Germany proposes $2,800 fine for parents skipping measles vaccination
edition.cnn.com
edition.cnn.com
What we need are massive civil suits against these folks for putting other people into danger.
Edit: I think
Why does anyone believe that marginalizing or demonizing the antivax movement, that attempting to force them into submission, will do anything but strengthen their resolve?
Even I am starting to wonder why, when the benefits of vaccination are obvious, governments feel the need to _force_ parents. If the vaccination story is solid, which I believe it is, let's just let this play out. Let the anti-vaxxers be our control group. History will settle the debate.
Those people rely on herd immunity to not get sick, and we shouldn't allow crazy anti-vaxxers to endanger them.
But seriously? What is the alternative? Moving closer and closer to forced vaccinations for everyone who can be vaccinated? This will only feed their discourse.
Though I believe we both agree on the benefits of vaccination (my children are vaccinated and will continue to receive their vaccinations as recommended), I think we disagree on the nature of the perceived threat. Please correct me if I am wrong, but I believe that you consider the lack of vaccinations the main threat here. According to me, the antivax movement itself is the greater potential threat.
YES!
> This will only feed their discourse.
I don't care. Should we kowtow to every group with "discourse"?
> I think we disagree on the nature of the perceived threat.
I think they are both a major threat. We disagree that the anti-vax movement will "run its course". Ignoring them isn't going to make them go away. We can't just bury our heads in the sand and pretend it's not harmful to have a bunch of un-vaxinated people out there.
We already give you a fine if you don't wear a seat-belt, smoke indoors, have glass containers in public places, and so on. You may disagree with all these regulations on some libertarian(ish) ground, but then we have a fundamental disagreement about when your freedom infringes on my right to be safe, and your right to be a burden on the state.
In short, not getting vaccinated is a public health risk, and the government has a responsibility to protect its citizens by enforcing as high a vaccination rate as is reasonably possible.
> I don't care. Should we kowtow to every group with "discourse"?
Perhaps the word "discourse" means something different than I thought it meant. I meant to say that forcing vaccinations would only end up making their arguments more plausible.
I do not advocate kowtowing, I advocate carefully choosing a strategy which addresses the main threat here.
Nor do I advocate ignoring them, I merely disagree that fighting them will make them go away.
I'm honestly not sure you're actually arguing in good faith here. You've offered no path that would address the issue other than hand waving and saying "fighting will make it worse", and "we should let it run its course". I'm saying that there is no "run its course", they aren't gonna just give up and go home if you stop fighting, and they aren't all gonna just die if measles either (thanks to the above mentioned herd immunity we all protect them with).
You say you've vaccinated your kids. Lucky you. Maybe realize you're privileged to have been able to do that and stop telling those less fortunate they'll just have to let their loved ones die from preventable diseases lest we make a bunch of crackpot conspiracy theorists' "arguments more plausible".
I propose the following (briefly):
* Though admittedly callous, do not force vaccination, do not penalize refusal to vaccinate. Sadly, there will be a toll. But, eventually, this will change some hardliners' opinions. Having them advocate to vaccinate will be more effective.
* Focus on the fringe cases. For example, if the child desires to be vaccinated, or if one of the parents wants vaccination. Allow this to expand to concerned grand parents. Civil courts.
* Continue with the information campaign. As the decades roll by, more and more hard data will be available showing occurrences of autism (or whatever it is they claim is caused), life expectancy, etcetera.
In other words, focus on those who have not been indoctrinated yet. Adjust your strategy on constraining this movement to the fringe. Do not invite lengthy court battles determining whether or not they have the right not to vaccinate. Let's just prevent building case law [edit] in that area.
edit2: Let's avoid building case law on whether or not the government is allowed to force vaccination. Of course, building caselaw wrt my second point is unavoidable.
Whether or not one is fined for not wearing a seat-belt, smoking indoors, having glass containers in public, etc. is irrelevant. I honestly couldn't care less.
> [...] the government has a responsibility to protect its citizens by enforcing as high a vaccination rate as is reasonably possible.
I merely disagree that protecting the its citizens is best achieved by enforcing...
To be clear, I'm not saying that it would work; just that I don't know that it wouldn't, and it'd be great if it would.
Me and my wife carefully considered every recommended vaccination by reading studies on the vaccines, their side-effects and general success rate. We chose to have our son vaccinated against measels (and others) because it made sense. However other vaccines against other childhood diseases didn't do so great a job. So we decided against them.
Just saying "get (your kid) vaxed with every vax out there" is just as bad advice as not vaccinating at all. You also don't have to believe in this "vaccines create autism" bs. Every medicine has side-effects. The question is just what they are and if you should prefer them to the disease, maybe even if the vaccine just protects only in 30% of the cases.
There are more things to consider: - Vaccinating a child to early (especially if it is breastfed) will seriously dampen the success of the vaccine. - Lots of childhood diseases are especially dangerous to adult people. So it makes a lot more sense to vaccinate them (again). - Mothers that have had childhood diseases as kids will give their offspring a better immunization against those.
I'm not even going to go into your nonsense about mis-vaccinating or whether or not your analysis was even accurate. Follow the advice of your skilled pediatrician and the standards bodies they belong to. Good day, sir!
> Parental financial incentives have often been cited as a possible approach to encourage uptake of vaccinations. In fact, evidence appears to be limited, according to an NIHR systematic review, and not sufficient to show effectiveness. The review did find limited evidence that incentives might not work as well as quasi-mandatory schemes, such as preventing children from starting school until vaccinations are complete.
Herd immunity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity
Personally I prefer spreading actual knowledge about vaccines and their advantages (and possible side-effects, too) to calling skeptical people dumb and trying to make them hate "the system" more.
>> Actually, a reasonable starting fine is the expected cost of healthcare outside the family due to non-immunization by the family.
Well, its damn hard for anyone immunocompromised (under immunosuppressive therapy or by disease). They have a higher chance of dying, a death that could be prevented if herd immunity would be reached. They are not just a costly externality.
since clearly all lives dont have the same economic value, and the market is really the only effective process to ascribe such a value - slavery is really most natural framework to sort all this out.
as a plus, we also dont have to have all those stupid discussions about trollies and track switches anymore.
You say that choices whose primary consequences are to be born by the family ought to stay with the family.
With that logic established, do you believe violence against family members is permitted? How about psychological harm or abuse?
Your logic doesn't hold up because we've established that certain things are Bad regardless if it's self-contained within a family unit. Ergo, vaccinations should be included as something that should be included. Avoiding vaccinations I argue is tantamount to child abuse.
I don't want to be funny here, but I am pretty sure if you took the people who don't want to vaccinate their children and the people who would like to sterilize the "god-damn-migrants" - there will be a significant overlap.
It's not a slippery slope. We're not living in Wild West any more - the population is growing and lack of vaccinations is becoming more of an issue than in a more sparsely populated past.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobson_v._Massachusetts
Already resolved in America, at least, with good arguments
I totally see the point of this proposal, but you could achieve a better outcome with less authoritarian rules: just forbid non-vaccinated kids to go to public schools, kindergartens, to ride public transport, etc. That would still leave you with the choice of living away from other humans and taking care of your children at home without endangering anyone _and_ without taking away the right to control what happens to your body. In the end most people would choose to just get vaccinated.
I especially wonder what happens to people that just pay the fine, are their children still allowed to go to public schools? If yes you didn't really solve the problem, you just created another tax.
I'm also fine with sequestering unvaccinated children and adults, but given Germany's history, that might not go over very well.
There isn't a good solution here that satisfies all parties and science is on the side of the vaccinated. Sometimes you just have to make hard choices and stick with them.
Right, that's immoral, but what I was getting at was that you can choose to not endanger anybody to a large extent even if you aren't vaccinated. The main problem are densely populated areas and public institutions. If you are just living on a farm in the middle of nowhere barely visiting the neighbor villages there is much less risk involved.
> I'm also fine with sequestering unvaccinated children and adults, but given Germany's history, that might not go over very well.
I know, I'm German, but the proposal itself bears some resemblance to forced sterilization during that time to "improve public health". It's one of the most tricky policy areas there are and should be handled with more care and consideration.
I totally agree that getting vaccinated is the right choice, but without consent it's abuse and if written as law it's tyrannic.
It's not exactly a new concept that parents' rights to make decisions for their kids isn't absolute (e.g. the law requires that you send your kids to school, and it is not considered abuse if the state enforces that), so there clearly is some potential room for this.
And what option is there if the parents refuse to give consent? People who refuse to vaccinate their kids for bullshit-science reasons aren’t exactly reasonable to begin with. Tyranny sucks but it’s very occasionally useful and people get over it eventually.
Ask any parent who used to a teen about the wannabe Genghis Khan they had for a parent.
Sounds like you've never visited Germany.
The post says that GP is German.
But following your logic, should 80 million people get vaccinated just because a few thousand might be affected?
Also, science ( especially politicized science ) is on the side of vaccination. But science was on the side of performing hysterectomies on women, using leeches and blood letting, experimenting surgery on black slaves, etc. When it comes to things like rights and bodily autonomy, we shouldn't solely appeal to science because it has a nasty habit of going horrible ( aka nazi germany ).
Yes. I agree that sometimes you have to make hard choices. Authoritarianism is always the easy choice. Freedom is the hard choice.
It's incredible how the same people who proclaim a woman's body is hers to do with as she wants and yet, when it comes to vaccines, nobody has bodily autonomy.
I'm always wary of "everyone has to do X" for the benefit of the few. Strange to find so many pro-authority sentiment on a hacker news site.
In Germany parents who neglect their parents, can get their parental rights taken away because they are apparently unfit to not harm the rights of their kids.
In the US the balance between personal freedom VS other people’s rights is traditionally closer to “personal freedom”, while in the europe after WWII it has been more on the side of “other people’s rights”.
If you don’t vaccinate your children against a illness with a mortality rate akin to that of measels, the state has to weigh the parents right to personal freedom against your kids right to be bodily unharmed. You are not allowed to let your kid starve, you are also not allowed to leave your kid unbuckled in the car for the very same reason.
It becomes even more clear when you start to factor in the rights of other people that can’t vaccinate because they are pregnant or have a medical condition that doesn’t allow them to.
Measels is also highly infectious and can be transmited through the air, so these vulnerable people have no reasonable way to avoid it.
The comparison with abortion is a bit weird. No women wishes to go through an abortion. This is about the balance of rights between the women and a unformed embryo. Why european nations are very slightly in favour of the women’s right to decide is because a society doesn’t really gain a lot from unwanted kids and a embryo by our definition is not a person yet. Also: the religious feelings of bystanders don’t have a right here.
This of course gets more and more problematic during the growth of the embryo, but this is reflected in German law. You are only allowed to abort up to a certain point unless certain medical conditions arise.
So, just because exposing these kids to preventable disease is not enough, your solution is to rob them of public education, and let them be "educated" by anti-vaxx parents?
At some point, the right of a child to not get sick and get a normal education (i.e., a chance to lead a normal life) must trump the right of a parent to shove random crap on their children.
It takes away choice of parents about their children's bodies. That's not quite the same.
> you could achieve a better outcome with less authoritarian rules: That's way to much punishment for the kids who don't really have a choice in this, and I'm not sure how it's less authoritarian to basically completely exclude kids from society for a decision their parents made.
We also really do not want private schools specializing in unvaccinated children...
Vaccination is seen very similar around here. Yes, you have a right to be in control of your own body. But so should be everybody else.
The state has to find a solution that values your personal freedom and balances it with the rights other people have.
Keep in mind this might also protect children from parents. You are not allowed to neglect your kids, and the state could take them away from you if you repeatedly neglect them. Not vaccinating your kid against a illness with that high of a mortality rate is a form of neglect.
You are forced to buckle your kida up in the car with a seatbelt. There is a huge chance this might save their life. There is a tiny chance it might kill them (trapped in a burning car etc). Yet it is mandatory for you to buckle them up.
Because thats what prevents thousands of dead kids each year.
Supplying reasonable and preventive healthcare to a child is a parental responsibility, full stop. Now of course every treatment should be weighed fairly based on the treatment itself, but the evidence for vaccinations hugely outweighs the evidence to the contrary.
This is not about personal choice, as child cannot be considered to be able to make those types of decisions, it is about proper parenting. Not only this, but these decisions impact on other children as well.
I live in a third world country where decisions to vaccinate children aren't based on pseudo science, but rather on economic barriers. When there are outbreaks it can be devastating including outcomes such as death.
> just forbid non-vaccinated kids to go to public schools, kindergartens, to ride public transport, etc.
I think fining someone to relieve them of the right of choice to vaccination also isn't as bad as taking away the child's right to it's own freedom. Locking away a child is not a right I want to give out in exchange for the right of non-vaccination.
A propos: the "herd immunity" line of argumentation is totally red herring, since the Western rate of immunization is way above of what is needed for herd immunity to be effective (defined as driving pathogen reproduction rate below one - note that reproduction rate is NOT the same as infection rate). So is the "recklessness" line of argumentation, since the chances of actually getting infected and suffering serious consequences of that are rather small. It's way more reckless to cross a street once a day.
We should have the "Say No to Totalitarians" day. A free society can tolerate some amount of foolishness - both because not doing so implies reduction of humans to livestock, and because fools sometimes turn out to be right.