Is it time to consider compulsory vaccinations?

We could start by reading it: However loosely I interpret it, I can't see how it means that people have a right to deny medical care to their children. And since in extreme cases people have been jailed for doing just that, apparently the courts don't see it that way either.

That's not much of an argument. If I said that the Eighth Amendment means that Congress should give everyone a pet duck, would you be happy if I argued for it on the basis that people have successfully found constitutional rationales for other things? Well the title of this thread suggests that the answer would be "no" 'cos of us not having compulsory vaccine laws.However, people can be and have been penalized for failing to take purely prophylactic measures against harm: seatbelt laws, for example, and laws requiring motorcycle helmets. A fortiori if they have no right not to protect themselves against harm, they have none to prevent their children from being protected against harm.

But easy to argue with her about the cause.It was not, after all, mothers of affected children who identified vitamin D deficiency as the cause of rickets, or aspirin as a factor in Reye's syndrome, or contaminated drinking water as the cause of cholera, or ... well, you get my point. Having a child suffer from a condition does not turn a mother into an epidemiologist.

But that is not the same as knowing what caused the change. "My child was vaccinated and got ill three months later" may consist of two perfectly accurate statements joined by a conjunction, but it is not a discovery of cause and effect. The mother has sufficient expertise to state the two facts, but not to know if there is a causal link between them. How could she?

But what they clearly associate it with is not evidence. In the Middle Ages people clearly associated illness with witchcraft. The number of people who did so is, it turns out, not a datum about anything except how silly people can be. No, not really. Health scares and health fads are practically their own religious cult. There's just less talk about gods and angels and devils and more talk about toxins and energy fields and balancing the kidneys ... Yes it is. Look at all the people who suddenly became gluten-intolerant when it became fashionable. Look at all the people who are sensitive to the "radiation" from cell-phones ... but only when they know there's a cell-phone in the room. Or look again at all the people who managed, once, to blame witches or Jews for what we now know to be infectious diseases.Well, one bogus study on vaccinations from Andrew Wakefield (and yes, that is pretty much how it started) and a decade later you've got loonies refusing vitamin K shots. Sure, Wakefield was writing about the MMR vaccine, but vitamin K comes in needles, doesn't it?

But your right to start fires ends when you commit arson, and your right to religious freedom ends when you commit child sacrifice. And refusing your child vaccination is akin to both those things simultaneously.

... and which I don't believe I argued for. It's like one person striking one match to burn down their own property, regardless of how the fire might spread ... except that children aren't their property. If there's a point at which the analogy breaks down, then that is it.

Not to all of us, perhaps. But they threaten people who are, for example, so young that they haven't been vaccinated yet; or whose immune systems are compromised because of HIV or a genetic disorder or immunosuppressant drugs used by transplant recipients or old age; or indeed the children of other whackjob parents.And, as has been pointed out to you, you know how evolution works. The unvaccinated kids are the Petri dishes for a new strain, something that will sweep across the world affecting hundreds of millions, killing, blinding, or disabling millions, a global catastrophe, a pandemic. And if that happens I will not be comforted by the fact that Patient Zero's parents were immune from unreasonable search and seizure, because actually that would still have been true if we'd interpreted the Fourth Amendment my way.

They are in fact threats before they get the disease, just like a driver who's just chugged a bottle of vodka is a threat even before he violates the traffic laws, let alone crashes into someone.

First, this poses a threat to babies who are too young to be vaccinated. Second, it poses a threat to people with compromised immune systems. And thirdly, it poses a threat to the unvaccinated children. Just because the parents are idiots, why should their children suffer? If the parents are Bad Guys, does that mean that their children aren't Good Guys? No. So all the Good Guys aren't vaccinated. If nutty adults could somehow unvaccinate themselves, that might have a certain justice to it. But they enjoy the protections of vaccination while putting their children at risk. The Bad Guys by and large are vaccinated: it's their children who are going to suffer.Your question represents the moral nadir of anti-vaxxer rhetoric: it tacitly assumes that so long as I've made sure that my kids are OK, it's unreasonable of me to care what happens to other people's kids; that I ought to be perfectly selfish and only care about my own. Would you apply that to anything else but vaccines? --- would you say "If you don't rape your children, what's your objection to other people practicing incestuous pedophilia?" Traditionally, liberals are on the side of the truth. And true things don't stop being true just because pharmaceutical companies agree that they're true.

Do you have any evidence of who started it, or any reason why that would matter? However, we do apparently know who spread it: And unfortunately the measles carrier wasn't one of California's many vaccinated people. Otherwise, she wouldn't have carried the virus. Er ... yes it is. 'Cos it's measles, recurring.

The 2011 measles epidemic in Minnesota was caused by an unvaccinated child visiting Kenya and bringing back measles.An outbreak of measles in an undervaccinated community - PubMedOne unvaccinated child was patient zero of a measles epidemic#

Yes it does. This is not true. In the first place, imaginary adverse effects are not as worrying as real diseases.In the second place, this is not the only measles outbreak that has ever happened. Why are you comparing one event in Minnesota in 2011 against "thousands of [largely fictitious] cases" culled from all over everywhere at any time?In the third place, you're committing a classic statistical error. It's like saying that seatbelts do more harm than good because more are injured by seatbelts than by flying headfirst through their windscreens. But this is only true because lots of people wear seatbelts, which prevent them from flying through their windscreens. You're constructing an argument that a program is a bad idea based on the very data that shows it's successful. (Like the people who complain that we spent all that money on fixing the Y2K bug and then nothing went wrong. We spent the money in order that nothing should go wrong. That was the point.)

d.pEdited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Oh, now you like mandatory vaccinations? I'm not. You are. That was the second point in my post. And the third gave additional reasons why this is a silly thing for you to do. You can stop now. Ah, assertion.