A Bonza Idea from the Aussies

From Australia we see a proposal to limit social welfare benefits to parents who refuse to inoculate their children. Well played:

Parents who are "conscientious objectors" to childhood vaccination will have their childcare and family tax payments stopped from 1 January next year as the federal government attempts to crack down on the anti-vaccination movement.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott announced on Sunday a loophole would be closed to stop payments to parents worth up to $15,000 per child.

"Parents who vaccinate their children should have confidence that they can take their children to childcare without the fear that their children will be at risk of contracting a serious or potentially life-threatening illness because of the conscientious objections of others," Mr Abbott said.

Although Australia's overall childhood vaccination rates remain high - about 97 per cent - the numbers of people who are registered conscientious objectors has risen in the past 10 years.

There are now 39,000 children aged under seven who are not vaccinated because their parents are registered, according to the Australian Childhood Immunisation Register.

This is an increase of more than 24,000 children over the past 10 years.

This is a very good idea.

First, having unvaccinated children in childcare facilities is like smoking exploding cigars at an oil refinery.

Second, the science has thoroughly debunked Dr. Andrew Wakefield's vaccination-autism link.

Third, much of the anti-vaxx movement is about relying on herd immunity from the rest of society, and so they are moochers.

Forth, it puts those with compromised immune systems, who are medically unable to be vaccinated, at risk.

Finally, children should not  be held hostage to their parents' idiocy:

Writing on The ScentificParent blog, a chagrined Canadian mom announced that she is leaving the anti-vaxx movement after all of her seven children — four of them completely unvaccinated — have come down with whooping cough.

Writing from quarantine, and surrounded by sick kids, Tara Hills wrote she is “emotionally, a bit raw. Mentally a bit taxed. Physically I’m fine,” before admitting that not only are her own kids sick, but they may have exposed her five-month-old niece who is too young to be fully vaccinated.

What began with a cold brought into her home by her brother-in-law, turned into coughing by her kids leading to full-blown whooping cough in all seven children.

“My youngest three children were coughing so hard they would gag or vomit. I’d never seen anything like this before,” she wrote. ” Watching our youngest struggle with this choking cough, bringing up clear, stringy mucus – I had heard of this before somewhere. My mom said I had it when I was a kid. I snapped into ‘something is WRONG’ mode.”

Jumping onto her computer, she discovered her children’s symptoms matched — almost perfectly — all the symptoms of whooping cough in a household that was woefully under-vaccinated.

“We had vaccinated our first three children on an alternative schedule and our youngest four weren’t vaccinated at all. We stopped because we were scared and didn’t know who to trust,” she explained. ” Was the medical community just paid off puppets of a Big Pharma-Government-Media conspiracy? Were these vaccines even necessary in this day and age? Were we unwittingly doing greater harm than help to our beloved children? So much smoke must mean a fire so we defaulted to the ‘do nothing and hope nothing bad happens’ position.”

Hills explained that she had a hard time overcoming her biases and mistrust of “Big Pharma,” asking herself, “Could all the in-house, independent, peer-reviewed clinical trials, research papers and studies across the globe ALL be flawed, corrupt and untrustworthy?”

Now Hills says that years spent “frozen” out of fear of vaccinating her kids has the whole family frozen: confined to their home by a quarantine.

She said she hopes her mea culpa will make other families who have held back from getting their children vaccinated rethink what they are doing.

“Right now my family is living the consequences of misinformation and fear. I understand that families in our community may be mad at us for putting their kids at risk. I want them to know that we tried our best to protect our kids when we were afraid of vaccination and we are doing our best now, for everyone’s sake, by getting them up to date. We can’t take it back … but we can learn from this and help others the same way we have been helped.”

Preach it, sister.