I am neither an anti vaxxer nor pro vax. I get hated on by both camps. Neither side is very rational about this. So, you should probably put this in, say, the same box as religion and try to a) be respectful of their right to live their lives as they see fit and b) avoid the topic.
I have a medical condition where most people get the flu vax annually. I stopped getting mine because all of the people actually helping me get healthier after doctors basically wrote me off for dead were strongly antivax in opinion. I am not, but I decided to go with skipping my flu vax because these people seemed to know what the hell they were talking about. I have gotten steadily stronger ever since.
I have had people on the internet give me hell for choosing to forego my flu vax on some theory that maybe I would be some danger to their child with respiratory problems, though there was no reason to believe they would ever actually run into me.
I sleep in a tent in the wilderness and I have minimal contact with people. I am not harming anyone and no one is catching my germs. (I also have not had the flu in many years.)
There are ways to handle germ control other than vaccines. I don't know how humanity will sort this question out. But as someone who needs a high degree of control over my body to have any hope of staying well, I think both sides are equally assholish here.
1. We actually do have an influenza vaccine that would provide herd immunity protection, but our regulatory system is so stuffed that it will never reach the market - this is another rant though.
I do remote work. Because of my genetic disorder, I have arranged my life to be able to avoid exposure to infection.
The need for herd immunity is posited on the premise that people have no choice but to be crammed together with large groups of unrelated people at school, work, etc. This is a) a very modern idea that did not exist all that long ago and b) not actually a given.
It isn't a given. I spend my days in a large city. I just have freedom to get up and walk away from people coughing and sniffling, an option I did not have at my corporate job.
When I looked into it, the thing that bothers me about the flu vaccines vs most other vaccine formulations is that the flu vaccine is basically constructed every year as new from a mixture of flu strains. While they do have safety monitoring systems, and the way of replicating them is the same, the core portion is new. The safety monitoring is basically keep track of reports of side effects and try to detect if too many hit a warning threshhold. So between that, and my past experiences, I pass too.
For the other vaccines, I think I agree with especially school requirements for a standard set of vaccinations. I think that in CA they should go a bit further and limit ratios of students accepted with waivers at individual schools if it brings the numbers below that of needed for herd immunity benefits.
Edit: For the flu shots, it seems from my layman's reading of the literature that their efficacy is low and highly variant compared to other vaccines, enough that there is no consistent herd immunity to be gained from current flu formulations.
Also, if it's your children not getting the vaccines, it's their health, not yours.
Chances are you did have vaccinations as a kid.
I have certainly met such people online. You should be a lot more worried about the behavior of those folks online than about my personal health choices.
You're an outlier. You, in your tent out in the woods are not the problem. Thousands or tens of thousands of people sending their non-vaccinated children to schools and living in the same cities as everyone else weakening herd immunity is the problem.
It's not an issue of bodily autonomy versus freedom, it's an issue of bodily autonomy versus the likelihood of mass death.
Given that we don't really know what is causing them, pro vaxxers are not really in a position to argue that vaccines are not part of the problem. But, they do it anyway and are at least as closed minded as they accuse anti vaxxers of being.
Great, but people believe a lot of things, so show me some evidence. Believing some vaccines to be harmful is, at least, a defensible (and scientifically testable) position. But that's not the same as believing vaccination as a whole should be avoided. Vaccines do work, and herd immunity is a thing. Even if we didn't truly understand the long-term ramifications of vaccines, we do already understand what happens in their absence.
Pro-vaxxers aren't being closed minded, we just don't want our children to have to worry about whooping cough and polio.
People here are talking to me as if I am an antivaxxer when I have said I am not. Pro vaxxers are just as blind, unthinking and extremist as anti vaxxers.
Both sides disregard valid points on the other side. This is the crux of the problem.
Einstein said that you cannot solve a problem from the same level of thinking that created it. The world is not going to solve this conflict as long as it frames it in extremist either/or terms. The efforts to ramp up the pressure on anti vaxxers to conform merely deepens the conflict. It does not help the matter.
Appeal to authority. Also, Einstein wasn't an epidemiologist.
>The efforts to ramp up the pressure on anti vaxxers to conform merely deepens the conflict. It does not help the matter.
This is a serious claim, do you have any evidence to support it? I'd expect countries with culture that emphasizes the collective over the individual to have much lower rates of anti vaxxers, as compared e.g. to the US.
Most of anti vaxxer material I see here in Europe is poorly translated and almost universally originally intended for the anglophone market. The 'higher end products' are written by locals, but still heavily leaning on anglophone sources.
I don't know what your beef is with me. As far as I can tell, both my comments make the same point: That pro vaxxers are just as extremist and close minded as anti vaxxers.
There are lots of people who have bad reactions to vaccines, who take some vaccines but not others, etc. who are not ideologues on the subject. The medical community has processes for dealing with the reality that some people react badly to vaccines and judgement calls need to be made. Pro vaxxers act like this is not a reality. Both camps are very all or nothing.
An appeal to authority is a type of fallacious argument; in attributing the quote to Einstein, your subtext is that his endorsement is your argument. But, of course, context-free quotes from Einstein aren't sufficient evidence of anything.
But that isn't the issue I have with anti-vaxxers:
They are against all vaccinations, even for things like fucking polio, smallpox, mumps, and they apply it to children, not themselves. They have the benefit of the vaccine, but decide their child is better off going the maverick route.
Polio is not the flu. You're not going to recover from polio with chicken soup and bed rest.
Do whatever the fuck your want to yourself, but refusing a child medically proven vaccines is child abuse, plain and simple.
The solution to the problem of anti-vaxxers is simple. If you don't want to vaccinate then you need to take out a massive insurance policy to cover the risks you push onto the community. 99.9% of the anti-vaxxers when faced with a massive bill each year will find some mental contortion to make vaccinating OK.
It's clear that vaccination is a successful way of eradicating diseases like measles, smallpox, polio.
It's not so clear whether it causes autism and it's possible that the person doing such research was scapegoated.
But which would you choose? A world with no polio or smallpox, or a world with 2% less autism?
Vaccines weren't taken up by the masses because they wanted to eradicate polio for example, but rather because they wanted their children to be safe from it. Parents would gladly vaccinate themselves, even at a risk that they'd get a full infection, just to guarantee that their children would be safe.
The anti-vaxxer issue nowadays is a tragedy of the commons scenario. Every individual who does not vaccinate their child, doesn't give up herd immunity immediately, and (if true) get's to avoid any complications associated with vaccine. They have others bear the costs of herd vaccination, and gain a benefit by defecting.