We've all heard about Rand Paul's comments. Children are chattel, the adult owners must be free to handle their property as they see fit. Obviously not good PR for the Senator, but doesn't it reveal the true point of anti-vax activism? It's the ultimate libertarian platform. Compulsory vaccination is coercion, compulsory vaccination of private property is theft. But he is wrong, other libertarians are wrong, and they should not latch on to nutjob anti-vax theories. http://www.economist.com/blogs/demo...cination?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/resortingtofreedom Also, as a doctor, he should really be ashamed. http://www.salon.com/2015/02/04/you_call_this_a_doctor_whats_really_behind_rand_pauls_junk_science/
There's a very basic difference between a libertarian and a humanist rejection of slavery: The libertarian will tell you you own yourself, while the humanist will tell you that you cannot be owned.
Agreeing that vaccinations shouldn't be compulsory doesn't mean you don't think vaccinations work or that you shouldn't get your kids vaccinated. Or do I really have to remind the OP that he shouldn't paint people with the same brush?
Just make it a law that if you want to go to public school you need to be vaccinated or have a legitimate medical reason for not being vaccinated. After a couple of weeks with their own brats they will either go back down into their doomsday bunkers and hug their guns, or they will get the vaccinations so they can be rid of their crotch droppings for a few hours a day. Frankly, anyone who listens to medical advice from either hippy or dippy paul is too stupid to be a part of the human gene pool and needs to die anyway. Seriously, getting medical advice from the paultards should make you legally a danger to yourself and we should have you committed. I am not sure how they did it but somehow people stopped listening to the doctors who spent years studying medicine and they started listening to pundits and bloggers who spent years studying the color of the fungus between their fucking toes.
Fine. I say if you don't vax your kids, and don't have a sound, verified medical reason for doing so, you should be required to move far away.
Why? The only people who would be threatened are those who have similarly chosen not to be vaccinated.
We need universal vaccinations to get to a point where the immunity is no longer necessary, as with polio, for example. Sent from my iPhone while driving
It puts those who can't get vaccinated, for legitimate reasons, into danger as well. It puts senior citizens in danger, children in danger, it puts anyone who has a chronic condition that causes damage to the immune system in danger. Herd immunity only works if the herd stays up to date on their vaccinations.
Yes, because "move far away" means "herd them into camps." There's a point where you have to delineate between freedom and irresponsibility that causes harm to others. You can get drunk, but you can't drive drunk. You can not wash your hands after you take a piss, but you can't touch someone else's food when you're preparing it. Every day we draw lines in order to protect the public health, and this is one such line that needs drawn.
And, yanno, those with autoimmune disorders that may die from the vaccine and babies under a year old that can't receive the vaccine yet.
Exactly. To me this is the most frustrating part of libertarianism of just about any stripe -- the refusal to acknowledge that the development of vaccination opened a door that could not have been considered, even conceived of, by their intellectual forbears: the idea that under normal unexceptional circumstances, to passively refuse to act puts others in danger. More generalized, it bugs me that libertarianism ignores when new technologies create fundamentally new situations. It's a disservice to rational thought to try to pigeonhole every new thing into old boxes. Sometimes (rarely!) there are new boxes! And those boxes require separate thoughtful thorough consideration. It may be that smarter men and women than I have looked at this particular new box and written about it... but if so I haven't heard of it. It seems to me that people's views on it are pretty reflexive based on their existing ideology. The utilitarians say "yep, should definitely be required; it's a good idea," the libertarians say, "nope, shouldn't be required; I don't care if it's a good idea," the politicians say "let's require it only as far as we can without causing people not to vote for us," the bureaucrats say "oh, we can do that with a religious and personal belief exemption," and the idiots say "I can work with that; it's a bad idea. Oh God, won't somebody think of the children?!" To put it another way, it's a rare (read: unprecedented) case where the requirement of the good thing is as important as the thing itself. That deserves full consideration due a new situation in the human condition, and next to no one is giving it that. A very few utilitarians seem to have done so, entirely in reaction to the anti-vaxers, but since a utilitarian worldview compels positive actions towards good ends already, there's nothing obviously new in its philosophy here. You can recognize those that have by their position that all vaccines proven to be safe and effective should be mandatory, including an annual flu vaccine. So here's my libertarian take on it: insofar as, under ordinary circumstances, refusing to act causes danger to others involuntarily, then the minimum possible action should be compelled. This is the part where I would usually include a useful analogy, but there is literally nothing like vaccines to compare to. As long as there are public spaces, this will be a problem. Back to the specific situation, this does of course extend only so far. I don't believe non-communicable diseases should require vaccination -- tetanus, for instance -- nor diseases which require a positive action to spread -- bloodborne and STDs. We probably SHOULD require flu shots every year, as much as I recoil at the thought. Astute readers will have noticed the logical flaw two paragraphs up, namely that those who do know they are immunocompromised or parents of children too young to vaccinate could simply abstain from going to public places. Aside from practical (quarantining the healthy but at-risk has worked approximately never) or fairness (is it really ethical to cut off those segments of the population from a normal life? is it developmentally salutary for babies to be so isolated from the world in their pre-vaccine years?) considerations, these objections are mooted by a lager one - vaccines are not 100% effective, and there is often no sign of this until the person falls ill. Thus it is impossible, not merely impractical, to suggest that telling those who cannot be immunized to stay out of public spaces will solve the problem. And so it falls to herd immunity. And so immunization against casually transmissible diseases is the minimum possible requirement here. Wish there was a better way, because this new situation brings some decided inelegance to the surface description of libertarianism, but there's not, as far as I can tell.
How exactly does that work? If you do understand that a parent is putting their child at grave risk by refusing to have the kid vaccinated, why should they have that right? Or do you believe that they also have the right to physically harm their kid in other ways? Perhaps the difference is between active and omitted, so they mustn't wound their kid, but may withhold vaccines as well as food?
Excellent post, but I'm not quite sure how to read that sentence. Can you expand on it a bit? Is the good thing health, and the requirement the vaccine?
Some people can't be vaccinated. Children under one year of age for example. Also, vaccinations aren't perfect. Around ten percent of the people who've been infected by the current measles outbreak were vaccinated.
"Other libertarians" are pretty solidly in the pro-vaccine camp. Reason.com, one of the biggest libertarian sites around, seems to be putting out a pro-vaccine article every other day.
Well, either it is that way and there really are just a few anti vaccinators to speak of, or there isn't and we have a problem.
If anyone doesn't vaccinate mostly because of the 'autism is caused by MMR' bullshit,... they deserve to lose their children. Fucking idiots.
Survey say..........BBBBZZZZZZZZZZZTTTTT!!!! Wrong, the issue is unvaccinated kids spreading diseases to children TOO YOUNG TO BE VACCINATED.
But there's lots and lots of evidence! The best kind of evidence. Evidence you can trust. Anecdotal evidence!
That is not even remotely true. Vaccination doesn't make a person immune. It just makes it less likely they will get it and if they do get it then the effects will be lighter.
Not so fast there Skippy. For the record, I didn't vote for that douche nozzle. I voted for the other one.
Yep. The MMR vaccine is 91% effective. That means there's still that 9% that slips through and need protecting with herd immunity.
Look up "herd immunity." There's also a father in one of the worst anti-vax communities in CA whose son's immune system has been compromised by chemotherapy. If the kid is exposed to measles, he dies. Father's petitioning the school to do something to protect his kid.
Except that you're talking about forcibly relocating people, and that's where I draw the line. Strawman and hyperbole. Except the part where you very clearly implied that libertarians and anti-vaxxers were essentially the same.
