Vaccines, Guns, and Liberty
I consider myself libertarian-oriented. I'm not an anti-vaxxer or anything but my promotion of liberty as an important political and ethical virtue does raise some questions in regards to mandatory vaccinations and gun control, i.e. what right does the government have to force you to get vaccinations or sell your guns?
I'm thinking that it could be argued that by not getting vaccines, you are by proxy enabling the spread of dangerous diseases to others, thus limiting their own liberty. Your immune system failure, when it could have been stronger, becomes a violation of liberty. We should be allowed to breach someone's personal liberty if the situation requires it, and the personal consequences are not extreme. This is where the anti-vaxxer rhetoric comes in, claiming that vaccines are scary and dangerous. It's this frothy cloud of ignorance and confusion that is the only supportive cause against mandatory vaccinations.
The same thing goes with gun control. A farmer may use his gun to survive, or shoot on his own land. Meanwhile, in major cities, people are dying from gun violence, and the slippery gun control policies in America are at least partly to blame. For the sake of everyone's liberty, guns must be controlled. Just because some guy likes his guns doesn't mean his liberty is more important than others' liberties.
So we would have to sacrifice the liberty of a single person for the collective liberty of everyone else. Liberty becomes a commodity that must be maximized in accordance to its instrumental value to sentient welfare.
I'm thinking that it could be argued that by not getting vaccines, you are by proxy enabling the spread of dangerous diseases to others, thus limiting their own liberty. Your immune system failure, when it could have been stronger, becomes a violation of liberty. We should be allowed to breach someone's personal liberty if the situation requires it, and the personal consequences are not extreme. This is where the anti-vaxxer rhetoric comes in, claiming that vaccines are scary and dangerous. It's this frothy cloud of ignorance and confusion that is the only supportive cause against mandatory vaccinations.
The same thing goes with gun control. A farmer may use his gun to survive, or shoot on his own land. Meanwhile, in major cities, people are dying from gun violence, and the slippery gun control policies in America are at least partly to blame. For the sake of everyone's liberty, guns must be controlled. Just because some guy likes his guns doesn't mean his liberty is more important than others' liberties.
So we would have to sacrifice the liberty of a single person for the collective liberty of everyone else. Liberty becomes a commodity that must be maximized in accordance to its instrumental value to sentient welfare.
Comments (25)
Re vaccinations, they're actually only required if your child is going to go to public school. I'd be in favor of requiring them even more broadly if there's good evidence that not requiring them actually does increase the prevalence of certain diseases. I'm not sure if there's good evidence of that at the moment with respect to most of the diseases in question.
Re guns, my stance on that recently is simply this: gun violence is out of control in the U.S. We don't know exactly why it's out of control--likely the causes of it are quite complex, and surely they have to do with cultural factors. I think that the aim should be to curb gun violence, and I'm willing to try anything conceivable to curb gun violence--anything from banning guns outright to requiring that everyone be armed and trained. Basically, whatever would work to curb gun violence is what I'm in favor of. My only motivation there is to greatly reduce gun violence. I really couldn't care less about any philosophical issues surrounding it.
When there is no justice in or out of court and people are rioting in the streets and sniping cops from rooftops debating gun laws and whether vaccinations impose on our individual liberties is insipid to say the least. So much for libertarianism. They talk the talk and never walk the walk. Liberty for sale to the highest bidder.
The Pentagon alone spends as much in a single year as most countries make. I've met dozens of generals and admirals, CIA spooks, and you name it. Once I met Stormin' Norman Swartzkopf in the Crystal City underground, an entire city dedicated just to selling things to the Pentagon with their underground walkways preventing spying eyes from watching what it going on. Americans sold their country to the highest bidder long ago explaining why in ten years I have yet to find a single person who knows the simple distinction between a lynch mob and a democracy and why we have a military equal to the next six or seven largest in the world combined for "defense" purposes, while people riot in the streets.
It is a well-known fact that tiny banana Republicans are the ones who compensate by buying the biggest guns.
Which is often their own undoing. Divide and conquer is simply not a viable long term internal strategy making any country ripe for invasion or other outside influence. The Russians now attempting to influence a US election is a clear indication they know we are no longer the "united" states.
How much do you need? The anti-vaccinationist have provided us with more than enough with record measles outbreaks over the past few years, for example, confirming the prediction that if vaccination rates drop below 95% in a community it's well on the way to being as dangerous as no vaccinations at all. As someone who was nearly killed by measles at the age of 5 (long before the vaccination was available) and whose health is still affected in part by it, it is beyond my ken why anyone would even begin to question the need for universal vaccination.
Could you ask that question in a sentence that I might be able to comprehend? X-)
Sometimes the government has to protect people who are too stupid or pig headed to protect themselves.
Quoting Terrapin Station
The measles vaccine is a good example of effectiveness: Look at the graph showing a plunging incidence of measles after the measles virus vaccine was introduced. The rubeola virus, a paramyxovirus, causes serious disease. Sure, anyone who has had measles is immune, but that is immunity gained the hard way. Measles can be fatal. 5% of children with measles develop pneumonia and/or encephalitis. Either can lead to death. Anyone suffering from the measles virus is infectious for quite a few days, and the virus is readily transmitted (especially among children).
The effect of vaccines on most illnesses (for which it is used) is similar to measles. They work.
The influenza vaccine is not always effective. Because influenza is a rapidly changing disease, and because it takes months to manufacture vaccine, a mis-match sometimes develops between the time the likely strains of next year's epidemic are identified and the time the vaccine is injected. A mis-matched vaccine doesn't harm anyone directly; it just doesn't do a lot of good.
The other cause of ineffectiveness for the influenza vaccine is age. People older than 65 (give or take a little) no longer respond as vigorously to the influenza vaccine as they would have when they were younger. Their immune systems just aren't quite as capable as they used to be. (BUT... even if the influenza vaccine is 60% effective rather than 90% effective for the elderly, that's a lot better than no protection at all.
sewage disposal,
clean water
garbage removal
rat and mosquito control
quality health care facilities
vaccination against preventable diseases
disease tracking and intervention (like it does for syphilis, tuberculosis, AIDS, etc.)
etc.
The WHO lists 25 diseases for which vaccines are available:[2]
Anthrax
Measles
Rubella
Cholera
Meningococcal disease
Influenza
Diphtheria
Mumps
Tetanus
Hepatitis A
Pertussis
Tuberculosis
Hepatitis B
Pneumoccocal disease
Typhoid fever
Hepatitis E
Poliomyelitis
Tick-borne encephalitis
Haemophilus influenzae type b
Rabies
Varicella and herpes zoster (shingles)
Human papilloma-virus
Rotavirus gastroenteritis
Yellow fever
Japanese encephalitis
All too true, but its becoming harder to even keep up the pretense. A man who fled the former Soviet Union was asked by reporters his first impressions of the US and his response was, "We knew we were being lied to!" Conan O'Brien does a regular routine where he has his staff record fifty talking heads all spouting the same B.S. verbatim off a teleprompter and his audiences just laugh and laugh.
I just happened to look at this thread again--I didn't realize you responded to me earlier.
You said, "If vaccination rates drop below 95% in a community it's well on the way to being as dangerous as no vaccinations at all."
Presumably, if there are no vaccinations at all, everyone is at risk of whatever the disease in question is. But if 94% of a population is vaccinated, isn't that 94% protected against the disease? So that would be quite different than everyone being at risk, no?
"Herd immunity" would certainly apply at 94%. By and large, the "herd" is protected. If the 6% get sick, that could be a significant--even dangerous--loss, but that would depend on who got sick. Unless the 6% unvaccinated all live together, they aren't likely to all become infected.
<50% vaccination rates don't produce much herd immunity. It's important that "vectors" of disease get vaccinated. For instance, if you have only enough measles vaccine for 30% of the population, give it to the most socially active children (they being the ones most likely to mix and spread the virus). Isolated children living with immune parents aren't likely to get infected -- until they come in contact with an infectious child. If 90% of socially active children are immunized against measles, for instance, there would be a good chance that no large epidemic would occur.
Its critical to get health care workers vaccinated against a readily contagious disease that will bring people into hospitals. They might compose only 5% of the population, but health care workers make a great vector for transmitting influenza.
The same strategy is being used on polio, except that polio is shed by the gut, which means fecal contamination can transmit the virus. So, when a case occurs, everyone in a village, county, or city needs to be vaccinated, whether they had contact with the person or not. Polio has been eliminated from the western hemisphere, most of Asia (excepting Pakistan, and maybe a few other small areas), Europe, and much of Africa.
Ah, I see. The trouble is that no vaccine is 100% effective in 100% of the vaccinated population, whether this is due to mutation in the disease itself, or problems with individual's immune systems. The higher the percentage of vaccinated people the less likely it is that if the disease is introduced into the community it will be transmitted to those who remain vulnerable (if patient zero is in contact with person A who is in contact with B who is in contact with C and C is at risk, he is protected by A and B's immunity if both are vaccinated, less so if only B is vaccinated, and not at all if neither are vaccinated). At around 95% vaccination rate (obviously that's not exact to the 10th decimal place) there are so many possible trains of transmission that this buffering effect is reduced to virtually zero.
Unfortunately its only slightly less dangerous cousin AFM now seems to be on the rise in the US.
Epidemiologists have predicted (correctly or not, don't know) that we will see more new diseases over time, as a result of increased human/wild animal contact in rain forests, and so on. Ebola is an example of a new disease emerging from human/animal contact. In addition old diseases are getting moved around more -- like West Nile Virus's jump to North America, or Zika virus's appearance in South America.
The other thing is that as old diseases fade into the background (mostly not disappearing) diseases which might have been similar to epidemic diseases (like polio) might become identifiable. Cancer, for instance, is more common now because more people live long enough to develop it. Prostate cancer, for instance, probably wasn't a common problem until many men started living long enough to develop serious symptoms and metastases.
Yes, by saying, ""If vaccination rates drop below 95% in a community it's well on the way to being as dangerous as no vaccinations at all."
Er .. that was me! Not him!
And there is clearly a qualification there in 'on the way to'. I'm not at all suggesting that you instantly go to zero protection if indeed there even exists such a thing. Even at the height of the Great Plague in London, for example, the infection rate never got above 25% so natural immunity could be said, accounting for those who just got lucky, to be similar to maybe a 60% vaccination rate.
Sorry, I get you two mixed up sometimes, just because of the two-word names starting with "B."