So what is your solution, survival of the fittest?
Jon
If I am ever on Life Support;
Unplug me
Wait a couple of minutes
Plug me back in.
See if that works
Vaccinate, of course.
Not doing so is murderously stupid. Literally.
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If you truly believe that not vaccinating is murderously stupid, as you say (I think it merely selfishly, archetypically stupid) how do you justify burning fossil fuels? I’m pretty sure you do so, and quite literally millions of people die unnecessarily so you don’t have to put a coat on indoors in the wintertime.
This is a objective truth- burning fossil fuels kills and most of us are party to that carnage - antivaxxers will never reach the level of murderousness that is represented by home furnaces and summer lawn mowing.
Antivaxxers are scapegoats; their crimes exaggerated so that we can ignore our own. A mote in the eye, et cetera.
If you aren’t contributing to the 7 million deaths per year caused by air pollution, I apologise for the somewhat accusatory note here. But the odds are, you’re complicit, and that you’ll simply choose to deny it rather than ackowledging that your own actions are just as selfishly motivated as antivaxxers are. Did you read Maggie’s article?
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Yes, I read the article. If required to summarise it in a sentence, it’d be “not all vaccine refusers are driven by ignorance; some of them are just selfish arseholes”. That’s not how Maggie viewed the situation, but I’m not required to agree with her take on it.
I don’t think that the air pollution analogy is valid. There is a large difference between “here is a technology that has benefits, but also causes harm; we have collectively decided that the benefits outweigh the harms, but continue to work to minimise those harms as much as possible” and “I choose to act in a way that substantially increases harms to others in order to gain a small-to-nonexistent benefit for myself”.
For the record, my air pollution impact is probably well below the western average (don’t own a car, use a bicycle for <10km journeys, work in the bush with unpowered tools for a job, generally impoverished so I don’t buy much in the way of manufactured products). But that is irrelevant; even if I never touched a petrol-powered vehicle, I still live in a society in which the food is delivered by truck and the electricity is generated by coal burning.
Every member of such a society is partially complicit in air pollution. OTOH, dropping out to play caveman is no solution, either: five million individual campfires generate a fuckton more pollution than five million families living in an electrified city do. Low-tech living may feel more environmentally friendly, but it very much isn’t.
Which brings us back to the original point: reality matters, and replacing an imperfect solution with a much-worse solution is a destructive act. I place a much higher importance on epidemiological fact and kids dying from preventable illnesses than I do on waffly notions of epistemological liberty.
My tolerance for alt-med nonsense runs out at the point when it starts killing people. Want to sell crystals for insane prices? Fine. Want to tell people that the crystals are magic? Unethical, but it doesn’t bother me too much so long as you don’t actively target the most vulnerable. Start telling people that your crystals will cure cancer, and that they should stop listening to the science-based medics? Fuck off and die, you murderous pricks.
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Let me shorten your rationalization:
Yes, I am part of a vast group that is doing titanic damage, but I’d rather focus my hatred on a smaller group doing a tiny fraction of that damage.
Am I wrong? What you’ve said is true, and since you don’t own a car you are certainly less complicit than average. Yet, still, in the end you’re part of a problem that threatens our entire species, while antivaxxers threaten only themselves and people already in danger. Is it fair for the greater crime to condemn the lesser? I have no answer that anyone will accept.
I see the antivaxxers as a self-selecting control group. My family is vaccinated, but I appreciate the existence of a control. I won’t condemn them, or at least no more than I condemn those who pollute. You’re all just self-centered humans trying to make the best choices you can. I’ll save my hatred for more useful purposes. 
No. Parents don’t have absolute control over their children. When riding in cars, children must wear seatbelts or be in car seats, and parents can’t smoke cigarettes. Just because you’re a parent doesn’t give you the right to expose your child to the consequences of your stupidity, carelessness, or woo-woo magical thinking. Flouride in water helps prevent tooth decay, condoms help prevent the spread of disease and teenage pregnancy, seatbelts and vaccines help save lives. Case closed, show’s over, the end, go home.
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This is actually something we, as a species, are agonizing over right now. How much is a child under the control of the nation, the father, the birth mother, the religion, and/or cultural memes and prejudices? Which trumps what, and when?
I let my children learn and do things that others think should be illegal - they know proscribed skills - but I force them to be vaccinated, against their will.
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Is it binary? Can individuals rail against multiple truths?
I argue that they should; but I think that anyone who rails against anti-vaxxers should expand their focus to the cult of selfishness itself, that we are all embedded in. Anti-vax is just a fairly typical expression of the shortsighted, self-destructive self-obsession that characterizes modern western cultures. I don’t mean to promote a dichotomy; it’s one problem.
Also, people will rail on about whatever they wish, regardless of my opinion, because I do not have luck dragon powers :).
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