Diversity is good. A few children who are not vaccinated is probably in the best interest of humanity. Imagine at some point in the future a vaccine does cause genetic problems, what then? Do you want to risk 100% of the population on that?
Respecting the "diversity" of opinions on the issue would have achieved the opposite.
The potential damage of a viral pandemic is well documented and well known while the damage from vaccination seems, to say the least, controversial. I'm aware of one study linking vaccinations to autism having been debunked as a hoax, for instance[1].
[1]http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com/2013/03/29/vaccine-autism-conn...
| damage from vaccination seems, to say the
| least, controversial
the fact that no one cares to collect statistics on side-effects from the vaccines
Doesn't the existence of a fund to cover those with really bad side effects suggest that we actually do have those statistics? They're certainly collected during FDA mandated testing, which is particularly extensive for vaccines because the tradeoffs are so stark, you're giving them to an generically healthy population, it's not a "take an antibiotic or die" kind of thing.
| FDA mandated testing, which is particularly
| extensive for vaccines
What about the other vaccines mentioned here, where children get 3 or 4 vaccines at once by convention? How do you know which ones are causing adverse reactions?
Otherwise they're as identical as possible, the least reasonable amount of chicken "stuff" left in, the preservatives used, etc. And I'm pretty sure there is some testing done before new batches are tried out on the whole population.
As for "how do you know which ones are causing adverse reactions", why do we care? I would assume if they're bad enough the child isn't given any more, so which causes what is irrelevant (remember, we know this is going to happen, these vaccines are licensed with that understanding). If less severe, I'm sure there are protocols to address this so the child can get further vaccinations with reasonable safety (e.g. you can test with a very small amount to see if one causes a reactions ... and, hmmm, that should do for the severe reactions as well).
So i'll suggest the null hypothesis -- assuming that vaccines do at least as much, if not more, harm than good (of which we're unaware because of politics and whatnot) then there should be evidence of lethality due to vaccinations on a scale approaching that of viral pandemics. The evidence of the good should be indisputible - how many people still get polio? The onus is on the other side to demonstrate harm.