Canada just lost its measles-free status. So here’s the question…
If an unvaccinated child spreads measles to someone else’s kid, why shouldn’t the parents be liable in small-claims court?
I’m not talking about criminal charges, just basic responsibility. If your choice creates the risk you should have to prove you weren’t the reason someone else’s child got sick.
Is that unreasonable?
No, we are boosting our immunity.
We don’t see natural immunity spike when there are less people taking the vaccine. Which is why Canada is no longer measles free.
The circumstance of dying from a disease due to biological weakness has a suppressive affect on phenotypes which don’t provide an immune system capable of fighting the disease. This is basic.
I am not making the argument that we are destroying species immunity to any particular disease by getting vaccines, which is clearly false. When you get vaccines or get a disease, the result is some degree of immunity to that specific disease (or some degree of immunity or maiming or death, in the case of getting disease).
Rather, bolstering the immune system with vaccines is a crutch that, while it may be the best option for an individual to choose, does still permit phenotypes which cannot handle the disease to be passed to offspring.
Obviously, this is a slow process. But also, just as obviously, someone who chooses not to vaccinate and thereby dies from a disease would have, otherwise, potentially passed that weakness on to their children.
this isn’t bullshit or a niche theory. It’s basic evolution, but in an area that is hard for some people to accept because they don’t like it, and want to distance themselves from death, and feel like they are outside of the realm of natural necessity, or because they just can’t conceive of biological robustness being that important, or being truly subject to any kind of degradation. But that is a failing to see the scope of the necessity to sustain our genetic robustness - not enforced by some creepy nazi idea is what’s “perfect”, through eugenics, but through sovereign choice.
And yes, making vaccines available does benefit the species as a whole, because we increase the ways we can fight disease. But those who fight a disease naturally, and actual actually accept the consequences of that, are exercising their individual rights in a way that is also beneficial to the species, by reducing the instances of problematic phenotypes, and (hopefully) breeding if they survive.
IMO vaccine and evolutionary biology is very nuanced, and depends a lot on the individual genetics, type of pathogen, type of vaccine, etc. The net result from people dying off might be moot, and could even be harmful.
Immune science is often taught as an arms race, but that model tends to imply that both sides are constantly gaining beneficial traits. That’s true in some cases, like the fever response, which is a beneficial trait we gained at some point, and it continues to be useful.
Meanwhile, other phenotypes are very context dependent for whether they are helpful or harmful. HLA (human leukocyte antigen) for example, that’s how our T-cells identify between ‘self’ and ‘foreign’ particles. We rely on the tremendous diversity of HLA alleles in the human population in order to survive new diseases. Someone’s HLA alleles can be a poor match for a current disease, but very helpful for a future disease. Having them die off now would be a bad thing. Similarly, someone with an HLA combination that makes them more effective against a current disease, may be ineffective against a future disease. Another simpler one is the ABO blood types, where different pathogens (ex. malaria, cholera, smallpox) are better/worse at infecting cells with certain blood types, evidenced by the different proportions of blood types in regions endemic to such diseases.
Evolution is messy, and the evolution of the immune system is messier still. Even if we only look at it from a simplified Darwinian evolution perspective, having genetic diversity might be more important than any shedding of ‘weaker’ alleles from people dying off because their natural immunity couldn’t handle a particular infection.
I appreciate this response, and agree with much of it.
There’s some grey-area stuff:
True, but in theory, a good chunk of people would be taking vaccines - and so while there’s a selective pressure (mostly on those willing to undergo it), overall diversity would be maintained.
and, as an aside – alas, simplified is the domain and utility of science. It’s how we grasp anything natural at all.
…there are some tidbits I do disagree with, though. mainly:
While that would be a bad thing, it’s not like there’s selective pressure against having the HLA alleles that would be good for a future disease - more, just that there’s selective pressure against not having one for the current disease. Let’s say that the theoretical future-disease-preventing HLA alleles are randomly distributed, and that the incidence of death from a current disease roughly matches the incidence of death from car accidents, then the car accidents have just as much of a deleterious affect on the future as the current disease does. That’s like the Christian argument “The baby you’re about to abort could be the one that comes up with the cure for cancer.” …sure, but it could by Hitler 3.0, too.
The very multifaceted complexity that goes into the entire process of how animals (including us) handle disease has a couple knowable facets:
It works, generally speaking, over the long term, and often enough in the short term
we have added new means of gaining immunity, but with that we also reduce selective pressures on the species, not just for disease-specific immune responses, but any other traits (including but not limited to rapidity of immune response) that impact the capacity to handle and survive a disease
it is clearly selection pressure that has led to effective immune systems in the first place
but even aside from that, the following are my opinions, and though I’m open to the possibility, I doubt they’ll change today:
edit: btw, thanks for the genuine civil discourse, I enjoy it.