Many people are going to suffer horribly, measels is no fun, and many will die because of these stupid, stupid anti-vaxxers.
They should all be quarantined on some remote island off the coast of Alaska.
If they are willing to wear all encompassing bio hazard suits, and bubble their house, fine by me if they care not to vaccinate...
It is our problem when people don't believe in herd immunity and other problems that can affect the community.
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.
https://www.cdc.gov/quarantine/aboutlawsregulationsquarantin...
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.
http://247wallst.com/special-report/2016/08/22/states-with-t...
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Deliberately avoiding vaccinations for your kids and causing a measels outbreak in a school where multiple children die carries no penalty. Maybe it should.
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.
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.
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.
This is not like sterilizing the poor, something based on junk science. This is based on hard, established fact. Don't make false equivalencies here.
Are you arguing you should be able to carry around packets of anthrax in public if you, personally, are immune to it?
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.
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.
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.
Kid is born. You rejoice. Kid develops autism. You're devastated. Doc tells you it might be genetic, partially. The rational part of your brain goes "genes, mutations, alleles, etc". The irrational part of your brain goes "you mean my man-juice was bad and spoiled? how dare you? I am a real man and I'll see you in hell!"
So at that point it depends on which part of your brain wins. Is it the part that gave us Einstein or Plato? Or is it the part that we're sharing with pigs and jackals?
I think this model explains a lot of completely irrational things bouncing around the world these days.
Being intelligent about things means remaining objective and weighing facts and observations, not just chugging the anti-vaxx Kool-Aid and calling it a day.
Close. Seems like they are self-segregating in Seattle.
http://kuow.org/post/seattle-kids-have-lower-polio-vaccinati...
But they don't do that. They push quite hard for everyone to stop vaccinating.
Ask someone older than 70 what polio is like. They all have stories of someone they know being struck down by it, and even those that squeaked through and survived never did well.
It's stupid.
Actually it has been expected for quite some time that there should be a gigantic measles epidemic:
>"The second scenario represents the impact of a vaccination programme that reaches high levels of coverage (85% of all new-borns) which are, nevertheless, not high enough to lead to eradication of the agent. However, for the first 15 years after the introduction of vaccination, it appears as if eradication has been achieved, there are no infections. Then, suddenly, a new epidemic appears as if from nowhere. This is an illustration of a phenomenon known as the ‘honeymoon period’. This is the period of very low incidence that immediately follows the introduction of a non-eradicating mass vaccination policy. This happens because susceptible individuals accumulate much more slowly in a vaccinated community. Such patterns were predicted using mathematical models in the 1980s6 and have since been observed in communities in Asia, Africa and South America7. Honeymoon periods are only predicted to occur when the newly introduced vaccination programme has coverage close to the eradication threshold." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12176860
The reason is that they underestimated the infectiousness of measles (via airborne routes) when first implementing the vaccination policy. Vaccine effectiveness is not high enough to eradicate the virus, thus we should see a honeymoon period followed by a very large epidemic:
>"The Center for Disease Control (CDC) led in mounting the program with a formal paper at the American Public Health Association annual meeting in Miami in the fall of 1966. Two colleagues and I wrote the “official statement” which outlined in detail unqualified statements about the epidemiology of measles and made an unqualified prediction. My third position in the authorship of this paper did not adequately reflect my contribution to the work.14 I will make but two quotes: 1. “The infection spreads by direct contact from person to person, and by the airborne route among susceptibles congregated in enclosed spaces.” (Obviously the ideas of Perkins and Wells had penetrated my consciousness but not sufficiently to influence my judgment). 2. “Effective use of (measles) vaccines during the coming winter and spring should insure the eradication of measles from the United States in 1967.” Such was my faith in the broad acceptance of the vaccine by the public and the health professions and in the infallibility of herd immunity.
The results of this prediction are well known. The reported incidence of the disease dropped from a level of 400,000-500,000 cases a year during 1960-1964, to 250,000 in 1965 and 200,000 in 1966. This clearly reflected the use of the early-type vaccines in private practice. Incidence further dropped to 50,000 in 1967 and to 25,000 in 1968 but since then has continued a fluctuating cou~s e .T’~he variability can be related to the degree of the total national effort, and the availability of federal funds to defray vaccine costs. Eradication remains elusive although intensification of effort during the past 12 months appears to have brought incidence to a lower point, near 12,000 cases.
There are many reasons and explanations for this rather egregious blunder in prediction. The simple truth is that the prediction was based on confidence in the Reed-Frost epidemic theory, in the applicability of herd immunity on a general basis, and that measles cases were uniformly infectious. I am sure I extended the teachings of my preceptors beyond the limits that they had intended during my student days.
In the relentless light of the well-focussed retrospectiscope, the real failure was our neglect of conducting continuous and sufficiently sophisticated epidemiological field studies of measles. We accepted the doctrines imbued into us as students wikout maintaining the eternal skepticism of the true scientist." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6939399
Right now I'm not sure the US administration could manage to bungle up something only as badly as the Hurricane Katrina response.
Remember when China bungled SARS? That's what the US will do if there's an outbreak now.
It's like the only person standing between the president and a total catastrophe is a temporary appointee: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Schuchat