People who refuse to vaccinate their children put others at risk of preventable and dangerous diseases. Should people who suffer from their decision be entitled to sue? Should refusal to vaccinate be considered a criminal act?
A follow-up to my previous post on vaccine rage. I see lawsuits like the ones hypothesized in this article (and the original journal article from the Journal of Law, Ethics, and Medicine, and the Harvard Law Blog post) as the pretty much inevitable next step in this conflict. We have the technology to trace the source of an outbreak down to a single person beyond a reasonable doubt. And if that person is your child, and your actions on your child’s behalf kill someone else’s child, why wouldn’t you be liable?
You don’t raise your child in a bubble. The decisions you make for him or her aren’t only for him or her— you’re making them for sick kids (and adults! and senior citizens!) in your community, too. And you don’t get to inflict your wildly irresponsible, reprehensibly irrational fear mongering bullshit on other people. I am so intellectually FASCINATED by this entire fucking debacle of humanity, because it hits on pretty much every one of my personal and professional interests, but I’m also finding myself surprisingly emotional about it.
During the very brief amount of time I spent doing public health work at a hospital in rural Northwestern Ghana a woman came into our clinic toting four children: two school-aged children, one toddler, and one infant. She told me she had walked six miles with her kids to get to our clinic, which had the closest doctor to her village, to get her infant vaccinated.
To have seen that, and to watch these affluent white people (yes, it is that demographically concentrated) completely disregard real science from every single reputable source in the medical field, because they have the egotism to think that they know better than literally every other respected, educated person who does this for a living? That’s what gets me. The staggering ARROGANCE of it all. The stunning selfishness. The mind-boggling stupidity.
These are not the mommy wars. This isn’t about your choice to breastfeed or go straight to formula, or your preference for private school over public, or your favoring the cry it out method of sleep training. This is not “agree to disagree”. If you choose not to vaccinate your vaccine-eligible children, you are fucking wrong. You are making an unethical, malicious decision out of willful ignorance, and yes, you should be civilly and criminally liable.
^YES
The Case for Suing Parents Who Don’t Vaccinate Their Kids. Or Even Criminally Charging Them.
Jackass Penguins 