Require parents who don’t want a child vaccinated to get a science lesson

So imagined risk of autism outweighs real risk of death?

 

You're very simple minded about some things.

 

stop antagonizing. There's more than enough silliness from the anti-vaccination line of logic.

 

I agree up to a point. These "rights" are noble and should be upheld as much as possible, but there are times where my rights and your rights clash. Is your right to not be poked with a needle if you don't want it greater than my right to not be killed or harmed by a pathogen? I just don't think it's as easy of a situation as you make it out to be.

 

Your right to exhale germs you could have been vaccinated against ends at the tip of your nose; if my child gets polio from your kid or whatever, I should be able to sue you for every cent my kid might have made as a professional football player.

 

Which rights?????

People talk in general sweeping terms all the time, and saying inalienable rights sounds great, but what are these rights, because so far every right that has been mentioned there has been listed times when those rights don't apply.

Life - death penalty
Liberty - Jail, mental hospital
Pursuit of happiness - if you get happiness from killing puppies or peeing in elevators.

Which ones are truly inalienable?


Answer - None. These are rights that we try and preserve wherever possible. But when these rights butt up against other peoples rights or the laws of the land, then they get chipped away at. I am not saying we should mandate vaccinations right now, just saying that there may come a time, a situation, that calls for it. And if that day comes, then that will trump the importance of keeping the inalienable rights "inalienable".

 

Nature granted these right? Hogwash. Nature granted us typhus, tapeworms, malaria, tooth decay, gangrene. Nature did not grant property, which does not exist in nature. Nature did not grant liberty, that is a human construct. Life, I can grant, but gangrene is as alive as we are.

 

Nature gave us the right to die, science gave us the power to be greater than a disease. But fear and ignorance try to stop that.

 

Breathing is not a right, it's our biological system. So those on an iron lung don't have the same rights as you or I? You have read glorious prose elucidating the meaning of life, and I think you have taken those words to be too ridged. And I am really not tying to catch you on anything when I ask for you to list what these inalienable rights are, I can't think of one right that truly is inalienable. These are terms that are thrown around frequently but not analyzed often. It's a beautiful idea to think we have certain rights given by our creator/nature, but they are only rights in so far as we choose not to tamper with them. And for each example I can think of, there are times in which we accept that we tamper with those rights. SO, either we do a totally shitty job at subscribing to the ideals of "inalienable rights" or we accept that rights are not divine, but are an agreed upon norm which we try not to tread on too much.

The point is there are possible situations when talking about hundreds of millions of Americans, or billions around the world, where there is not time and/or resources to quarantine infected people. And, the point of inoculating is to make sure they do not play host to a growing and mutating pathogen witch could turn into devastation. On your way into America, you are tested for TB and other health concerns because we dont want an epidemic. And if an outbreak occurred, that can harm innocent people. With TB, easily treated nowadays, one in four deaths in England around 1815 were from it. We don't need to worry about TB anymore, but we do need to worry about what has yet to present itself. The one certain thing with viruses, bacteria, prions and other pathogens, they mutate, and on occasion a real bad ass bug will emerge.

 

Wait so we wouldn't have the time or resources to quarantine infected people, but we'd have the time and resources to give EVERYONE else a vaccine shot?

 

I actually take it a step further. We choose to call something a right and to hold that up as virtuous. But, there is nothing inalienable about those rights. I don't say government gives those rights, I say society does. society forms govt, society creates the norms, society elevates certain values over others. These values may not exist in a different society. If they are not routine in all environments, then they are not inalienable.

 

There may be gestation periods where we don't know who is or is not infected. Those periods could be days, weeks or years. But a solid bioinformatics system and the proper analysts should be able to map general populations and likelihoods of outbreaks.