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Comment by dmm | Hacker News Reader

I'm completely fine with this. We just need to internalize the externality. You not vaccinating your child harms not only your family but potentially many others around you.

We need some sort of legal construct that would hold those who do not vaccinate responsible if there is an outbreak in the area. For example, you don't vaccinate your daughter for whooping cough and my daughter(too young to vaccinate) catches it. My daughter has to suffer months of terrible pain and discomfort in addition to potential long-term consequences. I should be able to seek compensation from you.

Of course there are other social alternatives, such as lychings.

As a side note, you probably don't know shit about vaccines. What makes you think spacing them out will improve her reactions to them?

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Provided that most everyone else does get vaccinated, it should be fine to avoid vaccinating the small percentage of people with natural allergic reactions to the vaccine.

I don't think you should find the allergic culpable in your scheme, because if the reaction is bad enough, you're asking them to either endure suffering or die so that there is no possibility that they can harm you.

How exactly would you be able to prove that your daughter caught a disease from any particular person?

For instance, if someone with whooping cough coughed hard, then left the room, and 10 minutes later your daughter walked through the room on the way to meeting the other person's daughter, how exactly could you tell that?

I think that there ought to be a law against people who think "there ought to be a law against X" ...

> How exactly would you be able to prove that your daughter caught a disease from any particular person?

Set the standard of evidence to whatever the current technology can provide. Right now I'm fine with unvaccinated people having responsibility for all outbreaks in their area.

> I think that there ought to be a law against people who think "there ought to be a law against X"

I think there ought to be a law against people who don't know the difference between civil and criminal law.

"As a side note, you probably don't know shit about vaccines. What makes you think spacing them out will improve her reactions to them?"

For the same reason that I let my toddler eat dirt if she wants to. The longer her immune system has to build up a defense, the better it will defend against something in a vaccine that causes her medical or allergic distress.

If your kid was allergic to peanuts, would you be allowing your neighbors to force her to eat peanuts?

Recent research suggests the best way to deal with peanut allergies is exposure to small amounts. Kind of like a vaccine really.

Science is very difficult, frustrating and time consuming. The reason we bother with it is that human intuition is remarkably bad at most things.

You should just admit that you are making medical decisions about complex phenomenon based on vague feelings. Why do we even bother studying immunology? Let's just ask how camworld is feeling today!

What makes you think spacing them out will improve her reactions to them?

The thinking probably goes something like, "If A and B each individually cause severe symptoms, A and B combined will probably be worse." This accurately describes most things.

It sounds sensible, but turns out to be faulty for several reasons. See the parallel thread above.

And heavy things fall faster than lighter things! Right? Oh wait, intuition can and is very often wrong. Particularly with respect to complex phenomenon such as the human immune system.

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