Bioethicist says parents who don't vaccinate should face liability

http://www.pri.org/stories/health/bioethicist-says-parents-who-don-t-vaccinate-should-face-liability-for-consequences-13929.html

by soundsop • 13 years ago

33 68 13 years ago

pri.org

gwgarry3• 13 years ago

Diversity is good. A few children who are not vaccinated is probably in the best interest of humanity. Imagine at some point in the future a vaccine does cause genetic problems, what then? Do you want to risk 100% of the population on that?

krapp3• 13 years ago

How much of the population do you want to risk on a comeback by whooping cough or polio or smallpox?

gwgarry3• 13 years ago

You can/have to put the kids that don't have vaccines under a special surveillance and work around the issue. Should society subsidize those costs? Perhaps.

GuiA• 13 years ago

http://op12no2.me/toys/herd/index.php?scenario=intro

breadbox2• 13 years ago

There will always be a few unvaccinated children; some kids can't get vaccinated due to other issues. We don't need more people voluntarily exposing their own children to needless risk.

gwgarry3• 13 years ago

I think there has to be a level of tolerance which is justifiable by science and working around the issue by other means -- for instance only so many kids without a certain vaccine can be in the same peer group. Else you are a totalitarian and we've seen that this type of thinking produces problems.

DanBC• 13 years ago

It feels like a reasonable idea. You're not going to get much money. Perhaps you should go after the people promoting the anti-vaccine stance instead?

Measles outbreaks are happening in a few places: (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-south-west-wales-22221704) (http://www.nyc.gov/html/doh/html/diseases/immmea.shtml)

Some nurseries in some countries prohibit children that don't have vaccination certificates. That seems reasonable - you can chose which nursery to send your child to.

Andrew Wakefield is a crook. In my opinion he should have paid a huge fine. (http://tallguywrites.livejournal.com/148012.html)

dmillett• 13 years ago

Vaccines usually don't cause problems, but when they do it is very hard to get those statistics collected. I do have a coworker who lost her hearing due to a bad vaccine. My daughter did have a minor side effect from the measle/chicken pox vaccine. The side typical side effects from each of those vaccines are similar, but since it was a combination vaccine, I'll never know which one/both my daughter had a reaction to. The pediatricians did not care and said it's hard to get the CDC to collect feedback like this. I would argue for singular vaccines and blood test for pre-disposed reactions. In my opinion it's hard to push good science to the medical community, so approaches like this seem to go nowhere.

markdown• 13 years ago

> My daughter did have a minor side effect from the measle/chicken pox vaccine. The side typical side effects from each of those vaccines are similar, but since it was a combination vaccine, I'll never know which one/both my daughter had a reaction to.

Isn't this expected?

lignuist11• 13 years ago

This is only acceptable, if vaccinations itself are guaranteed to be 100% safe. Of course then someone should be liable for any damage caused by vaccination.

jlgreco13• 13 years ago

Nothing is guaranteed to be 100% safe.

I can however guarantee you that a population losing herd immunity will put more lives at risk. Can those who abstain from vaccines be held liable when those who actually cannot get vaccinated fall ill? That seems like a fair compromise; tax anyone who chooses not to vaccinate and use the proceeds to help those who are harmed by their decision. We wouldn't be jailing them, merely holding them accountable for their actions.

Throwing salt onto the icy sidewalk in front of your business can be dangerous, but if you don't do it and somebody gets hurt, you can be sued.

lignuist11• 13 years ago

If safeness cannot be guaranteed, then noone should be forced.

Arguing with statistics over a population surely must sound cynical to those who have been negatively affected by vaccination: "Sorry, you're one of the rare people we ignored while forcing everyone to take the medicine which is known to cause problems for 0.00001% of people."

Also, vaccination does not guarantee, that I cannot be an agent of the germ, even if I am imune myself.

btilly4• 13 years ago

Much popular misinformation notwithstanding, the balance of risk between vaccination and not vaccinating is extremely lopsided. No, vaccination is not perfectly safe. But it is safer than getting sick. And for anyone who is immune compromised (the very young, the very old, people receiving chemotherapy, those with AIDS, etc) their only protection is to have everyone else vaccinated.

The question is at what point your acting on your fringe beliefs are allowed to kill other people, and what liability you should have for it.

And no, this is not a hypothetical point. We have concrete cases of dead babies and known infection vectors. We really can say, "Your decision to not vaccinate killed that baby." In that case why shouldn't you be liable for criminally negligent manslaughter?

dragonwriter• 13 years ago

> In that case why shouldn't you be liable for criminally negligent manslaughter?

Because causing death through actions which demonstrate depraved indifference to the risk to human life is murder [1], not manslaughter.

[1] http://criminal.findlaw.com/criminal-charges/second-degree-m...

lignuist11• 13 years ago

We also have concrete cases of negative effects of vaccination and as long this is the case, forcing people to take these risks, just to lower the vague risks for others people's babies is ridiculous. Maybe people shouldn't expose their babies to the public as long as they are so vulnerable. Probably safer than requiring that everybody else is vaccinated...

mikeash2• 13 years ago

Way ahead of you:

http://www.hrsa.gov/vaccinecompensation/index.html

lignuist11• 13 years ago

Interesting, but looks very US-centric to me.

viraptor• 13 years ago

Typhoid Mary got quarantined against her will for spreading the disease, so this idea is quite similar (but not as extreme). Basically if you're harming others you're liable. There's an interesting text on old cases of healthy carriers at http://cythereabast.wordpress.com/2007/02/20/the-board-of-he...

jlgreco13• 13 years ago

Typhoid Mary is a great example. You can quibble over the investigative technique and how they perhaps did not treat her with compassion but the fact is that she was killing people and imprisoning her was the only way to spare others. (Thankfully imprisoning is not necessarily in this case.)

tassl• 13 years ago

I am not going to argue against vaccination (which seems to be the target of a lot of conspiration theories), but I am really interested on where are the limits of this logic: are we going to "use" only vaccination or any factor that might/could increase the chances of getting somebody else sick?

fleitz2• 13 years ago

Since vaccines are not 100% effective why would it incur liability? You can't prove that the person wouldn't have gotten sick with the vaccine.

People should have the right to refuse medical treatment. Can we sue the FDA for with holding treatments that may have prevented death?

kevingadd2• 13 years ago

The problem is herd immunity. If you're okay with getting sick and you opt not to get vaccinated, whatever. You can get sick. The problem is that by getting sick you are now able to spread your affliction onto others, and you're compromising herd immunity.

If enough people get vaccinated, it protects the unvaccinated people as well by stopping the spread of disease. So each person who withholds vaccination increases the chance that the disease will be able to spread and reach all the unvaccinated.

EDIT: To give a more simple example, do you think it's okay for people to show up to work badly ill with the Flu or some other transmissible disease? What if they get the whole team sick? Is that okay?

fleitz2• 13 years ago

To me vaccines provide enough individual benefit that there is no need for a social solution. Vaccines are not a case of market failure.

Especially in the United States it strikes me as insane that vaccine manufactures are by law not liable for the side effects of vaccines, yet people would propose to hold individual parents liable for not vaccinating their children. (Note: I'm not talking about crazy autism stuff, but the risks that have been proven and for which industry has sought protection)

jlgreco13• 13 years ago

They would still have the right to refuse. Others would also be able to sue them for the fallout. You would only need to prove your case beyond a preponderance of the evidence to sue. In this case doing that would be trivial.

eip3• 13 years ago

If you think vaccines are so effective then take yours, stop worrying, and leave everyone else alone.

Not everyone wants to be part of the herd. Herds get slaughtered.

jlgreco13• 13 years ago

Now that is what I would call a depraved indifference to human life.

eip3• 13 years ago

All science is merely a means to an end. The means is knowledge. The end is control. Beyond this remains only one issue: Who will be the beneficiary?

In 1954 this was the issue of primary concern. Although the so-called "moral issues" were raised, in view of the law of natural selection it was agreed that a nation or world of people who will not use their intelligence are no better than animals who do not have intelligence. Such people are beasts of burden and steaks on the table by choice and consent.

arbitrarywords2• 13 years ago

The complication is vaccines have two benefits. 1. I am less likely to be infected 2. I am less likely to infect someone who can't be vaccinated. If you want people to leave you alone then you have to convince them that point 2 is less important than something else.

eip3• 13 years ago

http://rense.com/general86/killa4.htm

We begin to see the true purpose of GAVI once we realize that its official literature contain thousands of papers, journals and textbooks on what is known as "Reproductive Immunology" or to the layman, "how to make women immune to pregnancy." A GAVI article from 1991 has the headline "The WHO Task Force on Vaccine for Fertility Regulation". Numerous institutes have reproductive immunology on their research scheme. And as we see, the method is based solely on vaccination programs and the WHO is deeply involved in their practical implementation.

dnautics2• 13 years ago

Who is liable when the child gets sick from the vaccine? It happens. Rarely, but in this country we are supposed to protect the minority and the freedom of choice against coersion, which this is.

hga6• 13 years ago

The government does through an excise tax on covered vaccines and a no-fault court system to cover claims: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_court

And you should at least admit there are two minorities in the balance, children who's parents refuse to get them vaccinated, and children who are not immunized because they can't take them or don't develop a sufficient response. Too many of the former and the "herd affect" stops protecting the latter.

dnautics2• 13 years ago

there is a difference between a minority created by inaction and a minority created by forced action.

Executor• 13 years ago

The issue has to do with free will. Not much else.

Bioethicist says parents who don't vaccinate should face liability

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