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?
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.