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Comment by pkulak | Hacker News Reader

There's always some risk with injecting anything into yourself (or your child). With a vaccine that risk is miniscule compared to what it prevents, but, if everyone _else_ in society takes that tiny risk, _you_ can get all the benefits without actually taking the risk yourself. So, if I give my son his a shot and he gets a little fever, or a sore arm, etc, you can skip it with your kid and send him off to school where he's assured to not get the flu/pertussis from mine. It's just downright selfish to put it on everyone else.

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That assumes you want the benefit.

If living a 'natural' life is higher on your value scale than preventing a possible infection, then you wouldn't want the vaccine even if no one else was getting it either.

Let's say your neighbors want to build a $1M lake. They want you to chip in $50k. You're going to get the 'benefit' of the lake one way or the other. But you don't even like lakes. In fact, you'd prefer they didn't build a lake, as lakes attract mosquitoes, and you are (perhaps irrationally) concerned about infections from mosquitoes. Would it be selfish for you to not chip in? Would it be rightful for them to take the $50k from you by force since you're getting the 'benefit' of the lake?

I'll give you that, with the side note that if "living a 'natural life'" is that important to a person, it would be rather strange for them to spend all their time surrounded by machinery and copper wires and airplanes and roads and tall buildings and clothing.

Edit: I'm not saying people should be forced into taking the shots or anything. Just that I'll laugh at people who use reasoning that doesn't begin to make sense to me.

In that case, it would not be selfish of you not to chip in, and it would be wrong for them to take it by force. In this case, it is selfish to not get vaccinated, and it is still wrong for anyone to do it by force. One is a pretty view, one is not dying a disease-ridden death.

(quote It's just downright selfish to put it on everyone else.)

So the argument has been lifted from the individual to society. The next logical step might be the species. There may be a strong argument against immunization for the sake of human kind. Are our immune systems still evolving? Will we need rely on technology to replace the improvements that were previously made by natural selection? If not, is the human race going to lose to a virus we can't defeat with medicine? Short term gains, and all that jazz.

Factual error: You make the incorrect assumption that vaccines displace the immune system's functionality. They do not. Vaccines train the immune system to do what it always does. They just do so in a manner that doesn't involve you dying before your immune system gets enough antibodies together.

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