Informed consent is an essential pre-condition to providing immunization.
Why does the consent need to be collected individually? We don't even require collective sign off for the factory fumes we each breathe daily. It seems reasonable for a government to consent on behalf of its governed for something like public health.
Does it? How can you guarantee that your government's interpretation of "public health" matches yours?
There are no guarantees in social systems. This is true for governing legitimacy as well as concepts like consent.
By precedent, it does. Your blood contains all kinds of artificial compounds, originally ingested or inhaled, that came out of regulated factories or government programmes. You have no say around whether you are exposed to these substances individually. In the case of inhalation, you have little to no control.
Nope, it doesn't. The fact that I have those things in my blood does not mean I consented to them.
But I'm surprised you'd give up your bodily integrity so easily. Do you trust the government that much? Or are you just resigned to it?
That’s the point. You didn’t. You didn’t have to. That’s the precedent.
> I'm surprised you'd give up your bodily integrity so easily
I actually don’t love it. But the argument that such measures are problematic because they sidestep an individual consent that we don’t bother getting in other analogous situations makes it moot. I’m not disagreeing, I’m saying the reasoning doesn’t hold.
Fair enough
> But the argument that such measures are problematic because they sidestep an individual consent that we don’t bother getting in other analogous situations makes it moot.
I guess this is where we don't agree. If I'm understanding correctly, your point is that existing contaminants in the food and air are analogous situations to these mosquito vaccines, and since we already don't give consent for the former, we shouldn't bother with the latter. I disagree: the fact that we have no control over these contaminants entering our body is not a reason to give carte blanche to the government to go even further.
Not quite. Contaminants as well as substances we intentionally introduce into our food and water for public health purposes. (Including biologics [1].)
And not that we shouldn't bother. But that the argument for individual consent in a case where we've ample history of not bothering with it, often for the best, isn't a great argument.
> not a reason to give carte blanche to the government to go even further
Sure. But it's not "going further." It's business as usual.
One could go full R. F. K. and argue against the whole enterprise. But that's a fringe position. A proven losing argument. To argue against this (and other specific wrongs at the far end of the spectrum) you need arguments as to why those cases are different. Because going from N = 10,000 to 10,001 isn't qualitatively "going further," it's doing the same thing.
The Nuremberg trials are about why governments and people cannot be trusted, period.
This isn't about trust. It's about what requires individual consent, and for what groups can consent collectively. When medicine is individually administered, best practice is informed consent. But when substances are collectively administered (or removed), and this ranges from water sanitation to fluoridation to mandated fortification to factory pollutants you get to breathe, we have deep precedents that say it's fine to ask the group together and skip individual consent.
That doesn't mean this is fine. (The risk-reward seems skewed to the left when eradication of malaria-carrying species is on the table.) The argument is simply flawed. We simply do not get individual consent every time an artificial substance is introduced into peoples' bodies.