I can understand the anger, it's quite horrifying that diseases we thought were eradicated are making a comeback. On the other hand I'm also horrified by the idea of shipping people off to Alaska for refusing to submit to a medical procedure. That's a very dangerous precedent that could be applied in all sorts of heinous ways.
What exactly do you think grants you a right to herd immunity? You might really really want herd immunity, but you don't have a right to it. Your rights stop at theirs just as much as their rights stop at yours. They do have a right not to be subjected to medical procedures, you don't have a right to herd immunity. It's frustrating and regressive but herd immunity is something we have to decide on as a herd, and currently we're deciding against it.
It's not about rights, it's about public safety. I don't have an inherent natural human right to have people obey traffic laws, but they save lives and a majority of people support them. And more then 2/3s of parents in every state of the nation vaccinate their kids. It's the tiny minority of people who refuse to that fuck it up for the rest of us, much like people drinking and driving cause car crashes.
Sorry, to me it is about rights and it should be to you as well. It is also very much about public safety to me, both are important. But to me forced procedures would be an unacceptable violation of rights not worth it for the public safety gains. I can understand the point of view that eroding those rights is worth the public safety gains. I cannot understand the point of view that this is not, on some level, about rights.
Driving licenses restrict rights because the alternative, anyone being allowed to drive anything, anywhere, in any condition, is utter chaos and would result in tens of millions of people dying from avoidable catastrophes.
So long as people have a right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" then they must acknowledge that certain things must be done to protect that right. Mass vaccinations is one of those things.
I guess I think rights go hand in hand with duties and responsibilities, including one's duty to other humans, and the responsibility of the government to act on behalf of the governed for the common welfare.
As a society we've worked hard to eradicate things like polio, measels, and other violently contagious diseases that left uncheecked would destroy the lives of hundreds of millions of people.
As a member of that society I have the right to benefit from our collective efforts because those efforts were done for me, for you, for everyone, without exclusion. These things were given to us by our ancestors, by our governments, by our own individual contributions.
Right now there are people working tirelessly and facing extreme risk to elininate the tiniest pockets of polio in the world. They are killed on a worryingly regular basis because of a form of anti-vaxx sentiment: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-36090891
If you're a staunch libertarian your position should be that I can do whatever I want so long as I don't infringe upon your rights, and one of the most fundamental rights is a right to live and do what I please.
Unvaccinated people can strip you of your right to live.
Could use the same argument for vegetarianism, environment causes, gun control, etc.
If it were up to me guns and hard liquor would be banned and cars would have limited speed. These are all things that affect me even if I don't use them.
If you can frame vegetarianism in a way that someone eating meat causes another person direct harm, maybe you have a case.
Environmentally speaking there is more of a clear connection, though it is more of a sliding scale. Is someone smoking next door an imminent threat to my life? Not typically. Is someone experimenting with highly radioactive materials next door an imminent threat to my life? It could very well be.
There's often a lot of grey, but there are times when the threat is obvious. A deliberately unvaccinated child is a serious health risk to everyone they interact with. If there's enough of these children around the risk grows.
Vaccinated children are already rife with disease, they're more vulnerable than adults. Unvaccinated ones may as well be radioactive.
I don't know that hard liquor bans are something you could argue for. America tried that already and it didn't work out at all.
I think it's facinating that we are likely moving to cars with limited speed (driverless controls), and that we have tried banning booze.
At least banning alchohol as a constitutional ammendment was rather ineffective and led to some wild crime and an eventual repeal. On the face of it, though, it's an interesting social experiement whose outcome probably wasn't very obvious at the time. At least to the proponents.
The guns though? I'm not at all sure how America could even try banning that. Perhaps we just need to look to another country to see how that affected society. It also has that awkward bootstrapping problem: how do you take the guns from the people? They're by definition armed, after all...
I think this is sorta on the nose, but I would rephrase it as "Do we have a right to not be subjected to medical procedures?"
And the answer to that seems to be fairly strongly in the affirmative. I imagine we will be approaching a more nuanced legal view of such things in the near future as we battle to understand where rights really stand. (Much like many of our rights, there are exceptional situations - like the oft quoted yelling "FIRE!" in a movie theater - and perhaps vaccinations should be treated similarly.)
EDIT - I was pointed to some interesting CDC info below, and there is an interesting scenario possible: make measels a quarantinable disease. This would become a choice with teeth. Choose to vaccinate, or risk isolation. Thankfully, the CDC seems like a fairly serious outfit, and I'm not worried about abuse of power in this way, but it does rephrase the topic a bit.
From that site, it seems that isolation and quarantine is largely done at borders between states and country. It's also very serious, and it's not something the CDC takes lightly: the last major enforcement of the rule was in 1918 for the Spanish Flu (though it cites there were other minor applications - the ebola scare last year may be one small instance of that).
In context of this, I would imagine that measles would need to be added to the list of diseases quarantine is enforced (I haven't spotted this list yet).
EDIT: found the important list, and it mentions specifically measels are NOT on the list:
The list of quarantinable diseases is contained in an
Executive Order of the President and includes cholera,
diphtheria, infectious tuberculosis, plague, smallpox,
yellow fever, viral hemorrhagic fevers (such as Marburg,
Ebola, and Congo-Crimean), and severe acute respiratory
syndromes.
Many other illnesses of public health signficance, such as
measles, mumps, rubella, and chicken pox, are not
contained in the list of quarantinable illnesses, but
continue to pose a health risk to the public. Quarantine
Station personnel respond to reports of ill travelers
aboard airplanes, ships, and at land border crossings to
make an assessment of the public health risk and initiate
an appropriate response.
At some point, there is a social contract. In exchange for the benefits of being part of society, you play by the rules of society. For example, I may not dispose of feces in ways that allow it to get back to groundwater. This holds even if it is on my own property. In the same way, people do not have the right to infect others with preventable diseases.
With individual decision about vaccination, the minority gets to overrule the decision of the majority. The majority of people are vaccinated. The majority of people have, in effect, voted for herd immunity. A minority of people have voted against herd immunity. Because it requires 90-95% vaccination rates for herd immunity to occur, the minority wins that "vote". This is unreasonable.
When such "decisions" mean me and my family are incurring a substantially higher risk of getting some deadly disease, things are no longer so nice and well-manicured as you describe them.
I don't think it's nice or well-manicured at all, quite the opposite in fact. I just can't get myself to a point where I think it's reasonable to force a medical procedure on someone. Forced medical procedures have been used in too many evil ways in the past, always under the guise of a greater societal good. I agree that the societal good (herd immunity) is very real and very important in this case, I just can't square myself with the costs of obtaining it.
Right now we're debating whether it's reasonable or not to "force" a medical procedure on someone.
When epidemics break out and people start to die, all the reasonable parts of this debate will go down the drain, and more forceful approaches may be adopted.
Keep that in mind when you're thinking about what's "reasonable" and what isn't.
Typhoid Mary was an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid fever. Her work as a cook resulted in numerous outbreaks and deaths. She was informed of the risks, and warned not to return to the food industry. She ignored these warnings, changed her name, and returned to work as a cook. As a result, another outbreak, and more deaths.
Refusing to vaccinate is just as irresponsible as Typhoid Mary.
It isn't punishment for refusing to submit to a medical procedure, any more than drunk driving is punishment for driving. It is refusing to take basic medical care, resulting in the decreased health of society.
Another result was that she (Mary Mallon) was imprisoned/quarantined for the remainder of her life (after being released from her first quarantine and being told not to work as a cook, changing her name, working as a cook, causing more outbreaks and deaths). 23 years...
She refused medical procedures that could have removed the infection (removal of gall bladder) and as such died in imprisonment/confinement.
I'm not suggesting we should lock up anti-vaxxers, but if there is an outbreak of polio then those people who refuse to be vaccinated put at risk those who cannot be vaccinated.
Stealing a $1 candy bar can mean a life in jail if it's your third strike.
Deliberately avoiding vaccinations for your kids and causing a measels outbreak in a school where multiple children die carries no penalty. Maybe it should.
Do we? Last time I checked we put people in cells for committing crimes. What sorts of prisoners are you talking about here? It's not obvious to me but perhaps I'm being thick.
No, we put people in cells because they represent a threat to the general public. Of course, it doesn't always play out that way in reality, but their are a limited number of options re punishment as well.
Society has a right to protect itself. If your decisions put my life, as well as thousands of others, in danger unnecessarily then you represent a significant risk.
>> On the other hand I'm also horrified by the idea of shipping people off to Alaska for refusing to submit to a medical procedure.
If a very small minority of people are going to endanger the lives of millions - or billions - of others shipping them off to a colony for refusing to submit to the procedure is kind in my opinion. I guess it depends on whether you have a more utilitarian outlook on ethics or believe personal freedom is more important. And I believe the 'dangerous precedent' you mention should be easy to protect from in a lawful democratic society. You should be entitled to your personal freedom and rights until they start infringing on the basic rights of others.
> And I believe the 'dangerous precedent' you mention should be easy to protect from in a lawful democratic society.
It's not easy to protect from at all. There was a time in this country when we had forced sterilization of poor people. [0] It was justified using all the same language that you're using here and seen as an incredibly progressive policy. It's not easy at all to protect from these kinds of abuses. Quite the opposite in fact.
> You should be entitled to your personal freedom and rights until they start infringing on the basic rights of others.
Anti-vaxxers aren't infringing on any of your basic rights, they are putting you at risk but you don't have a right to herd immunity from diseases. They do have a right decide which medical procedures they undergo, again that may be regressive but that's currently the way it works in our country.
>> Anti-vaxxers aren't infringing on any of your basic rights, they are putting you at risk but you don't have a right to herd immunity from diseases
I have the "Right to Life, Liberty, Personal Security". By putting my life in danger they are infringing on that right. Now they also have the right to "Freedom from Torture and Degrading Treatment" which forced vaccination may be treated as. But one right has to take precedence and I would argue it is the former.
I don't think it's a dangerous precedent, in the sense that precedent happened a long, long time ago. These sorts of diseases are horrific, and quarantine is usually applied with extreme predjudice. Quarantine is no joke, and is a last line of defense.
That said, quarantine might be overkill. But isolation really is a valid solution. It's just awful. But refusing vaccination is also awful, since it can lead to far more brutal suffering than the inconvenience of uprooting one's home.
Honestly it's just a crap situation, where each solution that isn't vaccination is just a measure of weighing the ultimate amount of suffering and choosing the least bad.
I'd be interested in seeing a counter example. But I'm pretty sure for someone to be guilty of manslaughter there has to be an actual death, not just a risk of death.
Reckless endangerment might be a more reasonable charge, but I think that assumes herd immunity as the baseline of risk and thus anything that raises that is endangering you. As I've argued elsewhere in this thread, we don't have a right to herd immunity, it's something we'll either do or not do as a herd and currently we seem to be choosing the latter.
