But it's been crickets so far. I'd love to hear a defense of this couple and their cause. Or -- is this so far outside the Overton window that folks are afraid to speak up?
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.
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...
The only time anyone makes NIMBY arguments is when something's actually being built in their backyard. Then they quickly realize how YIMBY arguments often ignore local context and negative side effects.
Also, no one is happy with the status quo. I'm relatively on the pro-NIMBY side (at least for the median HN commentator). I support development. I also think impacted communities, particularly marginalized communities, do deserve substantial say in how that development takes place, up to and including veto rights.
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.
Video game players are not putting other people at risk by not being social.
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.
If they are the widely reported ones for which that timeframe is cited, that doesn't seem to be the consequence they were talking about. (Yes, the phrase “the world will end” was used, but the world ending is a common hyperbolic metaphor for things other than the end of humanity—and even with the end of humanity it's still a hyperbolic metaphor, since that does not literally end the world.)
> Al Gore said that 20 years ago and here we still are.
No, he didn't.
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.
The hacker ethos is not to be contrarian, it's to explore.
So the crickets are actually part of the conspiracy.
This is not the case with Vaccines.
From concerns regarding their safety (see the quality control issues with Chinese vaccines), to nefarious government intervention (such as unethical medical trials) to concerns about espionage and data collection ( see the CIA and their vaccines as cover for spying in Pakistan and Afghanistan).
To say "there is no reason to ever question or be against vaccines" shows a disturbing ignorance and naivety on how the world works
Would you prefer "There is no reason to question vaccines produced to FDA quality guidelines based on established and well-accepted efficacy, completed within an ethical and rigorous set of clinical trials"? Because I'm pretty sure that's what people generally mean when saying "there is no reason to ever question or be against vaccines" even if they don't state that explicitly.
Those things mentioned, to the extent they exist, are tiny nits on the enormous benefit. They are always discussed in isolation complete with heart-rending horror stories of suffering and no countervailing presentation of massive benefit of vaccines. It's a common tactic of subversion - essentially "how to lie with facts".
My downvote was for the "This is not the case with Vaccines" assertion. It is imperfect from a factual and epistemological perspective, at least.
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.
For many of us, there's nothing moral about an anti-vaxxer's insistence on personal autonomy (read: "You're not the boss of ME!") when it could endanger thousands of others. Anti-vaxxers had better be prepared for an effort to get them to do otherwise — OK, sure, by kindly persuasion if that's possible, but if not .... And yes I do realize that's a two-way street.
Then I will believe your argument about sacrificing individual sovereignty for a common good.
Demand all you like, but we have established processes for this sort of thing. If I were a physician or nurse tasked by a government with vaccinating people against their will, then certainly I'd do the job — assuming of course that the vaccine had been appropriately tested, etc., and that due process had been followed. Likewise, if I were a police officer and it was my job to make sure someone stood still to be involuntarily vaccinated, then sure, I'd do that job too, subject to the same assumptions. This is not a novel problem nor are we lacking in solutions; what I've described has been painfully worked out in the course of thousands of years of communal life.
If the morality you advocate is that vaccines should be administered against the will of the patients, then the policy I suggest you advocate for might be to have Vaccination squads that break into people's homes in the middle of the night and inject people with vaccines. It's better than demanding doctors to do it that as their Hippocratic oath bounds them not to do it and will fight you tooth and nail because of it. You could get to them as well by making it illegal for them to practice medicine unless they forcefully vaccinate all the patients as soon as they see them - without any medical reasoning that could be used as a lever for civil disobedience. But non-medical staff is the way to go, as brute and unapologetic as possible.
The morality I advocate for is for vaccines to be administered at will, and for the anti-vaxers to be first persuaded, and then held reasonably accountable by their personal choice. If some anti-anti-vaxxer find themselves trapped in a dangerous situation because they are surrounded by anti-vaxxers, then they should get vaccines themselves and physically force it down on people, risking their own lives in the process (to get, in exchange, better life themselves). I would not advocate against those people, but neither for the anti-vaxxer that violently defends himself. I assure you that if these were the options for anti-anti-vaxxers, you would achieve much more peace and calm than with a system that gratifies their perverse pleasure of violence without risk or danger.
One upvoted comment literally mentions murdering and ghettos, something that would get you banned and possibly fired if you replaced the word anti-vaxxers with anything else, but applauded in a forum of wealthy intellectuals.
Seems like folks just view anyone who isn't fully and unquestioningly bought-in on vaccines as the enemy, and worthy of downvotes for that reason. Sad day for HN. Hopefully this won't spread to other topics.