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On Individual Liberty and Vaccinations — Troy Senik
Here in Nashville for a couple of weeks — the closest thing I have to therapy — I’ve been perusing the local press, partially as a means of playing one of my favorite games: “Spot the Contrast with California.”
It takes only one item to underscore the difference. The big economic fight right now in Tennessee — a state that already has no general income tax and is in the process of phasing out its estate tax— is whether the Hall Tax, a levy on income from stocks and bonds, is also destined for repeal. We’re not in Los Angeles anymore, Toto.
My survey, however, also brought me to this item — one that the two states have in common. From The Tennessean:
With preventable diseases such as measles staging a resurgence, a leading Nashville physician says it’s time for Tennessee and other states to stop allowing parents to opt out of vaccinating their children.
Exemptions for personal or religious beliefs put children at risk who have legitimate medical reasons for not getting vaccines, said Dr. Bill Schaffner, an infectious diseases professor at Vanderbilt University.
Forty-eight states, including Tennessee, have passed laws allowing parents to opt out of mandatory school vaccinations. About 2 percent of Tennessee children do not receive their required shots because parents cite religious or medical reasons, according to the state health department.
Infectious disease experts worry about that percentage rising, as it has in states such as California, where the rate of parents citing personal belief exemptions rose 50 percent in three years.
… Any action to remove exemptions for mandated school vaccinations in Tennessee would face certain opposition from organizations such as Vaccination Liberation. Kelly Riggs, a spokeswoman for the organization in Knoxville, said the opt-out law in Tennessee should be expanded, not restricted. She wants the state to add philosophical objections to the religious and medical reasons for refusing mandated vaccinations to attend public schools.
“We don’t want the state or any government to tell us what we need to do with our child or body,” Riggs said.
I don’t have any truck with the anti-vaccine crowd, who, in a just world, would receive the kind of “anti-science” scorn reserved for climate change skeptics (the anti-vaxxers, after all, actually hurt people). I’m also libertarian enough, however, that I don’t begrudge people their stupid decisions provided that they — and they only — are the ones who bear the costs.
That’s not the case here, of course. In fact, what makes this issue so interesting from a philosophical point of view is that it includes the two great spike strips of pure libertarianism: children and negative externalities. Both of those factors would lead me to be inclined towards narrowing the exemptions (thought, at two percent, I’m not sure the issue is pervasive enough to justify a response yet).
I’ve got to be honest — I don’t feel great about coming to that conclusion. I’m almost always on the side of those making the religious liberty argument. I was with them on the contraception mandate. I was with them on the fight in Arizona. And here … well, the right to leave your child gratuitously exposed to illness just feels like a bridge too far.
What say you, Ricochet? If you were a state legislator and this issue came before you, what approach would you take?
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All that said, we live in a free country and parents should not be forced to immunize their children. Without a medical exemption, it is irresponsible, arrogant, and dangerous, but it is their right.
Let me see if I got this right: You don’t want your kid to have a vaccine, with the risk is he’ll get sick. Other kids who get the vaccine won’t get sick. What is the issue again?
If the federal government cannot create a functioning website, how can we trust its ability to create effective vaccines?
I’m coming late to this party, but I want to throw my two cents in here.
Vaccines are the single greatest improvement in public health ever. They save lives. They save children’s live.
They’re heavily tested and proven safe. The minor risks involved (and they are extremely minor) are nothing compared to the major risk of not vaccinating your kids.
And just a reminder: VACCINES DO NOT [expletive] CAUSE AUTISM!
Don’t be an idiot. Get you kids vaccinated.
That being said, while I haven’t come to final conclusions on this issue myself on this issue, my inclination is always toward persuasion over coercion. So I’d rather persuade all these non-vaccinating nimrods to vaccinate their children than to coerce them into doing so.
Their objections are stupid, but freedom includes freedom for people to act like idiots and hold moronic anti-science beliefs. The answer is persuasion, not coercion.
This does make sense. It would also be helpful to know what percentage of the population is actually unvaccinated. It could be that the these numbers represent nearly the entirety of the un-vaccinated community and only a tiny fraction of the vaccinated community in the area.
Great posts! Thanks!
We don’t. The government does not create vaccines. Who said that/
There more people that have it, the less foothold the disease gets. It is not always 100%, so the less people get the vaccine, the more it can spread. If everyone takes it, we can wipe some of these things out.
Bryan G. Stevens: #46 referencing thalidomide, “And the other case besides that one is?”
The FDA now permits a self-administered abortifacient. It was prescribed for an underage woman who died administering it to herself.
My info is hearsay but I have the impression that any number of the woman who self-administer this abortifacient end up in the emergency ward.
The release of this particular drug was due to political pressure. It wasn’t required to go through the massive testing and screening that other drugs used to have to go through. The pro-abortion lobby wanted results from whatever administration was in power (Obama’s if I remember correctly) and got those results.
Doctors are being mentioned. So far as I can tell, all physicians carry massive amounts of insurance to protect themselves from lawsuits. It is part and parcel of the cost of medicine these days.
Now imagine a physician who administers a vaccine against the wishes of the parents; then imagine that this is one of those people who fall outside of the norm, and is actually harmed by the vaccine.
Talk about a lawyer’s dream.
So one can blame the parent/s for failure to vaccinate, or one can blame a zealous physician for overreach into a parent’s prerogative. There are no winners but there may well be losers, including the child.
Good point.
Your version of persuasion is to call people idiots and other people’s version of persuasion is to get the force of government to make others do what they want done. Persuasion is a big word that has a wide definition for some people.
Another question I have is whether mothers who breastfeed are passing on their vaccination-induced immunity to their babies. Most mothers today were vaccinated as children. Will the high number of mothers who are now breastfeeding their babies make some of the immunity issues evaporate anyway?
Could we test more kids to see if some of them don’t actually need certain vaccines? Then we could reach out to the remaining group specifically–a smaller number of those who would need some intense counseling to convince them of the safety and benefits of vaccines.
NiceGrizzly posted a good article about the bundling of vaccines, which said that it is safe to do so. It looks at the issue from the immune system question. It does not address the gastroenterology problems babies were experiencing near the times they were receiving bundled vaccines. But at least it is something.
It ought to be a requirement of making an argument, especially an argument on a controversial topic, that one try to understand one’s opponent as he understands himself, thereby making a fair statement of his views. I realize that on this subject the majority believes that the opposition is idiotic, ignorant, and dangerous, but a little restraint is in order, because there are serious people making arguments on both sides. Certainly our own colleagues here on Ricochet ought to be treated respectfully.
As one who lived through those childhood diseases, as did everyone I knew–I had all of them except for pertussis (there was quarantine to stop that in those days) and polio–most of the diseases against which we vaccinate do not worry me as much as the current state of our childrens’ health, and it seems to me that there may be a lack of science on more than one side. We don’t yet know the fate of our children who are so heavily vaccinated (including my own and my grandchildren) but we do know that children have a long list of diseases that were once almost unknown, such as brain tumors and ADD and auto-immune diseases, and yes, autism. Asthma used to be rare. No more. How come? Have we traded one kind of illness for another? I’m glad polio is almost gone and I wouldn’t wish pertussis on anyone, but it isn’t so clear to me that we are going down the right path.
I believe it’s chronic and gestational Vitamin D deficiency caused by excessive fear of sun exposure. The correlations fit.
I am not antivaccine. Two of my children had bad reactions, and the doctors–not I–said no more of these two vaccines. Otherwise, I’ve had all of them and so have they.
When my first baby was to get her DPT shot, I asked my pediatrician about it. I don’t remember the issue at that time, but there was one.
He said to me, “Look, she has to have this. Whooping cough progresses so fast that we might not catch it in time. It is a horrible disease.” Case closed for me. I trusted him, I believed him, and that was the end of the discussion. I can’t help thinking that the anti-vaccine parents don’t have a good relationship with a pediatrician.
That said, parents should ask questions always: I hope fluoride does not turn out to be a carcinogen. It was the Next Big Thing when my kids were little. I had it in my prenatal vitamins; we didn’t have it in our water so our kids took pills every day; it was in the kids’ toothpaste; and it was given to them at school in a rinse. They had some striation on their teeth as a result. So they had a lot of it. My pediatric dentist said that kids who had striated teeth almost never had cavities. That’s great, and they didn’t. But now I worry about the long-term effects.
Nothing is easy or straightforward in the life of a parent.
Now you are attacking fluoride? It has so been proven to work, and been used for ages without causing cancer.
I’m not attacking fluoride. (And are you sure it isn’t a carcinogen? As I wrote, I hope not. I remember that the question came up. I don’t remember how it was resolved.) And this isn’t a war. :) It is a good discussion on how the public–me and people like me–gets its health information. People get their information in dribs and drabs.
It is hard to follow these issues. I’m not in the health care field. But I have to sort out this stuff if I’m a parent. I don’t understand why it bothers people that parents have concerns and questions.
That was my point about the fluoride.
Why and how did this issue become so emotionally and politically charged? I honestly think that parents are reacting to the force of the emotions attached to this issue. I just don’t understand how this happened.
Also, with asthma, there is the issue of severe asthmatics now being able to live long enough to reproduce. I am now the third generation in my family who would have died in childhood if not for emergency asthma treatment (which, for my parents’ and grandparents’ generation, consisted perhaps of little more than massive injections of epinephrine when they were about to die, plus maybe supplemental oxygen).
Since there’s asthma on my husband’s side of the family, too (only one sibling out of several, but still…), our children are likely to be asthmatics as well, thus perpetuating the asthma.
Asthma is a disease of the immune system, and it’s pretty common for asthmatics to develop other, seemingly random problems, also resulting from disordered immune reactions, such as ulcerative colitis.
I don’t know how big this survival effect is, incidentally, but I have a hard time imagining that it’s trivial.
I have the same concerns.
There is a lot of talk about parents having concerns about things like fluoride and immunizations, and MarciN questioned why people are bothered by that. Of course, as a parent, it’s natural and healthy to have concerns and ask questions. What bothers people is that there are good, solid, evidence-based answers out there, but for one reason or another they are ignored or rejected. The concerned parent hears the answers, from their child’s pediatrician or the CDC or whoever, yet dismisses them and goes on being concerned and asking the same questions. Why? Most likely because those answers do not confirm their natural biases.
MarciN, I’m not saying that describes you, that’s just been my observation over the years.
Everybody does this. No matter how smart you are, or how much science you do. Motivated reasoning is an occupational hazard of being human.
In fact, the more skilled you are at reasoning, the more adept you are at poking holes in arguments you dislike, and so the harder you are to persuade.
I agree, Midget. We all have our biases.
This is a good point. It is like being called “closed minded” because I refuse to listen to evidence of someone’s pet theory on say, UFO’s. They have nothing new to say, but they want me to refute it point by point, again. Easier to write them off.
Yeah. One of mine is that I am biased in favor of 40 years of evidence that some things are effective.
I might point out, for the “raising rates of XYZ’ crowd, that things like Autism go up, while Mental Retardation go down. These diagnosis change and are flexible, to you can go with them as a benchmark.
Further, for the whole “There is more cases of cancer” argument, I say, “Well, sure”. After all, people don’t die of all those diseases, so they live to get cancer.
Or to put it another way: You will die of something. Heart Disease is the number 1 killer now. If we came out with a pill that cured it, I and 100% say that more people will get cancer, and someone, somewhere, will blame that pill as “causing cancer”.
Note, though, that refusing this heart disease pill because you’re afraid of cancer isn’t necessarily the same as blaming the pill.
If I think it very likely that I’ll die either of a heart attack or cancer, and consider cancer a more gruesome way to go, I might refuse the heart-disease pill on the grounds that, as you say, I’ve got to die of something, and I’d prefer the heart attack.
Though I was quite young at the time, I was furious when the furor over Vioxx erupted. Even then, I knew my strong preference for avoiding pain that keeps you from functioning, even at an increased risk of death. That for me is an easy choice. And I know others for whom the choice is also easy, though their decision is the opposite.