Politicizing this was one of the greatest electoral innovations of all time.
Somebody realized that calling people ignorant and telling them they had to do something pissed people off and lionized them. So they took the vaccine issue and made it political. They knew the "nerdy folks" would just continue pushing and prodding, and that would continue to rile up the other side's voters.
The "institutions" (which are easy to throw shade at) telling folks they had to comply or lose work - that's a cause to fight. There's much more energy in this than in opposing it, and opposition just inflames the other side even further.
Genius political move.
The correct response to a vaccine critic isn't to call them stupid or tell them they must get a vaccine or lose their job. The correct response is, "you do you, but the supply runs out next week".
Hank Green had a nice video essay about this (I'll try to find the link).
I grew up in the South. These are reasonable folks, and they can be reached, but it's being approached the wrong way. The current methodology is only making it worse.
This is like a viral "meme" that actually causes harm. And the more you try to get rid of it, the deeper it digs. You have to try a new approach. The current one -- and it feels so righteous to call them out -- does the exact opposite of what you want.
For one thing, it feels just as temptingly righteous and insulting to treat your opponents as overgrown toddlers with oppositional defiant disorder as it does to call them stupid. Arguably it's worse, since the implication in calling them stupid is that you would like them to be less stupid and fully expect they are capable of doing so, but the implication in treating them like toddlers is that you expect them to continue to act like toddlers and will adjust your behavior accordingly to get them to eat their vegetables.
Maybe more importantly though, it feels like a huge trap. Far from defusing an effective political strategy, accepting that you are responsible for choices and behavior of others gives them endless license to do bad things free from any feeling of personal responsibility that should come with those actions in a civilized society. Even if you can win on vaccines, the precedent set with that approach is less than ideal.
> "you do you, but the supply runs out next week".
What's the supply referring to here? Not able to follow what this is saying.
What is your view when they don't extend the same courtesy? We convince them to vaccinate to protect those who cannot be vaccinated, however they still dig their heels in the "got mine, forget you" mentality until it affects them personally? (Abortion rights, school lunches, walkable neighborhoods, food shelters and donation centers)
Abortion was legal until it became a political issue in the 1800s.
Churches used to be food banks in the 80's, then "welfare" became political.
People got vaccinated until it became a political issue in the 2020s. Many of the elder anti-vaxxers remember getting vaccinated for Polio and how scary that was.
One of the central tenets of the New Deal was that, in a pluralistic society, under disestablishmentarianism, it was unfair to expect families to rely on charity from religious groups where they didn't subscribe to their creeds and didn't share their faith or beliefs. If you accepted charity from, e.g. the Baptists, would you find yourself indebted to them, spiritually?
That is a large reason why secular welfare states became so important and popular with voters. Because if the State managed the welfare, the purse strings, the distribution, and the need-based awards, nobody needed to worry about whose church was doling out the food, clothing, or housing.
Interestingly, though, through a number of turns, the State is actually funding faith-based charities now to distribute all that food, clothing, and shelter. Or some/most of it. Obviously, secular housing authorities are handling Section 8 Vouchers, but a lot of shelters are religious facilities and they're run by church volunteers. Food banks, funded by the USDA, may be non-profits, or churches, synagogues, or community colleges. But they're all receiving USDA funding, and they all follow USDA policies to distribute that same food and assistance.
For millennia there had been instructions and recipes for making abortifacient concoctions, to good or bad effect. Many of them are highly toxic to the mother herself. So many abortion-minded women faced the proposition of harming themselves to get at their unborn children.
And that is the premise of "legalizing" it: that it can be made "safe" and so they wouldn't need to use a coat-hanger in a back-alley "anymore" (although practically nobody did such things.)
And abortion was probably still used by older women too: the risk decrease with each child, but increase with age.
If men were giving birth, abortion would be "obviously a choice". (I am a man and a father)
Not according to Dobbs, which goes into this extensively.
"At common law, abortion was criminal in at least some stages of pregnancy and was regarded as unlawful and could have very serious consequences at all stages. American law followed the common law until a wave of statutory restrictions in the 1800s expanded criminal liability for abortions. By the time of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, three-quarters of the States had made abortion a crime at any stage of pregnancy, and the remaining States would soon follow."
So you’re correct that, for vaccine proponents, framing this issue properly is key. If you frame it in terms of mandates and dismiss optionality out of hand, it’s a lay-up for right-wing Tik Tok to come back with “they’re more left wing than Sweden.” (Disclosure: Despite being a right winger, I would be fine with holding people down and vaccinating them.)
Of course there’s relevant differences. Swedes are culturally orderly and most Americans aren’t. Sweden has a 97% vaccination rate even with voluntary programs. But you have to confront that issue head on and deal with it.
I think it's a bit more complex than that. How do you frame an issue properly when a small group of people are out to discredit you based on everything from 'deep state' to 'bible' and even the 'aliens'? And while these people are swayed more by emotions than cold hard data (which is not entirely unusual), you also get to hear some of them say 'I do my own research' to an experienced doctor who's trying calmly and respectfully to change their mind.
Let me contrast that with my place. My place isn't as developed as the US or Sweden. But people were keen to oblige when a lock down was declared for covid, despite personal losses, because the rich people didn't get richer on the backs of their misery. The covid vaccines we had here weren't as effective as the mRNA vaccines of the west, and also had the rare blood clotting problem (VITT) that killed a few people. Despite that, people were thronging the health centers when the vaccine came out and the critical mass was soon reached to lift the lock down. People knew the dangers and were making educated tradeoffs. They were online talking about the droplet transmission mode, R0, myocarditis, etc. Doctors didn't have to plead like in the US. We don't have childhood vaccine mandates because parents make it a point to ask the pediatrician about it and the associated risks and do it diligently. We grew up learning the horrors of smallpox, polio, Hansen's disease, tuberculosis, etc. Nobody is keen to take them on again.
The real problem in the US isn't right wing or left wing politics. It's the anti-intellectual culture. Honestly, I haven't seen as much skepticism against the sciences anywhere else. Sure, people sometimes say stupid stuff in underdeveloped places. But rarely does anybody reject science outright like in the US. And very often, the US government is squarely responsible for it. How many times has the government taken the sides of the big industries and hung the people out to dry? (Big oil, big tobacco, telecom, big pharma, big agriculture, chemical producers, etc.) Wasn't there a case where a racial minority of a city was intentionally infected with syphilis and denied treatment for a sick experiment? This is how people turn anti-government, anti-establishment and even anarchist. And then the people find it difficult to believe anything the government stands for - including the genuine pro-public science institutions like the CDC or even NASA - to a level that some even have difficulty believing that the Earth is spherical (roughly). Heck! I was once asked by an American tourist if I believe that the US sent men to the moon, when I was a project engineer for a mid-heavy lift launcher!
You can see this effect even outside the US. The US used a vaccination drive in Abottabad, Pakistan to collect information about Osama Bin Laden. I'm not here to support the terrorist. But that action led to the people there distrusting and rejecting vaccines, leading to a Polio outbreak. Effing Polio that was nearly eradicated after decades of grueling global effort! Even people who has been to the US say that the government is a bit eccentric and overbearing with their science policies. The problems in the US is more cultural and pervasive than you think. It's self-defeating to think that it's a fringe phenomenon or that it's partisan. A simple reframing of the issue isn't going to solve that.
So far, this hasn’t been overturned by the courts. It’s been in place for a few years now.
What is needed here are laws making it a crime to conceal that you have or had a communicable disease, so infections can be tracked and fault determined.
Absolutely not. We tried this with HIV and it just incentivizes people to not seek treatment, and then they spread the disease more.
It is hysterical and illogical for people to make these accusations. Get real.
See also "negligent homicide".
Before we can answer that, we would have to define the risks.
For example, the polio vaccine has no logical basis for being mandatory in the US. The requirement of the polio in the US has no basis in science and it goes against the stated purpose of the recommendations as it does not weigh risks and benefits. Instead, it is an ideological stance. Polio has been eradicated from the US (except for cases caused by vaccines themselves) and most of the rest of the world. You could require it for travel to/from risky locations. We know that severe adverse affects vastly out number the cases of Polio in the US.
This just sounds like "It's working too well" to me. The cases of polio have dropped to near nothing because we have so many people vaccinated. We're left with a couple hundred bad effects over the sample size of the entire country.
It's not because we have so many people vaccinated. It's because we had so many people vaccinated when it existed. Polio has been eradicated from all but 2-3 countries due to past vaccination efforts. Just as Yellow Fever has been eradicated in the US and that vaccine is only required for travel to risky places.
Yes, because unvaccinated humans lack immunity. A single imported case could spread rapidly through an unvaccinated population.
I found this informative ECDC page: https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/poliomyelitis/facts
Quotes:
- Poliovirus can survive at room temperature for a few weeks in soil, sewage, and water
- It's highly infectious with sero-conversion rates of 90–100% among household contacts
- Factors like poor sanitation, high population density, and low vaccine coverage all fuel transmission
Yellow fever needs mosquitoes to spread and has animal reservoirs. Once you reduce/eliminate transmission in those reservoirs, the virus basically can't circulate even with low human vaccination coverage. For polio, humans are the only reservoir, and it spreads directly person-to-person. That's why you can't just rely on vaccinating travelers.
Plus, vaccine-derived polio (cVDPV) is actively circulating in Nigeria and Chad right now. In 2025 alone Nigeria reported 62 cVDPV2 cases. This happens when vaccination coverage drops low enough for the weakened vaccine virus itself to mutate and spread. So it's not just reintroduction risk, the virus is actively evolving in low-coverage areas.
If a huge cluster were to emerge, you'd need rapid mass vaccination campaigns to stop it. That's way riskier than maintaining routine childhood vaccination.
That's assuming there would be an imported case. Travel restrictions can solve that. That's how we handle other US eradicated diseases, such as yellow fever.
You'd still need mass vaccination campaigns because immunity wanes over decades. If it resurges, it will rip through the elderly, especially nursing homes.
Would I be right in saying your 'some of them' ~= 10?
And now, people who've never opened a history book can confidently claim they are useless, and that polio disappeared on its own so vaccines were never required, and are even harmful! Fuck that particular brand of ignorance.
He would be amazed at our current epidemic of anti-science stupidity.
If your “reasoning” relies upon the other people being “dumb” or “cruel” or <insert-your-invective>, you are almost certainly falling short of understanding why the controversy persists.
1. People who are ignorant 2. People who are using anti-vax propaganda for some kind of gain
In the US, category two have gone all-in on using category one to gain political power. The "health official" in this post is clearly in category two, and might be in category one as well, but he is absolutely deserving of invectives.
If you do value public health then this viewpoint can seem cruel. But if you think like my mom then vaccines might as well be a government-mandated forehead tattoo.
And your mom is pretty ignorant(oops, I said it again) if she thinks "her economy" isn't wrapped up in her neighbors economy, her towns economy, her states economy, her country's, economy, and the global economy.
He explicitly acknowledges that this will lead to more children getting tragic and preventable diseases, to be clear. There's no dispute about that. He's just decided that sacrificing those children is worth it for the sake of medical autonomy.
I do not see how either side can then say the government has a right to force people to do something to their bodies.
Vaccines are not mandatory in any country I know but most people have them bar hippies and conspiracy theorists.
I think its stupid not to have (most, at least) childhood vaccines but people should be free to be stupid.
You see it with all sorts of topics. For example, almost anything to do with the UK will result in someone going on about Brexit. The current US president is mentioned at the slightest excuse. Any kind of polarising issue, really.
"I don't want my kids to get vaccinated and I don't want your daughter to have sex."
It’s just like taxes.
Well, speaking of ignorance!
Vaccines are not perfectly safe. All medicine can harm, and vaccines are no exception. Mandating dozens of vaccines to billions of children is forcing parents, under threat of state-sponsored violence, to injure their children.
There are 10s of thousands of VAERS cases in the US per year. Now multiply that by 20 and we're in the ballpark for number of children youre so cavalierly arguing to force harm upon.
Now, there are diseases where vaccines make sense. However, the blanket statement "inject into your newborn whatever the government tells you" is pretty obviously stupid in my opinion; there are plenty of cases of known-toxins taking years to get removed from market with no corporate repercussions - the incentive structures arent perfect. See DDT, leaded gasoline, asbestos, Teflon, uranium mill tailings, cases too numerous to mention. However much you trust the government to do their best, there are agile corporations getting paid handsomely to outmaneuver them.
For my children, we make a disease-by-disease risk/reward determination and do a slower schedule once they're a little older.
I've also done something similar with my children. Make a determination for a specific vaccine and schedule. This is a combination of both weighing their health above public health and applying my particular circumstances (e.g. stay at home mom vs. daycare) to adjust the risks. They ended up getting most vaccines, just on a different schedule.
Hepatitis B is spread via bodily fluids, including blood. In this, Hepatitis B is particularly insidious: there is generally a large viral load in the blood relative to other diseases, so even microscopic amounts of blood are sufficient for infection, and the virus can remain active for up to a week on exposed objects.
Perhaps your children are different, but blood is a pretty common sight with most children.
Worse: when you contract Hepatitis B, it may become a lifelong infection.
Sadly, screening those people who have contact with your child is thwarted by the fact that roughly half of those infected don't realize it.
See: https://www.cdc.gov/hepatitis-b/about/index.html
See: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/hepatitis-b
See: https://www.stanfordchildrens.org/en/topic/default?id=hepati...
See: https://www.chop.edu/sites/default/files/vaccine-education-c...
See: https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2025/why-hepatitis-b-vaccinatio...
I think the burden of proof is on you (or the health authorities) to have some conclusive evidence based story here how them getting this vaccine is a net plus, or at least that not getting the vaccine is a high enough risk in the big picture. What I read online borders propaganda, it is just the natural reflex to defense the existing practices, there is no evidence that I have seen that has real world data comparing the risk that proves what needs to happen here. Because hard evidence is the enemy of bad policy.
Yeah absolutely. Another example, which is tangential since its not a vaccine but is a default medicine for some reason, is antibiotic eye ointment on literal hours-old infants. Im not concerned we have gonorrhea thanks, ill listen to your talks and sign your waiver.
Fwiw, the hep b recommendation just changed like a month ago :) sensibility wins out, sometimes eventually.
This was honestly the weirdest part of that whole post.
So after all that “not everything is safe”, it sounds like you … wait a little while and then do it anyway? Is it less risky because your kids are a little older?? This seems so unlikely to me.
Anyway, I think a lot of that post demonstrates a failure of an ability to have a dialog (radicalized positions don’t lead to understanding imo).
Not referring to a status quo, but to the implication of the parent, and yours after the fact, that we should consider mandating vaccines.
> deadly communicable disease
If you think this is the only thing on the US vaccination schedule, you should do a little research.
I dont know what youre talking about, I dont follow politics. And even if I did, I dont know what relevance that could have on our conversation.
> I'm not interested in engaging [...] I won't waste my time talking
Then I agree, commenting on a public forum is not the right place for you
> Rules are rules and violence is violence
Laws (not sure why you switched to taking about rules) are explicity - not implicitly - backed by state violence. Unsure where the confusion is.
Even for the laws which are "backed by" state violence in some deep theoretical sense, I think it's misleading to the point of nonsense to characterize them that way. When the government says "the speed limit on this stretch of the road is 65 miles per hour", they do not mean and the public does not understand them to mean "we will commit violence against anyone who drives 66 miles per hour". It would be ridiculous for driver who's stopped by police and gets a speeding ticket to claim that they've been subject to violence.
To me, it seems clear that this kind of equivocation is an attempt to minimize the actual ongoing campaign of literal state violence by the Trump regime. I'll take you at your word that you're not familiar with that campaign, but please remember that the concept of "state violence" is inherently political. Talking about it implies a position on the actual state and how it actually deploys violence, whether you intend to or not.
Are they OK to stockpile those viruses and culture trillions more, on an industrial scale, in every American state? What about in Venezuela? North Korea?
From the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, I would have thought, and hoped, public health is their priority.
Individual autonomy is for the politicians to decide on, isn't it?
Medical professionals advise on medical matters, politicians decide based on the societal implications.
Medical professionals aren't elected, and I don't want their personal politics (on individual autonomy or abortion or anything else) infecting their medical advice.
What it sounds like to me is politicians getting the advisors to do both jobs because the politicians want to put their hands in the air and say 'I'm just following the advice'. If the outcome is unpopular then the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices are the bad guys, not the politician(s).
Personally I don't think it needs to go that far, and it's a situation entirely preventable.
The reason we want people to get vaccinated is to stop people getting the diseases…
Nobody is scared of getting polio anymore and one person not getting vaccinated doesn't really change anything --> the fact that they're nonetheless making me get vaccinated must be because of government chips, lizardpeople, big pharma profits, etc etc.
More specific than Chesterton's fence or just history repeating itself.
https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/health-professionals-communities/c...
Should we ban alcohol?
While it's true that there are different externalities here (e.g. you're increasing other people's risk by not vaccinating and losing the herd effect) there are also externalities to alcohol consumption (e.g. drunken drivers).
The question is where does that line go between freedom and health factors and other externalities. We should be able to have this discussion without political tribalism.
What about smokers and second hand smoke?
Freedom is all well and good, but what about responsibility? Are you not (partially) responsible for keeping the community you live in safe?
In the US you were born into free and working society because those before you took responsibility to make it so: should you not do the same for the next generation? ((Re-)Introducing disease(s) brings back suffering and subjugation that are imposed on new generation.)
What about people who can’t get vaccines? The vaccinated help to protect them.
That being said, of course the net effects of this will be more disease, and internationally probably harsher Visa restrictions on Americans.
Good job guys, in the meantime I will check if ironlung.io or ironlung.ai are available to buy... I might have a business idea
I’m waiting for the next crazy denial, like that dinosaurs didn’t exist or that the earth is the center of the universe… just give it a few years
And being a choice often means you have to pay yourself to get it because it isn’t covered by health insurance.
So bad for poor people again
some snakeoil salesmen know they are pushing bunk, a frightful number actually believe in what they are peddling.
The right wing in America isn't trying to improve the population, they're grifting and hoping that 1. they won't face the same consequences as their supporters, because they're rich enough to be shielded, and 2. that they're going to die before society collapses from the havoc they unleash.
This is also true of, say climate change.
Polio is starting to slowly become a thing, so we will probably need to start producing more Iron Lungs if we follow the new flat-earth CDC.
Even the article proves these "advisors" have no clue on how vaccines work.
Where?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9577438/
There were other articles I have seen over the last few years talking about polio and the US.
Am I allowed, as a business owner, to pass on an antivax candidate? Am I, as a school administrator, permitted to keep an unvaccinated child from my school system?
Vaccines were always optional in the sense nobody ties you down and makes you take them, and certainly all requirements have exceptions for people with, i.e, immune system issues.