Book Is Rallying Resistance to the Antivaccine Crusade
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The problem becomes that there's a tipping point. If 5% aren't vaccinated, that's a lot of potential carriers. Then it becomes a fight of "i don't want my child vaccinated, but i want your child vaccinated to protect my child." It's not hard to imagine parents of immunized children then saying, "well, screw you trying to get us immunized while not taking the risk for your kid!"
Ah, the rights of the individual and the rights of the society! It's really fun to think about.
The general approach to preventing a negative externality is to tax it, so that before you can take an action that 'costs' everyone else, you pay that much into the system.
So raw economics suggests that we figure out the marginal 'cost' of adding one unvaccinated person, and offer to let them 'choose' not to vaccinate if they pay the cost to society up front.
Of course in reality that's all bollocks because the cost goes up once you hit a tipping point (as you said), and trying to identify a monetary damage per-non-immunized is sure to result in a WAG.
Fun problem to think about though.
That's a fairly biased representation of those parents' viewpoint, isn't it?
No one would claim that vaccination = autism. It's more like 0.001 * vaccination = autism if you're in that camp (1 in 1,000 times vaccination causes autism for those that might not understand my quasi-programmer speak).
For a lot of things in life, belief and reality are the same thing. Whether or not vaccinations cause autism, the belief that some have that it does cause autism alters behavior. Whether or not the economy is going to crash, if everyone believes it will and stops spending so they have money when it does crash will cause it to happen (since if everyone stops spending money, very soon businesses will have no money coming in). There is reality, but from a game theory perspective it often doesn't matter since people's behavior will be altered by perception of reality probably as much as by reality.
So, let's say it's real that vaccines cause autism in 1 out of 1,000 cases. If everyone looks at that and says, "no way my kid's getting vaccinated," we have a huge public health problem. On the other hand, if most submit to the social good, there will be large resentment of those who don't and are relying on the vaccination of others not to become infected.
We're not anywhere near the levels where it becomes a big issue in society, but if more parents go down this road there might be more heat to force them not to (for the public good). I'm not saying that's good or bad. Morality is better left to people better than me. I'm just saying it'd be interesting (I guess in the way a car wreck is interesting) to see how it played out socially.
Actually, this is a problem. California has had several measles outbreaks in past few years -- a deadly disease that was effectively eradicated a few decades ago:
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm57e222a1.htm
Not vaccinating your child should be classified as abuse. There is no personal liberty argument that overwhelms the public good in this situation.
Virtually any choice you make in life has some type of health care risk. I think that's almost impossible to draw a line and say these behaviors are ones we will deny care.
The proposal is to separate people into two groups: those who agree to donate their organs, and those who decline. Later on, when people happen to need organ transplants, they receive them according to their group priority, i.e. if you decline to donate, you turn comes up only after everyone in the first group received their organs.
I think that is a fair system, and could be applied in this case also. If you choose to vaccinate, you are covered, and if you do not, you pay out of pocket.
If everyone gets vaccinated, and 1% fail (that's just an arbitrary number), it's no big deal because there isn't enough of a population to carry an outbreak.
But if 1% of vaccinated patients are vulnerable, and 5% of people choose not to get vaccinated, then now there's a potential for outbreak, and even some people who vaccinated get sick.
In economic terms, by not vaccinating you're introducing a negative externality into society that you're not paying for, so the true cost to non-vaccinators is artificially low.
Not really a flaw in your system as much as just something interesting to think about.
Hold it. If you're going to deny them govt-paid healthcare, how do you justify taxing them to pay for govt-paid healthcare?
But like so many things, the facts don't matter to some people.
The next time someone tells you that, like, science and knowledge is, lik, just your opinion, man, keep in mind that sort of willful ignorance is far from harmless and can be quite damaging.
Since no one can explain why the incidents of autism are increasing so rapidly there's a ton of crackpot theories which desperate parent's latch on to.
As I said, I would tend to believe the "no causation" camp, but I also don't have 100% faith in doctors...
Recently I was in a heated discussion with a friend about "The China Study", which claims that animal protein causes most of the worst "civilization diseases" like cancer and heart disease. At face value it sounds absurd, because it seems as if people have always been eating lots of meat (not sure if they really have, 150 years ago). So my friend completely rejected the possibility. The book sounded convincing to me, though - but at the end of the day, it is just one guy... At least I tried to Google for articles debunking the book and found none, but there is still a nagging feeling that one might fall for yet another diet scam (although as I said, the book really made a very solid impression on me). Just saying it is a similar problem, who is one to believe?
The vaccination story gets so much media attention I'm sure there are many people who believe that its true simply because its in the news so frequently.
http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/vaccines.htm
But as the page that leads into that link notes, "The weight of the evidence indicates that vaccines are not associated with autism. But CDC knows that some parents and others may still have concerns about this issue." If people don't look up the evidence for themselves, they may act contrary to the evidence when deciding what to do for their children.