The illogical public health management situation

A chicken pox outbreak leads to the isolation of the healthy

Lockdown during the Covid hysteria brought us a novel idea, the idea of quarantining the healthy. Never before had anyone thought such a thing made sense.

But now, after our collective mass trauma, we’ve been desensitized. We got used to the idea of isolation because we were lied to about how most vaccines work, most recently the mRNA interventions that were promised to prevent transmission, but actually did no such thing. (This article proves my point — I cite it due to its bias towards conventional, mainstream wisdom. The author comes to all the wrong conclusions. Nevertheless, she admits what I’m saying.)

We were told that somehow, not being vaccinated made even a healthy person a threat. Because those in power are not held accountable for their claims, even the truth that those who got the shot are more likely to transmit Covid is hidden. We are simply left with the notion that being vaccinated = being protected and not being vaccinated even if one is healthy = being a risk to others.

This matrix of assumptions affects the question of other illnesses besides Covid, and quarantining a healthy person threatens to be embedded in policy, however unwritten. Bear with me here while we go over the facts.

Chicken pox is a mild childhood illness. Yes, there can be, rarely, complications, but that is true of any illness — one can develop pneumonia from the common cold, for instance, or an opportunistic deadly infection from a cut. About 100 people died each year from chicken pox in the US as of 1995, which is of course sad, but also negligible in terms of public health (and it’s notable that when this stat is brought out, it’s not broken down; undoubtedly mortality is among the extremely fragile who would have died from some other exposure, if not chicken pox).

Yes, photos of the pitiful rash that develops can bolster the narrative of a severe, “extremely contagious” threat (they do this with measles too), but the truth is that the chicken pox is three weeks of uncomfortableness — contagious to be sure. Of course, there must be someone to care for a child for that period of time; hence the push for a vaccine: a working mother can’t be spared for something so routine, trivial, and yet so lengthy (as ordinary illnesses go).

Chicken pox, when contracted in childhood, confers important immunity for life. As the illness makes the rounds of various populations, circling back over the years, it also affords a sort of booster effect, protecting adults, including women who will bear children, from getting and transmitting it and from getting shingles later, as vulnerable elders.

And of course, the vaccine is developed with aborted fetal tissue, making it immoral to take (or give to one’s children), with the bitter footnote that the compromise is for something decidedly not life-threatening.

The CDC “recommends” the varicella shot and therefore, all states mandate it for school. In my home state of Massachusetts, the regulation for school-age children is that they receive the varicella shot or show immunity. The regulations further say that anyone contracting chicken pox must quarantine “until all their blisters have dried and crusted,” which has always been the practice, even before the shot, and is just common sense. Staying home when sick is normal.

And now we come to the latest development. I don’t know if this is universal — perhaps you can tell me if you’ve come across it. Recently in our town, the board of health responded to “an outbreak” (one student) of chicken pox by requiring any child without proof of immunity be quarantined — removed from the school for three weeks.

I find this chilling. I have read the regulations and I don’t find where they say to do this — to isolate the healthy person. Even if they do say it, it makes no sense and goes against the vast amount of collected knowledge regarding public health that flew out the window during Lockdown.

Let’s think about it. The child with the illness went home, appropriately. The other children are in school, learning (and paying tuition in the case I’m referencing), and presumed immune.

Even if all of the remaining children have no proof of immunity, what danger do they pose? If one of them gets sick, he goes home. The others are healthy. Those who are at risk are either not there because they are newborns or too compromised to be there, or pregnant without immunity and taking care of their own exposure, i.e. self-isolating.

Parents of the schoolchildren can decide what they want to do about the situation regarding their healthy children, as is the presumption — or had been until 2020 — about the risk-benefit analysis carried out by everyone in the normal course of things. Any rational public health policy takes into account all the effects of any measure, not limited to a narrow calculation of infection (pointless in this case).

The current conventional recommendation for an outbreak is for the person at that point to receive the varicella shot. “Varicella vaccination is recommended for outbreak control. During an outbreak, persons who do not have adequate evidence of immunity should receive their first or second dose as appropriate.”

However, from the current public health perspective, that person is then considered immune and not able to transmit; yet the insert — the manufacturer’s own rules — for the shot states:

“… [d]ue to concern for transmission of vaccine virus, vaccine recipients should attempt to avoid whenever possible close association with susceptible high-risk individuals for up to six weeks following vaccination” including immunocompromised individuals, pregnant women, and newborn infants of mothers without documented history of varicella.”

As Aaron Siri says, “But here is the incredible thing: those vaccinated with the chickenpox vaccine can transmit the virus to others for six weeks after vaccination yet are never excluded from school during this period.”

To sum up, here we have the illogic: the action taken by the board seems to be recorded nowhere — the board of health seems to have unilaterally imposed it, against all experience. Even if it’s a state regulation, it’s wrongheaded. The healthy child can pose no risk, and is likely immune (keep in mind, the titer is not sensitive and is expensive) and surrounded by the immune. Getting the chicken pox, all things being equal, is better for the child and the community. The recommendations for the shots in such a case, where an outbreak is noted, go against the recommendation from the manufacturer (and indeed, when has any health care provider informed the parents of the child getting the shot that he should be isolated?).

What recourse do these parents have?

What new exertions of regulatory power (the power to shut down the school, among other things) are next?

What do you think of this?