Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/03/21/our-social-contract-demands-pe.html
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I don’t disagree @jlw but good luck with that. We live in a nation wrought with freedoms that allow for people to endanger others. Taking the perceived freedom away will be volatile at best.
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Not vaccinating is pretty much equivalent to firing guns wildly in the air all the time.
Sure it might not kill someone. But it’s a really stupid risk with no benefit.
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We regulate all sorts of freedoms. This one is an invented scare and our neighbor who read discredited papers is less an authority than the CDC and WHO.
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One thing we can do that doesn’t “take away freedoms” is to treat this much like we treat selective service. Don’t want to vaccinate? Fine, but no govt assistance… ever. No student loan aid, job training, or federal jobs and a tax to cover the increased medical costs to the nation. And if your choice ends up infecting someone else, jail.
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Again. I wholeheartedly concur. I just think it will be hard to get that change made nationally. I am absolutely not opposed to it and supported it in our own school district where vaccinations are required.
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For all practical purposes (like, the 4th Amendment) you have no Constitutional rights crossing the border (or even within 100 miles of it or a seacoast.) Long ago, when the only vaccine preventable disease was smallpox, the USA established that on entry to the USA you either showed proof of vaccination (or other evidence of immunity) or spent long enough in quarantine to prove yourself free of disease.
I’m good with restoring that. Give ICE something to do besides arrest people speaking Spanish in Montana – and also cut back on viruses coming in from shithole countries like France and Switzerland.
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While I’m in favor of getting necessary vaccines (I’m up to date on all of mine, and so are all my family members and pets) I think it’s a bit scary to suggest that the government should mandate the injection of chemicals into our bodies, no matter how beneficial.
Plus, you can still be a carrier of a disease if you’re vaccinated against it.
I say the more responsible thing to do is to not expose your children to idiots, and get them vaccinated as soon as possible.
Social contract. I think it’s the “social” part that antivaxxers get stuck at.
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It almost goes without saying that part of this social contract should include the provision that all standard vaccines are provided free to everyone.
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then why do i have to go outside to smoke at the dna lounge? 
we already acknowledge in many instances the rights of the many outweigh the rights of the few. sometimes to an extreme level (ex: banning smoking in bars makes sense, but you can’t smoke on an open air balcony in some states)
why can’t we apply that logic to vaccines?
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I’d say you absolutely can! But first smoking is not outlawed/illegal. being non vaccinated would be illegal based on the post. Additionally (which gets more to my point) smoking is banned in bars/restaurants in some places…not nationally.
While in the Northeast where I am one cannot light up in a bar, there are bars in other parts of the nation you still can (Tennessee comes to mind).
That’s what I am stating will be perhaps an insurmountable wall…getting it done on a national scale.
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This is a complete aside, but it stumped me a bit.
An anti-vax friend of a friend had a kid who was one of the 1in 100,000 who was negatively affected by some vaccine (I can’t remember which one) which left the child with a neurological disorder. This colored her entire world against anything vaccine, and unfortunately, she became a poster-mom of the movement and stands at the forefront of the echo-chamber. I felt entirely sympathetic for her, ignoring the whole poster-mom thing, and I honestly couldn’t say where I would stand on the issue if one of my kids were so adversely affected.
That said, I would argue that if we have tests, genetic or otherwise, to filter out the kids who might be adversely affected (in the same way we filter out immunocompromised people), I think that would be a small win.
Not that I want to engage the mathematically impaired anti-vaxers who say “well, 1 in 10,000 is too many!”
Hell, I don’t know. I agree 100% with the post.
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So are you suggesting individuals have no right to freedom from avoidable infection? OR that populations have no right to avoidable epidemics?
Freedom to not die of demonstrably, laughably preventable disease not registering?
I think your inclination towards “how to sell this” is smart. I do not think the frame of “either vaccinations are mandatory or people get to have freedom” is useful.
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Smoking in the workplace is outlawed precisely because it increases others’ risks of heart attack.
NO.
That’s like arguing that the harms to public health from low vaccination rates can only be improved by the harms to public health from a less educated populace. An educated society is a healthier society for everyone in it.
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This is one example of people who refuse to be vaccinated. The reason that he states is that the vaccines were developed using tissues from aborted fetuses and that, as a Catholic, it is against his beliefs, despite the fact that the Catholic Church has stated that “One is morally free to use the vaccine regardless of its historical association with abortion. The reason is that the risk to public health, if one chooses not to vaccinate, outweighs the legitimate concern about the origins of the vaccine. This is especially important for parents, who have a moral obligation to protect the life and health of their children and those around them.”
What really irks me is that fact that he is so concerned about the lives of already aborted fetuses, but apparently unconcerned about passing the disease to pregnant women and their fetuses, babies, and immunosuppressed and immunodeficient people, endangering their existing lives. As far as I am concerned, he should be shunned from society.
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The “Anti Vaxxers” are pretty ignorant, to me they are in the same self delusional camp as flat earthers, climate change deniers, and invisible man grovelers. When my wife got pregnant, this whole movement was just starting and after all of about two hrs of research it was obvious that the data all pointed at vaccination.
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My EXACT WORDS were good luck in trying to get it passed on a national scale. I do not need to justify that or sell that in any way…because it will be FUCKING HARD to sell that on a national level. period. Look how long it took to get mandatory seat belt laws for fucks sake and that is just simply clicking in a buckle!
I believe in vaccinations…my kid are vaccinated. As far as I am concerned those assholes who do not vaccinate themselves or their kids are practicing Darwinism. FUCK EM.
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Numbers do matter though, as not all diseases (or vaccines) are equally dangerous, and not all vaccines are equally beneficial. (If you question that statement go ahead and get yourself the rabies vaccine even if you haven’t been bitten yet)
According to the CDC the pre-vaccine incidence of death from varicella was about 1 in 60,000 cases. If hypothetically the vaccine were to kill 1 in 100,000 (not saying that it does!!) that would be better than the disease, but perhaps not so much better that it would make a slam-dunk case that the vaccine should be mandatory. But those same odds of vaccine-caused death would be far more compelling when making the case for mandatory measles vaccines, as measles has a much higher fatality rate.
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This is the condition most typically cited by antivaxxers as “reason to avoid vaccines.” It is true enough that fevers can bring on severe seizures in these kids, and some vaccines can cause fevers. But so do the illnesses they prevent. It is a truly sucky condition. The incidence cited is ~1:40,000 live births, which is high enough that it impacts statistics some, but the concept that avoiding vaccines protects these kids is deeply flawed, since febrile conditions are just simply not entirely avoidable.
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