Routine vaccinations drop among U.S. kindergartners for the third year in a row

No. No it isn’t. I don’t know where you’re writing from but I can tell you that home schooling is a thing in some European countries. Maybe all of them? I can say for sure and I’m unwilling to subscribe to a sweeping statement about a mass of 44 countries. It amazes me that anyone would.

in Europe it’s mandatory to send your child to school - whether the parents want it or not.

No it's not. It's mandatory to educate them. Home schooling exists in Europe and parents who think teachers at a school are teaching children things that are wrong can do various things about it.

That's either a weird strawman, or you missed the point of what "ultimate authority" means here. The question is who gets the final say in how the child is cared for - if the parent thinks that something is harmful to the child, and the state says it's mandatory, who gets final say?

You're right. Children aren't property. They're human beings that deserve protection. Sometimes that means protection from the state.

   > Sometimes that means protection FROM their parents.

They were likely taken aback by how forward and certain you seem to have been about it. If you had instead said, "your child is having some academic trouble, maybe you should get him tested for a learning disability" it would have gone over better. Focus on providing advice within your area of expertise.

Teachers, in general, seem to feel entitled to be surrogate parents to children, but that's really not their role. Their job is solely to help the child learn.

To engage in empathy you must be able to fairly articulate their views and the reasoning they use to arrive at them, in the same way they would or even better. In both posts you haven't done that. That's why they aren't listening to you. Your response to their views is laughable, it's to say "trust me" and then try to manipulate ("guide") their child when they aren't around, which is the opposite of being trustworthy. They trusted you to tutor their child in specific subjects and instead you betrayed that trust, then act surprised when they are "brick walls"?

To convince the parents, you first need to convince them to talk to you and take you seriously. That in turn requires that you, firstly, stop bringing their child into it. Just ignore the child. The child is not being harmed, you aren't a hero who's saving them. The child's views are not your business, they are the parent's business. And secondly, that you do the legwork to fairly investigate their beliefs and the evidence they found convincing, so you can debate with them directly instead of telling them about "a place of trustworthiness" that they clearly don't believe in.

The linked-to page says those are: "measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) shot; the diphtheria, tetanus, and acellular pertussis (DTaP) shot; and the shots against poliovirus and varicella (chickenpox)."

Not COVID vaccination.

That was true five years ago and it’s equally true now — we’re talking about the same routine vaccines. Nothing that happened during the Covid-19 pandemic changed that.

At that level, we face coercion all the time: a traffic light is a form of coercion backed by the threat of state violence.

Does fighting back against that coercion explain why people run red lights?

Moreover, if it's the expected human response, what explains the 2% difference between now and the 2019-2020 school year? Do more people now think of themselves as having free will than a few years ago?

I always wonder what people mean when they talk about "the news" or "the media". I don't watch any of the 24/7 cable stuff (I last had cable in 1999), but I get the impression its what actually drives the perception of whatever this unitary entity is believed to be thinking/scheming at any moment. So I'm somewhat blind/deaf to a lot of this zeitgeist, though I understand that like any media, they long ago cracked the code that negative engagement is more profitable, and so yes, scaremongering is part of the job, and so I tend to avoid it.

That said, I knew people who died from Covid, the latest just a few weeks ago. When my parents, who aren't young anymore got it, I was pretty fearful for them.

That said, I absolutely agree 'normal' people were pushed to the limit in a way that made them look for anything that made sense of what was happening around them.

Back in the day that kind of crazy was relegated to the dark corners of the Internet and you had to explicitly seek it out.

Nowadays social media apps that claim to make it easier to connect with your family/friends will happily push these in front of you, knowing that getting you deep into that rabbit hole is likely to net them more "engagement".

The net result is that naive but well-meaning people who originally just wanted to keep in touch with friends/family got sucked deep into this bullshit.

Nobody that listened to public health experts ever "hated" masks. But initially, they didn't rush out to buy masks because the advice was to prioritise isolating the infected, social distancing for everyone else and clean hands to avoid [overestimated risk of] contact transmission, and not to rely on masks to protect you from infected people because there was no evidence they would offer that protection (the only masks they had reasonable confidence might work were far too limited in supply to stop it on a population level)

The recommendation changed (pretty quickly, based on stronger evidence of aerosol transmission and asymptomatic transmission and COVID being sufficiently widespread to make altogether avoiding contagious people unrealistic) to suggesting that although social distancing was recommended because cloth masks alone were insufficiently effective at preventing infection, masks were better than nothing and so on a population scale wearing them in public places would slow infection rates. At this point - even though I'd already had the infection - I started wearing a mask to the supermarket because apart from it being logical, it was also required to enter. It wasn't much of an imposition, and subsequent evidence largely supports the reduced transmission risk.

I think the question works better in reverse. When was it you switched from being angry at the CDC for telling you not to bother with the masks because they couldn't altogether prevent infection so you were better off avoiding people with COVID altogether to being angry at the CDC for recommending masks in public places to somewhat reduce risk of infection? What was the scientific evidence that lead you to change your mind?

It's not "dogma" to "sterilize" some fringe idiocies, just implying that is often pretty much helping that sewer just fester under our noses.

1) There is no way to quantify how likely this is from personal stories. If your experience is 1 in 100 event, you are doing more harm sharing it than not sharing it if 1 in 10 becomes too suspicious to follow diagnosis.

2) We really don't know. Either things happened as people say, or they doctor shopped until received a misdiagnosis and mismedication they wanted.

3) Readers can't use your example in their personal life because they are different. They may read what you said and go doctor shopping and googling until they are misdiagnosed and mismedicated.

You should not blindly trust doctors, and get second opinion of things seem wrong, but sharing medical stories in the internet is misses the information needed for it to be usable.

No, you haven't.

> natural immunity would provide far greater protection

false

> vaccines wouldn't prevent transmission, carried a non-zero risk of side effects

"Prevent" and "non-zero" are weasel words, that sentence as written is true of literally every treatment and prophylactic in existence forever.

But it does reduce the risk of transmission even in the case of prisoners sharing a cell.

And the risks of side effects are much, much lower than the risks of those effects from the actual illness.

> that there would no benefit to lock downs, and that masks were pointless.

False on both counts.

Lockdowns were there to reduce the secondary consequences from running out of capacity. Several places ran out of capacity to handle the dead, let alone the living. I still don't understand how we were able to get short of medical oxygen, but that happened in some places too.

Masks likewise, reduce the transmission rate. Not eliminate, reduce. That's not pointless.

> that vaccination was unnecessary for children and younger adults,

Weasel phrasing, "unnecessary" can mean anything. But, I will try to interpret generously as possible: Sure, lots of kids and young adults won't die, they'll only get sick for a few weeks, with unknown long term damage.

It's truly bizarre to _radically_ disagree, especially as a layperson.

I have no issue with traditional vaccination, but this is nothing like a vaccination. They wouldn't have needed to change the definition of vaccination if it was.

They wouldn't need to push this 24/7 on every possible platform if it worked as promised. They wouldn't have to tell us that these super rare side effects that every one of my colleagues is experiencing is super rare and nothing to be concerned about.

If you find your opinions align with the mindless masses, perhaps you are among them.

While there is a massive difference in evidence supporting these two sides, as I have a mere GCSE grade C in biology, I necessarily have to just have faith in the research methods and licensing regimes that made my 4 Covid jabs and humpteen others.

Not unadulterated faith, but I do have faith, and it is only faith. I can't do a double-blind replication even if I wanted to.