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?
Parents who don’t vaccinate their children without a good medical reason should be treated as any other parent who intentionally abuses, harms, mistreats, or abandons their children, simple as that.
If they harm other people on top of that, then that should probably count as attempted murder plus aggravated assault and battery, or some equivalent.
It’s a shame that rampant wilful idiocy with intent to cause harm and mayhem isn’t a criminal offence, though, because they should also be charged with that.
You know, we eliminated smallpox in the wild, and mostly eliminated polio, by giving vaccines. Fuck these moronic idiotic parents not vaxxing their kiddos. It ABSOLUTELY should count as child abuse to not vax your kid.
Offering a generous tax credit for proof of vaccination ought to resolve the problem easily enough, given the simple-minded and grift-oriented nature of your average antivaxxer.
I wonder if the numbers could back that up? Like the cost of treatment of an unvaccinated child getting a preventable disease, versus a vaccinated child getting the same disease? Also, the number of children in each group? No vaccine is 100% after all.
There could be an actual cost to the healthcare system for choosing to not vaccinate. If that’s the case, creating an incentive like a tax credit for vaccinating could be an effective way of reducing cost overall.
I’d like to see someone study this, if they haven’t already.
It seems so fundamental to the equation “how much of a village it should take”. To me, that’s the only hard metric that matters (not on an individual level, by any means, but averaged out, over the long term trend).
What is the cost to each of us as individuals so that we may all, on average, enjoy a better quality of life than we do today.
While I subscribe to that same kind of thinking, others will not. They will see it as being forced to share the rewards of their hard work with others who, in their opinion, didn’t work as hard. Put another way, they see themselves as having taken on the responsibility of caring and providing for themselves, and policies like that would force them to also care for someone else who isn’t meeting that responsibility.
It’s a simple take, but not completely wrong. There will be people who will take advantage of others generosity, shirking the responsibility to care and provide for themselves, and keep demanding more. And there’s also the reality of government waste and corruption siphoning that “hard work” away.
It ignores the many realities out there, like how not everyone gets the same starting point in life and not everyone has the same abilities. But its simplicity is its strength. It explains things in a way that is easy to understand. I worked hard, they didn’t. I didn’t get handouts when I was struggling, so why should they.
This is why I think the way to convince these people to do the right thing is to reward those who do vaccinate with a tax credit or payout. It makes it fair across the board, and makes those who still choose not to vaccinate understand the cost of that choice. Or at least see that there is a cost to the choice.
A study, that could give a hard number of the average cost per patient, broken down by vaccinated and unvaccinated, could go a long way to proving the point. The recent measles outbreak would be a great place to start.
Naw gotta hit em in the pocketbooks.
I’d love to see how much time and effort it’d take to convince chuds to approve another expense on socialized vaccines.
I’d argue that parents should be liable to the state, not the victim or their family. This is a societal issue, and civil liability won’t fix it.
Liable to the state but not your fellow citizen? I just don’t see it that way.
Otherwise we go the American route and end up fighting amongst ourselves.
If it’s between the parents and the victim, then our government has failed us.
We are not litigious as Canadians, but maybe we should be in this aspect.
Where do you draw the line ?
Also how do you sue/prove the 4th grader’s parents when a kindergartner catches measles. Maybe it was the kid down the street who spread it.
Probably better to strip them of their free Heath care and bill them for extra costs.
Actuaries love sorting out probable numbers by statistical groups
It’s not an unreasonable idea. The parents should absolutely be held liable.
Exact responsibility would be virtually impossible to prove, though. Even a lawyer who graduated at the bottom of their class from a terrible law school could easily defend the accused parents.
I don’t disagree with this mindset, but I do want to say that it should be on the plaintiff to prove your child caused the problem rather than the defendant to prove they did not. Proving a negative is damn near impossible in court.
I don’t disagree with this mindset, but I do want to say that it should be on the plaintiff to prove your child caused the problem rather than the defendant to prove they did not. Proving a negative is damn near impossible in court.
If your choices raise everyone else’s risk, it’s fair that you carry some of the burden. Courts deal in probability every day.
Honestly, I’d settle for disclosure, especially now that they’re removing school requirements in some states. It would be worth it to me to know which kids/ parents to keep my kids away from.
Agreed - it’s pretty unlikely that you’d be able to prove something like that.
I suppose you could try to apply precedents surrounding HIV disclosure, but I think it’d be a tough sell.
Edit: And to be clear, even in that situation, we’re talking about disclosure, not actual treatment-related choices.
Liable for what? Medical expenses, funeral costs? Expected life earnings? What about the homeschool/tutoring expenses of immunocompromised kids that didn’t catch measles because the were withdrawn from school due to fear of an outbreak. I’m not trying to throw out straw men to muddy the water, but where do you draw the line between someone’s actions and their consequences.
I’m not talking about criminal charges, just basic responsibility.
Maybe we should be. There are consequences to reckless driving and drunk driving independent of whether you actually harm someone because this actions are inherently dangerous to others.
Im not a judge.
Yes.
How are you going to deal with pesky things like religious freedoms and the Mennonites/similar cults?
They are still free to practice their religion.
And if vaccinations are against their religion? I’m not siding with them btw just curious how other people want to handle cult members in regards to holding them liable.
Fun fact: ancient religious texts don’t have shit to say about modern medical practices.
I still think they should be held liable, this is a preventable disease.
This right here, there’s nothing preventing the religion from being followed. And being in a religion doesn’t make you not responsible for your actions.
I doubt they’d see it that way and pull out the ol’ persecution complex but I agree with you guys. They can quarantine at least.
“Religious freedom” doesn’t give people the right to endanger public health.
If they choose to not vaccinate their child, fine. But they shouldn’t then expose other people to their children’s infections.
It gets messier when they are communicable before symptoms are showing. But if my Sally and your Bobby were at a party with 10 other kids, and the next day bobby is showing symtoms, and then a week later a binch of kids at the party are as well, then they should be held responsible.
Especially if they had reason to believe Bobby had been exposed to it days prior.
Make your choices, but if your religious choices are that important to you, then account for how that impacts other choices you make, and don’t put other people at risk.
Quarrentine - No public schools or markets, or public places if there is an outbreak and unvaccinated.
Ignore them when they harm society. They don’t get the freedom to commit murder and they shouldn’t get the freedom to not follow public health requirement just because they have some mumbo jumbo excuse.
Gonna show my age here and I’m not from the USA, but I remember in the 80s the doctors and nurses would come to the school one day, we’d all have to line up, and we all got vaccinated with something. Pretty sure there was no parental consent involved.
We’ve gotten a bit too soft on some things.
Religious freedom can go suck a dick when it harms other people.
According to the Church of the JustPulledANewReligionOutOfMyAss, our Chief Papa Ghost said I need to break your kneecaps then push you onto a busy highway: your sacrifice is nothing personal, but if I don’t do it, I’ll spend eternity being spanked by fire goats. Doesn’t make sense to me either, but Chief Papa Ghost works in mysterious ways, so I don’t have a choice, you see? It’s my religion!
…except if I actually tried that, I’d spend the rest of my life in prison, cuz even religious freedom doesn’t give me the right to kill people ‘because God’.
At least not directly: I can still kill you without consequence by spreading a completely avoidable pathogen to you, but giving that scenario the “wtf?!” treatment is pretty much why OP made this thread, lol.
Now if you’ll excuse me, Chief Papa Ghost had a kid out of wedlock with a lower-dimensional being, and it just so happens that he’s made of BBQ twist Fritos and Rootbeer, so I’m gonna go commune.
We’re dangerously close to “it’s illegal to be contagious”.
If there is no disease there is no contagious.
this is the disturbing reality of the current attitude. People have no idea how important body sovereignty is.
The most disturbing thing about reality is that we have morons opting their children and neighbors into preventable diseases because of absurd lies they read on Facebook.
I think most people are ok with you choosing to not vaccinate. The problem is when you choose to inflict that decision on others.
Not vaccinating and not isolating yourself is violating everyone else’s body sovereignty.
I don’t care if you host diseases. I absolutely do care about you spreading them.
Except that we are also actively destroying species immunity and replacing that with a different layer of existence - technology.
While I appreciate that vaccines exist, those who choose not to take them are (wheher selfishly, selflessly, intelligently, or srupidly) actively maintaining species genetic integrity by volunteering to die or be severely hinderedif they can’t handle the disease biologically without significant technological intrusion.
Those who force others, force others. The first apparent violation of sovereignty is the virus affecting a human. We are all susceptible to that. The next is:
- either another person definitely violating someone’s body sovereignty by requiring them to take a vaccine
- or someone possibly violating someone’s body sovereignty by being infected.
Fortunately, for most circumstances, there’s a way to protect oneself against the latter: Get yourself a vaccine. I do, in some cases. But I sure as hell respect the sacrifice that others, wittingly or not, make by not getting it.
It opens some weird ideas to the game. If you are unvaccinated, yet previously had the illness and recovered, do you need a vaccine. What if you’ve been vaccinated and still spread it. What if you can’t have the vaccines because if of health conditions. Anger does not fix the problem. We need a compromise, not a rule.
Kids shouldn’t be getting measles in the first place. No measles, no problems you described. No anger here.
I mean, from a simple enforcement perspective “prove that you’re vaxxed” runs into the same problem as “prove that you’re a legal resident”.
Access to health care, access to documentation of that health care, and the ability to produce it on demand all require certain amenities that marginalized people don’t have. It’s a rule that inevitably penalizes people for being poor.
Shy of getting people chipped and slotting your medical records into the same system that we use for criminal enforcement, the folks enforcing the laws will default to the assumption that you’re at fault until you can prove otherwise.
