I am in favor of freedom for any and all religions and any and all ideologies – as long as they don’t cause violence or otherwise endanger the public welfare.
You may, in other words, worship the ancient god Baal and believe human sacrifice is justified, but I think you should be thrown in prison for first-degree murder if you practice it.
You have every right to think the murderously addled Communism of the Khmer Rouge is a spiffy idea, but if you start shooting anyone who wears glasses or is educated, I want you treated like any other dangerous criminal.
That’s the American way. Freedom to swing your fist has always ended where the other person’s nose begins. You also can’t put raw sewage in the reservoir which holds the town’s drinking water, even if you don’t happen to believe bacteria and toxins are real.
Okay. I doubt that anyone, at least anyone who could pass a sanity test, would disagree with any of the examples I have just given. This is common sense.
So why in the world do we even think about tolerating anti-vaxxers?
We are in the middle of a national measles outbreak – not yet an epidemic — that is at its worst in New York City and Detroit. When I was a child, pretty much everyone got measles – three or four million people a year — and about 450 people died annually from measles or its complications. But in 2000, measles, like smallpox before it, was declared completely eradicated in the United States of America. But now it is back, with more cases reported than at any time in the last 20 years. The reason for this is clear:
It is due to children not being vaccinated because of the myth that vaccines can cause autism. There is absolutely no basis in fact for this. To quote the website of the Association for Science in Autism Treatment, “after ten years of research and dozens of large scale studies in multiple countries, the medical/scientific community (that is, the medical/scientific community that embraces the scientific method, with its emphasis on peer review, objective measurement, and testing of all hypotheses) is unanimous in its finding that no credible evidence exists that would support a connection between vaccinations and autism.”
Now I am aware that there are a very few people who should not be vaccinated for legitimate medical reasons, and we need to find a way of accommodating them while protecting the public welfare. But that’s not the problem. It is pseudoscience; people listening to the thoughts of some feather-headed celebrity, or someone passing along anecdotal information, or something they have read on some website on the Internet.
Anti-vaxxers would say that forcing them to have their children inoculated is an assault on their freedom. I say that allowing them not to vaccinate amounts to creating an irresponsible threat to everyone else’s children, and the public health.
What if I worked with food in your local restaurant, said I didn’t believe in germs and did believe that soap caused autism, and refused to wash my hands when I went back to work after using the bathroom. Would you defend my right to do that?
Freedom is a wonderful thing, but parents don’t have the right to endanger their own children’s lives, let alone the lives of others. Science has established the truth.
Acting on it is common sense.
