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Comment by strbean | Hacker News Reader

Parents don't have sole discretion about their child's well-being. As pointed out by another reply, "I thought it was best for them" doesn't hold up when the wealth of evidence shows they are endangering or harming their child.

> The vaccines work, so parents who choose to vaccinate their kids will be protected.

This is false for a number of reasons.

1) Vaccines don't provide perfect protection, breakthrough infections can occur.

2) Some people can not receive vaccinations due to health conditions.

3) Immunocompromised people are not protected by vaccines.

We managed to make it illegal to beat the crap out of your kids even though there are still plenty of Americans who think not beating your kids is harmful to them.

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Well I agree and understand that herd immunity exists and it protects the small number of kids who can’t get the vaccine for whatever reason. But the choice is still the same, you’re asking parents to prioritize someone else’s child over their own and if they believe that it is dangerous to do so then why would they do that?

I don’t believe there are any people who believe that NOT beating their children is dangerous. If you put yourself in these parents’ shoes, they basically see this stuff as poison. What you’re asking them to do (in their mind) is inject their children with poison and for no other reason than because the government says so. It’s just a losing battle, you need to educate these people and show them that they are safe, address their concerns directly.

I would not inject my children with mercury if the government told me to. I would need to be convinced that mercury is safe and beneficial before I allowed my kid to be injected with it. I don’t feel like equating this to physical violence is helpful at all because in this case these parents believe they are preventing harm to their children.

It has been proven. It has been proven to benefit EVERYONE way more than any harm it could cause. I hope you and the others that give these 'concerns' (that if we are honest, these sorts of people will never have a bar high enough that they will say they are satisfied have been met) give generously to our country's future polio beggars in the streets. You might be too young to have experienced what happens to the victims, the suffering that you consider these 'concerns' to outway. It's is horrible to inflict on the population. Measles/mumps are going to result in a lot more deaf people like it was when I was a kid. Polio in lots more paralyzed children.

This is the suffering you are OK with because 'concerns':

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfoxqghXxEs

I wish I had your arrogant confidence.

I'm a vaxer But one community I hang with is strongly antivax. Many of them have been very harmed even if they didn't take the vaccines.

When something is that important to you (even for woowoo reasons or social media misinformation) then it is a fertile situation for mental health impacts.

Antivaxxers are a vulnerable population too (they have self selected into a circle by their beliefs and communities).

Disclosure: I've seen some good people severely harmed by overbearing government actions in New Zealand. I believe New Zealand did a good job of protecting everyone here from COVID, but that the collateral costs to everyone were very high (and extremely variable chronic costs to some).

Edit: apology that I've bucketed all vaccines together. E.g. Measles vaccine is quite different from covid vaccines.

You can empathize with your friends’ personal beliefs, but when those beliefs put children at risk, society has to draw a line. Vaccination is basic health hygiene required for large groups of people to live, learn, and function closely together without constant outbreaks. The requirement is minimal: if you want access to public education, you agree to the few safeguards that make it possible for the masses to share space safely (you use the bathroom, you wash your hands, you shower, you get vaccines).

Imagine if I said 'my religion doesn't allow running water, I should be allowed to defecate anywhere, and also science says toilets increase the risk of hemorrhoids, and you can't make me give my kids hemorrhoids'. You can't allow that, not because you don't agree with it, but because the way we live in groups needs artificial sanitation. Just like we need artificial stimulation of immune systems.

I am not talking about empathy with friends (I'm not sure why you assumed that). I am certainly not saying "don't immunise". I suspect you're making assumptions about me, but to be clear I am strongly pro vaccination and pro-science.

Each vaccination has costs and benefits. The science is amazing at reducing the physical risks.

I am just asking you to understand that some people are seriously psychologically harmed by requiring vaccinations (for themselves or for their children). It may be irrational, unscientific or selfish but I have seen how real the harm is for some people. That harm is a complex grey area. It should rarely trump the needs of children or society.

Society has a variety of ways to balance that harm against the expected benefits.

The second half of your comment is just a strawman story. And introducing religion as a topic is usually a poor idea.

I apologize if you feel attacked/judged. Conversations shouldn't go like that. I believe people have the right to their opinions, and in a democracy we WILL go down different avenues than I would like and that is part of democracy. And I appreciate you raising views not your own but not represented in the conversation. But I am going to point out the outcomes. I'm going to point out that the 'body autonomy' people harassed my mother for wearing a mask while dying of cancer and didn't care about her autonomy to wear a mask out of chemo need.

The original anti-vax exemptions were given on religious grounds. All justifications after that have built on that initial allowance. It is very much not a straw man when it comes to vaccine allowances. It is the OG justification that opened the conversation.

After watching my santa cruz woo woo ex-wife's friends all literally talk themselves into believing in the damage of vaccines (while being fine taking MEGA/unhealthy doses of western science discovered vitamins), I consider vaccine hesitancy a form of Munchausen syndrome. One that should only be tolerated to a certain point, and this is well past that point.

Covid vaccines are the elephant in the room. In many jurisdictions, children were coerced to take them for no good reason. Like it or not, we are dealing with the fallout of extremely poor decisions made recently...

The covid response was done poorly done in classic knee jerk style and a bunch of authoritarian aholes used it as chance to act like authoritarian aholes. Also yes once the virus evolved to Omicron to avoid the vaccine we probably didn't need all the boosters they tried to push.

But the medical community was acting with the best knowledge they had at the time as imperfect as it was. Tell me how did taking the vaccine harm any child? It wasn't painful. Immediate side effects were minimal to non-existent. Myocarditis and Carditis incidence was something like 65/million. Even then most of those recovered without any treatment. Median hospital stay for those that needed it was 2 nights and most recovered without permanent issues.

I think the final death toll from the vaccine was estimated at around 1/million. Meanwhile at the height of the delta strain the death toll for anyone infected was well over 1/100 ( more than 10% for the over 60s).

The fallout doesn't make rational sense.

> Well I agree and understand that herd immunity exists and it protects the small number of kids who can’t get the vaccine for whatever reason.

You need to understand that herd immunization actually helps everyone, not just some small number of children who can't get vaccinated, because even the best vaccines don't offer 100% protection.

Your odds of getting sick are based on the odds that other people around you are contagious. That much should be extremely obvious, because every encounter with a contagion rolls the dice again.

What's less obvious is how much that matters because math is hard. Even if you have 95% immunity to some infectious disease, your probability of getting it at least once after 10 exposures is a whopping 40% (1 - 0.95^10). Everyone's protection, yours included, comes from reducing your chances of being unwittingly exposed because the people around you aren't getting sick, and that means vaccinating them too. When one person gets sick, everyone around them is put at increased risk. The way you fix that for everyone is by making it less likely that any member of the herd gets sick from any given exposure.

> Parents don't have sole discretion about their child's well-being.

In a just society they should have sole discretion. The current situation where kids aren’t even allowed to walk to school without CPS harassing parents, is because of this attitude where the state thinks it has any rights to your kids.

Of course it does. If you abuse your children, the state enforces the rights of your children. If you put their life in danger, the state can and should take them from you. Parents do not own their children any more than the state does and their rights should be protected by both parties.

The CPS issue is because of litigation not protection. No one wants to be responsible for something bad happening.

> Parents do not own their children any more than the state does and their rights should be protected by both parties.

Yes, they absolutely own their children more than the state does. I can’t believe there are any claims otherwise. Do you value the bond between parent and child and how special it is? Nothing should violate that. Not even the rare parent that is actually neglectful - meaning that should curtail the freedoms of the typical parent. And anyways, choosing to forego a vaccine isn’t abuse - on average it shifts outcomes very little. For example skipping a flu vaccine won’t change much.

Female Genital Mutilation is something parents do to their children.

A parental bond doesn’t overwhelm a child’s own rights as citizens and human beings.

Parents live in a society, even if it were a village, and there is no free pass to do just what you will if it crosses lines.

Collective health is one of those lines.

Parents do not "own" their children, at all.

> In a just society they should have sole discretion.

I think you need to spend some time thinking about how your idea of a just society is that child abuse is ok if parents do it.

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