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Comment by paulddraper | Hacker News Reader

> it has been ruled child abuse and illegal for Christian Scientists to deny their minor children life-saving medical treatment

Yes it has. If I understand you correctly, you suggest that the treatment having a 0.01% chance of being live-saving also be considered in the same way.

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Ethically yes, obviously it's many orders of magnitude worse to deny your septic child antibiotics than it is to not vaccinate them but in my view it's on the same spectrum. The data we have is all epidemiological, which is inherently somewhat fuzzy, however a plethora of well-designed studies have crunched the numbers different ways and absolutely no link can be found between rates of childhood vaccination and autism. Vaccination was considered one of the massive health breakthroughs of the 20th century. We have pretty much eradicated Hepatitis B for instance while it's still rampant in many Asian countries. From a Medical standpoint there is no valid reason not to vaccinate. I'm not advocating forcible vaccination and understand why that could make this hysteria worse however as a society we should examine where this misinformation is arising and how it's being amplified.

> From a Medical standpoint there is no valid reason not to vaccinate.

Currently, that is true. But medical opinion changes constantly. Is that really the proper domain of government?

If you're saying that the standard of 'reporting' on health and science in the media at large is often conflicting and distorted into a confusing and often contradictory form there is definitely validity in that. John Oliver has a great segment called 'Scientific Studies' I'll link at the end of this post, everyone should watch this. If you are able to read the journals directly and have studied how to critically evaluate scientific studies I can guarantee that there is significantly, like thousands-fold, more consistent information. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Rnq1NpHdmw

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