Philanthropist means something like "humanity-lover"; would they be:

* Misanthropists (humanity-hater)?

* Philnosists (disease-lover)?

Apologies for my extremely poor knowledge of Greekish (by which I mean "scientific-ish English with Greek word roots").

...the problem is that the test for charitable status has not all that much to do with working for/against humanity's best interests. One aspect is not generating a profit. The other aspect puts "science" and "religion" in the same category. I think that just about sums it up.

> Just inject them with measles then, and keep them away from the rest of the population.

I think people advocating for violence and assassination are a tad more dangerous than anti-vaxers.

You would have to quarantine them for the people who cannot have vaccines.

Or everytime they risked someone in such a state charge them with attempted murder, or at least assault wtih a deadly weapon.

Exactly this. But don't stop there, give them polio too. Let's see how their vaccines are holding up from long ago. I also think people who get one of the diseases from someone who ever visits their site or whatever should sue them for damages. We don't let people yell "Fire!" in a movie theater, it is considered a form of terrorism. This is no different. We need to prevent these people from getting access to any government services that we can until they get vaccinated.

There are several problems with this (other than that giving them the measles vaccine is a safer version of the same thing).

First problem is that the anti-vaxxers are both ignorant of history and unable to reason about risk. They ignore the centuries of disease, the then-common human experience of bearing a dozen kids and having only a few live to adulthood, and they vastly distort the risks and ignore the rewards of vaccines.

Worse yet, they are entitled freeloaders, freeloading on the herd immunity that is created and maintained by the smart people.

This specifically endangers those who need to rely upon the herd immunity, the not insignificant part of the population who cannot be vaccinated due to other medical conditions. The anti-vaxxers are literally threatening the lives of these people.

So, if we wanted to do that, the anti-vaxxers need to be shunned, hard. This means zero access to any public space. Remember, many of these diseases are so highly contagious that an infection can occur merely by walking through the same space hours after an infected person has been through.

So, the anti-vaxxers exclusion list would start with: schools, govt buildings, malls, grocery stores, and all forms of public transport including buses, trains, planes, and even taxi/Uber/Lyft. Even that list is likely inadequate if we lose herd immunity, as is now happening.

The implications to public health & the costs to society are staggering if we lose herd immunity. This must be a simple requirement to participate in an advanced society. If you don't want to do it, go live on some island somewhere.

Bring back the leper colonies, but for anti-vax people.

I wonder if these donations were related to his work on wall street. Maybe he was shorting some vaccine markers or something similar.

Or pay for your news sources.

While effective and (some might argue) the only way to deal with the washington post.. You can also just disable javascript with dev tools

If you are using Chrome, you can simply create a separate profile and treat it as an incognito profile, by clearing browsing data whenever needed. Unlike the incognito mode, it isn't possible to detect the use of such profiles.

You can put the headline or URL into google and click on it from there now. This seems to work. Cant wait for new browser updates that make it so websites do not know that you are in incognito.

They can’t comment on the donors because they can’t read the article.

That link is dead.

The first quote is about Americans of all ages, second quote concerns children specifically.

Edit- Missed your last line. "Children" is also a fairly broad categorization that may include infants. I would expect measles to be at least 10 times more deadly on younger children than healthy adults. So those numbers kind of add up to me.

The Overton window refers to things that are not allowed to be considered in public discourse for fear of public shaming.

There's another option: No one agrees with the anti-vax movement, the couple's cause, or the cause's tenuous relationship to free speech enough to pen a comment in support.

> I'd love to hear a defense of this couple and their cause

Okay, let me try.

There is no reasonable objection to the measles vaccine per se. The problem is with normalizing the population to the government mandating injections. Informed consent requires both consent and being informed. If someone isn't giving informed consent, the government cannot simply coerce them into complying (e.g. by withholding access to public spaces).

It's not like the American government hasn't previously abused this power. We have the Tuskegee syphilis experiment [1] and fake Pakistani vaccine drive in the hunt for bin Laden [2]. The Jewish population, specifically, has reasonable historical basis for suspecting the state-mandated introduction foreign compounds into their veins.

(Counter: We have consensus among a diverse population of doctors that the MMR vaccine is a good idea. New vaccines face medical and scientific skepticism. If a group were legitimately concerned about government overreach, an independent testing body would be a better approach than scaring people from prudent medical care.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/11/cia-fake-vacci...

On a similar note: despite the tens of articles/comment series I've read on HN about Bay Area housing, I've not once heard an actual NIMBY defend the status-quo. All I've ever heard is that NIMBY's are the primary cause. If they are powerful enough to cause the BA housing crisis, I'd expect that at least some of them would state their case online.

I feel like anti-vaxx talk is much more tolerated these days than when I was a child (in the 1980s). Back then, you had a much larger group of people who lived through terrible diseases that were eradicated through vaccination.

It's much easier to make an argument against vaccination when the vast majority of your audience hasn't lost a loved one (like a child or sibling) to a (now) preventable disease.

I can usually come up with a contrarian view point if summoned but on this topic all I can say is that while I personally don’t care if people do not want to vaccinate themselves or their children, them not doing so causes problems for herd immunity, so for that reason they should be forced to.

The problem is that people hold vaccines and "herd immunity" so dearly to themselves that they're afraid to accept that they have side effects just like any other medication. Gardasil (HPV Vaccine) for example is responsible for a slew of well-documented side effects (paralysis, GBS, etc) causing countries like Japan to stop recommending them. Add in it's inefficiencies at actually vaccinating against HPV and that the big risk of catching HPV is through an elective behavior and it's clear it shouldn't be mandatory.

Individual vaccines can be argued against their own merits, but unfortunately as you say the "Overton Window" is rife with people who are swallowing down opioids like candy and believe anything that comes in the form of a pharmaceutical is gold. The reality is most medications have extensive side effects, and vaccines are no exception. Unfortunately nobody can have an honest conversation on which ones are worth it and which ones aren't because of the uneducated stigma associated with the average anti-vax beliefs.

I'd cater that the same thing is the case with climate change. I read some comments today from people who unironically believe that humanity will be wiped out within 12 years. Al Gore said that 20 years ago and here we still are.

I'd advise people to be more open minded and try and convert the anti-vaxxers to the correct side. Of course you can admit that measles isn't so bad of a disease while still promoting it's vaccines, and surely that will garner more support than advocating strapping anti-vaxxers to a table and shoving a needle in their arm.

> But it's been crickets so far. I'd love to hear a defense of this couple and their cause.

I wouldn't offer a defense, because I'm not an anti-vaxxer, and I am not supportive of this couple's actions, but there is plenty of material on this topic here for an interesting epistemological discussion.

Staying emotionally disengaged seems rather difficult for most people though. Vaccines are safe, full stop, is only true for particular definitions of the word safe, not all. The fact that people have died from from vaccinations should be enough to demonstrate this from an objective/logical perspective on a hacker website, but this is where human psychology comes into play. Hackers, while highly logical, are first and foremost human.

> Or -- is this so far outside the Overton window that folks are afraid to speak up?

Well, you wouldn't be able to have much of a conversation on HN or in most subreddits, because the inevitable downvotes would render the person playing devil's advocate unable to respond.

I also don't have much time today despite how much I enjoy such conversations, and I'm quite confident it would rapidly descend into a shitshow of a conversation demonstrating various peculiarities of the human psyche, which you'd think would be interesting to those with a hacker mindset, but there seems to be limits to people's curiosity - certain topics seem to be off limits (this article touches on this phenomenon: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/experiments-in-philo...).

Just as a hint, I would be starting with questions along the lines of:

How do we know vaccines are safe?

What exactly is the definition of the term "safe" in this context? Does safe possibly have somewhat distinct meanings at the micro-level vs the macro-level?

Are there any imperfections in the current vaccine delivery and monitoring system that might allow unrealized risk to go undetected.

What's there to defend? People who support not vaccinating their children are delusional.

When your "rebellion" aligns with the objectives of big oil, or your "anti-authoritarian" movement is part of a Russian disinformation campaign you may need to consider you're not actually either of those things.

The hacker ethos is not to be contrarian, it's to explore.

The only reasonable form of vaccine skepticism would involve publically exholting the benefits of vaccines while not taking them yourself. Build up herd immunity, avoid any potential side effects yourself.

So the crickets are actually part of the conspiracy.

There are justifiable and reasonable questions about climate science, specifically in re proposed solutions.

This is not the case with Vaccines.

I think this happens because the vast majority of participants in this topic cannot distinguish between the overwhelmingly convincing evidence of the good of the vaccine and the terrible morality of the government forcing them down on people.

In this topic you can often find individuals complaining about the threat of internment camps while simultaneously arguing to round up all anti-vaxers together and punish, humiliate or segregate them. [In the HN thread a participant that has been voted up has literally suggested inoculating people and placing them in ghettos]

To satisfy your original request, I will offer the counter-weight: my core argument is that herd immunity is a privilege not a right. You are not entitled to it, and thus if you want it, you need to pay for it. The vaxers need to compensate the anti-vaxers for their perceived inconvenience. There are more worthwhile details in the debate: medicine is not about forcing treatment on people, but public health often is (through some mechanisms like segregation). It also could be very counter-productive to do the latter, since the most dangerous clinically wise is someone lying about getting the vaccine, than someone not getting it.

Fundamentally my request to those that wish to use force against the anti-vaxers is to grow a pair and try to go with a vaccine in hand into these people's homes and inject it themselves, since they are so brave to ask for drastic measures.

I have commented in the past but no longer do so because of the downvotes that come my way. This is the only topic on HN where I censor myself in this way. And I am someone who is fully vaccinated and who vaccinates her family.

The difference between getting rammed by a car vs. catching an infectious disease from someone is traceability - in the former case, one can reasonably identify who did the damage; in the latter, good luck finding that one person out of 1000+ you passed by during the day.

Which is to say, it's only all the more reasons for a blanket mandate of vaccination. The society should not allow someone to be this stupid especially when it's not possible to make the stupid pay for their mistakes using regular means (like lawsuits).

if you don't use WP as a subscriber you can block cookies on their domain to avoid this while reading normally

Education?

Correlation is not causation.

Actually, that's an interesting question: Is a donor to a charity liable for harm derived from the activities of the charity? In this case, Lisa Selz is the charity's president, so I guess the question would be, is the charity liable?

"In recent weeks, Bigtree has headlined forums in ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities in Brooklyn and Rockland County, N.Y., both areas confronting large measles outbreaks."

Hmm. One of the possible consequences of mumps is hypofertility. I wonder if the Anti-Defamation League would be interested.

To steal an idea from Taleb- we should worry about things based on the capacity to do harm in the future, not just the number of cases, and the potential distribution of outcomes matters. There were 4300 cosmetics injuries last year and there will be about 4300 cosmetics injuries next year. It won't be 8000. There were 372 measles cases in the US last year and 1044 in this year so far, so about 5X. Next year it could increase 5 fold again, or more. There were millions of measles cases per year in the US in the 1960s. People may worry about measles too much, but it is still silly to compare it to something that has no chance of a disastrous outcome.

Here's a video where Taleb makes this argument about Ebola at some point in the first few minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEAcmRZUM5M&t=2428s

Why do you believe that's relevant? People get injured from household goods all the time but those also have a reason for existing, whereas measles is cheap to prevent and there's no good reason to expose anyone to it.

Why do you think that is?

Maybe because the vaccines work?