Midnight City–M83

 

I wanted to write about this post about compulsory vaccinations last week and then forgot about it. Luckily, a rebuttal popped up today so I can present two sides of the same coin.

David Roepik at Big Think makes the case for compulsory vaccintions:

What does society do when one person’s behavior puts the greater community at risk? That’s a no-brainer, right? We make them stop. We pass laws, or impose economic rules, or find other way to discourage individual behaviors that threaten the greater common good. You don’t get to drive drunk. You don’t get to smoke in public places. You don’t even get to leave your house if you catch some particularly infectious disease.

We all agree in those cases that having the freedom to drive drunk is less important than the freedom for everyone to be safe on the roads. The same case can be made for vaccinations although the we don’t have the extreme images of people dying in car crashed to back it up. Despite good vaccination programs, many people are still at risk for those diseases we vaccinate for. Children can’t be vaccinated before a certain age, some children have allergies or suppressed immune systems that prevent them from getting vaccinated and vaccines aren’t 100% effective meaning that even people who are vaccinated are at risk. By allowing people to go unvaccinated, we are unnecessarily putting everyone else at risk.

Quinn O’Neill from 3 Quarks Daily disagrees using measles as an example. His two main points are that the risk of anyone contracting measles is really small so why bother with vaccinations and that maintaining high vaccination coverage rates is not cost effective. Weak, man, weak. First, it ignores the important fact that the vaccination rates we’ve achieved right now are thanks to compulsory programs that require kids to be vaccinated when they enter school. Does he seriously think vaccination rates would be as high without it being a prerequisite to get into school? When the vaccination rates drop, which they most likely would (although I’ll admit I’m basing this on intuition rather than evidence although I’m sure there is evidence on this out there), O’Neill’s calculations on the odds of getting measles wouldn’t look nearly as good.

As for O’Neill’s second point on cost-effectiveness, we have limited resources to give toward health so discussions on cost-effectiveness will always be a reality but should we be basing everything on cost-effectiveness? If we wanted to be perfectly cost-effective toward drunk driving we should reduce efforts to stop people from drinking and driving until the damage we avoid from stopping drunk drivers is equal to the money we spend on trying to stop people from drunk driving. Sound ridiculous?

Compulsory vaccinations is not a comfortable topic. There are no slam dunk arguments because there are pros and cons to every approach. In the end, I think that requiring school children to be vaccinated is the approach that makes the most sense.

(Image credit: Wikimedia commons)