It's like it would just be the end of the world if one American had to think about another American's life. Very disappointing, but then again I guess getting rid of vaccines will be all the rage until the backlash and then it'll be 20 years of we need vaccines and then it'll be 20 years of no vaccines and then... Because we just can't learn anything.
somethoughts · 1d ago
Looking at this from a glass half full mindset, a decade from now we should have a pretty interesting data set from a public health policy perspective.
Prior to this, to get such a large subset of children to not take vaccines for an epidemiological study would probably be illegal or at best be considered highly unethical. Convincing parents to enroll their children in such a study in the name of science and for a small stipend would probably be next to impossible considering the potential lifetime impacts.
I posit that the challenge has been that in order to prove vaccine efficacy on a continuing/updated basis, you need access to a non-vaccinated control group that controls for developed world socio-economic conditions which didn't exist (until now). Thus there hasn't been an easy way to do large population scale studies on vaccine efficacy - so it did somewhat become a "trust us" tautology (until now).
pavel_lishin · 1d ago
I'd argue that the current situation is pretty damn unethical.
triceratops · 1d ago
Scientists have to answer to ethics boards. Politicians do not.
Dig1t · 1d ago
Please don’t flame me, this is an honest question.
Why is this unethical and for whom?
The vaccines work, so parents who choose to vaccinate their kids will be protected.
Parents who don’t trust the vaccine for whatever reason, they feel strongly that they might harm their child.
Isn’t it sort of unethical to force parents to inject their child with something they think is dangerous?
You’re basically asking parents to willfully harm (in their mind they think it’s harmful, I’m not saying it’s actually harmful) their own child, from their perspective why should they make that choice?
I just don’t see how this problem can be solved other than going back to square one and trying to educate people and convince them that vaccines are not harmful. The alternative is to force people to accept these injections even though people believe they are harmful, which just isn’t going to work well in the United States.
zippothrowaway · 1d ago
No one is forcing parents to vaccinate your kids. It's just that in sane societies we say you can't use a public school if you're not vaccinated and otherwise healthy.
A moment's thought will tell you that it's to protect kids that are at risk from infectious diseases (e.g. immunocompromised cancer patients) that cannot be vaccinated.
So most people would agree that it's unfair that a cancer patient cannot attend a public school, through no fault of their own, because a parent wants their healthy kid to attend the school unvaccinated. We balance the rules accordingly.
SilverElfin · 1d ago
> No one is forcing parents to vaccinate your kids.
Yes, they are. If your kids are not allowed to attend school, then you are being forced to vaccinate them because you may not have other options. Claiming otherwise is gaslighting.
> It's just that in sane societies we say you can't use a public school if you're not vaccinated and otherwise healthy.
So do those parents get a voucher for the funds pertaining to their child’s public education, if they’re prevented?
zippothrowaway · 1d ago
1) you ignored my main point about children who cannot be vaccinated. Way to go.
2) with regard to gaslighting, should parents be allowed to send their kids to public schools naked? What's the difference in compulsion?
ViewTrick1002 · 1d ago
Are children the parents’ property or an individual we as a society should work to guarantee the best outcome?
Should parents be allowed to kill their property?
SilverElfin · 1d ago
Children are “property” of their parents, not society or the state. Do you have children?
anigbrowl · 1d ago
No they are not. If you abuse them you can be put in prison and unlike property you can't sell them or use them as collateral. Propertarian ideology is delusional.
SilverElfin · 1d ago
I used the word “property” in quotes because I am just repeating the word the earlier comment used. I’m not suggesting you can sell people. You’re attacking a strawman.
Regardless - my point stands that children belong first to the parents. Using words like “abuse”, which aren’t applicable to this situation at hand, is just a way to appeal to emotion rather than acknowledging that states taking over parental judgment is explicitly authoritarian.
anigbrowl · 1d ago
They're very much applicable to the situation at hand. Abusive parents are a common enough phenomenon that it can't be handwaved away, and istm that abusive behavior is just taking this ownership idea to its logical conclusion, since there are few/no restrictions on exploiting or even destroying your own property as long as it doesn't impact others.
SilverElfin · 1d ago
Abusive parents are extremely rare. It should be hand waved away to give most parents the freedom to parent that they fundamentally deserve. Withholding a vaccine isn’t abuse - it’s just a legitimate decision to live differently and judge risks and benefits differently. What you’re arguing for is a highly controlled authoritarian culture with no room to think differently from the powers that be. Free societies value individual rights above societal ones exactly to avoid this basic authoritarian trap.
BugsJustFindMe · 1d ago
> Abusive parents are extremely rare.
The people who actually study this say you could not be more wrong. They probably also say you should stop randomly making things up and should consider what else you're also wrong about.
"Approximately 1 in 4 children experiences child abuse or neglect in their lifetime ... 91% of the time, the perpetrator is a parent." - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK470337/
"Statistics provided by the Department of Children and Families (DCF) ... show that in about 82% of substantiated abuse cases the alleged perpetrator was the birth parent." - https://www.cga.ct.gov/PS98/rpt/olr/htm/98-R-0509.htm (adoptive parents are in there too but counted separately, in case you're wondering)
I don't care how you slice the numbers, there's no way to get from 23% of children (90% of 25%) in the US having abusive parents to abusive parents being "extremely rare" unless your definition of "extremely rare" here is utterly insane.
SilverElfin · 1d ago
Searching for things that confirm your view isn’t the way you find answers.
As an example, your first link isn’t even a real study. Hosting some text on a .gov website doesn’t make it correct. And Statpearls is basically a low quality scammy source. But you don’t need to know that about its reputation - just reading your own link’s content would make it obvious that it is REALLY low quality - in this case written by a couple random grad students.
Since we’re cherry picking things, I’ll quote this from your own source, which shows that even when you use very broad definitions, abuse is extremely rare:
> In the United States, Child Protective Services estimated that 9 out of 1000 children are victims of child maltreatment.
Consider what else you're also wrong about.
BugsJustFindMe · 1d ago
> > In the United States, Child Protective Services estimated that 9 out of 1000 children are victims of child maltreatment.
That's in literally just the one year (2012) and just within cases reported to CPS that year. There's an absolutely massive difference between that and the actually relevant statistic which covers the span of childhood and also isn't limited to just CPS referrals which the CDC calls out as likely underrepresentative.
It is for parents to judge what medical care is appropriate. You’re making it seem like everyone must consent to injecting whatever the government tells them, which is dystopian.
Tadpole9181 · 1d ago
No, children are not dolls for parents to neglect as much as they want with no legitimate justification. Are they allowed to withhold food too? Keep them from getting school? Marry 12 year olds off?
Oh, woops, the GOP do support that last one.
SilverElfin · 1d ago
If they want to homeschool, yes that is their fundamental right. Not everyone has to share the same culture or knowledge or way of life. As for food - do you think all Arab households should behave their children taken away when they withhold food for religious fasting?
BugsJustFindMe · 1d ago
> do you think all Arab households ... religious fasting
Religious fasting is not starving and home schooling is not "no school". You didn't address the marriage thing either.
I take that to mean you understand the point?
SilverElfin · 1d ago
I understand that you don’t understand that religious fasting is literally “withholding food” - which you had a problem with until you flip flopped apparently. Sigh.
Tadpole9181 · 15h ago
I didn't amuse your goal-moving example because it's not related and you're not bringing it up in good faith.
I have never met in my entire life, in America, a family that engaged in religious starvation fasting. Not Catholic, not Jewish, not Muslim. Their fasting rules were eating bland food or only at certain times of the day. And it's for a limited period of time.
But if a family makes a child go without eating for any prolonged period of time not for a medical necessity (pre-surgery, for instance), yes, they should get a a check-in from social services.
And to go even further, if you only feed your child bad foods on purpose - like only bread and potatoes every day, when you can afford real food and diversity - you should also get a visit from social services.
I seriously don't get why you're defending people like the Turpins. Do you genuinely not understand why these laws are necessary and why it is pivotal we have basic protections for children from their parents? You don't even need to look past Hollywood with Honey booboo and Justin Bieber and all that lot to see how dangerous parents can be, let alone the insidiousness and commonality of the lower-profile cases.
Again, a number of sitting members of legislation in 2025 are arguing that children as low as the age of 12 should be allowed to be married off to adults who then (if they haven't already) rape them. And that child cannot legally get divorced without their parent's consent!
In one hearing the politician admitted to knowing an example! So you can't even say "well it never happens."
I can't believe it needs to be argued: in any just and equitable society, children have a right to a basically healthy upbringing. That means socialization, education (both physical and mental), healthcare, nutrition, and protection from those who would do them harm.
They are not "lesser people" or property of their parents. It is a practical reality that some of their rights must be ceded because they are incapable, but their parents are meant to be guardians and not owners.
fragmede · 1d ago
Of course, we just don't agree on when it is acceptable. Between the ages of -.75 and -.50, it's generally legal to. Shifting the Overton window to make it legal for ages up to, say, 15, would be one for an ultra-left wing party to throw out there, just to disrupt the national conversation.
strbean · 1d ago
Parents don't have sole discretion about their child's well-being. As pointed out by another reply, "I thought it was best for them" doesn't hold up when the wealth of evidence shows they are endangering or harming their child.
> The vaccines work, so parents who choose to vaccinate their kids will be protected.
This is false for a number of reasons.
1) Vaccines don't provide perfect protection, breakthrough infections can occur.
2) Some people can not receive vaccinations due to health conditions.
3) Immunocompromised people are not protected by vaccines.
We managed to make it illegal to beat the crap out of your kids even though there are still plenty of Americans who think not beating your kids is harmful to them.
Dig1t · 1d ago
Well I agree and understand that herd immunity exists and it protects the small number of kids who can’t get the vaccine for whatever reason. But the choice is still the same, you’re asking parents to prioritize someone else’s child over their own and if they believe that it is dangerous to do so then why would they do that?
I don’t believe there are any people who believe that NOT beating their children is dangerous. If you put yourself in these parents’ shoes, they basically see this stuff as poison. What you’re asking them to do (in their mind) is inject their children with poison and for no other reason than because the government says so. It’s just a losing battle, you need to educate these people and show them that they are safe, address their concerns directly.
I would not inject my children with mercury if the government told me to. I would need to be convinced that mercury is safe and beneficial before I allowed my kid to be injected with it. I don’t feel like equating this to physical violence is helpful at all because in this case these parents believe they are preventing harm to their children.
BugsJustFindMe · 1d ago
> Well I agree and understand that herd immunity exists and it protects the small number of kids who can’t get the vaccine for whatever reason.
You need to understand that herd immunization actually helps everyone, not just some small number of children who can't get vaccinated, because even the best vaccines don't offer 100% protection.
Your odds of getting sick are based on the odds that other people around you are contagious. That much should be extremely obvious, because every encounter with a contagion rolls the dice again.
What's less obvious is how much that matters because math is hard. Even if you have 95% immunity to some infectious disease, your probability of getting it at least once after 10 exposures is a whopping 40% (1 - 0.95^10). Everyone's protection, yours included, comes from reducing your chances of being unwittingly exposed because the people around you aren't getting sick, and that means vaccinating them too. When one person gets sick, everyone around them is put at increased risk. The way you fix that for everyone is by making it less likely that any member of the herd gets sick from any given exposure.
_DeadFred_ · 1d ago
It has been proven. It has been proven to benefit EVERYONE way more than any harm it could cause. I hope you and the others that give these 'concerns' (that if we are honest, these sorts of people will never have a bar high enough that they will say they are satisfied have been met) give generously to our country's future polio beggars in the streets. You might be too young to have experienced what happens to the victims, the suffering that you consider these 'concerns' to outway. It's is horrible to inflict on the population. Measles/mumps are going to result in a lot more deaf people like it was when I was a kid. Polio in lots more paralyzed children.
This is the suffering you are OK with because 'concerns':
Covid vaccines are the elephant in the room. In many jurisdictions, children were coerced to take them for no good reason. Like it or not, we are dealing with the fallout of extremely poor decisions made recently...
elp · 19h ago
The covid response was done poorly done in classic knee jerk style and a bunch of authoritarian aholes used it as chance to act like authoritarian aholes. Also yes once the virus evolved to Omicron to avoid the vaccine we probably didn't need all the boosters they tried to push.
But the medical community was acting with the best knowledge they had at the time as imperfect as it was. Tell me how did taking the vaccine harm any child? It wasn't painful. Immediate side effects were minimal to non-existent. Myocarditis and Carditis incidence was something like 65/million. Even then most of those recovered without any treatment. Median hospital stay for those that needed it was 2 nights and most recovered without permanent issues.
I think the final death toll from the vaccine was estimated at around 1/million. Meanwhile at the height of the delta strain the death toll for anyone infected was well over 1/100 ( more than 10% for the over 60s).
The fallout doesn't make rational sense.
robocat · 1d ago
I wish I had your arrogant confidence.
I'm a vaxer But one community I hang with is strongly antivax. Many of them have been very harmed even if they didn't take the vaccines.
When something is that important to you (even for woowoo reasons or social media misinformation) then it is a fertile situation for mental health impacts.
Antivaxxers are a vulnerable population too (they have self selected into a circle by their beliefs and communities).
Disclosure: I've seen some good people severely harmed by overbearing government actions in New Zealand. I believe New Zealand did a good job of protecting everyone here from COVID, but that the collateral costs to everyone were very high (and extremely variable chronic costs to some).
Edit: apology that I've bucketed all vaccines together. E.g. Measles vaccine is quite different from covid vaccines.
_DeadFred_ · 1d ago
You can empathize with your friends’ personal beliefs, but when those beliefs put children at risk, society has to draw a line. Vaccination is basic health hygiene required for large groups of people to live, learn, and function closely together without constant outbreaks. The requirement is minimal: if you want access to public education, you agree to the few safeguards that make it possible for the masses to share space safely (you use the bathroom, you wash your hands, you shower, you get vaccines).
Imagine if I said 'my religion doesn't allow running water, I should be allowed to defecate anywhere, and also science says toilets increase the risk of hemorrhoids, and you can't make me give my kids hemorrhoids'. You can't allow that, not because you don't agree with it, but because the way we live in groups needs artificial sanitation. Just like we need artificial stimulation of immune systems.
robocat · 8h ago
I am not talking about empathy with friends (I'm not sure why you assumed that). I am certainly not saying "don't immunise". I suspect you're making assumptions about me, but to be clear I am strongly pro vaccination and pro-science.
Each vaccination has costs and benefits. The science is amazing at reducing the physical risks.
I am just asking you to understand that some people are seriously psychologically harmed by requiring vaccinations (for themselves or for their children). It may be irrational, unscientific or selfish but I have seen how real the harm is for some people. That harm is a complex grey area. It should rarely trump the needs of children or society.
Society has a variety of ways to balance that harm against the expected benefits.
The second half of your comment is just a strawman story. And introducing religion as a topic is usually a poor idea.
_DeadFred_ · 7h ago
I apologize if you feel attacked/judged. Conversations shouldn't go like that. I believe people have the right to their opinions, and in a democracy we WILL go down different avenues than I would like and that is part of democracy. And I appreciate you raising views not your own but not represented in the conversation. But I am going to point out the outcomes. I'm going to point out that the 'body autonomy' people harassed my mother for wearing a mask while dying of cancer and didn't care about her autonomy to wear a mask out of chemo need.
The original anti-vax exemptions were given on religious grounds. All justifications after that have built on that initial allowance. It is very much not a straw man when it comes to vaccine allowances. It is the OG justification that opened the conversation.
After watching my santa cruz woo woo ex-wife's friends all literally talk themselves into believing in the damage of vaccines (while being fine taking MEGA/unhealthy doses of western science discovered vitamins), I consider vaccine hesitancy a form of Munchausen syndrome. One that should only be tolerated to a certain point, and this is well past that point.
SilverElfin · 1d ago
> Parents don't have sole discretion about their child's well-being.
In a just society they should have sole discretion. The current situation where kids aren’t even allowed to walk to school without CPS harassing parents, is because of this attitude where the state thinks it has any rights to your kids.
conception · 1d ago
Of course it does. If you abuse your children, the state enforces the rights of your children. If you put their life in danger, the state can and should take them from you. Parents do not own their children any more than the state does and their rights should be protected by both parties.
The CPS issue is because of litigation not protection. No one wants to be responsible for something bad happening.
SilverElfin · 1d ago
> Parents do not own their children any more than the state does and their rights should be protected by both parties.
Yes, they absolutely own their children more than the state does. I can’t believe there are any claims otherwise. Do you value the bond between parent and child and how special it is? Nothing should violate that. Not even the rare parent that is actually neglectful - meaning that should curtail the freedoms of the typical parent. And anyways, choosing to forego a vaccine isn’t abuse - on average it shifts outcomes very little. For example skipping a flu vaccine won’t change much.
intended · 1d ago
Female Genital Mutilation is something parents do to their children.
A parental bond doesn’t overwhelm a child’s own rights as citizens and human beings.
Parents live in a society, even if it were a village, and there is no free pass to do just what you will if it crosses lines.
Collective health is one of those lines.
LocalH · 16h ago
Parents do not "own" their children, at all.
BugsJustFindMe · 1d ago
> In a just society they should have sole discretion.
I think you need to spend some time thinking about how your idea of a just society is that child abuse is ok if parents do it.
lm28469 · 1d ago
Read into heard immunity, not everyone can be vaccinated, not every vaccinated person gets full immunity, more vaccinated people = safer for everyone.
This doesnt work anymore because people are more individualistic than ever, unless something will directly harm them in a very obvious way in the next hour it's as if it didn't exist in their mind
Kind of like spouse of illegal migrants who voted trump, or people surviving thanks to medicaid voting against their own interest, they're so blinded by rage/outrage that they can't even understand basic logic. I personally think we're at a breaking point in most of the west and it'll only be going downhill from now on, so just as you I don't see any solution. The education system can't fight social media, and you can't "force" people you've been brainwashing for decades into believing the be all end all of human life is their little unlimited personal freedom
I am aware of herd immunity, but the same statement applies. You are asking parents to inject their children with something they think is dangerous. They are going to prioritize their own child’s health over a small percentage of other children, especially as social trust decreases over time.
bdangubic · 1d ago
What if me, as a parent, decide that it is insane my child to wear clothes because their skin will get fucked up from fabric? OK for my kid to walk around the school naked? What if I think it is in the best interest of my boy to be tough and tell him it is OK to punch the lights out of anyone he wants in school, other kid, teacher, whatever? I am a parent after all and I only care about my child - your or other children in the school are not my concern, all this good?
n4r9 · 20h ago
One of the functions of government is to ensure the health of its citizens. Potential harms have to be weighed against individual liberty. Parental choices can affect the health of their and other children. The line has to go somewhere. Some parents don't even believe in feeding their children: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c62v59621dro
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF · 1d ago
> Why is this unethical and for whom?
People with auto-immune disorders who can't safely take the vaccine lose the protection of herd immunity. (Edit: and the children who don't have control over their own health outcomes.)
Agreed that it's not an easy problem to solve.
SilverElfin · 1d ago
> Isn’t it sort of unethical to force parents to inject their child with something they think is dangerous?
Yes, it is unethical. The other comments don’t agree, but this is exactly the position a lot of people hold. In the end, parents should be allowed to judge the risk for their own children based on their experience. Not allowing for that is basically thought control.
The real issue is that parents who want herd immunity to protect their own children, don’t want to also protect their children by keeping THEM away from the public or having THEM take precautions (like wearing masks or whatever). Instead, they want the risk to be taken by other people, which is unethical.
realityfactchex · 1d ago
Gosh, please accept these remarks in the most positive spirit possible.
> Yes, it is unethical
Agreed on that.
> The real issue is that parents who want herd immunity to protect their own children...
Arguably, for some, the "real issue" is whether viruses have even been reasonably shown to exist at all with something other than a) appeal to authority or b) other logical fallacy.
For instance, if one reads many virology papers (just a PubMed search away) for detail and understanding, one may find that there are not actually scientifically controlled studies proving the existence and causal nature of so-called viral particles, but instead the papers are a house of cards that undo themselves. There's no science in the The Science™ -- just enough to look like it and pass muster among people just trying to get along in this hectic and challenging world.
--> The cognitive dissonance (and conditioning) is so loud on the above point, that most people will label the claim a Conspiracy Theory and become instinctively distraught or look the other way in emotion, unable to bear scrutinizing the claim.
Thus, to assume that
> they want the risk to be taken by other people
is missing the point entirely, for a quite serious and well-informed contingent of conscientious objectors to vaccination requirements.
At that point, it is moot to point out that, if people are convinced by the likes of world's greatest omnichannel marketing campaigns that they need a certain product put into their body (for fear of death and disease), nothing stops those people from doing as they please to themselves.
After all, if the product really (a) is safe and (b) works, then the customers of that product certainly have nothing to worry about. (Nobody needs to convince *other people* to take a product, if it works for them.)
zaptheimpaler · 1d ago
It's unethical because vaccines don't work 100% of the time so if the disease is allowed to spread, some vaccinated people will also get the disease and suffer the consequences. If some of these horrific diseases actually start circulating again commonly, it will mean a LOT of vulnerable people will basically not be able to go out into the public at all. Many of the diseases we vaccinate against like measles or polio have horrific lifelong consequences. It's condemning many people who didn't make that choice
This is ethical only in the extremist libertarian view where personal choice trumps all. Some parents probably believe that beating their child or otherwise abusing them is good for the child.. so should we just let them do that? There IS an end to personal liberty, it's not unlimited. "Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man’s nose begins"
I totally get what you're saying about these people not trusting the vaccines and the education problems though, and maybe the solution will have to be to meet these people where they are and try to educate them out of the misinformation hole. Here's one small example of how that goes - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o69BiOqY1Ec (it does not go well..)
It's very very hard to change these people's minds and we genuinely don't have any answers to how to do that. It's a very hard problem because all of us take an experts word for it at some level of reasoning, the anti-vaxxers just believe in different "experts". You can't go deep enough into the science and papers and experiments to really undeniably show everyone the truth, so how does anyone prove anything? Not to mention these positions often aren't reasoned into, and can't be reasoned out of. Most of us have some experience in trying to change someone's mind on one of these issues and know it fails. A lot of the time some visceral experience has to hit them or something internal has to shift within them and we don't know how to do that.
aredox · 1d ago
>Isn’t it sort of unethical to force parents to inject their child with something they think is dangerous?
Then isn't it unethical of these parents to force the other parents - the rest of society - who think illnesses are dangerous to cohabitate with their kids who could be highly contagious, and breed and mutate viruses?
It goes both ways. "Society" is made of humans too.
fzeroracer · 1d ago
> Isn’t it sort of unethical to force parents to inject their child with something they think is dangerous?
Is it unethical to say parents should feed their kids if they believe food to be dangerous? Is it unethical to stop them from giving their kids bleach if they believe it to be a cure?
The answer is that as a society we have limits around what a parent can or cannot do for the sake of the overall well-being of their children. If a parent refuses to vaccinate their child without a very good reason why (such as other exacerbating health issues or allergic reactions), it should be treated as child abuse. Because it is.
n4r9 · 20h ago
> parents should feed their kids if they believe food to be dangerous?
Ethics board have already discussed the topic at length, where you "argue" with a single sentence - but ok, let's admit vaccination obligations are unethical. Then you do admit infecting others is unethical as well? Now, science has advanced far enough we can retrace who I texted who through genetics; therefore, if you want to abandon compulsory vaccination, it must be compulsory that each and every infection must be investigated like a poisoning is and people who infect others be prosecuted as severely as polluters.
aagha · 1d ago
Isn't there too much intra-state travel to allow for us to have comparative sets in the future?
The problem with FL not vaccinating is that people who are sick will spread disease (and die) at different rates than those who are vaccinated.
bluesounddirect · 1d ago
The better question is why announce this message? was there some sort of push for some contradictory vaccine policy from the federal government? This is another thinly veiled attempt to distract from the fact Trump is connected to Epistein. The children of Florida are going to pay, again for Trump meddling with their lives.
xnx · 1d ago
The beauty/tragedy of the modern world is we're so far removed from all he painful lessons that got us here that we don't think about them at all.
uncircle · 21h ago
We must learn from history; if we don't, history will beat us with the textbook until we finally get the lesson.
Honestly I am glad that Nature has very effective mechanisms to keep a rein on the ever-increasing hubris of humanity.
NoGravitas · 15h ago
Given the current levels of hubris, we will need Godzilla.
treetalker · 1d ago
Steel-man it: Perhaps DeSantis and the other geniuses in Tallahassee are simply incentivizing the Florida population to develop herd immunity to polio, measles, and meningitis.
dwattttt · 1d ago
Yes, most of the survivors will have developed immunities. There's a catch in that sentence if you read it carefully.
triceratops · 1d ago
> incentivizing the Florida population to develop herd immunity
I thought these "freedom" type people didn't like being sheep.
aredox · 1d ago
Like the herd immunity that made polio measles and meningitis extinct in the millenia before the invention of vaccines...
I really wish sometimes RFK jr went through with his idea to let avian flu "rip through" poultry farms. The complete collapse of chicken farming would have made things clear.
krapp · 1d ago
People aren't going to "develop herd immunity to polio, measles, and meningitis," they're just going to get sick and die en masse. Herd immunity at the scale of modern societies requires mandatory widespread vaccinations.
treetalker · 1d ago
I agree with this and the other responses I have seen so far. I was simply trying to make the Florida argument as strong as I could — which is not very strong, because once again Florida government is being hare-brained.
Tadpole9181 · 1d ago
Defending these policies is actively harmful. Why in the world would you do that? Actual, real-world policy being created that will cause children to die or be crippled for life is something to joke about or try to justify? Are we going to steel man Nazism next?
treetalker · 1d ago
Apparently my comment was not dripping with enough sarcasm. In no way am I defending this — quite the opposite.
krapp · 1d ago
To be fair to treetalker, we're supposed to use the strongest possible interpretation per the guidelines. Doing so isn't implicit defense or advocacy.
I sometimes take positions I don't necessarily believe in if I think it will spur on better discussion, there's nothing wrong with it.
_DeadFred_ · 1d ago
This is what they have used their political authority/power to bring back into our every day lives:
Unfortunately, one of the lesser-known facts about measles is that it causes your immune system to forget how it previously fought other diseases. So if it suddenly flares up in a community, everyone who catches it is now vulnerable to a second round of other diseases.
ChoGGi · 1d ago
I've a plan for an iron lung startup in Florida, any investors looking to get in early?
I've got AI and blockchains.
beAbU · 22h ago
Put me down for a 100 bucks. I have a friend who makes leg braces for a living, let me know and I'll hook us up.
uncircle · 22h ago
Nah, that's too high tech. I'm just waiting until blood-letting is back in fashion.
morepork · 1d ago
Honest question: do you get charged more for health insurance in the US if you and/or your family aren't vaccinated?
jerlam · 1d ago
When would we see actual effects from ending vaccine requirements immediately, seeing as a large number of children are already vaccinated? What would it look like?
Balgair · 1d ago
Depends on your assumptions. Measles requires 92-95% immunity for hers immunity.
Here's a likely scenario for a K-5 school of 600 children, 100 per class, assume incoming post requirement drop is 1/5 students:
Year 0: 96% immune (Typical from what I can glean online)
Year 1: 80% of Ks now immunity from vaccination. 96% of 1-5 immune as normal. Non immune =20 +5*(4) = 40 out of 600, or 7% of 600 kiddos. So 93% rate of immunity. Right on the bubble in a year's time.
Tweak numbers as you'd like, but with even modest decreases (16% loss, or and additional one in 6 hesitancy) in vaccination, Measles herd immunity is tettering in a year and lost in the second year, by a large margin
fzeroracer · 1d ago
A remarkably stupid decision made by remarkably stupid people that won't face the consequences of their actions, because it'll primarily be the vulnerable that have to deal with the fallout of disease resurgence.
bdhe · 1d ago
How are others processing this horrific backsliding in scientific trust, literacy, and straight up lack of compassion for the most vulnerable in the US?
Folks can surely see the connection between dropping vaccination rates and the rise of measles in Texas for example. Why aren't more people outraged and how are they allowing unprincipled politicians to impact their lives so drastically in pursuit of power?
dogleash · 1d ago
> How are others processing this horrific backsliding in scientific trust
Tragic, but we sleepwalked into this state of affairs by downplaying the severity of epistemic failures in academia and science communication.
Oh it's just a little publish or perish here, replication crisis there. Nobody really believes the clickbait headline. Overall we're on a solid foundation. Science means rigor, right? So the word science means rigor was done. Getting mad at someone for over-correcting won't make them feel more righteous.
We have failed our fellow countrymen.
watwut · 1d ago
No, this is result of intentionally and well paid propaganda. It has nothing to do with failure of science or academy. Even less with publish or perish.
This is happening because some rich people radical right on republican side wanted to happen. Smart conservatives worked for this for years. They knew they are lying, but it did not mattered to them.
Blaming others is just another round of enabling. Blame shifting away from who intentionally caused this wont help anyone and does not reflect the truth.
Also, publish or perish thing is literally something the same people actively worked for.
tpm · 1d ago
This has nothing at all to do with academia and science.
krapp · 1d ago
This seems like a bit of a retrofiction. People weren't pushing the anti-vaccine narratives because of the replication crisis, rather they used the replication crisis to justify their pre-existing mistrust of vaccines.
The science around vaccines is actually sound, there's was no "replication crisis" or failure of rigor in that regard. Yes, even the covid vaccine was tested and went through clinical trials.
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aredox · 1d ago
Polls show there isn't an exceptional loss of trust on confidence in the medical system:
What happened is that the minority of contrarians and FUD spreaders have managed to hitch a ride on Trump's train and be promoted to governance.
Dig1t · 1d ago
I am surrounded by people in my daily life who are celebrating this change, I can tell you exactly why.
The establishment has done very little to try and address concerns from vaccine skeptics. Their response is mostly one of condescension and derision. Rather than using kindness and education, many establishment folks simply refuse to meet these people where they are and instead continue to act as though it’s completely insane to question the things that are being injected into their children.
There are completely valid questions for normal people to ask that don’t receive much of a response often, things like “why are vaccines immune from lawsuits?” and “why has the standard vaccine schedule increased so much?”.
Instead of providing good clear answers to these questions, skeptics are marginalized. How can this behavior not create distrust in scientific experts? The more you talk down to people, the less likely they are to trust you.
Note: I myself am not a vaccine skeptic, but I know many and I hear their reasoning often.
LexiMax · 1d ago
I am also friends with a fair few anti-vaxers and have attempted the reasonable and kind approach based on the facts. After many, many attempts, the conclusion I finally came to is that there isn't truly a gap in communication, but in culture.
This can take many forms, be it religious, political, or just whatever social groups they are a part of, but I believe that this form of motivated reasoning isn't necessarily something you can reason someone out of. To that effect, I don't believe trying to inform them is productive, but rather asking probing questions that attempt to reveal _why_ they believe what they believe.
In my own personal experience, I've found that nearly all of the anti-vaxxers I've talked to root their dismissal for vaccinations in religious reasons or in grievance politics.
NoGravitas · 15h ago
You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into in the first place.
intended · 1d ago
Please lay no hopes in the establishment. There is NOTHING that will get past the FOX barrier, unless it serves a political purpose for the Republican Party.
There is no “establishment” here.
When Fox began targeting environmental efforts against global warming back in the day, they happily platformed cranks to spread FUD. Eventually it got so bad that scientists went to FOX to try and bring the case to the audience and explain things. At which point they were fed to the lions.
There is no fair fight in the media space. There can be no profitable trade in hard to produce facts, when the other side is able to sell cheaper emotionally salient content.
fzeroracer · 1d ago
> The establishment has done very little to try and address concerns from vaccine skeptics.
For decades, the argument against anti-vaccination skeptics was to try and educate them. We've put them on TV, thrown our most well-reasoned arguments against them, showed them the data and proved to them multiple times over that their arguments are wrong. We argued over and over and over again that Andrew Wakefield, a literal fraudster who kicked off a large part of things and who aimed to profit from the anti-vaccine sentiment, was wrong.
Frankly the only argument and patience I have now for anti-vaccine skeptics is extreme derision and insults. They deserve nothing and should receive zero respect.
Dig1t · 1d ago
I can tell you that whatever education you think has been put out there, it’s absolutely not reaching its intended audience, and much of what does land is actually doing the opposite of what it intends to do. Example: Colbert’s “The vax scene” episode did more to damage the reputation of vaccines than I think anyone realizes.
Yes discrediting Andrew Wakefield helps, but you have to fight the incorrect ideas about the vaccines themselves not just one of the people who pushed these ideas.
One example: many skeptics ask the question “if vaccines are so safe then why are they immune to lawsuits?”. This is a very reasonable question for people to ask! And honestly, responding to this common sense question with derision and insults hurts your cause. The establishment needs good responses to questions like this and they need to be repeated in a non-hateful way.
99% of media and online conversation is just condescending. Like look at the comments in this HN post, most people are extremely unkind.
“Extreme derision and insults” is going to make the problem so much worse.
mr-wendel · 1d ago
Let's also recall that almost nobody changes their mind when engaged in these types of conversations, and the more confrontational the more likely you cement existing biases.
Where you do stand to make a difference is with more casual observers and people on the fence. A show of patience and respect bolsters a good argument better than perhaps even the argument itself.
What does tend to change people's minds is forming good relationships with people who hold differing opinions and their desire to make the relationship work. Logic and rationality are secondary considerations. Hopefully they will accept better conclusions for these reasons, but it's quite unlikely without adopting the kind of approach espoused by Dig1t.
ryandrake · 1d ago
All of these questions get answered over and over and over, with good answers, often backed by decades of medical research, delivered by everyone from the Surgeon General to contagious disease experts, all the way down to individual people's family doctors. If the evidence and research is not getting to people, it's because they are deliberately blocking it out. You can't bop people on the head and force them to get educated. And you can't "meet these people where they are" because where they are is a fortress that is specifically built to repel knowledge and expertise.
And, of course, when you point that out, it's attacked as condescending and derision. I, too, live in a community surrounded by these people. There is no reaching them, sadly.
bdhe · 1d ago
> One example: many skeptics ask the question “if vaccines are so safe then why are they immune to lawsuits?”. This is a very reasonable question for people to ask!
Seems like a reasonable answer to me! The question is, why don't vaccine skeptics just look things up and try to educate themselves?
===
Why are vaccine manufacturers shielded from liability?
A 1982 TV news report entitled Vaccine Roulette suggested that the whole-cell pertussis vaccine was the cause of permanent brain injury. Subsequent studies indicated that while the whole-cell vaccine was associated with febrile seizures, it was not associated with long-term brain damage. However, those studies took at least 10 years to exonerate the vaccine.
In the meantime, as vaccine manufacturers were flooded with lawsuits, some decided to stop making vaccines rather than face continued legal pressures. Consequently, production dropped, leading to concerns about vaccine supply and subsequent vaccination rates.
By shielding vaccine manufacturers from liability, Congress assured that future generations would be protected from devastating diseases. A common misconception is that this process completely shields vaccine makers. However, a plaintiff may file a civil court claim against vaccine companies after filing a claim in the VICP if they reject the vaccine court's decision.
aredox · 23h ago
Will Dig1t reply to this? Will he try to show this to the many vaccine sceptics he knows of and update us on how they reacted?
Because usually that's what happens when you "debate" with vaccine sceptics: they just accuse you of being mean/pretentious/know-it-all/arrogant/etc., they move goalposts, they switch subjects, or they completely ignore you, disappear and come back later elsewhere asking the exact same "questions" as if your discussion never happened.
Because they have reached a point where hey are so much wrong that admitting it would be admitting they have been very stupid, very unjust and very bad people. And it requires a lot of backbone to own such a personal failure. So instead they double down.
aredox · 1d ago
>Colbert’s “The vax scene” episode did more to damage the reputation of vaccines than I think anyone realizes.
Oh yeah, perfectly rational to make health decisions based on a mediocre skit by a comedian you don't like and almost never watch... The people around you are perfectly sane people who are not trying to find any excuse to justify their tribal, cultish beliefs.
The solution is easy: vaccine proponents, whoever they are must be absolutely perfect in every way, shape and form.
Otherwise vaccine sceptics will instead prefer to believe the rich son of a political dynasty (who is certainly not a member of the establishment!) who had a brain worm and dumped a dead bear in central park and who has been proven a liar dozens and dozens of times.
Really wonder why vaccine "sceptics" apply a double standard... What could be the motivation behind this inconsistency? Truly a mystery. We should engage them in debate, we could certainly convince them (if we, and everyone and anyone who could be linked to vaccines, are perfect).
fzeroracer · 1d ago
I don't care. I've spent likely far more time than you trying to argue against and correct these anti-vaccine behaviors and ideas. They always start with 'reasonable questions' that lead into insane nonsense and there is no correcting that stance no matter how much evidence you give to the contrary. People are extremely unkind because they're matching the same level of vitriol and shit spewed out by the anti-vaccine nuts and frankly most people are tired of it.
tstrimple · 1d ago
This is it quite frankly. Platforming anti-vaxxers creates more anti-vaxxers no matter how thoroughly their arguments are discredited. Just the fact that conspiracy theory lunatics are put on the same stage as actual fucking experts elevates the opinions of the ignorant masses to the same level as actual research and results.
You saw the exact same thing when big name scientists started debating religious zealots on the TV. It literally does not matter how many facts are presented or how logically outmatched the Christians are. Just the fact that there is a Christian apologist on the same screen as Bill Nye makes the Christian claims more credible and has proven to be an incredible fund raiser for them. Same thing happens when we entertain debates with flat earth believers. Doesn't matter that in every debate and in every experiment the flat earthers are proven to be completely ridiculous people. The more their ideology is exposed and debated the more morons who think there must be something to it.
The "great marketplace of ideas" is full of spam and outright lies and the majority of the population aren't equipped in the slightest to navigate it.
aredox · 1d ago
>There are completely valid questions for normal people to ask that don’t receive much of a response often
Wrong, wrong, wrong. These perfectly valid answers have received again and again perfectly valid answers, and vaccine "sceptics" refuse to engage with the answers.
It is all FUD as a way of life.
Your repeated use of "the establishment" shows perfectly well that they don't want to hear the answer anyway. It's "us against them". Any official data - even from the CDC, or the media - that may show vaccines cause harm is blindly trusted and paraded. Any official data - from the same sources - that shows vaccines don't cause harm is manipulated, fake, censored by everyone: doctors, scientists, statisticians, officials, the Media...
riahi · 1d ago
Because they are disingenuous in their “just asking questions”.
They don’t want to vaccinate due to literal decades of propaganda campaigns turning anti vaccination into a tribal identity.
They just want some “reason” to blame others for the way they want to behave. It reminds me of the Matt Bors comic
It's quicksand. The more you tell people RFK is a quack, they more they'll believe him and that you are working for 'them'.
pstuart · 1d ago
This will be a classic case of FAFO (Fuck Around and Find Out). It's a pity that innocent children will likely bear the brunt of the finding out.
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atomicnumber3 · 1d ago
Decades of disinformation and partisan politics being brought to its ultimate conclusion.
throwawayqqq11 · 1d ago
I wonder if the less manipulated have lasting moments of "what if they called us dipshits for a reason". We only see the extremes here. I wish those more reasonably right leaning internet victims would speak up as loud and as long as they could.
AIorNot · 1d ago
WTF - how insane is this country.
Also the tech world Google, Facebook(Meta) in particular deserves part of the blame for this state of the world, by creating social media platforms that create willful ignorance bubbles around their users which allowed our stupidest people to feed themselves politically motivated conspiracy and lies over scientifically validated truths
cosmicgadget · 1d ago
It's terrible that kids have to suffer because their parents are terminally online.
burnt-resistor · 1d ago
Being ignorant, unreasonable, a billionaire, or a pedophile should be uniformly punished severely socially if judicial, legislative, and executive bureaucrats won't.
Prior to this, to get such a large subset of children to not take vaccines for an epidemiological study would probably be illegal or at best be considered highly unethical. Convincing parents to enroll their children in such a study in the name of science and for a small stipend would probably be next to impossible considering the potential lifetime impacts.
I posit that the challenge has been that in order to prove vaccine efficacy on a continuing/updated basis, you need access to a non-vaccinated control group that controls for developed world socio-economic conditions which didn't exist (until now). Thus there hasn't been an easy way to do large population scale studies on vaccine efficacy - so it did somewhat become a "trust us" tautology (until now).
Why is this unethical and for whom?
The vaccines work, so parents who choose to vaccinate their kids will be protected.
Parents who don’t trust the vaccine for whatever reason, they feel strongly that they might harm their child.
Isn’t it sort of unethical to force parents to inject their child with something they think is dangerous?
You’re basically asking parents to willfully harm (in their mind they think it’s harmful, I’m not saying it’s actually harmful) their own child, from their perspective why should they make that choice?
I just don’t see how this problem can be solved other than going back to square one and trying to educate people and convince them that vaccines are not harmful. The alternative is to force people to accept these injections even though people believe they are harmful, which just isn’t going to work well in the United States.
A moment's thought will tell you that it's to protect kids that are at risk from infectious diseases (e.g. immunocompromised cancer patients) that cannot be vaccinated.
So most people would agree that it's unfair that a cancer patient cannot attend a public school, through no fault of their own, because a parent wants their healthy kid to attend the school unvaccinated. We balance the rules accordingly.
Yes, they are. If your kids are not allowed to attend school, then you are being forced to vaccinate them because you may not have other options. Claiming otherwise is gaslighting.
> It's just that in sane societies we say you can't use a public school if you're not vaccinated and otherwise healthy.
So do those parents get a voucher for the funds pertaining to their child’s public education, if they’re prevented?
2) with regard to gaslighting, should parents be allowed to send their kids to public schools naked? What's the difference in compulsion?
Should parents be allowed to kill their property?
Regardless - my point stands that children belong first to the parents. Using words like “abuse”, which aren’t applicable to this situation at hand, is just a way to appeal to emotion rather than acknowledging that states taking over parental judgment is explicitly authoritarian.
The people who actually study this say you could not be more wrong. They probably also say you should stop randomly making things up and should consider what else you're also wrong about.
"Approximately 1 in 4 children experiences child abuse or neglect in their lifetime ... 91% of the time, the perpetrator is a parent." - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK470337/
"Child abuse and neglect are common. At least one in seven children experienced child abuse or neglect in the past year in the United States." - https://www.cdc.gov/child-abuse-neglect/about/index.html#cdc...
"Statistics provided by the Department of Children and Families (DCF) ... show that in about 82% of substantiated abuse cases the alleged perpetrator was the birth parent." - https://www.cga.ct.gov/PS98/rpt/olr/htm/98-R-0509.htm (adoptive parents are in there too but counted separately, in case you're wondering)
I don't care how you slice the numbers, there's no way to get from 23% of children (90% of 25%) in the US having abusive parents to abusive parents being "extremely rare" unless your definition of "extremely rare" here is utterly insane.
As an example, your first link isn’t even a real study. Hosting some text on a .gov website doesn’t make it correct. And Statpearls is basically a low quality scammy source. But you don’t need to know that about its reputation - just reading your own link’s content would make it obvious that it is REALLY low quality - in this case written by a couple random grad students.
Since we’re cherry picking things, I’ll quote this from your own source, which shows that even when you use very broad definitions, abuse is extremely rare:
> In the United States, Child Protective Services estimated that 9 out of 1000 children are victims of child maltreatment.
Consider what else you're also wrong about.
That's in literally just the one year (2012) and just within cases reported to CPS that year. There's an absolutely massive difference between that and the actually relevant statistic which covers the span of childhood and also isn't limited to just CPS referrals which the CDC calls out as likely underrepresentative.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210204022708/https://www.cdc.g...
https://acf.gov/sites/default/files/documents/cm2012_0.pdf
Oh, woops, the GOP do support that last one.
Assuming you mean Muslim households and not Arab households, since not all Arabs are Muslim (today is the day you learn about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Christians and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Jews and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Druze and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bah%C3%A1%CA%BC%C3%AD_Faith and even https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreligion_in_the_Middle_East), everyone still eats during Ramadan, they just do it at night.
I take that to mean you understand the point?
I have never met in my entire life, in America, a family that engaged in religious starvation fasting. Not Catholic, not Jewish, not Muslim. Their fasting rules were eating bland food or only at certain times of the day. And it's for a limited period of time.
But if a family makes a child go without eating for any prolonged period of time not for a medical necessity (pre-surgery, for instance), yes, they should get a a check-in from social services.
And to go even further, if you only feed your child bad foods on purpose - like only bread and potatoes every day, when you can afford real food and diversity - you should also get a visit from social services.
I seriously don't get why you're defending people like the Turpins. Do you genuinely not understand why these laws are necessary and why it is pivotal we have basic protections for children from their parents? You don't even need to look past Hollywood with Honey booboo and Justin Bieber and all that lot to see how dangerous parents can be, let alone the insidiousness and commonality of the lower-profile cases.
Again, a number of sitting members of legislation in 2025 are arguing that children as low as the age of 12 should be allowed to be married off to adults who then (if they haven't already) rape them. And that child cannot legally get divorced without their parent's consent!
In one hearing the politician admitted to knowing an example! So you can't even say "well it never happens."
I can't believe it needs to be argued: in any just and equitable society, children have a right to a basically healthy upbringing. That means socialization, education (both physical and mental), healthcare, nutrition, and protection from those who would do them harm.
They are not "lesser people" or property of their parents. It is a practical reality that some of their rights must be ceded because they are incapable, but their parents are meant to be guardians and not owners.
> The vaccines work, so parents who choose to vaccinate their kids will be protected.
This is false for a number of reasons.
1) Vaccines don't provide perfect protection, breakthrough infections can occur.
2) Some people can not receive vaccinations due to health conditions.
3) Immunocompromised people are not protected by vaccines.
We managed to make it illegal to beat the crap out of your kids even though there are still plenty of Americans who think not beating your kids is harmful to them.
I don’t believe there are any people who believe that NOT beating their children is dangerous. If you put yourself in these parents’ shoes, they basically see this stuff as poison. What you’re asking them to do (in their mind) is inject their children with poison and for no other reason than because the government says so. It’s just a losing battle, you need to educate these people and show them that they are safe, address their concerns directly.
I would not inject my children with mercury if the government told me to. I would need to be convinced that mercury is safe and beneficial before I allowed my kid to be injected with it. I don’t feel like equating this to physical violence is helpful at all because in this case these parents believe they are preventing harm to their children.
You need to understand that herd immunization actually helps everyone, not just some small number of children who can't get vaccinated, because even the best vaccines don't offer 100% protection.
Your odds of getting sick are based on the odds that other people around you are contagious. That much should be extremely obvious, because every encounter with a contagion rolls the dice again.
What's less obvious is how much that matters because math is hard. Even if you have 95% immunity to some infectious disease, your probability of getting it at least once after 10 exposures is a whopping 40% (1 - 0.95^10). Everyone's protection, yours included, comes from reducing your chances of being unwittingly exposed because the people around you aren't getting sick, and that means vaccinating them too. When one person gets sick, everyone around them is put at increased risk. The way you fix that for everyone is by making it less likely that any member of the herd gets sick from any given exposure.
This is the suffering you are OK with because 'concerns':
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfoxqghXxEs
But the medical community was acting with the best knowledge they had at the time as imperfect as it was. Tell me how did taking the vaccine harm any child? It wasn't painful. Immediate side effects were minimal to non-existent. Myocarditis and Carditis incidence was something like 65/million. Even then most of those recovered without any treatment. Median hospital stay for those that needed it was 2 nights and most recovered without permanent issues.
I think the final death toll from the vaccine was estimated at around 1/million. Meanwhile at the height of the delta strain the death toll for anyone infected was well over 1/100 ( more than 10% for the over 60s).
The fallout doesn't make rational sense.
I'm a vaxer But one community I hang with is strongly antivax. Many of them have been very harmed even if they didn't take the vaccines.
When something is that important to you (even for woowoo reasons or social media misinformation) then it is a fertile situation for mental health impacts.
Antivaxxers are a vulnerable population too (they have self selected into a circle by their beliefs and communities).
Disclosure: I've seen some good people severely harmed by overbearing government actions in New Zealand. I believe New Zealand did a good job of protecting everyone here from COVID, but that the collateral costs to everyone were very high (and extremely variable chronic costs to some).
Edit: apology that I've bucketed all vaccines together. E.g. Measles vaccine is quite different from covid vaccines.
Imagine if I said 'my religion doesn't allow running water, I should be allowed to defecate anywhere, and also science says toilets increase the risk of hemorrhoids, and you can't make me give my kids hemorrhoids'. You can't allow that, not because you don't agree with it, but because the way we live in groups needs artificial sanitation. Just like we need artificial stimulation of immune systems.
Each vaccination has costs and benefits. The science is amazing at reducing the physical risks.
I am just asking you to understand that some people are seriously psychologically harmed by requiring vaccinations (for themselves or for their children). It may be irrational, unscientific or selfish but I have seen how real the harm is for some people. That harm is a complex grey area. It should rarely trump the needs of children or society.
Society has a variety of ways to balance that harm against the expected benefits.
The second half of your comment is just a strawman story. And introducing religion as a topic is usually a poor idea.
The original anti-vax exemptions were given on religious grounds. All justifications after that have built on that initial allowance. It is very much not a straw man when it comes to vaccine allowances. It is the OG justification that opened the conversation.
After watching my santa cruz woo woo ex-wife's friends all literally talk themselves into believing in the damage of vaccines (while being fine taking MEGA/unhealthy doses of western science discovered vitamins), I consider vaccine hesitancy a form of Munchausen syndrome. One that should only be tolerated to a certain point, and this is well past that point.
In a just society they should have sole discretion. The current situation where kids aren’t even allowed to walk to school without CPS harassing parents, is because of this attitude where the state thinks it has any rights to your kids.
The CPS issue is because of litigation not protection. No one wants to be responsible for something bad happening.
Yes, they absolutely own their children more than the state does. I can’t believe there are any claims otherwise. Do you value the bond between parent and child and how special it is? Nothing should violate that. Not even the rare parent that is actually neglectful - meaning that should curtail the freedoms of the typical parent. And anyways, choosing to forego a vaccine isn’t abuse - on average it shifts outcomes very little. For example skipping a flu vaccine won’t change much.
A parental bond doesn’t overwhelm a child’s own rights as citizens and human beings.
Parents live in a society, even if it were a village, and there is no free pass to do just what you will if it crosses lines.
Collective health is one of those lines.
I think you need to spend some time thinking about how your idea of a just society is that child abuse is ok if parents do it.
This doesnt work anymore because people are more individualistic than ever, unless something will directly harm them in a very obvious way in the next hour it's as if it didn't exist in their mind
Kind of like spouse of illegal migrants who voted trump, or people surviving thanks to medicaid voting against their own interest, they're so blinded by rage/outrage that they can't even understand basic logic. I personally think we're at a breaking point in most of the west and it'll only be going downhill from now on, so just as you I don't see any solution. The education system can't fight social media, and you can't "force" people you've been brainwashing for decades into believing the be all end all of human life is their little unlimited personal freedom
People with auto-immune disorders who can't safely take the vaccine lose the protection of herd immunity. (Edit: and the children who don't have control over their own health outcomes.)
Agreed that it's not an easy problem to solve.
Yes, it is unethical. The other comments don’t agree, but this is exactly the position a lot of people hold. In the end, parents should be allowed to judge the risk for their own children based on their experience. Not allowing for that is basically thought control.
The real issue is that parents who want herd immunity to protect their own children, don’t want to also protect their children by keeping THEM away from the public or having THEM take precautions (like wearing masks or whatever). Instead, they want the risk to be taken by other people, which is unethical.
> Yes, it is unethical
Agreed on that.
> The real issue is that parents who want herd immunity to protect their own children...
Arguably, for some, the "real issue" is whether viruses have even been reasonably shown to exist at all with something other than a) appeal to authority or b) other logical fallacy.
For instance, if one reads many virology papers (just a PubMed search away) for detail and understanding, one may find that there are not actually scientifically controlled studies proving the existence and causal nature of so-called viral particles, but instead the papers are a house of cards that undo themselves. There's no science in the The Science™ -- just enough to look like it and pass muster among people just trying to get along in this hectic and challenging world.
--> The cognitive dissonance (and conditioning) is so loud on the above point, that most people will label the claim a Conspiracy Theory and become instinctively distraught or look the other way in emotion, unable to bear scrutinizing the claim.
Thus, to assume that
> they want the risk to be taken by other people
is missing the point entirely, for a quite serious and well-informed contingent of conscientious objectors to vaccination requirements.
At that point, it is moot to point out that, if people are convinced by the likes of world's greatest omnichannel marketing campaigns that they need a certain product put into their body (for fear of death and disease), nothing stops those people from doing as they please to themselves.
After all, if the product really (a) is safe and (b) works, then the customers of that product certainly have nothing to worry about. (Nobody needs to convince *other people* to take a product, if it works for them.)
This is ethical only in the extremist libertarian view where personal choice trumps all. Some parents probably believe that beating their child or otherwise abusing them is good for the child.. so should we just let them do that? There IS an end to personal liberty, it's not unlimited. "Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man’s nose begins"
I totally get what you're saying about these people not trusting the vaccines and the education problems though, and maybe the solution will have to be to meet these people where they are and try to educate them out of the misinformation hole. Here's one small example of how that goes - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o69BiOqY1Ec (it does not go well..)
It's very very hard to change these people's minds and we genuinely don't have any answers to how to do that. It's a very hard problem because all of us take an experts word for it at some level of reasoning, the anti-vaxxers just believe in different "experts". You can't go deep enough into the science and papers and experiments to really undeniably show everyone the truth, so how does anyone prove anything? Not to mention these positions often aren't reasoned into, and can't be reasoned out of. Most of us have some experience in trying to change someone's mind on one of these issues and know it fails. A lot of the time some visceral experience has to hit them or something internal has to shift within them and we don't know how to do that.
Then isn't it unethical of these parents to force the other parents - the rest of society - who think illnesses are dangerous to cohabitate with their kids who could be highly contagious, and breed and mutate viruses?
It goes both ways. "Society" is made of humans too.
Is it unethical to say parents should feed their kids if they believe food to be dangerous? Is it unethical to stop them from giving their kids bleach if they believe it to be a cure?
The answer is that as a society we have limits around what a parent can or cannot do for the sake of the overall well-being of their children. If a parent refuses to vaccinate their child without a very good reason why (such as other exacerbating health issues or allergic reactions), it should be treated as child abuse. Because it is.
In case anyone thinks this is purely hypothetical: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c62v59621dro
The problem with FL not vaccinating is that people who are sick will spread disease (and die) at different rates than those who are vaccinated.
Honestly I am glad that Nature has very effective mechanisms to keep a rein on the ever-increasing hubris of humanity.
I thought these "freedom" type people didn't like being sheep.
I really wish sometimes RFK jr went through with his idea to let avian flu "rip through" poultry farms. The complete collapse of chicken farming would have made things clear.
I sometimes take positions I don't necessarily believe in if I think it will spur on better discussion, there's nothing wrong with it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfoxqghXxEs
I've got AI and blockchains.
Here's a likely scenario for a K-5 school of 600 children, 100 per class, assume incoming post requirement drop is 1/5 students:
Year 0: 96% immune (Typical from what I can glean online)
Year 1: 80% of Ks now immunity from vaccination. 96% of 1-5 immune as normal. Non immune =20 +5*(4) = 40 out of 600, or 7% of 600 kiddos. So 93% rate of immunity. Right on the bubble in a year's time.
Tweak numbers as you'd like, but with even modest decreases (16% loss, or and additional one in 6 hesitancy) in vaccination, Measles herd immunity is tettering in a year and lost in the second year, by a large margin
Folks can surely see the connection between dropping vaccination rates and the rise of measles in Texas for example. Why aren't more people outraged and how are they allowing unprincipled politicians to impact their lives so drastically in pursuit of power?
Tragic, but we sleepwalked into this state of affairs by downplaying the severity of epistemic failures in academia and science communication.
Oh it's just a little publish or perish here, replication crisis there. Nobody really believes the clickbait headline. Overall we're on a solid foundation. Science means rigor, right? So the word science means rigor was done. Getting mad at someone for over-correcting won't make them feel more righteous.
We have failed our fellow countrymen.
This is happening because some rich people radical right on republican side wanted to happen. Smart conservatives worked for this for years. They knew they are lying, but it did not mattered to them.
Blaming others is just another round of enabling. Blame shifting away from who intentionally caused this wont help anyone and does not reflect the truth.
Also, publish or perish thing is literally something the same people actively worked for.
The science around vaccines is actually sound, there's was no "replication crisis" or failure of rigor in that regard. Yes, even the covid vaccine was tested and went through clinical trials.
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https://news.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-institutions.as...
What happened is that the minority of contrarians and FUD spreaders have managed to hitch a ride on Trump's train and be promoted to governance.
The establishment has done very little to try and address concerns from vaccine skeptics. Their response is mostly one of condescension and derision. Rather than using kindness and education, many establishment folks simply refuse to meet these people where they are and instead continue to act as though it’s completely insane to question the things that are being injected into their children.
There are completely valid questions for normal people to ask that don’t receive much of a response often, things like “why are vaccines immune from lawsuits?” and “why has the standard vaccine schedule increased so much?”.
Instead of providing good clear answers to these questions, skeptics are marginalized. How can this behavior not create distrust in scientific experts? The more you talk down to people, the less likely they are to trust you.
Note: I myself am not a vaccine skeptic, but I know many and I hear their reasoning often.
This can take many forms, be it religious, political, or just whatever social groups they are a part of, but I believe that this form of motivated reasoning isn't necessarily something you can reason someone out of. To that effect, I don't believe trying to inform them is productive, but rather asking probing questions that attempt to reveal _why_ they believe what they believe.
In my own personal experience, I've found that nearly all of the anti-vaxxers I've talked to root their dismissal for vaccinations in religious reasons or in grievance politics.
There is no “establishment” here.
When Fox began targeting environmental efforts against global warming back in the day, they happily platformed cranks to spread FUD. Eventually it got so bad that scientists went to FOX to try and bring the case to the audience and explain things. At which point they were fed to the lions.
There is no fair fight in the media space. There can be no profitable trade in hard to produce facts, when the other side is able to sell cheaper emotionally salient content.
For decades, the argument against anti-vaccination skeptics was to try and educate them. We've put them on TV, thrown our most well-reasoned arguments against them, showed them the data and proved to them multiple times over that their arguments are wrong. We argued over and over and over again that Andrew Wakefield, a literal fraudster who kicked off a large part of things and who aimed to profit from the anti-vaccine sentiment, was wrong.
Frankly the only argument and patience I have now for anti-vaccine skeptics is extreme derision and insults. They deserve nothing and should receive zero respect.
Yes discrediting Andrew Wakefield helps, but you have to fight the incorrect ideas about the vaccines themselves not just one of the people who pushed these ideas.
One example: many skeptics ask the question “if vaccines are so safe then why are they immune to lawsuits?”. This is a very reasonable question for people to ask! And honestly, responding to this common sense question with derision and insults hurts your cause. The establishment needs good responses to questions like this and they need to be repeated in a non-hateful way.
99% of media and online conversation is just condescending. Like look at the comments in this HN post, most people are extremely unkind.
“Extreme derision and insults” is going to make the problem so much worse.
Where you do stand to make a difference is with more casual observers and people on the fence. A show of patience and respect bolsters a good argument better than perhaps even the argument itself.
What does tend to change people's minds is forming good relationships with people who hold differing opinions and their desire to make the relationship work. Logic and rationality are secondary considerations. Hopefully they will accept better conclusions for these reasons, but it's quite unlikely without adopting the kind of approach espoused by Dig1t.
And, of course, when you point that out, it's attacked as condescending and derision. I, too, live in a community surrounded by these people. There is no reaching them, sadly.
I hear this point cited and I googled it and it took me like 3 seconds to get this answer: https://www.chop.edu/vaccine-education-center/science-histor...
Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Childhood_Vaccine_Inj...
Seems like a reasonable answer to me! The question is, why don't vaccine skeptics just look things up and try to educate themselves?
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Why are vaccine manufacturers shielded from liability? A 1982 TV news report entitled Vaccine Roulette suggested that the whole-cell pertussis vaccine was the cause of permanent brain injury. Subsequent studies indicated that while the whole-cell vaccine was associated with febrile seizures, it was not associated with long-term brain damage. However, those studies took at least 10 years to exonerate the vaccine.
In the meantime, as vaccine manufacturers were flooded with lawsuits, some decided to stop making vaccines rather than face continued legal pressures. Consequently, production dropped, leading to concerns about vaccine supply and subsequent vaccination rates.
By shielding vaccine manufacturers from liability, Congress assured that future generations would be protected from devastating diseases. A common misconception is that this process completely shields vaccine makers. However, a plaintiff may file a civil court claim against vaccine companies after filing a claim in the VICP if they reject the vaccine court's decision.
Because usually that's what happens when you "debate" with vaccine sceptics: they just accuse you of being mean/pretentious/know-it-all/arrogant/etc., they move goalposts, they switch subjects, or they completely ignore you, disappear and come back later elsewhere asking the exact same "questions" as if your discussion never happened.
Because they have reached a point where hey are so much wrong that admitting it would be admitting they have been very stupid, very unjust and very bad people. And it requires a lot of backbone to own such a personal failure. So instead they double down.
Oh yeah, perfectly rational to make health decisions based on a mediocre skit by a comedian you don't like and almost never watch... The people around you are perfectly sane people who are not trying to find any excuse to justify their tribal, cultish beliefs.
The solution is easy: vaccine proponents, whoever they are must be absolutely perfect in every way, shape and form.
Otherwise vaccine sceptics will instead prefer to believe the rich son of a political dynasty (who is certainly not a member of the establishment!) who had a brain worm and dumped a dead bear in central park and who has been proven a liar dozens and dozens of times.
Really wonder why vaccine "sceptics" apply a double standard... What could be the motivation behind this inconsistency? Truly a mystery. We should engage them in debate, we could certainly convince them (if we, and everyone and anyone who could be linked to vaccines, are perfect).
You saw the exact same thing when big name scientists started debating religious zealots on the TV. It literally does not matter how many facts are presented or how logically outmatched the Christians are. Just the fact that there is a Christian apologist on the same screen as Bill Nye makes the Christian claims more credible and has proven to be an incredible fund raiser for them. Same thing happens when we entertain debates with flat earth believers. Doesn't matter that in every debate and in every experiment the flat earthers are proven to be completely ridiculous people. The more their ideology is exposed and debated the more morons who think there must be something to it.
The "great marketplace of ideas" is full of spam and outright lies and the majority of the population aren't equipped in the slightest to navigate it.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. These perfectly valid answers have received again and again perfectly valid answers, and vaccine "sceptics" refuse to engage with the answers.
It is all FUD as a way of life.
Your repeated use of "the establishment" shows perfectly well that they don't want to hear the answer anyway. It's "us against them". Any official data - even from the CDC, or the media - that may show vaccines cause harm is blindly trusted and paraded. Any official data - from the same sources - that shows vaccines don't cause harm is manipulated, fake, censored by everyone: doctors, scientists, statisticians, officials, the Media...
They don’t want to vaccinate due to literal decades of propaganda campaigns turning anti vaccination into a tribal identity.
They just want some “reason” to blame others for the way they want to behave. It reminds me of the Matt Bors comic
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/9/30/1981821/-Cartoon-...
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Also the tech world Google, Facebook(Meta) in particular deserves part of the blame for this state of the world, by creating social media platforms that create willful ignorance bubbles around their users which allowed our stupidest people to feed themselves politically motivated conspiracy and lies over scientifically validated truths