Citing parental freedom, Arizona lawmakers move ahead with anti-vaccine bills

arstechnica.com

6 points·okket··4 comments

I would really like some of the free speech absolutists to explain how the resurgence of measles and other preventable diseases stacks up against the benefits of unrestricted public discourse.

There's evidence that trolls have significant involvement in anti-vaxxer forums, and the incidence of bad actors and manifest failure of the best available information to naturally displace falsehoods suggest that our model of public discourse is severely lacking in explanatory power.

Completely agreed. I recently finished reading the book Dark Money by Jane Meyer. She lays out convincing evidence for how our political discourse and democracy is being undermined by monied interests. The Citizen's United court decision likely accelerated this as well.

This doesn't explain the more severe measles epidemics in low-Internet-usage countries like Vietnam.

Measles doesn't spontaneously appear within a community; it's brought in from the outside.

I have not looked into the Vietnam case but here's an report about how Costa Rica had not had a single case for 5 years until an unvaccinated french child presented at a hospital with the disease a few days ago. https://boingboing.net/2019/02/25/tourism-brings-the-measles...

There might well be a different explanation for outbreaks in different places; I am certainly not asserting this as a universal causal factor.

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