I'm fine with "you can't force me to get vaccinated" if it includes an acceptance of civil liability should you be part of an outbreak of vaccine-preventable disease.
That's just petty. Even assuming liability, you cannot sue dead people back to life, or sue an epidemic away. So, no, that is silly and helps nobody. If you're going to do that just go full hog and fine people, at least it doesn't feel like petty revenge.
Ultimately it is the fact that vaccines AREN'T required that forces the government to spend the time, resources, and effort promoting vaccines. Without that they can just arbitrarily start demanding we inject things and outright reject all requests for information/data/etc.
We are actually in a good-ish place. Most of the population is vaccinated, there's plenty of data on vaccinations available to the public, and many of the concerns have been debunked using good solid science which cannot easily be refuted.
Essentially the forced-vaccination people are arguing for worse science, they just haven't figured that out yet because they aren't looking far enough into the future. If they are forced, what is the justification for the science? Or are you just going to rely on other countries where it isn't mandated for the science (in particular follow up studies)?
As the parent of twins born the day before the third trimester, I assure you my motivations here are not petty.
> Even assuming liability, you cannot sue dead people back to life, or sue an epidemic away.
Negligent homicide is punishable both civilly and criminally in most other situations. Why not in refusing to be vaccinated?
> We are actually in a good-ish place. Most of the population is vaccinated, there's plenty of data on vaccinations available to the public, and many of the concerns have been debunked using good solid science which cannot easily be refuted.
And we're finding that a certain percentage of the population is immune to scientific refutation. They're not going away, and they're causing some areas to drop below herd immunity levels. http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/01/27/ca...
Negligent homicide is punishable both civilly and criminally in most other situations. Why not in refusing to be vaccinated?
Because it doesn't actually do anything with the problem of there possibly being an outbreak of some disease with the potential for widespread death.
Okay, great, you can hold the one person accountable for not vaccinating their kids liable for the deaths of ten people. Fantastic. Ten people still died.
Our justice system is very much a "If X, then Y" system - but what if your goal is not to deal with X the consequences of X, but to prevent it in the first place?
You could argue the deterrent effect, but if someone is irrational enough to ignore the conclusive logic that vaccines prevent you from getting sick, they're probably not going to be much more convinced by a (low) possibility that they might end up in front of a court and possible face prison. (And that's even if it can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the one person not getting vaccinated was the direct cause of the deaths beyond a reasonable doubt)
I think it's pretty fair actually - I don't want anyone (particularly children) to be forcibly vaccinated. But people should realize that choosing not to be vaccinated may cause harm to others and in that case it seems fair to be able to obtain compensation via the courts.
That mechanism wouldn't work very well though, because it's a situation with low risk, where it's hard to prove who caused the harm, and even when you do, the damages are so high, the injury won't be restored: For instance, if an influenza outbreak, that we assumed was caused by a set of 5 people in a school contracting the disease, and that killed 10 people, would not lead to multi million dollar payouts to the families of those that died, because chances are, there are no millions of dollars to give. So the compensation will not be any good.
Therefore, all you have left is deterrent, but really, do you think an anti vaxxer would care about going bankrupt, vs their perceived chance of their kid getting autism? I'd be very surprised if it provided any deterrent at all.
