can be a normal reaction to vaccines, but it spooked Brownsberger given her daughter’s medical diagnosis, which would later require open heart surgery.
Brownsberger, a self-proclaimed “MAHA mom” who tries to avoid toxins in her food and products, told her pediatrician she no longer wanted shots. Her doctor, according to Brownsberger, warned that she would need to seek care elsewhere if she chose not to vaccinate. Brownsberger viewed it as an ultimatum and found someone who was willing to delay vaccinations.
Five years later and now with three children, the 30-year-old Brownsberger chooses not to vaccinate any of her kids. She visits a nurse practitioner who she calls “vaccine friendly” — terminology used interchangeably in some online spaces with “vaccine neutral” to describe medical professionals who will care for children irrespective of parents’ vaccine views. Brownsberger found her on a site that advertises alternative medicine and maintains a list of preferred practices by state.
Yeah, they should call them what they are: anti-science.
Pro-preventable disease
the anti-vaxxers or the doctors who are willing to treat them?
to be honest, the current evidence we have about clinical best practices actually supports doctors not trying to convince anti-vaxxers, so in some sense I can see a way of defending “(anti-)vaccine-friendly” clinical practice, as a way to ensure they have some biomedical healthcare - not just out of concern for the health and well-being of the anti-vaxxers (who deserve to live and be healthy despite their self-destructive and ignorant practices), but also for the health and well-being of the society who is threatened and burdened when other people get sick
there are social and economic costs to illness, and it is a situation in which we have to be invested in one another’s health
(this ironically makes being anti-vaxx all the more anti-social and unethical, but the solution to anti-vaxx and anti-science movements should be invested in the well-being of everyone)
If there are no societal roadblocks to prevent anti-vaxx parents raising their children to also be anti-vaxxers, then the cycle of misinformation will only get worse as time progresses.
Regardless, parents should not have the ability to prevent their children from getting vaccinations on the basis of their own unscientific beliefs.
right, but people don’t get socialized or educated by their doctors, doctors are like gatekeepers for medicine and surgeries that you get to see in very short windows of time once a year … withholding access to medicine and surgery is not going to help the situation
right, but the flip side is that you’re OK with foregoing the individual’s right to opt in or out of a medical procedure … I haven’t read enough bioethics to arrive at some kind of position on this, but I don’t think either side is obviously right - on the one hand individual liberties being protected results in more overall harm and deaths from fewer vaccinations; on the other hand ignoring individual liberties is authoritarian and can create medical trauma, as well as may backfire and result in greater resistance.
Either way, we need to solve this on a societal level through education, developing greater trust in biomedicine, and probably by penalizing the grifters who profit from promoting anti-vaxx anxieties.
The best bet would not to have them on caseload. Once word spreads, more antivaxxers come, your vulnerable populations and infants are at risk.
denying healthcare because a patient has vaccine hesitancy seems really unethical to me, but I also think that it probably overall increases community risks compared to other methods like empathetic-refutational interviewing, especially because refusal to listen and address concerns and meeting vaccine hesitancy with sanctions will have an effect of further undermining trust and so helping anti-vaxx and anti-science movements