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Comment by creaghpatr | Hacker News Reader

>If you're spreading anti-vax propaganda, you're complicit in killing kids.

That is absolutely nuts if you believe that.

Is it?

If A says to B, "don't vaccinate your kids", B complies, and then B's child dies of a disease it could have been vaccinated against, you would not say A had any culpability?

Depends on if you think people have any free will or ability to think for themselves

I don't think it does. People share information and learn from each other. Hence, it is important to be responsible when providing information. We frequently see disclaimers on HN, Reddit, etc. like "IANAL", so as to put forward a point of view while warning it shouldn't be taken too seriously as actionable advice. It's the sensible thing to do.

Anybody spreading anti-vaccination propaganda has been convinced of it themselves.

Let's keep going, though... there IS a non-zero chance that your kid can die from a vaccine. It is very very rare, and more kids will die from not getting a vaccine than from getting one, but there will exist a parent who can say truthfully that vaccines killed their kid.

Can they then argue that a pro-vaccine person killed their kid? Can they sue their doctor?

If we allow this line of reasoning, where does it stop? If I tell people they should let their kids play in the dirt, can they sue me if their kid gets sick from a dirt born disease?

Everything has risk, and we can't make a law saying that anytime a risk event occurs you can sue someone who said to do the thing.

Someone made an interesting counterpoint and deleted their comment while I was replying, so here is my reply to that:

I don't disagree with being upset with antivaxxers and thinking they are causing real harm to our society.

However, I think the harm is outweighed by the benefit of allowing people to make whatever arguments they want in public (much like I think the risk of dying from a vaccine is worth it because of the reduced risk of dying from the disease the vaccine is preventing). The alternative is having to set some sort of 'risk threshold', where you aren't allowed to argue for something that increases risk more than x%..... but that gets really complicated, because most of the times you are advocating to increase risk IN RETURN FOR SOMETHING ELSE.

For example, driving a car is EXTREMELY risky (and kills way more people than die from not taking a vaccine). However, most people feel the benefit of auto transport is worth the risk. However, that is very subjective, and it would be difficult to logically and objectively argue against someone who says that risk is not worth it, and we should outlaw cars.... and anyone who advocates driving is responsible for every automobile death.

This is exactly the kind of discussion I was thinking of, FWIW. I tend to agree with this line of thought — responsibility is too diffuse in this case.

So... what are other options here? Cause it is definitely bad for the public if people stop vaccinating their kids. That’s not a risk, it’s a certainty. It is also fairly clear that a significant enough percentage of people will listen to anti-vaxxers no matter what, and they will move mountains to avoid vaccines.

I don't know if there is an option, at least not legislatively. Risk is so subjective, and trying to force people to be 'rational' in their risk assessment is futile. Even if we could force people to be rational, there is still the subjective nature of the 'value' of the risky behavior. I personally think BASE jumping is way too risky for me, but I wouldn't tell someone else that they are irrational for deciding it is worth it for them.

So what do we do? What we are currently doing, really. We try to educate people about vaccines, we pass laws saying unvaccinated kids can't go to public schools without a medical reason (which yes, that loophole will be exploited, but it is an improvement), and we work to reduce the risk as much as we can. We are never going to 'solve' the problem of people making risky decisions that hurt society as a whole, so we just do our best to mitigate where we can, and accept the rest of the risk as just part of being a human in society.

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