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.