Am I allowed, as a business owner, to pass on an antivax candidate? Am I, as a school administrator, permitted to keep an unvaccinated child from my school system?
Vaccines were always optional in the sense nobody ties you down and makes you take them, and certainly all requirements have exceptions for people with, i.e, immune system issues.
It’s just like taxes.
He explicitly acknowledges that this will lead to more children getting tragic and preventable diseases, to be clear. There's no dispute about that. He's just decided that sacrificing those children is worth it for the sake of medical autonomy.
"I don't want my kids to get vaccinated and I don't want your daughter to have sex."
I do not see how either side can then say the government has a right to force people to do something to their bodies.
Vaccines are not mandatory in any country I know but most people have them bar hippies and conspiracy theorists.
I think its stupid not to have (most, at least) childhood vaccines but people should be free to be stupid.
Before we can answer that, we would have to define the risks.
For example, the polio vaccine has no logical basis for being mandatory in the US. The requirement of the polio in the US has no basis in science and it goes against the stated purpose of the recommendations as it does not weigh risks and benefits. Instead, it is an ideological stance. Polio has been eradicated from the US (except for cases caused by vaccines themselves) and most of the rest of the world. You could require it for travel to/from risky locations. We know that severe adverse affects vastly out number the cases of Polio in the US.
And now, people who've never opened a history book can confidently claim they are useless, and that polio disappeared on its own so vaccines were never required, and are even harmful! Fuck that particular brand of ignorance.
Well, speaking of ignorance!
Vaccines are not perfectly safe. All medicine can harm, and vaccines are no exception. Mandating dozens of vaccines to billions of children is forcing parents, under threat of state-sponsored violence, to injure their children.
There are 10s of thousands of VAERS cases in the US per year. Now multiply that by 20 and we're in the ballpark for number of children youre so cavalierly arguing to force harm upon.
Now, there are diseases where vaccines make sense. However, the blanket statement "inject into your newborn whatever the government tells you" is pretty obviously stupid in my opinion; there are plenty of cases of known-toxins taking years to get removed from market with no corporate repercussions - the incentive structures arent perfect. See DDT, leaded gasoline, asbestos, Teflon, uranium mill tailings, cases too numerous to mention. However much you trust the government to do their best, there are agile corporations getting paid handsomely to outmaneuver them.
For my children, we make a disease-by-disease risk/reward determination and do a slower schedule once they're a little older.
Not referring to a status quo, but to the implication of the parent, and yours after the fact, that we should consider mandating vaccines.
> deadly communicable disease
If you think this is the only thing on the US vaccination schedule, you should do a little research.
I've also done something similar with my children. Make a determination for a specific vaccine and schedule. This is a combination of both weighing their health above public health and applying my particular circumstances (e.g. stay at home mom vs. daycare) to adjust the risks. They ended up getting most vaccines, just on a different schedule.
Yeah absolutely. Another example, which is tangential since its not a vaccine but is a default medicine for some reason, is antibiotic eye ointment on literal hours-old infants. Im not concerned we have gonorrhea thanks, ill listen to your talks and sign your waiver.
Fwiw, the hep b recommendation just changed like a month ago :) sensibility wins out, sometimes eventually.
This was honestly the weirdest part of that whole post.
So after all that “not everything is safe”, it sounds like you … wait a little while and then do it anyway? Is it less risky because your kids are a little older?? This seems so unlikely to me.
Anyway, I think a lot of that post demonstrates a failure of an ability to have a dialog (radicalized positions don’t lead to understanding imo).
Are they OK to stockpile those viruses and culture trillions more, on an industrial scale, in every American state? What about in Venezuela? North Korea?
So you’re correct that, for vaccine proponents, framing this issue properly is key. If you frame it in terms of mandates and dismiss optionality out of hand, it’s a lay-up for right-wing Tik Tok to come back with “they’re more left wing than Sweden.” (Disclosure: Despite being a right winger, I would be fine with holding people down and vaccinating them.)
Of course there’s relevant differences. Swedes are culturally orderly and most Americans aren’t. Sweden has a 97% vaccination rate even with voluntary programs. But you have to confront that issue head on and deal with it.
So far, this hasn’t been overturned by the courts. It’s been in place for a few years now.
If your “reasoning” relies upon the other people being “dumb” or “cruel” or <insert-your-invective>, you are almost certainly falling short of understanding why the controversy persists.
If you do value public health then this viewpoint can seem cruel. But if you think like my mom then vaccines might as well be a government-mandated forehead tattoo.
1. People who are ignorant 2. People who are using anti-vax propaganda for some kind of gain
In the US, category two have gone all-in on using category one to gain political power. The "health official" in this post is clearly in category two, and might be in category one as well, but he is absolutely deserving of invectives.
What is needed here are laws making it a crime to conceal that you have or had a communicable disease, so infections can be tracked and fault determined.
It is hysterical and illogical for people to make these accusations. Get real.
Absolutely not. We tried this with HIV and it just incentivizes people to not seek treatment, and then they spread the disease more.
Politicizing this was one of the greatest electoral innovations of all time.
Somebody realized that calling people ignorant and telling them they had to do something pissed people off and lionized them. So they took the vaccine issue and made it political. They knew the "nerdy folks" would just continue pushing and prodding, and that would continue to rile up the other side's voters.
The "institutions" (which are easy to throw shade at) telling folks they had to comply or lose work - that's a cause to fight. There's much more energy in this than in opposing it, and opposition just inflames the other side even further.
Genius political move.
The correct response to a vaccine critic isn't to call them stupid or tell them they must get a vaccine or lose their job. The correct response is, "you do you, but the supply runs out next week".
Hank Green had a nice video essay about this (I'll try to find the link).
I grew up in the South. These are reasonable folks, and they can be reached, but it's being approached the wrong way. The current methodology is only making it worse.
This is like a viral "meme" that actually causes harm. And the more you try to get rid of it, the deeper it digs. You have to try a new approach. The current one -- and it feels so righteous to call them out -- does the exact opposite of what you want.
What is your view when they don't extend the same courtesy? We convince them to vaccinate to protect those who cannot be vaccinated, however they still dig their heels in the "got mine, forget you" mentality until it affects them personally? (Abortion rights, school lunches, walkable neighborhoods, food shelters and donation centers)
Abortion was legal until it became a political issue in the 1800s.
Churches used to be food banks in the 80's, then "welfare" became political.
People got vaccinated until it became a political issue in the 2020s. Many of the elder anti-vaxxers remember getting vaccinated for Polio and how scary that was.
For millennia there had been instructions and recipes for making abortifacient concoctions, to good or bad effect. Many of them are highly toxic to the mother herself. So many abortion-minded women faced the proposition of harming themselves to get at their unborn children.
And that is the premise of "legalizing" it: that it can be made "safe" and so they wouldn't need to use a coat-hanger in a back-alley "anymore" (although practically nobody did such things.)
some snakeoil salesmen know they are pushing bunk, a frightful number actually believe in what they are peddling.
The right wing in America isn't trying to improve the population, they're grifting and hoping that 1. they won't face the same consequences as their supporters, because they're rich enough to be shielded, and 2. that they're going to die before society collapses from the havoc they unleash.
This is also true of, say climate change.
Personally I don't think it needs to go that far, and it's a situation entirely preventable.
The reason we want people to get vaccinated is to stop people getting the diseases…
Nobody is scared of getting polio anymore and one person not getting vaccinated doesn't really change anything --> the fact that they're nonetheless making me get vaccinated must be because of government chips, lizardpeople, big pharma profits, etc etc.
More specific than Chesterton's fence or just history repeating itself.
Polio is starting to slowly become a thing, so we will probably need to start producing more Iron Lungs if we follow the new flat-earth CDC.
Even the article proves these "advisors" have no clue on how vaccines work.
Where?
And being a choice often means you have to pay yourself to get it because it isn’t covered by health insurance.
So bad for poor people again
That being said, of course the net effects of this will be more disease, and internationally probably harsher Visa restrictions on Americans.
I’m waiting for the next crazy denial, like that dinosaurs didn’t exist or that the earth is the center of the universe… just give it a few years
https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/health-professionals-communities/c...
Should we ban alcohol?
While it's true that there are different externalities here (e.g. you're increasing other people's risk by not vaccinating and losing the herd effect) there are also externalities to alcohol consumption (e.g. drunken drivers).
The question is where does that line go between freedom and health factors and other externalities. We should be able to have this discussion without political tribalism.
What about people who can’t get vaccines? The vaccinated help to protect them.
What about smokers and second hand smoke?
From the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, I would have thought, and hoped, public health is their priority.
Individual autonomy is for the politicians to decide on, isn't it?
Medical professionals advise on medical matters, politicians decide based on the societal implications.
Medical professionals aren't elected, and I don't want their personal politics (on individual autonomy or abortion or anything else) infecting their medical advice.
What it sounds like to me is politicians getting the advisors to do both jobs because the politicians want to put their hands in the air and say 'I'm just following the advice'. If the outcome is unpopular then the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices are the bad guys, not the politician(s).
throw0101c•2h ago
https://archive.is/J4C5i