Is it time to consider compulsory vaccinations?

But easy to argue with her about the cause.It was not, after all, mothers of affected children who identified vitamin D deficiency as the cause of rickets, or aspirin as a factor in Reye's syndrome, or contaminated drinking water as the cause of cholera, or ... well, you get my point. Having a child suffer from a condition does not turn a mother into an epidemiologist.

I'm very pro vaccination and I worry about the children who are going unvaccinated because of this fear, but I don't see that there is enough information to dismiss the fear. I have an email in to someone who might be able to answer some questions about that side of the argument. I'd like to know for instance how many cases of mothers there are out there who are convinced their child was adversely affected by vaccination. You don't have to be an epidemiologist to know your child well enough to know there has been a change. I do stick by this until I have a reason to dismiss all of them as merely hysterical. Personally I'd like to see a law passed requiring vaccinations, it seems the civilized thing to do, but if it resulted in harm I'd feel terrible about it and I assume you would too.

But that is not the same as knowing what caused the change. "My child was vaccinated and got ill three months later" may consist of two perfectly accurate statements joined by a conjunction, but it is not a discovery of cause and effect. The mother has sufficient expertise to state the two facts, but not to know if there is a causal link between them. How could she?

Something has changed in the manner of Faith's persona here.....

I did not intend that to make a complete argument. What I intended was to give you a reason to re-consider your approach of simply literally reading the text and then telling me that right X does not exist. If you are equally at a loss to find the result of Roe v. Wade anywhere in the bill of rights, then perhaps your approach to con law is wrong. Roe v. Wade is also partially grounded in the fourth amendment.The fourth amendment literally provides protection against government search and seizure of one's personal papers and effects. Courts have extended that idea to also provide protection from intrusion by the government on your insides. Not absolute protection, but certainly of important protection where the intrusion is not minor. In my view that is not a great leap from the text. Nothing like a pet duck and the eight amendment.I did provide another post with some reading material on the topic. Maybe you'll find it helpful, and maybe not. I would suggest that laws regarding safety devices are similar to current laws on vaccination. The state licenses your riding of motorcycles and provides the rules for attendance in public schools. Unsurprisingly the state can make rules about the safety devices you wear while riding or make rules about getting shots before you come to school.On the other hand, the state would find it constitutionally more difficult to mandate that I wear a force field belt while walking around or sitting in my home regardless of how helpful such a belt might be, and they might find themselves similarly unable to force me to vaccinate if I home school my kids.
Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

That is very true, which is why I'd want to know how many parents there are who have this impression of a change in their child they clearly associate with vaccination, and more about exactly what change and how they arrived at their impression. From what I've heard the vchange is immediate though.It's not all that often that a whole movement gets started like this. You might expect it from a particular religious cult but not just mothers at large. I just feel there is a lot more to know about this. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

cfsacfsdfsdEdited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

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It isn't mothers at large. The overwhelming majority of mom's vaccinate their kids and experience no problems.

I'm not happy with forcing people to do anything--nothing cuts harder against my grain. The surest way to keep me from doing anything is to tell me I must; I recall my mom patiently explaining to one teacher after another, "Nobody can make Omni do anything he doesn't want to do."I appreciate the irony of that in the context of this thread.The problem with linking vaccinations with employment, public schools, public building access, etc., is that it would simply not do the job. The employment approaches would miss children altogether.We cannot quarantine a large subset of children; kids mix more than any other demographic.I see it as analogous to the notion that your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose; the right to send your kids into the world as happy little disease incubators ends where my grandkids' presence begins.There was a measles outbreak in Amish communities in Ohio this spring. The Amish are typically reluctant to vaccinate, but after the outbreak was recognized, they willingly lined up for their shots. My fear is that a great number of children will have to sicken and/or die before reason can trump fear and ignorance, and I don't want to sacrifice my grandchildren on that altar.

I don't want to change the 2nd amendment--if folks keep trotting out their cute little disease vectors, we'll need those guns Pull!

But nothing there is in any way similar to vaccination. An unvaccinated child is a direct threat to the public simply by being in the presence of others. That is not the case with retrieving a bullet as evidence.

The basic right involved is the same. The 4th amendment limits the governments attempts to intrude on your privacy within your body. Your objection as expressed above is that in the case of vaccinations, the state has an interest in not recognizing your right.I agree that the government interest is different, but that difference does not guarantee that the government wins. For example, cities have an interest in regulating guns, but the 2nd amendment still prevents them from forbidding citizens to keep guns in their homes. It really does not even matter how dangerous we can prove guns in the home are.Your rights do not just disappear simply because the government wants them to or because the public would rather you not have them. Were that to be the case, the Bill of Rights would be meaningless because the Bill of Rights is nothing more than a list of things the federal and state governments cannot do.Are your rights absolute? Of course not. But for an example of what the government has to put up with, consider the Pentagon Papers.And aren't non vaccinated children threats only to themselves and other non vaccinated people?

Yeah, well then you can pry the 4th amendment out of my cold, dead, disease ridden hands. Come and get me coppper.

I understand. But I think that as long as vaccinations have risks, regardless of the balance, the government is going to have a hard time forcing an otherwise healthy kid to get a vaccination except to attend school or play sports etc. But that said, in many cases there are just too many exceptions to the law. The SC has said that religious exceptions to immunization laws are suspect and probably not supported by the constitution, but states grant them anyway. It turns out some of the states that are considered backwards in other situations have the fewest exceptions (Mississippi and West Virginia).