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Comment by yongjik | Hacker News Reader

1) Vaccinators can't access some regions of California because of violent resistance to vaccination.

2) Western vaccines are resisted by hippie Californians who fear Measles vaccines are a Western pharmaceutical plot to spread autism.

3) Disneyland is a great opportunity for the disease to spread between members of these regions.

Let's see if Jenny McCarthy is forcefully vaccinated. Until then, it will be hard for me to take your "They aren't the same people as us, so let's use brute force, for humanity" attitude seriously.

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One could argue that mandatory vaccination laws, which are being passed in some states, are a form of force. I think that these laws are good and useful, but they do point out that even Westerners need coercion at times. They also point out a potential way to apply 'force' to the remaining pockets, which is to introduce vaccination requirements into international treaties, either as requirements for trade deals or something else. The UN would probably be the proper vessel for this, rather than any individual Western country, although certainly those countries could spearhead the effort to make this happen.

There are major differences. First is that your point (1) is simply untrue. There is resistance, yes, but not violent resistance.

More importantly, measles is still pretty widespread and there's no realistic prospect for near-term eradication. Getting all the California hippies to vaccinate wouldn't make a difference in terms of measles eradication, because they make up an insignificant proportion of global measles cases. Polio, however, is endemic in precisely two regions of the world, and getting those two regions to vaccinate would eliminate the disease entirely.

Yes, luckily for these people, they live in a region where Polio is uncommon.

Most of the world could stop vaccinating their children if they chose to. It'd be fine. Until the disease spreads to their population and people start to get infected.

One case of Polio could quite quickly cause California to become a Polio infected region, like Nigeria, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Then we'd have to deal with that area too.

Though without the conviction of other populations, I imagine a once-defiant Western population would quickly revert to willingly accepting the vaccine once they've seen the horrors of the disease with their own eyes.

Yeah - in some ways the effectiveness of vaccines is the only reason that people in western countries can argue against vaccinations at all.

I'm perfectly comfortable with the idea of CPS taking children away from anti-vax parents, and unvaccinated adults who refuse vaccination being forcibly quarantined.

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