oldjerry wrote:I'm sure you can,infact probably have,put forward an overwhelming case for all children to be vaccinated,but clearly for a number of people,however stupid they may appear to the rational mind,it just doesn't seem right.The only way round this is for the State to use force.
If you review my postings in this thread, I'm pretty sure you'll find that at no point have I actually advocated any sort of coercion. I've said that it's an interesting, difficult, and complex question for which I can see arguments on either side, I've put forward a number of arguments for why I think people
should vaccinate, and I've raised a number of objections to the common arguments against vaccination, but I haven't actually come down firmly on the side of
forcing anybody to do anything. As a determined non-parent, I don't really see it as my place to make that sort of decision.
I
personally think that refusing vaccination because you care about your kid's health is silly, misinformed, and based on a dreadful lack of understanding about relative risk ratios, but hey -
I'm not going to be the one sitting by a hospital bed (or buying a child-sized coffin) as a result. Knock yourselves out, but don't expect much sympathy from me should it all go horribly wrong. And the end of the day, there's only so much you can do to protect people from their own (or their parents') foolishness. The people I
do have a lot of sympathy for are the parents of the kids who suffer (and / or die) because of
other people's decisions not to vaccinate, but apparently many people are perfectly happy to risk other people's children over this sort of thing, and call it moral whilst they do so. It makes no sense to me, but that's nothing new...
About the only level of compulsion they I could possibly favour would be to force non-vaccinating parents to visit the hospital wards containing the kids suffering from the (admittedly rare) more serious effects of the diseases we so nearly consigned to the history books, and to attend their funerals should the worst come to the worst.