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I don’t think the right question is “should vaccines be optional?” I think it’s “to what extent should public and private institutions be expected to accommodate people who, for no other reason than ignorance, choose to opt out of the collective responsibility to public health?”

Am I allowed, as a business owner, to pass on an antivax candidate? Am I, as a school administrator, permitted to keep an unvaccinated child from my school system?

Vaccines were always optional in the sense nobody ties you down and makes you take them, and certainly all requirements have exceptions for people with, i.e, immune system issues.

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I think what is missing from every debate about 'freedom to...' is that choices should have consequences. If your unsafe operation of your body (no vaccines when you could have gotten them) injures or kills another person then you should be held accountable. This basic principle, freedom requires responsibility and accountability, is rarely ever brought up. In the US 'freedom' just means freedom from consequences which is wrong. I am more than willing to let someone tote a gun or fail to be vaccinated, but if they do so in a way that actually harms someone then they should be held accountable and the more obvious the danger, and the more reckless the behavior, the more severe the penalty. You think not vaccinating is the right choice despite the mountains of evidence otherwise? When you get sick your insurance can deny all claims. If you infect someone else they can claim damages or criminally prosecute you for assault. That is actual freedom.

We're all approaching this wrong.

Politicizing this was one of the greatest electoral innovations of all time.

Somebody realized that calling people ignorant and telling them they had to do something pissed people off and lionized them. So they took the vaccine issue and made it political. They knew the "nerdy folks" would just continue pushing and prodding, and that would continue to rile up the other side's voters.

The "institutions" (which are easy to throw shade at) telling folks they had to comply or lose work - that's a cause to fight. There's much more energy in this than in opposing it, and opposition just inflames the other side even further.

Genius political move.

The correct response to a vaccine critic isn't to call them stupid or tell them they must get a vaccine or lose their job. The correct response is, "you do you, but the supply runs out next week".

Hank Green had a nice video essay about this (I'll try to find the link).

I grew up in the South. These are reasonable folks, and they can be reached, but it's being approached the wrong way. The current methodology is only making it worse.

This is like a viral "meme" that actually causes harm. And the more you try to get rid of it, the deeper it digs. You have to try a new approach. The current one -- and it feels so righteous to call them out -- does the exact opposite of what you want.

That is a great approach, but there can be multiple right paths here. Fundamentally internalizing as a nation a definition of 'freedom' that isn't 'freedom of consequences' as well as giving incentives to act responsibly aren't mutually exclusive. I totally agree that telling someone they are stupid never works. It is like the silly idea that taunting the bully will make them back down. I think both your suggested approach and mine share something in common which is we need consequences, not words. You don't want to vaccinate? It is a week long drive and that is it so you loose your chance, a consequence. You act irresponsibly and harm someone because of a 'freedom', you are charged with assault. Neither path is going on a talk-show and calling people stupid for their actions which, I totally agree, is completely the wrong path.

I agree we should generally accommodate as many people as possible for the greater good of our communities, regardless of how we may feel at the time.

What is your view when they don't extend the same courtesy? We convince them to vaccinate to protect those who cannot be vaccinated, however they still dig their heels in the "got mine, forget you" mentality until it affects them personally? (Abortion rights, school lunches, walkable neighborhoods, food shelters and donation centers)

Every single one of these wasn't originally a problem until it became politicized.

Abortion was legal until it became a political issue in the 1800s.

Churches used to be food banks in the 80's, then "welfare" became political.

People got vaccinated until it became a political issue in the 2020s. Many of the elder anti-vaxxers remember getting vaccinated for Polio and how scary that was.

Abortion was legal, but wasn't it sort of extraordinarily dangerous? I mean, particularly a surgical abortion would have been, at that time.

For millennia there had been instructions and recipes for making abortifacient concoctions, to good or bad effect. Many of them are highly toxic to the mother herself. So many abortion-minded women faced the proposition of harming themselves to get at their unborn children.

And that is the premise of "legalizing" it: that it can be made "safe" and so they wouldn't need to use a coat-hanger in a back-alley "anymore" (although practically nobody did such things.)

There were hundreds of thousands of deaths of women who attempted abortion in Europe after the war. This was done via various artisanal mechanical methods.

If men were giving birth, abortion would be "obviously a choice". (I am a man and a father)

Abortion was less dangerous than giving birth, especially for young (16-) women with smaller hips. The proposition was often "harm yourself, and maybe painfully sterilize yourself" or "maybe die". Marriage as a sacrament (and age limitations) did not come from nowhere.

And abortion was probably still used by older women too: the risk decrease with each child, but increase with age.

Churches used to be the only source of welfare support for American citizens (and in other nations) until the New Deal.

One of the central tenets of the New Deal was that, in a pluralistic society, under disestablishmentarianism, it was unfair to expect families to rely on charity from religious groups where they didn't subscribe to their creeds and didn't share their faith or beliefs. If you accepted charity from, e.g. the Baptists, would you find yourself indebted to them, spiritually?

That is a large reason why secular welfare states became so important and popular with voters. Because if the State managed the welfare, the purse strings, the distribution, and the need-based awards, nobody needed to worry about whose church was doling out the food, clothing, or housing.

Interestingly, though, through a number of turns, the State is actually funding faith-based charities now to distribute all that food, clothing, and shelter. Or some/most of it. Obviously, secular housing authorities are handling Section 8 Vouchers, but a lot of shelters are religious facilities and they're run by church volunteers. Food banks, funded by the USDA, may be non-profits, or churches, synagogues, or community colleges. But they're all receiving USDA funding, and they all follow USDA policies to distribute that same food and assistance.

> Abortion was legal until it became a political issue in the 1800s.

Not according to Dobbs, which goes into this extensively.

"At common law, abortion was criminal in at least some stages of pregnancy and was regarded as unlawful and could have very serious consequences at all stages. American law followed the common law until a wave of statutory restrictions in the 1800s expanded criminal liability for abortions. By the time of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, three-quarters of the States had made abortion a crime at any stage of pregnancy, and the remaining States would soon follow."

Lol sounds like right way to do it by this point is to lean into the politicization, and spread the news that doctors are only giving the vaccine to democrats.

I think you’re pretty much spot on, but the societal incentives we’ve set up that make this profitable are really bad. Many things require some personal sacrifice to achieve a collective goal, and if people can’t be swayed by those arguments anymore, it’s hard to achieve anything as a group.

That idea seems like a pretty common one around this issue. While it's not entirely unreasonable on the surface, I'm skeptical of a political argument where only one side is expected to be fully paid up adult members of society with agency and responsibility not only for their behavior for the behavior of others.

For one thing, it feels just as temptingly righteous and insulting to treat your opponents as overgrown toddlers with oppositional defiant disorder as it does to call them stupid. Arguably it's worse, since the implication in calling them stupid is that you would like them to be less stupid and fully expect they are capable of doing so, but the implication in treating them like toddlers is that you expect them to continue to act like toddlers and will adjust your behavior accordingly to get them to eat their vegetables.

Maybe more importantly though, it feels like a huge trap. Far from defusing an effective political strategy, accepting that you are responsible for choices and behavior of others gives them endless license to do bad things free from any feeling of personal responsibility that should come with those actions in a civilized society. Even if you can win on vaccines, the precedent set with that approach is less than ideal.

Agree completely, just curious to understand better this

> "you do you, but the supply runs out next week".

What's the supply referring to here? Not able to follow what this is saying.

it means you are the master of your own domain but when it gets bad and you want vaccine now that there is none left, remember your choice, you were the architect of that portion of fate.

I really wish refusing a vaccine only impacted the person refusing. It would make everything easier.

Note that vaccines are optional in Sweden, and not required for attendance in public schools: https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/the-public-health-agency...

So you’re correct that, for vaccine proponents, framing this issue properly is key. If you frame it in terms of mandates and dismiss optionality out of hand, it’s a lay-up for right-wing Tik Tok to come back with “they’re more left wing than Sweden.” (Disclosure: Despite being a right winger, I would be fine with holding people down and vaccinating them.)

Of course there’s relevant differences. Swedes are culturally orderly and most Americans aren’t. Sweden has a 97% vaccination rate even with voluntary programs. But you have to confront that issue head on and deal with it.

> So you’re correct that, for vaccine proponents, framing this issue properly is key. If you frame it in terms of mandates and dismiss optionality out of hand, it’s a lay-up for right-wing Tik Tok to come back with “they’re more left wing than Sweden.”

I think it's a bit more complex than that. How do you frame an issue properly when a small group of people are out to discredit you based on everything from 'deep state' to 'bible' and even the 'aliens'? And while these people are swayed more by emotions than cold hard data (which is not entirely unusual), you also get to hear some of them say 'I do my own research' to an experienced doctor who's trying calmly and respectfully to change their mind.

Let me contrast that with my place. My place isn't as developed as the US or Sweden. But people were keen to oblige when a lock down was declared for covid, despite personal losses, because the rich people didn't get richer on the backs of their misery. The covid vaccines we had here weren't as effective as the mRNA vaccines of the west, and also had the rare blood clotting problem (VITT) that killed a few people. Despite that, people were thronging the health centers when the vaccine came out and the critical mass was soon reached to lift the lock down. People knew the dangers and were making educated tradeoffs. They were online talking about the droplet transmission mode, R0, myocarditis, etc. Doctors didn't have to plead like in the US. We don't have childhood vaccine mandates because parents make it a point to ask the pediatrician about it and the associated risks and do it diligently. We grew up learning the horrors of smallpox, polio, Hansen's disease, tuberculosis, etc. Nobody is keen to take them on again.

The real problem in the US isn't right wing or left wing politics. It's the anti-intellectual culture. Honestly, I haven't seen as much skepticism against the sciences anywhere else. Sure, people sometimes say stupid stuff in underdeveloped places. But rarely does anybody reject science outright like in the US. And very often, the US government is squarely responsible for it. How many times has the government taken the sides of the big industries and hung the people out to dry? (Big oil, big tobacco, telecom, big pharma, big agriculture, chemical producers, etc.) Wasn't there a case where a racial minority of a city was intentionally infected with syphilis and denied treatment for a sick experiment? This is how people turn anti-government, anti-establishment and even anarchist. And then the people find it difficult to believe anything the government stands for - including the genuine pro-public science institutions like the CDC or even NASA - to a level that some even have difficulty believing that the Earth is spherical (roughly). Heck! I was once asked by an American tourist if I believe that the US sent men to the moon, when I was a project engineer for a mid-heavy lift launcher!

You can see this effect even outside the US. The US used a vaccination drive in Abottabad, Pakistan to collect information about Osama Bin Laden. I'm not here to support the terrorist. But that action led to the people there distrusting and rejecting vaccines, leading to a Polio outbreak. Effing Polio that was nearly eradicated after decades of grueling global effort! Even people who has been to the US say that the government is a bit eccentric and overbearing with their science policies. The problems in the US is more cultural and pervasive than you think. It's self-defeating to think that it's a fringe phenomenon or that it's partisan. A simple reframing of the issue isn't going to solve that.

You're right to intuit that the framing doesn't make sense. The source article clarifies that, when regime officials say "optional", what they actually mean is that they deny any collective responsibility for public health. The opinion of this "vaccine panel chair" is that you should not be permitted to exclude unvaccinated children from anything for any reason.

He explicitly acknowledges that this will lead to more children getting tragic and preventable diseases, to be clear. There's no dispute about that. He's just decided that sacrificing those children is worth it for the sake of medical autonomy.

It's a strange, sort of fatalistic cognitive dissonance to believe that parents have the right to risk their children's lives by exposing them to preventable deadly diseases while at same time making it illegal for women to terminate pregnancies.

It's not too strange. It's just selfish preference.

"I don't want my kids to get vaccinated and I don't want your daughter to have sex."

Cognitive dissonance via hypocrisy and absurdity is deliberately embraced by fascist regimes, because it's a form of proof that the speaker cares more about loyalty to the state than about rational independent thought.

The main argument for allowing abortion is that people have a right to do what they want with their bodies. The opposing argument is that this does not extend to a baby's body.

I do not see how either side can then say the government has a right to force people to do something to their bodies.

Vaccines are not mandatory in any country I know but most people have them bar hippies and conspiracy theorists.

I think its stupid not to have (most, at least) childhood vaccines but people should be free to be stupid.

I really don't understand why facile abortion analogies are so popular in vaccine discussions. In the worst case pregnancy is orders of magnitude riskier than vaccination, and the typical pregnancy is more impactful than all but the worst vaccine side effects. There's no useful comparison to be drawn.

Because its a subject people feel strongly about so they like dragging it into everything.

You see it with all sorts of topics. For example, almost anything to do with the UK will result in someone going on about Brexit. The current US president is mentioned at the slightest excuse. Any kind of polarising issue, really.

"Your kid deserves to die so because I don't trust science" is certainly a position.

In New York State USA your child must be vaccinated to attend public school: https://www.health.ny.gov/prevention/immunization/schools/sc...

So far, this hasn’t been overturned by the courts. It’s been in place for a few years now.

If someone doesn't get a vaccination, and as a result gets infected, and then as a result passes the disease to someone else, then this should be treated as equivalent to harming someone by causing an accident through reckless driving.

What is needed here are laws making it a crime to conceal that you have or had a communicable disease, so infections can be tracked and fault determined.

It should be a crime to accuse someone who is innocent of any intent to cause harm, and a crime to manufacture evidence to that effect, because basically you could never prove that Alice infected Bob, let alone with malicious intent.

It is hysterical and illogical for people to make these accusations. Get real.

Intent is not needed. Causing awful consequences to others through negligence is already a crime. After all, did a drunk driver intend to run over that child?

See also "negligent homicide".

>What is needed here are laws making it a crime to conceal that you have or had a communicable disease, so infections can be tracked and fault determined.

Absolutely not. We tried this with HIV and it just incentivizes people to not seek treatment, and then they spread the disease more.

There are many laws that make it illegal to conceal HIV status when that could result in the infection of others.

Yes and many are being repealed because they were written before modern antiretrovirals and before the medical consensus that undetectable = untransmittable (U=U).

“to what extent should public and private institutions be expected to accommodate people who, for no other reason than ignorance, choose to opt out of the collective responsibility to public health?”

Before we can answer that, we would have to define the risks.

For example, the polio vaccine has no logical basis for being mandatory in the US. The requirement of the polio in the US has no basis in science and it goes against the stated purpose of the recommendations as it does not weigh risks and benefits. Instead, it is an ideological stance. Polio has been eradicated from the US (except for cases caused by vaccines themselves) and most of the rest of the world. You could require it for travel to/from risky locations. We know that severe adverse affects vastly out number the cases of Polio in the US.

It absolutely weighed risks and benefits.

Can you elaborate?

Not mentioned here is the risk of importing polio from another country. The need for the vaccine can certainly be discussed, but I'm not going to pretend that the country exists in a vacuum

Just require if for travel, as we do with Yellow Fever and other vaccines.

If the polio vaccine was banned in the US starting tomorrow, would you expect the next cohort of newborns to experience higher levels of polio, similar levels of polio, or lower levels of polio over the next 10 years?

With my comment about travel requirements, it would be similar.

Do you know that even vaccinated individuals can travel to regions with polio, pick it up asymptomatically, and bring it back and give it to an unvaccinated person who may then show more of the paralytic polio symptoms?

Under the current vaccination policy that is possible. However, if travel restrictions were in place they should require recent live immunity, which would be extremely unlikely to result in a transmissible infection.

Yes, the live vaccine would prevent people from going abroad and coming home as a silent carrier, but the live vaccine leaves open the possibility of VAPP, meaning of the tens of millions of Americans who would need the live vaccine, some of them would develop VAPP and perhaps spread it to their community, which now generally has no immunity to polio if we aren't getting any polio vaccinations.

>VAPP risk was 4.7 cases per million births (range, 2.4–9.7), leading to a global annual burden estimate of 498 cases

Would I be right in saying your 'some of them' ~= 10?

Dead vaccine should work fine if administered as a booster.

Visitors from other countries could bring polio and US switched to 100% inactivated polio vaccine in 2000 to eliminate the risk of Vaccine-Associated Paralytic Polio.

That's why my comment says travel to/from risky areas should require it.

Polio was a deadly disease, paralyzing thousands of children for life, every year. Vaccines were seen as a blessing to the first generation that got them.

And now, people who've never opened a history book can confidently claim they are useless, and that polio disappeared on its own so vaccines were never required, and are even harmful! Fuck that particular brand of ignorance.

This seems off topic. I saw nothing in the article nor my comment that displays that level of ignorance. This seems more like a strawman to start a flame war.

Huh? You were the one claiming that polio vaccines cause more harm than good, in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Polio is so rare in the US, because of the vaccines, obviously.

My grandfather limped his entire life because he contracted polio as a child.

He would be amazed at our current epidemic of anti-science stupidity.

> We know that severe adverse affects vastly out number the cases of Polio in the US.

This just sounds like "It's working too well" to me. The cases of polio have dropped to near nothing because we have so many people vaccinated. We're left with a couple hundred bad effects over the sample size of the entire country.

Is it working if it's not actually doing anything? As in, the recipients are not at risk of contracting it, there is no difference in risk between the vaccinated and unvaccinated in an environment that lacks the pathogen. Travel requirements could continue the protection with less risk, just like with Yellow Fever.

It's not because we have so many people vaccinated. It's because we had so many people vaccinated when it existed. Polio has been eradicated from all but 2-3 countries due to past vaccination efforts. Just as Yellow Fever has been eradicated in the US and that vaccine is only required for travel to risky places.

> Is it working if it's not actually doing anything?

Yes, because unvaccinated humans lack immunity. A single imported case could spread rapidly through an unvaccinated population.

I found this informative ECDC page: https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/poliomyelitis/facts

Quotes:

- Poliovirus can survive at room temperature for a few weeks in soil, sewage, and water

- It's highly infectious with sero-conversion rates of 90–100% among household contacts

- Factors like poor sanitation, high population density, and low vaccine coverage all fuel transmission

Yellow fever needs mosquitoes to spread and has animal reservoirs. Once you reduce/eliminate transmission in those reservoirs, the virus basically can't circulate even with low human vaccination coverage. For polio, humans are the only reservoir, and it spreads directly person-to-person. That's why you can't just rely on vaccinating travelers.

Plus, vaccine-derived polio (cVDPV) is actively circulating in Nigeria and Chad right now. In 2025 alone Nigeria reported 62 cVDPV2 cases. This happens when vaccination coverage drops low enough for the weakened vaccine virus itself to mutate and spread. So it's not just reintroduction risk, the virus is actively evolving in low-coverage areas.

If a huge cluster were to emerge, you'd need rapid mass vaccination campaigns to stop it. That's way riskier than maintaining routine childhood vaccination.

"Yes, because unvaccinated humans lack immunity. A single imported case could spread rapidly through an unvaccinated..."

That's assuming there would be an imported case. Travel restrictions can solve that. That's how we handle other US eradicated diseases, such as yellow fever.

You'd still need mass vaccination campaigns because immunity wanes over decades. If it resurges, it will rip through the elderly, especially nursing homes.

"such as yellow fever"

Yellow fever is spread through mosquito bites and polio is spread person-to-person. An imported case of yellow fever is nearly impossible to spread, while an imported case of polio is virtually certain to spread.

Sorry, but it's simply naive to think that in today's global world we would not import polio. It's already happening right now in the US. The only thing stopping the spread is our current high vaccination rate. You'd have to cut travel to zero in both directions to stop it.

This just seems like we're asking for it. We have historical examples of polio ripping through the US causing tremendous amounts of damage. We're going to have an unvaccinated populace and someone's going to get exposed.

Optional often means not covered by health insurance

At least with vaccines there is a good chance that the actuaries will conclude that covering them is the cheaper thing to do.

> accommodate people who, for no other reason than ignorance,

If your “reasoning” relies upon the other people being “dumb” or “cruel” or <insert-your-invective>, you are almost certainly falling short of understanding why the controversy persists.

You created a straw man; the parent specifically wrote "ignorance" which is very different from "dumb" or "cruel".

Well, what do you call a person who refuses to even look at the evidence for why we know many vaccines work? That person is ignorant. Calling them ignorant to their face probably won't change their mind, but that's a different question

What if they just don’t value the abstract “public health”? To quote my mother, “there is no economy, there’s just my economy and it’s doing fine”. I think a large plurality (if not majority) of Americans think this way.

If you do value public health then this viewpoint can seem cruel. But if you think like my mom then vaccines might as well be a government-mandated forehead tattoo.

Then I'm not sure what we're talking about. It sounds like you agree with me and disagree with bilsbie that cruel people who see no value in protecting children from polio are the reason why the controversy persists.

It's not even talking about public health, it's talking about specific individuals health and the benefits of many vaccines for a specific individuals health.

And your mom is pretty ignorant(oops, I said it again) if she thinks "her economy" isn't wrapped up in her neighbors economy, her towns economy, her states economy, her country's, economy, and the global economy.

What I learned during Covid is that some people really want to blame someone else for when they get sick. Other people think of disease as inevitable and part of nature. The truth lies somewhere in between

Ignorance is neutral. It's not an assignation of blame, merely an acknowledgement of deficit.

The anti-vax movement was built entirely on a foundation of fraud [1]. That leaves us with two main categories of people who are anti-vaccination:

1. People who are ignorant 2. People who are using anti-vax propaganda for some kind of gain

In the US, category two have gone all-in on using category one to gain political power. The "health official" in this post is clearly in category two, and might be in category one as well, but he is absolutely deserving of invectives.

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

Vaccines aren’t perfect, and the inaction of others can cause extreme adverse impacts on everyone due to total vaccination rate falling below herd immunity levels.

It’s just like taxes.

Seatbelts aren’t perfect either

> no other reason than ignorance

Well, speaking of ignorance!

Vaccines are not perfectly safe. All medicine can harm, and vaccines are no exception. Mandating dozens of vaccines to billions of children is forcing parents, under threat of state-sponsored violence, to injure their children.

There are 10s of thousands of VAERS cases in the US per year. Now multiply that by 20 and we're in the ballpark for number of children youre so cavalierly arguing to force harm upon.

Now, there are diseases where vaccines make sense. However, the blanket statement "inject into your newborn whatever the government tells you" is pretty obviously stupid in my opinion; there are plenty of cases of known-toxins taking years to get removed from market with no corporate repercussions - the incentive structures arent perfect. See DDT, leaded gasoline, asbestos, Teflon, uranium mill tailings, cases too numerous to mention. However much you trust the government to do their best, there are agile corporations getting paid handsomely to outmaneuver them.

For my children, we make a disease-by-disease risk/reward determination and do a slower schedule once they're a little older.

What "state-sponsored violence" are you referring to? You can't go to jail for refusing childhood vaccines in the US, as far as I'm aware. But you also can't expect the rest of us to let you inflict violence on our children, by exposing them to deadly communicable diseases which you could easily vaccinate your own children against.

> What "state-sponsored violence" are you referring to?

Not referring to a status quo, but to the implication of the parent, and yours after the fact, that we should consider mandating vaccines.

> deadly communicable disease

If you think this is the only thing on the US vaccination schedule, you should do a little research.

The Trump regime murdered a guy for protesting them today, so I'm not interested in engaging with sophistry about mandates that might hypothetically lead to violence at some unspecified point in the future. Rules are rules and violence is violence, they're not the same thing and I won't waste my time talking to people who can't see that.

> The Trump regime murdered a guy for protesting them today

I dont know what youre talking about, I dont follow politics. And even if I did, I dont know what relevance that could have on our conversation.

> I'm not interested in engaging [...] I won't waste my time talking

Then I agree, commenting on a public forum is not the right place for you

> Rules are rules and violence is violence

Laws (not sure why you switched to taking about rules) are explicity - not implicitly - backed by state violence. Unsure where the confusion is.

The confusion is that your statement is not true. Many laws, including school vaccine mandates, aren't backed by state violence. They don't require nor anticipate the deployment of state violence to enforce. They're just rules about how a certain program ought to be administered.

Even for the laws which are "backed by" state violence in some deep theoretical sense, I think it's misleading to the point of nonsense to characterize them that way. When the government says "the speed limit on this stretch of the road is 65 miles per hour", they do not mean and the public does not understand them to mean "we will commit violence against anyone who drives 66 miles per hour". It would be ridiculous for driver who's stopped by police and gets a speeding ticket to claim that they've been subject to violence.

To me, it seems clear that this kind of equivocation is an attempt to minimize the actual ongoing campaign of literal state violence by the Trump regime. I'll take you at your word that you're not familiar with that campaign, but please remember that the concept of "state violence" is inherently political. Talking about it implies a position on the actual state and how it actually deploys violence, whether you intend to or not.

I generally support vaccination and there is an argument that public health can sometimes trump individual rights or even health. That said, the example that has always bugged me though the default of giving babies Hepatitis B vaccine even if there is no possible vector for them to get the disease. The other example is chickenpox where we are trading off a potentially mild disease (everyone I know had it as a child) to the risk of getting it as an adult where it is more severe. These tradeoffs are not straightforward and the health authorities are also not transparent about how they weigh the risks.

I've also done something similar with my children. Make a determination for a specific vaccine and schedule. This is a combination of both weighing their health above public health and applying my particular circumstances (e.g. stay at home mom vs. daycare) to adjust the risks. They ended up getting most vaccines, just on a different schedule.

> the default of giving babies Hepatitis B vaccine even if there is no possible vector for them to get the disease

Yeah absolutely. Another example, which is tangential since its not a vaccine but is a default medicine for some reason, is antibiotic eye ointment on literal hours-old infants. Im not concerned we have gonorrhea thanks, ill listen to your talks and sign your waiver.

Fwiw, the hep b recommendation just changed like a month ago :) sensibility wins out, sometimes eventually.

> That said, the example that has always bugged me though the default of giving babies Hepatitis B vaccine even if there is no possible vector for them to get the disease.

Hepatitis B is spread via bodily fluids, including blood. In this, Hepatitis B is particularly insidious: there is generally a large viral load in the blood relative to other diseases, so even microscopic amounts of blood are sufficient for infection, and the virus can remain active for up to a week on exposed objects.

Perhaps your children are different, but blood is a pretty common sight with most children.

Worse: when you contract Hepatitis B, it may become a lifelong infection.

Sadly, screening those people who have contact with your child is thwarted by the fact that roughly half of those infected don't realize it.

See: https://www.cdc.gov/hepatitis-b/about/index.html

See: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/hepatitis-b

See: https://www.stanfordchildrens.org/en/topic/default?id=hepati...

See: https://www.chop.edu/sites/default/files/vaccine-education-c...

See: https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2025/why-hepatitis-b-vaccinatio...

My daughters were born at home. Me and my wife do not have Hepatitis B. They did not go to daycare, my wife stayed at home with them.

I think the burden of proof is on you (or the health authorities) to have some conclusive evidence based story here how them getting this vaccine is a net plus, or at least that not getting the vaccine is a high enough risk in the big picture. What I read online borders propaganda, it is just the natural reflex to defense the existing practices, there is no evidence that I have seen that has real world data comparing the risk that proves what needs to happen here. Because hard evidence is the enemy of bad policy.

> we make a disease-by-disease risk/reward determination and do a slower schedule once they're a little older

This was honestly the weirdest part of that whole post.

So after all that “not everything is safe”, it sounds like you … wait a little while and then do it anyway? Is it less risky because your kids are a little older?? This seems so unlikely to me.

Anyway, I think a lot of that post demonstrates a failure of an ability to have a dialog (radicalized positions don’t lead to understanding imo).

What about the trillions of dangerous and live viruses that are cultured in order to make vaccines in the first place? Would those be harmful if they escaped into the wild? Or what about if they were ... deliberately released somehow?

Are they OK to stockpile those viruses and culture trillions more, on an industrial scale, in every American state? What about in Venezuela? North Korea?

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