Hacker News Reader

Comment by Kenji | Hacker News Reader

You cannot remove the burden to think for oneself from people. Fining people who give wrong advice sets a really dangerous precedent. What is wrong? Will we start fining climate change deniers? What about fining people who believe that certain antidepressants are dangerous? Etc.

EDIT: I wanna add to this that if you make things government-mandated and force it on people, you only give the conspiracy theorists more reason to be suspicious.

View on HN

> What about fining people who believe that certain antidepressants are dangerous? Etc.

There is no controversy about SSRIs' ability to provoke suicide ideation in people who take these drugs.

http://ahrp.org/prozac-revisited-concerns-about-suicides-sur...

Commonly used psychiatric drugs are notorious for worsening patients' conditions.

Another clear example of someone who did not comprehend my point, writing a message in disagreement when in fact it is precisely what I meant. Sigh... Interacting with other humans is difficult.

ok, lets get rid of the ohsa, epa, fda, building codes in general, traffic laws, etc... "you cannot remove the burden to think for oneself" is a stupidly simple response. people have a finite amount of decision making resources, and there are ways we can help... by enacting laws.

Simple. You endanger yourself - be my guest. You endanger others, you suffer. The key role of government is to represent community interest and not vaccinating your kids is very clearly endangering others.

Measles is one of the diseases that you only get once, then you're immune for the rest of your life. Some kids are killed by measles, which is why the vaccine is popular - it is difficult to predict which kids will have a difficult case of teh measles.

It's worse. Some kids can't be vaccinated for whatever reasons. They piggyback on others. If you take the herd immunity from their society, you put them in grave danger.

Plus, some outbreaks happen even in vaccinated communities. There aren't many people who are totally against vaccines. Most just recognize that hitting kids with the recommended onslaught of vaccines is associated with a higher percentage of kids suddenly mentally handicapped or dead or paralyzed. Vaccines are often beneficial, but they're not risk free.

The key role of government is to represent community interest and not vaccinating your kids is very clearly endangering others.

Why hasn't the government made it mandatory then (IMO it should be) ?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com