Hacker News Reader

Comment by Pharmakon | Hacker News Reader

Smart, this should change the media narrative from their utter bollocks of handling the comments thing. YouTube may be equal parts soulless and incompetent, but their PR strategy isn’t terrible sometimes.

On the other hand, antivaxxing is one of those problems crying out to stamped into the dust. I don’t particularly care if some decides to eat lots of fruit instead of getting chemotherapy, because their cancer isn’t contagious. Immunization though, is a matter of public health, and my patience for precious fools on a mission is precisely 0 when it could hurt people I care about.

Still... why the hell is this something we let YouTube decide? The problem with antivaxxers isn’t their YouTube channels, it’s the fact that our lawmakers are too cowardly to pass some laws around the issue. YouTube shouldn’t be in a position to exert this kind of power, and this isn’t how issues should be tackled. This doesn’t solve anything, it just obscures it. A solution involves restricting access to public spaces for selfish morons who don’t get vaccinated, and yes, their children.

Edit: Sorry I just realized that my comment is on the border of being little more than a rant. Like a lot of people here I suspect that this is the intersection of two issues I care about deeply; a big tech company’s questionable, situational ethics and enormous power, and the horror of people facing debilitation or death because of pseudoscience. I’m angry, I’m frustrated, and while I know having the government intervene is fraught with danger, it seems necessary especially in cases of public health.

View on HN

Exactly. I don't think that a company that is supposed to be just providing a service to publish your videos should be unilaterally deciding what they like and what they don't even if it majority opinion.

Free speech is there exactly to protect minority opinions because sometimes it happens people in minority are right.

Every major movement started as minority, by definition. Free speech protection is there to make sure we can have smart people notice a problem and then express their concern and be allowed to voice it so that if they can gather enough movement to make a change there can be a good change.

It is sad that this can sometimes lead to aberrations like anti-vac movement but it would be a horrible idea to argue this is a reason to throw free speech protection out. Instead we should demand lawmakers to grow a spine and recognize there is no basis for anti-vac movement and enough is enough. Sadly, vote counting is much more important nowadays than sound medical advice.

> just allowing you to publish your videos should be unilaterally deciding

Youtube is a not a public institution nor is it public land or space. Google can allow, or deny, whomever or whatever they want on their platform so long as their motivates for denying service are not due to regulated prejudice such as racism or sexism.

Ah, what if your phone company or internet provider decided to filter your ability to voice your opinions?

At some point a private company that allows you to post amateurish videos or 140 character messages becomes public utility used by millions and if they decide not to allow you to express your opinion your opinion becomes effectively unavailable to others.

Public utility is firmly defined, at least in the US, by the FCC. Even the Internet itself is no longer protected under such definitions, let alone your "right" to speak on a private companies website.

I would absolutely love for the top ~20 sites to all be rendered public utilities. But that would require legislation regulating these private websites as newly minted public institutions and I'm sure the operators of these cash cows would have a word or two to say about the government seizing control of their businesses, even if indirectly through regulation.

Right now, legally, Google can do whatever they want on youtube with impunity - if we want that to change, that will require state involvement, because all these sites are way too big for a crowd of nerds on a forum to influence the business models of in profound ways.

There are still some filters on what they will allow over their lines but as a carrier of communication they have been regulated by the government to allow everyone's data across (mostly). There is the option to buy a domain and host your opinions yourself, google and youtube are not preventing that from being an option (and google will even index your site and help people find it)... So theoretically this isn't an issue.

In actuality I think society has reached a point where the ability to post something to facebook or youtube is actually a specific form of expression that should be protected as a public institution. That said, spreading dangerous misinformation is not wholly protected by free speech, if you are a weatherman and advise (with malintent) commuters fleeing an incoming storm to take a highway that is known to be dangerous then your speech is not protected, the government may silence your speech and you will likely face legal repercussions for doing so.

I think freedom of speech is very important and I do acknowledge that this issue is littered with slippery slopes but, not all speech is free and there are some forms of speech that should be controlled. The problem of how to do that as a society while not impeding free speech is extremely hard and unsolved, the best current solution might be to assume all speech is free until a court rules otherwise but that is not an ideal solution.

The key here is "government may silence your speech" (or should it be "judiciary"). It is very different when it is a private company that decides this.

The correct course of action here is for our leaders to grow a spine and publicly acknowledge this is a problem.

Of course speech should be free until court rules otherwise. How otherwise you expect minority opinion to be safe from majority? It is not free speech if anybody with more power than you may shut you up.

If you were to tell a police office you were about to go into a crowded square of people rioting against a city government and announce your intention to pay one million dollars to whoever shoots the mayor first, how should that officer respond?

Should he submit a request to have the case reviewed to the DA and ask a judge to allow him to stop you from taking that option?

The courts cannot be expected to individually guide every action (although law enforcement should be cognizant of the types of speech previously ruled to be free or restricted and respect that ruling with penalties for knowingly violating that precedent).

This stuff is complicated and making blanket statements is just silly. _Most_ speech should be protected, but some speech is limited.

Soliciting a crime like that is already directly punishable and not free speech. Very bad example.

Youtube is demonetizing here, not censoring.

I guess you have no issue with Patreon and Mastercard deciding which business you can give money to either ? Not so diffirent from banks refusing to serve cannabis stores, or pornstars.

I think it's quite a jump from not showing ads on videos to blocking money transfers.

Youtube is trying to stem the outflow of advertisers who've clearly stated that they don't want to be associated with certain kinds of content.

There's an argument that perhaps Youtube should provide the ability for content creators to provide their own Ad Network integration, if Youtube is unwilling to provide that monetisation themselves.

However, creators are free to source their own advertising deals and directly incorporate those into their videos - see just about everyone advertising Audible, Squarespace, Dollar Shave Club, Brilliant, etc.

They still allow use of their platform... People can upload and view the videos. They're just disavowing "partnership" through the monetization program.

So you’re saying that government control of speech is bad, but government control of behaviour is good?

You're positing a strawman, but in the spirit of your approach: yes - if the behaviour being controlled is comparable to hooliganism, vandalism or worse.

The problem I see is what if there actually were a problem? Keep in mind I solidly believe that there is not.

But there have been many drugs with serious side effects pulled from the market some of them after regulators and drug companies behaving badly.

Is YouTube pulling them because of a sense of responsibility to open fair scientific inquiry? Or are they doing it as a PR stunt to distract from other bad behavior?

I'm sure if you lived in SW Washington with an infant you'd sing a different tune.

More than a few friends and people I know are immunocompromised, for them it is a big deal.

Then people would do a different thing. We aren't locked in forever to all decisions.

Over the last 20 years alone the measles vaccine has saved over 20 million lives, and that's just a single vaccine. And herd immunity is a critical part of the success.

All meds have side effects. Things do not work for 100% cases, but that doesn't make it invalid.

Leaving that aside, usually don't even understand why they choose to not vaccinate their child, they just believed someone that said it is bad. Look at the "flatearthers", some arguments are even funny because they are based in nothing. You can only just "believe" them.

Of course the government should do something about it. Don't forget the government is the society.

Case in point, vaccines can cause narcolepsy.

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/history/narcoleps...

They don't cause autism, but what if we set up mandatory vaccinations with absolutely no opt-out because some parents were offensively wrong, and later a vaccination does start causing serious problems and the government doesn't move fast enough to change its rules?

We have a family friend whose young daughter developed serious issues with autistic similarities after a vaccination.

This is not necessarily a topic to be 'stamped out', and free speech has to transcend censorship, search engine companies hiding materials and discouraging the creation of those materials.

> We have a family friend whose young daughter developed serious issues with autistic similarities after a vaccination.

Isn't that because those issues usually aren't visible before around that time? (I am neither a GP nor a psycologist though so this is just trying to apply common sense.)

I demand my kids gets all recommended vaccines. Because even if there was a (vanishingly small) chance of a kid getting autism like symptoms I can live better with that risk than the much bigger risk that that being unvaccinated presents.

> This is not necessarily a topic to be 'stamped out', and free speech has to transcend censorship, search engine companies hiding materials and discouraging the creation of those materials.

Free speech is important. I would like to use mine to point out that looking at some anti-vaxxers (I'm not singling out your relatives, they might very well be reasonable people) one might get the idea that any autism in their kids might have simpler explanation than a vaccine that millions of other kids take without issue every year ;-)

Edit: that last paragraph really feels bad. My point is I mostly do defend peoples right to free speech (I might even pay close attention to people who argue against AGW as long as they are trying to be honest and have a discussion, not a sermon), but when it comes to vaccines it is actually pretty much settled science that they save millions of lives, millions of hours of suffering each year.

If anyone still wants to debate it, I might even listen carefully, but it really helps a lot if the other part treat the subject with the respect it deserves.

Sorry to everone for the comment above. It really wasn't good IMO :-/

> Isn't that because those issues usually aren't visible before around that time? (I am neither a GP nor a psycologist though so this is just trying to apply common sense.)

In some cases maybe, but it don't believe in all cases. A neighbour had this with her 7 month old baby, and symptoms showed up literary 4-5 hours after vaccination (not autistic symptoms of course, problems with breathing and similar), but at about 3-4 years you could already see some of the autistic symptoms in the kid along with speech impairment.

Not only that. Freedom has its limits. Your freedom to a decision should not trump another person's freedom to live.

By not getting a vaccine when you medically can, you're putting others at risk because of your freedom.

> Still... why the hell is this something we let YouTube decide?

The only thing YouTube has decided here is that they aren't going to take money from advertisers and give it to anti vaccine channels.

Content creators say that demonetization is not only about the profits as such videos have less exposure as well (they won't go trending, they won't be recommended if you are not subscribed, etc.)

The problem with this trend now is that people have realized the truth they want can be the truth we all have if they're willing to yell loud enough about it.

It’s always been true, but it used to require someone with resources and like minded people to start it. Now everyone is in the game, with predictably unpredictable results. Worse, with bits and content farms it’s possible to distort the perception of reality and popular opinion at the individual level. Governments enjoy unprecedented power to erode trust at home and abroad. People are understandably giving up and turning away, while,other get lost in a deep dark hole.

How do we stop this without making matters even worse? I want to say “educate people” yet that’s a pat response. Some people won’t be educated, it takes a lot of time, and how do we even agree on what a good education is? To me it’s critical thinking, STEM, and meeting other people. To others it’s teaching their kids that people like me are the agents of the devil, that fossils are a test from god or a plot by the CIA. How can that gap be bridged without someone trampling all over the rights of the other? How can people in such separate relaities not undermine each other or seek to use the system against each other, only to see it turned back on themselves?

How many times have you read a comment on a board and your first thought was, “That has to be a troll/shill/bot”? How often have you just given up on a discussion because the signal:noise ratio was intolerable? I know my answer is “too many times to count.” I worry that it means bad actors are winning, that I’ve fallen under the spell of Oh Dearism.

Many religious leaders believe that lying to people is immoral -- or at least they used to it until they made a moral judgement that abortion (e.g.) was so much worse than lying.

Ironically that's postmodernism for you.

Postmodernism does not mean "all truths are valid". Foucault was often unclear in his writing but he was clear on this.

Foucault also wasn't the only one with an opinion on postmodernism.

Wait, you mean they just barely demonetized them? As in, they've been paying them for clicks this entire time, even after all of the measles outbreaks the last few months?

Crazy... to think YouTube execs had no clue that there is a direct correlation to the media they help propagate and the outbreak of previously cured diseases!

I assume you support enforcing vagrancy laws then and removing vagrants from public spaces? Because vagrants defecating in public and leaving used drug needles and other filth lying around certainly is a matter of public health[1][2].

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2017/09/14/health/hepatitis-a-outbreak-s...

[2] https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/Typhus-Epidemic-Wor...

If you look into the history of the countries with censorship, everything started by making decisions on what content should be allowed and what not.

And it’s funny because a lot of them actually started with health related concerns.

>>A solution involves restricting access to public spaces for selfish morons who don’t get vaccinated, and yes, their children.

Easier than that - you either vaccinate your kids or we take them away, period. We're ok taking kids away from parents who starve their kids or beat them or let their wounds get terribly infected. Why do we allow parents to keep children if they're not willing to vaccinate for bullshit reasons?

>Immunization though, is a matter of public health, and my patience for precious fools on a mission is precisely 0 when it could hurt people I care about.

Aren't the people you care about vaccinated?

> Aren't the people you care about vaccinated?

It is not that easy. Some people cannot be vaccinated, for example measles vaccination isn't licensed for babies younger than 6 months AFAIK. So they will still be at risk from others who could have gotten vaccinated but didn't.

That's a bit of an edge case.

A major benefit of herd immunity is to help with the edge cases - people who cannot, or should not, be vaccinated, but would be in danger from these infections should they be exposed.

Vaccines aren't 100% effective. Google herd immunity.

Vaccinations are not 100% effective, and some people cannot be vaccinated.

The threat of disease isn't news, yet the constant propaganda against anti-vaxers is. People got exposed to measles in the past and the vast majority were fine. You can only get measles once and the odds of dying of measles is akin to the annual odds of choking to death.

The threat of disease is news when we've reduced the risk of it occurring so much that a great many people have never actually seen a case of it, so effectively 0 risk has suddenly become nonzero for anyone who does not have immunity.

What are your thoughts on the Amish? As I understand it they don't get vaccinated, but they also don't interact much with the rest of society.

Where do you think the line should be drawn in your hypothetical government intervention?

Their right to practice their region shouldn't supersede everyone elses' rights to live a safe society.

If someone's religion said you needed to disobey red traffic lights, or shoot guns wildly into the air, we'd tell them to knock it off real quick.

Okay, I’ll bite. How would it endanger people if I weren’t vaccinated?

Well, I guess there's this one thing here...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/father-vanco...

Was that even a serious question?

http://vk.ovg.ox.ac.uk/herd-immunity

Yes, it was. And those links didn't address it in the slightest. Your first link is completely unrelated, that is, of course I understand that I am far more likely to contract a disease that I am not vaccinated for, particularly if traveling. And if anything, your second link ("herd immunity") underlines my question. I'm vaccinated. Everyone I know is vaccinated. The country I live it essentially requires that people be vaccinated. So again I pose the question, how would I endanger others if I weren't?

Some people are unable to get vaccinated, due to medical complications. Those people rely on others being vaccinated so that they don't contract some disease.

How would you endanger others if you weren't? Well you could potentially contact the disease and then spread it to those others, right?

If you're asking how you would endanger someone in a society where 100% of all other people were vaccinated, well I guess you don't but that's not the world we live in.

Right, like I figured. So it is a matter of probabilities. If one lives in a country where a super majority is vaccinated, particularly if that same person does not travel, the likelihood of him both contracting such a disease, interacting with a person not vaccinated against that disease, and then that person contracting the disease is vanishingly small. That is not remotely comparable to blowing through red lights, such as you suggested in your example. So my follow up question, is then, why the vitriol? The comments here are incredibly aggressive, particularly considering the usual behavior of the community. It seems to me the average commenter here is more likely to get in a head-on collision due to daydreaming about the rust borrow checker while driving home than the scenario presented earlier is to happen.

All vaccines have primary and secondary failure rates. Primary failure occurs if you get vaccinated but you do not develop antibodies (This is rather crude description of immunological memory but let just stick with it). Secondary one occurs when you get vaccinated, you develop antibodies but once you contract the disease you still get it (e.g. you immunological memory does not kick it). Both of these are well known effects and are subject of research to develop more effective vaccines. So even in population where 100% people get vaccinated there is insignificant percentage of those who are still susceptible to given disease.

> A solution involves restricting access to public spaces for selfish morons who don’t get vaccinated, and yes, their children.

I'm certainly not an antivaxxer. I receive vaccines and will vaccinate my children.

But the government mandating people vaccinate themselves or their children in order to participate in society crosses a line for me.

It may be reasonable in specific circumstances, which I haven't fully thought through, but not by broadly restricting access to public spaces.

I beg to differ. It's way too lenient to only restrict their children to access public spaces. No, they should be tried for the attempted premediated murder of every child their children meets or simply put, a crime against humanity. Biological warfare is a war crime, you know. Hand out a few thousand year sentences, watch anti vaxx sentiment disappear.

Shouldn’t the same argument be used to persecute pro-choice advocates, women who get abortions and doctors who perform them?

This issue is much simpler if you rephrase it: replace the "pro life" label with "anti woman". As long as the child is connected to the body of the mother, we as a society decided it's more important to give mothers bodily agency than any rights of a potential human. Do not get tangled in the definition of when life begins, this issue is not biological, it's very strictly a decision the society needs to make. And while you think the decision is not clear cut, it actually is, you just need to look elsewhere where soceties made a decision on bodily agency: organ donors after death. I never heard of any place where it is mandatory to be an organ donor -- actually most places are opt in. So, apparently even your cadaver deserves bodily agency. If we consider the agency of a dead body can be more important than the life of several adult humans then how on earth can the agency of a living body be less important than someone who is not even born yet (might not survive etc)? Hypocrisy much?

Sure, and you could similarly replace "pro-vaxx" with "anti-freedom". Then it becomes a bit harder to stomach, no?

The point is, women are free to abort unborn children. They're not free to let their (born) children die (of neglect). It's not an obvious choice whether they should be free to not vaccinate their children or not.

> It's not an obvious choice whether they should be free to not vaccinate their children or not.

I mean, it really is. Not vaccinate can lead to death, not always but it massively increases the risk to the point that I consider it neglect. Just as a child left on the street may survive, it doesn't stop the path that put that child on the street being termed "neglect".

(I am pro-choice and pro-vaccine)

How can you be for bodily agency and also be in favor of forcing people to get vaccines?

Note first I disagree with allowing to opt out of your body used as an organ donor after your death.

No value is absolute. Trolley problem and all that (Judith Jarvis Thomson phrased the trolley problem as an organ transplant case it so happens). The potential destruction wrought by an unvaccinated child is deadly enough it overrides the individual bodily agency. By taking away the bodily agency of one child you are potentially saving several living, actual humans. When you take away the bodily agency of one woman, you are potentially saving the life of an unborn person at best. This doesn't compare favorably. Also, beyond bodily agency we need to weigh all effects of forcing a decision and forcing vaccinations have an extremely low chance of causing harm to the child being vaccinated whereas banning abortions have an extremely high chance of causing harm to the woman.

The chance of a child dying from a vaccine preventable disease in the United States is far lower than from a car accident. It would be absurd to suggest we charge vehicle drivers with attempted premeditated murder because there’s a risk they might kill people on the roads they’re driving on.

(Yes, I’m aware this is due to herd immunity. I’m not talking about hypothetical situations where the majority of people do not voluntarily get vaccinated)

https://bc.ctvnews.ca/mother-absolutely-infuriated-after-hig...

Isn't this already a thing? Per below links, I thought most schools require vaccinations. It seems to be a minority of states that allow 'philosophical' exemptions.

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/imz-managers/laws/state-reqs.ht...

https://vaccines.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=003...

Obviously, restricting access to all public spaces goes much further...but functionally, this works well enough if we just get rid of the states with philosophical exemptions.

That may be one of the specific circumstances I'd be ok with, just because children are in such close contact with each other.

> It seems to be a minority of states that allow 'philosophical' exemptions.

Antivaxx is basically a religion, isn't it? ;)

Do you believe it's a bad idea for governments to mandate that you're up to date on your vaccinations before entering their country? Should you be allowed to lie about your vaccination history because you believe it's unfair for them to force that upon you?

Is it your right to potentially threaten their population by bringing in dangerous diseases? Or does this only apply to your current government?

I have a choice to travel to other countries or not. I don't really have a choice to not live in (or not pay taxes to) the country I was born into.

No, but you do live with other people. As part of that, we all sign the social contract when we're born which stipulates how we can and cannot behave around other people.

As part of that, people that disregard vaccination are putting the lives of those around them in very real danger. Which is exactly why people believe anti-vaxxers are a problem, and why there's an increasing push to deny them the public sphere.

> people that disregard vaccination are putting the lives of those around them in very real danger.

So do people that drive...

> putting the lives of those around them in very real danger

If thousands of people were dying of vaccine-preventable diseases I may reconsider my stance, but we are currently nowhere close to justifying crossing that line.

IMHO it's a self-correcting problem. If more people do start dying of these diseases some of the holdouts will get the vaccines.

As has been mentioned in this thread before it's not a 'self-correcting problem', because the people that legitimately cannot get vaccines or suffer from other issues compromising their immune system are affected as well. And as seen with issue issues relating to conspiracy theories...they tend to just deny the outbreaks as being government-orchestrated, or say that getting the disease is actually good for you.

Anti-vaxxers threaten the lives of innocent people and acting otherwise is incredibly callous and ignorant.

How many immune system compromised individuals die of vaccine-preventable diseases in the United States each year?

Like I said, if it's thousands I might reconsider my stance. If not, sorry, but it doesn't justify the government forcing people to do things to their body.

Okay, real question: Are you being serious here?

There's a huge logical problem with your argument. The reason why so few immune-compromised individuals die of vaccine-preventable diseases is because they're protected by herd immunity due to people being vaccinated.

When the vaccination rate goes down, you see more people die from vaccine preventable diseases. Because that's what vaccines do: they prevent people from dying from vaccine-preventable diseases. Which, often, is children.

> When the vaccination rate goes down, you see more people die from vaccine preventable diseases.

To see this all we have to do is simply visualize history backwards, re-visiting the time before vaccines and medicine in general, and how people just horribly died in large numbers of diseases we don't even think of as deadly any more.

But what are the odds vaccine deniers would believe historic record, right?

The plague pandemics? Never happened; it's just a fabrication to promote vaccination.

There’s no problem with my argument. Enough people are voluntarily getting vaccines that it doesn’t justify government forcing people to, which I am philosophically opposed to unless absolutely necessary.

I’ve repeatedly said I’d be willing to reconsider if that changes.

A beloved family member you care about very much is sick. They are in the hospital receiving treatment but their body and immune system are already taxed to the limit fighting to survive. A new Nurse arrives on shift, upon initial meeting the Nurse tells you that "I don't believe in vaccination and have never been vaccinated for contagious disease." Do you want that Nurse to take care of your sick family member? Or do you tell the supervisor you want a different nurse?

Nice straw man and appeal to emotions. Health care providers are already required to be vaccinated (at least in my state). That’s a perfectly reasonable condition of employment for that profession.

I don't consider this a fallacy, if you follow the whole libertarian idea of a person should be able to claim philosophical exemptions for their children shouldn't that immutable right to exemption also apply to everyone?

In the years 1331-1351, half the population of China, and one third of that of Europe, died in the Black Death pandemic. That is preventable by a vaccine.

> forcing people to do things to their body.

Ah, but, firstly, your child's body isn't your body; that's a separate human being who has a right not to have idiot parents interfere with their survival.

Secondly, one person's immunization status affects others around them. It's not just a personal choice. Choosing not to be immunized and being around people is somewhat like smoking.

Actually, the Black Death was caused by a bacteria, not a virus. It could have been cured with antibiotics, not vaccines.

I checked my facts before posting: vaccination does exist for Yersinia pestis. Though that particular pathogen is not commonly targeted by vaccination, it is not true that vaccines are just for viruses, whereas we just let people contract bacterial diseases and then fight them with antibiotics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine#Effectiveness

"Vaccines also help prevent the development of antibiotic resistance. For example, by greatly reducing the incidence of pneumonia caused by Streptococcus pneumoniae, vaccine programs have greatly reduced the prevalence of infections resistant to penicillin or other first-line antibiotics."

Sourced from Nature Journal: https://web.archive.org/web/20170722121157/http://www.nature...

> I checked my facts before posting

You're right, and I've never thought about the pneumonia vaccine being against bacteria as well, even though I've taken it myself.

> a right not to have idiot parents interfere

The only reasonable default assumption is that even "idiot" parents have more interest in the survival and well-being of their own children than the vaccination industry equivalent of the Sackler family.

Who is the "vaccination industry equivalent" of the Sackler family and what's wrong with them?

Why don't you take responsibility for your own health instead of expecting others to risk their lives so you can be lazy?

I was vaccine injured. I battled crippling physical pain and brain damage for over a decade. Do I not have a right to try and survive? Or are you willing to sacrifice people like me so you can be safe with minimal effort?

Can you clarify your point? Are you implying that the alternative of pre-vaccine history (which is very clearly documented) is preferable to the miniscule and heavily studied risk of negative vaccine effects? Back when many children routinely died from diseases which cause huge suffering which don't even exist in statistically significant rates in the US now?

In medicine, we understand that there are risk calculations to every treatment and preventative decision. You weigh them against each other. When public health at large is the question, you certainly do have to consider the risks that come with public health policy.

For example, diabetics with retinopathy receive injections of medication that can help stop the condition from causing blindness. There is a 1/3000 chance that the injection can cause an infection which can lead to permanent blindness in the eye that was treated. You have to weigh the risks in this case personally when you're a diabetic with retinopathy, but imagine that the decision was instead that refusing the eye injection because of the tiny, well studied risk to yourself meant you were risking blinding someone else's child. It's not a perfect analogy but I hope it may help some understand that we aren't talking about a sacrifice in the way you seem to portray it in your questions.

Also, regarding your health issues, I am truly sorry. I also have some debilitating medical issues that have affected my daily life for almost 20 years, but when having discussions about policy or philosophy around medicine I try not to use them as an appeal to emotion because that can cloud your judgement and logic.

The reason I'm resorting to appeals of emotion is because the opposing side will only listen to emotion. They are so convinced the science is settled that you can't get a single word in to present a logical argument.

Here is Coleen Boyle, Director of the National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities, testifying before congress that a double-blind placebo-controlled trial has never been done to evaluate the safety of any vaccine. This is the gold standard of clinical trials that every other drug on the market must complete before FDA approval.

https://youtu.be/uNWTOmEi_6A?t=145

You can't placebo-control because that would be highly unethical leading to sickness and death that would not have otherwise happened. You can't double blind as soon as you cant placebo control. You can't do crossover because the dead from your first trial cannot be un-dead, and those who lived now have a different baseline. This argument is exploiting the lack of specialized education in the general population to know what those terms mean.

Another issue is that physicians flat out deny that there are any risks associated with vaccines. And the one's that do admit this risk losing their license.

Yet it's widely known in the medical industry that all medical treatments carry risk, like you said.

Anyone trained in medical carries out appropriate screening to not vaccinate people with contraindications. This brings the rate of actual risk very close to zero.

The point I'm making is that it's not okay to force others to inject things they do not want in their bodies so that you don't have to make any effort for dealing with diseases. Forcibly injecting someone is violence, but it's so abstracted in our society that most do not see it that way.

I generally don't bother to argue logical points because no one will listen. But here are a couple of the big ones:

Measles is not a deadly disease for all but in the most rare of cases. Yet the claims of vaccine injuries are skyrocketing. It doesn't make sense to protect people from a non-deadly disease at the cost of giving millions lifelong debilitating illness.

There has not been one double-blind placebo controlled trial to evaluate the safety of any vaccine. All studies that have been done compare a newer vaccine to an older vaccine. Those are the kinds of studies people are referring to when they claim that there is no link between autism and vaccines. These studies only prove that the new vaccine is AS safe as the old vaccine.

The measles vaccine was introduced in 1963. Deaths from measles were already minuscule before the vaccine was even introduced.

Likewise, most diseases were well under control before the introduction of vaccines. This is due to advances in sanitation.

Of course, vaccines for polio are probably worth the risk/reward. But no one is actually talking about polio. We are talking about non-deadly diseases.

This is a decent summary with sources to these claims: http://www.jannyorganically.com/blog/2019/1/27/your-industry...

How would you suggest a placebo-controlled study (we can easily make it double blind once placebo controlled) for any disease be structured? Please tell me your study design, because an ethical study design that doesn't put lives at risk is the issue.

> Immunization though, is a matter of public health

Not necessarily. Human-to-human transmission isn't the primary vector (if even possible) for a lot of diseases we get vaccinated for, e.g. yellow fever, Japanese encephalitis, lyme disease, tetanus, shingles, rabies, etc.

...Measels, Mumps, Rubella, Polio, Varicella (i.e. what you need to contract to get shingles).

We can both make lists of equal length back and forth, but we also both know that there are plenty of communicable diseases between humans. Would we be having this debate if the outbreaks weren’t measles, but Variola Major? ZEBOV?

Shingles is caused by the chicken pox virus.

Sure, but the primary transmission vector for chicken pox isn't adults with singles, it's other kids with chicken pox.

> it’s the fact that our lawmakers are too cowardly to pass some laws around the issue.

There are laws on the books in the U.S.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;"

The solution to bad speech is more speech, not less.

Free speech is not a black and white issue, there are forms of expression that are limited in the US and I think as a society we agree with those limits. Calling for the assassination of a public figure or hiring a hit man are both obviously bad speech and should not be free.

Hiring a hit man is not speech.

And yes, there are forms of speech not protected from abridgement by Congress.

I think you and I both know that talking about side effects of medical procedures is not even close to being one of them.

I'm not quite sure the point you're trying to make here, but this isn't about freedom of speech.

People should be restricted from accessing public spaces if they pose a direct and credible threat to the public. If a person is not vaccinated, they are a threat to the health of those around them. It is not an issue of speech.

The laws would be for requiring vaccinations, not for silencing anti-vaxxers.

I am pro-vaccination, but forcing anyone to anything to their body is in some ways worse than restricting their speech.

The issue here is that these are parents making decisions for their minor children, not themselves. For example it has been ruled child abuse and illegal for Christian Scientists to deny their minor children life-saving medical treatment. The other issue here is that herd immunity or lack thereof can put other people's children at risk, not everyone is a responder to vaccination.

> it has been ruled child abuse and illegal for Christian Scientists to deny their minor children life-saving medical treatment

Yes it has. If I understand you correctly, you suggest that the treatment having a 0.01% chance of being live-saving also be considered in the same way.

Ethically yes, obviously it's many orders of magnitude worse to deny your septic child antibiotics than it is to not vaccinate them but in my view it's on the same spectrum. The data we have is all epidemiological, which is inherently somewhat fuzzy, however a plethora of well-designed studies have crunched the numbers different ways and absolutely no link can be found between rates of childhood vaccination and autism. Vaccination was considered one of the massive health breakthroughs of the 20th century. We have pretty much eradicated Hepatitis B for instance while it's still rampant in many Asian countries. From a Medical standpoint there is no valid reason not to vaccinate. I'm not advocating forcible vaccination and understand why that could make this hysteria worse however as a society we should examine where this misinformation is arising and how it's being amplified.

> From a Medical standpoint there is no valid reason not to vaccinate.

Currently, that is true. But medical opinion changes constantly. Is that really the proper domain of government?

If you're saying that the standard of 'reporting' on health and science in the media at large is often conflicting and distorted into a confusing and often contradictory form there is definitely validity in that. John Oliver has a great segment called 'Scientific Studies' I'll link at the end of this post, everyone should watch this. If you are able to read the journals directly and have studied how to critically evaluate scientific studies I can guarantee that there is significantly, like thousands-fold, more consistent information. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Rnq1NpHdmw

Shouldn’t the same argument be used to ban abortion?

No, because legally fetuses aren’t children.

Technically the earliest stages of pregnancy are more similar to cancer. Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-pregnancy-hel...

Another case where The Onion got there first: https://local.theonion.com/woman-overjoyed-by-giant-uterine-... :-)

Shakes fist at The Onion I'll scoop you one day!

Thank you, this is probably one of the more calm, rational pro-vaxx comments on this thread.

What might also help is research about what % of kids don't respond to vaccines so people who choose not to vaxx can better understand their impact.

The risk is overall low, often this debate gets hijacked by debating over degree of risk, which is impossible to exactly establish based on epidemiological data. All the data we have indicates no risk to vaccination, and some risk to not vaccinating. There are also swaths of the population that are on immune-suppressing meds for a wide range of illness, older people in general, and anyone else with a compromised immune system that also rely on herd immunity.

Edit: In case you were interested in hard data on non-responder rates here is that data: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/rr6007a1.htm

I'm pro-vaxx too, but the blowback for not wanting to go as far as forced vaccinations or debating the assertion that anti-vaxxers are child abusers is intense.

I hope we can learn from these intense political discussions that wether it's vaccinations, guns, MeToo, abortion, etc., if you skip the calm discussion of the facts and skip right to name calling, public shaming and advocating criminal prosecution, you've only succeeded in appealing to those who already agree with you.

So, what do we really want? To shame the other side or find compassion and common ground?

Unfortunately, if you look at all the anger getting upvoted, it's a very emotional discussion that probably will just alienate anyone who's on the fence or just starting to research things.

There are ways to encourage vaccination, without forcing them.

OP said "why the hell is this something we let YouTube decide?"

And YouTube's decision was to silence anti-vaxxers, not mandate vaccines.

YouTube demonetized them, they’re not silencing them. This is a hard enough conversation to have without inaccuracies.

You're right. They demonetized them. Point stands though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com