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.
How can you be for bodily agency and also be in favor of forcing people to get vaccines?
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 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.
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".
(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://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.
> It seems to be a minority of states that allow 'philosophical' exemptions.
Antivaxx is basically a religion, isn't it? ;)
Is it your right to potentially threaten their population by bringing in dangerous diseases? Or does this only apply to your current government?
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.
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.
Anti-vaxxers threaten the lives of innocent people and acting otherwise is incredibly callous and ignorant.
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.
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.
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.
I’ve repeatedly said I’d be willing to reconsider if that changes.
> 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.
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...
You're right, and I've never thought about the pneumonia vaccine being against bacteria as well, even though I've taken it myself.
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.
So do people that drive...