Comment by dap
3 days ago
> How long did humanity survive without vaccines for _everything_? Oh that's right.
Is this a trick question? Humanity survived by having enough people with enough other useful traits (like thinking, including the ability to reason about disease and how to prevent it) to overcome the numbers lost to disease. Humans died to disease in enormous numbers.
> nor that they're all good for _me_ as an individual.
Herd immunity presents a real challenge to idea that people should generally be allowed to make their own choices. One's choice here affects everyone else, in a minuscule way that nonetheless adds up to many thousands of lives saved. I'm not sure what the answer is for this, but generally I come down on the side of: if a democratic process creates rules requiring us all to be immunized for the common good, that's okay with me.
Herd immunity isn't on its own enough to justify coercion of medical interventions.
You might want to read up on the principle of informed consent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_ethics#Informed_consen...
> After receiving and understanding this information, the patient can then make a fully informed decision to either consent or refuse treatment.
You are overly simplifying vaccines as if they do not affect individuals individually. They absolutely do, for so many reasons, like allergies. But even if that wasn't the case, _all_ vaccines carry some risk/benefit tradeoff, and each individual is entirely in their right to weigh this for themselves.
Also did we learn nothing from covid?
> One's choice here affects everyone else
You still owe me a court trial if you want to act on that in a way that reduces my rights. Prove that my individual choices are affecting anyone.
> if a democratic process creates rules requiring us all to be immunized for the common good, that's okay with me.
Drinking is universally a harm. We should ban alcohol. It's for the common good, obviously, and there are zero arguments against this. Why do we allow drinking? At the very least we should ban _public_ drinking. There's no sense in socially allowing this to occur.
> Drinking is universally a harm. We should ban alcohol.
The actions that cause possible bad societal harms from drinking alcohol are indeed banned or heavily penalized. Drinking and Driving. Public Intoxication. Domestic Abuse. Child Endangerment and more.
It destroys your liver. Which one of those actions prevents that? Where is drinking to excess prevented? Why do people still die in vehicle accidents caused by alcohol?
Really. We should just stop selling it. It's insane that you think you can write a set of rules that somehow prevents harm. It merely manages the consequences of the harms. Your court cases cannot bring back the dead.
Why do we tolerate this yet take a hard line stance on far less important issues?
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