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Comment by psyklic | Hacker News Reader

Infants have rights too. It's against the law for a "seatbelt skeptic" not to put their kid in a safety seat.

As you increasingly mandate things that the public thinks are optional, eventually mandates in general start to look unimportant, and eventually you get less safety seat compliance.

If there are some illnesses we can handle with without universal vaccination, then including those vaccines as mandates means you’ll eventually get less compliance for high-priority vaccines too. This is what we’ve seen play out when the public distrusts medical authorities. We live in a democratic society and (not) listening goes both ways.

How many deaths are acceptable to say we can "handle" an illness?

Public health requires over 95% vaccination. There has never been a realistic path to that other than requiring students to be vaccinated to attend school. Without that requirement, even well meaning parents forget or may not make it a priority.

It's not fair for kids and others vulnerable in society to die because certain parents are ignorant.

Are you prepared to jail people who don’t get covid vaccines? If not, then you understand that there are trade-offs and limitations to what public policies will actually be effective in the real world that actually exists.

Edit: added the following.

> Public health requires over 95% vaccination.

This statement, made without qualifiers, shows that you have more room to think about this. For example, we haven’t had anything like 95% immunizations for smallpox or tuberculosis for a long time, yet public health is no worse off for these reasons.

Huh? As I mentioned, it has always been a requirement for students to get vaccinated to attend school. My point still holds that if not for this requirement then we'd be below the critical threshold, whether it's 95% or slightly less.

So, let’s start from the idea that a certain vaccination compliance threshold is needed for each illness that we need to and have the ability to prevent.

And then let’s consider the reality that many parents—enough of them to matter—think there are too many vaccines, so compliance has been eroding.

This is the actual challenge: the medical recommendation might be solid, but a public policy doesn’t work unless people follow it.

Because eroded compliance threatens to undermine those critical thresholds, the public policy’s effectiveness is collapsing.

We can stay the course and watch things collapse, determined that the experts are correct and that the general public cannot be helped, or we can update the policy to be more focused so that we achieve those critical thresholds for the most essential immunizations.

So you're suggesting that in response to misinformation about provably beneficial safety standards, we should erode the standards.

That encourages even more misinformation, and further erosion of public safety.

Ah yes, we’re back to the idea that the public cannot be helped. The answer is that the problem is a different, unsolvable one: presumably due to misinformation, members of the public have opinions that are too strongly held for them to follow policies.

> This is the actual challenge: the medical recommendation might be solid, but a public policy doesn’t work unless people follow it. ... presumably due to misinformation, members of the public have opinions that are too strongly held for them to follow policies.

Right before you posted this, RFK Jr stated that his objectively worse vaccine schedule was weakened so that skeptical people follow it. Whether you were aware of it or not, your arguments merely parroted exactly what he and other anti-vaxxers were heavily spreading on that day.

This is precisely how misinformation spreads, and how anti-vax "influencers" like RFK Jr have a large effect both on you and the public.

- To see how closely your arguments match RFK Jr's, see: https://www.instagram.com/p/DTbrH_zDvqw/

- To see that in actuality Republicans as a group (influenced by prominent anti-vaxxers) dropped from 91% to 78% belief (2016-2025) that vaccine benefits outweigh the risk, see this new Pew study: https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/11/18/how-do-americ...

Every disease can be treated without a vaccine. But treatments aren't 100%, and treatments come with their own risk. Taking medicine isn't risk-free, and certainly not necessarily less risky than vaccinations. So, even if you believe it's fine to just treat the disease instead of trying to prevent it, that doesn't mean you skip out on risk. You could have more, just from the medicines alone, not even considering the effects of the disease itself.

There are vast trade-offs that are worth considering beyond what you’ve outlined. I encourage you to think more about this.

Do you intend on elaborating on these, allegedly, "vast" tradeoffs?

It's a bit rich to be talking about tradeoffs when I'm the only one here addressing risk in an honest way.

It's not "free" to treat diseases. The risk of the treatment is something you have to weigh in, in addition to the risk of the disease itself.

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