
Bioethicist says parents who don't vaccinate should face liability - soundsop
http://www.pri.org/stories/health/bioethicist-says-parents-who-don-t-vaccinate-should-face-liability-for-consequences-13929.html
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DanBC
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>)

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viraptor
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...](http://cythereabast.wordpress.com/2007/02/20/the-board-of-healths-
exile-of-mary-mallon-was-it-justifiable/)

~~~
jlgreco
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.)

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dmillett
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
> 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?

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fleitz
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?

~~~
kevingadd
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?

~~~
fleitz
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)

~~~
hga
Ignoring for the moment how totally insane our legal system is, I think it's
very debatable it's the right tool to deal with side effects.

The thing is, we _know_ there are going to be side effects, some severe, some
fatal. The government licenses these vaccines knowing, statistically, that X
number of people will get sick, Y crippled, Z killed. But it does this because
the alternative is far worse. So as long as it's not stingy, it makes sense
for it to run a system (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_court>) to pay
out to those families affected, rather than the capricious legal system that
won't compensate a lot of people.

As I've noted elsewhere, expose manufacturers to unlimited liability and we
eventually won't have any left. We were in fact almost there when the
compensation system was changed.

Also, _you_ may not be talking about "crazy autism stuff", but lawyers
certainly were and would be if set loose again.

------
eip
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.

~~~
jlgreco
Now _that_ is what I would call a depraved indifference to human life.

~~~
eip
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.

~~~
swombat
Off with you and your conspiration-theory articles. We don't need you here.

------
tassl
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?

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dnautics
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.

~~~
hga
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.

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

~~~
hga
I don't think bacteria and viri care about such differences.

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

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lignuist
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.

~~~
btilly
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
> 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...](http://criminal.findlaw.com/criminal-charges/second-degree-
murder-overview.html)

~~~
btilly
I think that "depraved indifference to the risk to human life" is a hard
standard to meet when the person who didn't vaccinate honestly believed that
the vaccine posed a larger risk to their child than their unvaccinated child
posed to everyone else.

Compare to [http://criminal.findlaw.com/criminal-charges/involuntary-
man...](http://criminal.findlaw.com/criminal-charges/involuntary-manslaughter-
overview.html) where the equivalent is "The act either was inherently
dangerous to others or done with reckless disregard for human life." The
"inherently dangerous to others" standard is much, much easier to prove. And
it is easy to prove regardless of the mistaken beliefs of the (ir)responsible
parent.

~~~
jlgreco
In the general case yes, I think you are right.

It is however fairly easy to conceive of scenarios where an individuals
inability to understand risks posed by their actions becomes very blurred with
a _refusal_ to understand the risks.

Typhoid Mary for example was informed numerous times that she was posing a
risk and the fact that they were able to re-find her after she changed her
name by following her carnage should have been proof enough to her that they
were probably right. I think you could make a reasonable case that Typhoid
Mary had a depraved indifference to the risk to human life, even though she
claimed to not believe the doctors.

Edit: If you understand herd immunity and decide that you do not care (such as
eip here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5802206>) then you surely have
a depraved indifference to human life. Moreso even than Typhoid Mary could be
said to have.

~~~
btilly
For Typhoid Mary, yes. But for most of the cases, you'd have a much harder
standard to meet.

Here is an interesting problem. Suppose that we trace a disease through 5
unvaccinated children from the one who picked it up in a foreign country, to
the one who passed it on to the baby who died. Who is liable? All 5? The one
who passed it on? The one who went to a foreign country while unvaccinated?

~~~
jlgreco
All those who reasonably had the opportunity to provide their child with a
recommended (recommended by _who_ could be debated. I would throw out the CDC
as a first suggestion) vaccine that had the possibility of preventing the
outbreak, but chose not to.

I think it would be better to tax or fine those who chose to abstain from
vaccinating their children than to wait until an incident occurs and try to
sue people. Much easier, and it does a better job of driving home the point
that by refusing to vaccinate your child you are damaging herd immunity, not
just potentially killing particular people.

------
gwgarry
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?

~~~
breadbox
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.

~~~
gwgarry
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.

~~~
ubernostrum
Government-enforced mandatory vaccination is what really made inroads into
smallpox, a disease which is now eradicated.

Respecting the "diversity" of opinions on the issue would have achieved the
opposite.

