If your child is not vaccinated, they should be barred from attending public school

[Tellos Athenaios]

Hey, I have never said people can't make the WRONG choice.

I am saying that the wrong choice might be the right choice, in those weird instances when modern science and politicians simply are in the wrong. In the long run.

Let's allow those people to be around, for the better of humanity at large.

If we all were the same, a virus could easily wipe us out.

If some people go off the expected path, we as a race have a chance to survive.

I for one celebrate diversity, and I think diversity is the best way forward. Someone mentioned something along "the 10th view", if 9 people agree on something the tenth should do everything and anything to prove them wrong, and plan thereafter.

Government might be right in 99,99999999999 of the cases... But it only takes one mistake towards nature to **** us up completely. Pretty damn good in those situations to have people around with tin foil hats, or whatever.

And as we all know, nature is a pretty damn powerful force. I for one try not to mess around with it too much.

Nobody asks for experimental medicine to be mandated. We ask for what is more or less settled science. The measles vaccine is pretty damn well understood by now. No it does not cause autism. No it won't kill you. No it won't leave you infertile. What might leave you infertile as an adult male is the actual disease (measles) itself.

Us all taking a vaccine means that specific (cocktail) of pathogen strains is dealt with. It means those viruses will not be doing the wiping out. It does not make us all the same, and the risk of a hypothetical new virus doing us in remains the same as it ever was. In fact, the risk of a virus in general wiping us all out is reduced by taking out the threat of those pathogens. That's the whole point of (mandatory) vaccination!

If some people go "off the expected path" in this case, some people now actually reintroduce the risk of that cocktail of viruses wiping us out. That is all they accomplish: to risk the lives of others. Now since we're not dealing with population wide epidemics or pandemics we can afford to be relaxed about this and say it's their own decision to expose themselves to disease and us to a lesser degree to that risk as well.

But why on earth that should be a carte blanche for parents to do the same to their children (or indeed, for anyone to do it to anyone else) still escapes me.

To round off a post full of misunderstanding you apply classic scope insensitivity: failure to multiply. If there is a chance of only 10^-11 that the decision for mandatory vaccination is catastrophic, then based on the total human population which ever will exist (estimated to be < 10^10) we should go with the 10^-11 chance of error over the demonstrably vastly more likely alternative which is already causing minor epidemics in a well funded, highly vaccinated population today (USA!) -- simply because the herd immunity is no longer as powerful as it once was.

In simple terms: the numbers don't add up to admit any kind of utilitarian argument for allowing parents not to get their children vaccinated. There is simply no fringe benefit to be had outweighing the primary benefits from vaccination on a national or global scale.