Herd Immunity and Compulsory Immunization

Careful - you're peeling back the wizard's curtain... ;-)

Post 61

Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - 3:22pm

Robert, are you suggesting that not only are we not in Kansas any more, but that Toto the dog has exposed the machinations of a naked grabber of power?

(Edited by Luke Setzer on 2/03, 3:25pm)

Post 62

Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - 3:27pm

Well - I can only say I'M not in Kansas... ;-)

Post 63

Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - 3:28pm

Ooh kay...

Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - 3:52pm

Without claiming it changes the outcome of the argument, let me inform you that some asthmatics, myself for one, are affected by second-hand smoke. It varies from making me cough and get short of breath, to an escalating asthma attack requiring treatment and escape from the smoke source. Second-hand smoke could kill some of us.

Post 65

Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - 4:03pm

Except for us mind readers, Mindy, I think everyone is willing to accept scientific and medical evidence.

Post 66

Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - 4:23pm

Not to be elliptical, Ted, but ?

Post 67

Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - 4:26pm

Surely there is medical evidence that second hand smoke can induce a reaction in an asthmatic?

Post 68

Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - 5:05pm

Yes, but you said in post 47 that is wasn't, therefore my response. What was the mind-reading in reference to?

Post 69

Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - 7:02pm

Luke, whether the law is too lax for Ted or not (assholish tone of his posts aside) the principle of the government action is the same isn't? The government still mandates some portions of the population to take a vaccine whether they want it or not. School is compulsory, so vaccination is as a corollary to that compulsory for children. I think you raise some valid concerns over forcing a neighbor to take a vaccine, but the threat of a pandemic trumps that concern. If we are worried about forcing an individual to take a vaccine he doesn't want, why would we not be concerned about this unwilling neighbor forcing his contagion (or the high expectation he may receive the contagion) on his neighbors? If the neighbor has yet to contract the disease, without vaccination he may be highly susceptible to catching it, and is putting a great deal of risk on others. Does he have the right to endanger others? If we do experience another pandemic, our civilization is totally screwed. The normal question of what is ethical under normal circumstances must adapt if reality changes around us.

Post 70

Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - 7:32pm

I meant medical evidence that second hand smoke is a significant risk for cancer, Mindy.

Post 71

Wednesday, February 4, 2009 - 5:44am

John, I understand what you're saying, and if a pandemic truly threatened us, you would be right.

My point was that the natural law of self-interest seems to drive an adequate percentage of the herd to get those shots anyway based on the CDC numbers.

Of course, the CDC numbers are skewed by compulsory education so they may not serve as a valid basis for my assertion.

Given that the average person seeks self-interest and can accept shots, I find the threat of a pandemic in a well-informed public unlikely and coercion unnecessary.

This does raise the interesting question of the place of the CDC in a free society. I would assume it would share a place between "the police" and "the armed forces" (more likely the latter) because it protects people from the attacks of foreign germs. I do not recall Ayn Rand ever making a comment on this.

Post 72

Wednesday, February 4, 2009 - 5:56am

Mindy observed:

Without claiming it changes the outcome of the argument, let me inform you that some asthmatics, myself for one, are affected by second-hand smoke. It varies from making me cough and get short of breath, to an escalating asthma attack requiring treatment and escape from the smoke source. Second-hand smoke could kill some of us.

Mindy, I started a thread called "Second-Hand Smoke" for us to explore this issue further.

Post 73

Wednesday, February 4, 2009 - 3:45pm

I would agree Luke. If there was a threat of a pandemic, the CDC would have to presume a military posture to the threat, mandating mass vaccines (assuming there would be one). The only thing I'm concerned about is the possibility of a current contagion mutating into something far worse (more deadly and more contagious) that we could otherwise stamp out before it has a chance to mutate by mandating vaccines. Malaria was a good example where the contagion could have been wiped off the face of this planet had DDT not been banned. Albeit DDT is not a vaccine, but I think it's the same idea. What if something like HIV mutates into a mosquito-borne virus? Or what if West-Nile virus mutates into something more deadly and spreads like wildfire throughout North America? We'd be totally screwed. And sorry for the tangent, but it's stuff like that our civilization should be deathly afraid of, not something ridiculous like global warming.

Post 74

Monday, November 2, 2009 - 8:22am

Well, Leonard Peikoff has finally answered this question from February on his October 4th, 2009 podcast. He repeats my argument that shedding a contagious agent amounts to the initiation of physical force, and hence supports forcible quarantine. He rejects mandatory vaccination, which he says amounts to a violation of rights, since, he says, quarantine is sufficient, and who knows what the government will force you to submit next if they require vaccinations.

Of course quarantine works fine for leprosy, tuberculosis and other difficult to transmit diseases. The problem is that other diseases like smallpox, which historically killed more than 30-40% of its victims, 300 to 500 million in the 20th century alone, are often transmissible well before the carrier starts to show symptoms. The elimination of smallpox was done through both mandatory vaccination and quarantine and could not have been achieved otherwise.

We require people to tie up their dogs before they bite, not after. It seems to me that requiring a person to obtain a vaccination from a provider of his choice is both a more effective and less egregious imposition than locking someone in his home or putting him on an island at state expense only after he has already had a chance to spread and suffer his disease. But that's just me.

(Edited by Ted Keer on 11/02, 10:39am)

Post 75

Monday, November 2, 2009 - 10:39am

I think Peikoff has it right. Shedding the virus amounts to initiation of violence. Until that happens there is no justification for the government to act.
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Ted is right that there can be a long latency period where a person is shedding the infectious agents without anyone knowing. And that means that the disease can spread rapidly - faster than medical investigators can locate and isolate those who are becoming carriers. But there is no way around that without granting statism's premise of a government right to initiate violence.
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Ted says, "We require people to tie up their dogs before they bite, not after." Actually, people tie their dogs up to reduce their liability. When the culture is working properly it is encouraging people to get the vaccination rather than forcing them.
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Ted says, "It seems to me that requiring a person to obtain a vaccination from a provider of his choice is both a more effective and less egregious imposition than locking someone in his home or putting him on an island at state expense only after he has already had a chance to spread and suffer his disease."

But the important issue is legalizing government violation of individual rights - not effectiveness or cost.

The government could say that we require a vaccination for disease X. Without that, there would Y deaths per 100,000. The same logic would apply to forcing people to get their brakes inspected at an inspection station - since without it someone's brakes could cause an accident and result in Y or more deaths per 100,000.
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If there is a way out of the philosophical quandary, it is to recognize that the general level of intelligence and common-sense of the citizenry must rise significantly because to ask for Utopian-like results from a perfect government while the population is still deficient is silly.

Or, one could treat this quandary as a call to examine the foundations of individual rights. Can an individual who might reasonably become a virus shedder have a duty to avoid that state or to warn everyone around them that they might be shedding infectious material since they chose not to get vaccinated? Can anyone make a case that not getting vaccinated while still walking around in a population that is almost all vaccinated is akin to fraud? Is it a case of interfering with other people's attempts to use their minds to pursue rightful ends? I don't think so. Not without creating a hypothetical that doesn't match any situation likely to exist. I opt for the first - It is theoretically possible to create a perfect set of laws, arising from, and implementing a perfectly understood set of individual rights, BUT you won't get the desired perfect political environment without a better set of people.

In the meantime, it would not be a moral issue to execute, or imprison someone for life, if they were found guilty of infecting others after choosing to refuse to get a vaccination. It doesn't solve the problem, but just reduces it a little bit.

Post 76

Monday, November 2, 2009 - 11:22am

Steve, I understand and share your proper concerns, but you are ignoring some incredibly huge facts. When Obama declares H1N1 an emergency he makes the word meaningless. We should not let time and distance blind us from the knowledge of real emergencies.

Steve: "But the important issue is legalizing government violation of individual rights - not effectiveness or cost."

Wikipedia: "During the 20th century, it is estimated that smallpox was responsible for 300�500 million deaths.[7][8][9] In the early 1950s an estimated 50 million cases of smallpox occurred in the world each year.[10] As recently as 1967, the World Health Organization estimated that 15 million people contracted the disease and that two million died in that year.[10] After successful vaccination campaigns throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the WHO certified the eradication of smallpox in December 1979.[10] To this day, smallpox is the only human infectious disease to have been completely eradicated.[11]"

An average estimate of 300,000,000 to 500,000,000 dead due to smallpox in the 20th century, compared to how many killed by the communists and in all wars combined? Can we seriously say that it's a good thing nobody violated the rights of those dead people and the ones who infected them not to be forcibly vaccinated?

Granted, HPV is not smallpox. But I am not advocating mandatory vaccination except for demonstrably lethal epidemics spread by casual contact with unwitting carriers. In such cases the dichotomy between individual rights and effectiveness is a false one. We don't say that firefighters digging ditches on unburnt land are trespassers, regardless of their effectiveness fighting wild fires.

"If there is a way out of the philosophical quandary, it is to recognize that the general level of intelligence and common-sense of the citizenry must rise significantly because to ask for Utopian-like results from a perfect government while the population is still deficient is silly."

Hence it would have been proper for the world to wait for Somalia, where the last case of smallpox occurred, to evolve into South Dakota rather than to use force to end that epidemic? You can only speak of "silly" utopianism by dropping the context that smallpox was eradicated without perfect government or the coming of enlightenment to the Horn of Africa.

Rights absolutism in the face of epidemic is tantamount to anarchism. Consider what is seen, forcible innoculations, and what is unseen, hundreds of millions dead. You simply cannot while keeping context call the elimination of smallpox by mandatory vaccination a crime. I think in admirably trying to be careful, Steve, you are forgetting the real historical horror here.

Post 77

Monday, November 2, 2009 - 11:49am

Ted,

I don't think we disagree as much as you are indicating. When a disease like small pox is in play, that is an entirely different context. I said, "But the important issue is legalizing government violation of individual rights - not effectiveness or cost." I still stand by that under today's context. But if a disease equivalent to small pox is on the rampage it creates a new context - one of survival on a wide scale. It changes the issue of not getting a vaccination to one more akin to someone closing their eyes and firing a gun in a crowded room with no idea of where the bullet will go - they can't claim ignorance or lack of intent or absence of malice as valid defenses when someone dies. The same would be true of the person that refuses a vaccination when the danger is of epidemic proportions. When it is not a survival level epidemic, it is more akin to driving on the freeway where one can have a wheel fall of causing a swerve into another car and killing someone. Unless that became an epidemic like cause of deaths, rising to survival levels, there would be no justification for government to get involved in wheel checking.

Also, the remarks I made on Utopian expectations are still valid. I didn't drop context. You have substituted the narrow context of a small pox epidemic for the thread's broader context: "Is it valid for governments to be able to force people to get vaccinations - any vaccination?" My statements hold for the original context, where as yours only holds for the narrower, small pox context.

Post 78

Monday, November 2, 2009 - 4:04pm

I welcome your admission, Steve, that there is a difference in kind between smallpox and HPV.

I haven't "substituted the narrow context of a small pox epidemic for the thread's broader context." I didn't start the thread. My arguments are my own and I meant every word I said. Words I didn't say aren't my responsibility. I have no duty to carry that burden, and I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never argue for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to argue for mine.

Post 79

Monday, November 2, 2009 - 6:52pm