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?
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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.
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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.
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I’d love to see how much time and effort it’d take to convince chuds to approve another expense on socialized vaccines.
Naw gotta hit em in the pocketbooks.
I’m personally of the opinion that refusing to vaccinate your kids should not be a choice parents get to make. Just like how you can’t choose to starve your children, no matter how deeply and truly you believe that we can draw all our necessary sustenance from the air.
In Canada we have a legal concept called the “Duty of persons to provide necessaries.”
Here’s the relevant legal code:
215 (1) Every one is under a legal duty (a) as a parent, foster parent, guardian or head of a family, to provide necessaries of life for a child under the age of sixteen years;
https://www.criminalnotebook.ca/index.php/Failing_to_Provide_the_Necessaries_of_Life_(Offence)
I firmly believe that vaccinations should be deemed one of the “necessaries of life” under this article of the criminal code. Like food, water, clothing, shelter, etc. You shouldn’t have a choice in this matter. We shouldn’t even be talking about whether or not that choice harms someone else’s kid, because that’s actually beside the point. At a basic level, we as a society have already agreed that children’s right to be properly sheltered and cared for outweighs their parents rights to decide how they live. The idea that there should be an exception for vaccines - something that can mean the difference between life and death - is absolutely ridiculous.
Excuse me, I’m breath-tarian /s
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.
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Completely agree. I said more in my own comment, but if you’re interested, here’s the relevant criminal code that backs up what you’re saying; https://www.criminalnotebook.ca/index.php/Failing_to_Provide_the_Necessaries_of_Life_(Offence)
Failing to Provide the Necessaries of Life
I’m not fluent in legalese, but that seems about right, yes.
No, they should just not be allowed to prevent their children from being vaccinated.
I don’t believe people should be forced to do it, I think that they should be held liable tho.
Or their own. Lock them the fuck up.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We’re dangerously close to “it’s illegal to be 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.
Nah. It’s not concerning that otherwise intelligent people can’t figure out how to deal with their own lives without resorting to controlling others.
Anyone have tips on how to not get stabbed without forcing other people to stop stabbing?
No. You can reasonably take an action against someone that is the same degree of involvement they attempt to do to you. By someone stabbing you, or attempting to, they consent to the same degree of violence against them, by having taken direct action against you.
This is not the same as, for example, someone fleeing from attackers, and knocking on your door, thus potentially drawing the attention of the attackers to you. Of course, you’re free to deny the attackers or the victim entry.
So I can legally/morally stab someone who tried to stab me? How is that at all helpful? I don’t want to stab anyone.
How would this translate to the measles situation? If someone gives me measles, then I’m allowed to give them back measles? But they already have measles. That’s how they were able to transmit it. And I’ll still have gotten the disease. I want to maintain my health and not get infected in the first place.
Then don’t stab anyone, and prepare for what situations you run into where you know it’s possible to be stabbed, but won’t stab in return.
Yes. You can get measles from someone, and can give it to them. The fundamental bad actor is the disease itself, and we address that by getting immunity to it, one way or the other.
Get a vaccine. Nobody should every be able to take that right from you.
Are you an anti-vaxxer?
I’m absolutely for the rights of people to either have or refuse vaccines. Of course, in your mind, that probably just equates to being an anti-vaxxer. I get vaccines when it makes sense to me to do so, which doesn’t include all vaccines.
To partake in society you have to accept societal contracts. One such contract is to not be a dick to others. If you don’t vaccinate yourself against certain things, you are liable for spreading the disease. And thus you are being a dick. And thus you break the contract.
If you excuse yourself from society going forward though, I see no problem with your stance.
I reject societal contracts that do not support individual and body sovereignty. Of course, you can do with that as you will, because… …well… …sovereignty. Just know that if you take body sovereignty from people in one area, you empower the government to make decisions about your body, as well.
…and as we all have seen, the benevolence of the government is largely dependent on what party is in power, and what societal dynamics are in play. it’s… …unreliable, at best.
I literally called it, the day Democrats started pushing forced vaccinations, that the Republicans would go for reversal of abortion law. …and they fucking did, and they fucking succeeded in many ways, and that is direct consequence of permitting the government to violate body sovereignty, even when the voiced arguments do not pertain to it.
So, you can have your contiguous society, with forced social contracts rather than ones people actually are willing to agree to. …and you’ll also have the consequences, whether or not you can cognize how bad that will be right now.
Yeah, honestly you are an anti-vaxxer if your personal feelings (or crackpot theories) negatively affect your perception of vaccine science even slightly. What you’re expressing here is an idea that has killed countless people and it will only get worse. Everyone should thank you for bringing back measles though, because your valiant freedom fighting “helped” us in that way.
Crackpot theories… …like… … how evolution works? …or how regressive evolution works?
Diseases have killed countless people, and we have multiple vectors (and should have multiple vectors) for addressing them.
We have technology, as in vaccines. This is a good thing.
We have social behaviors including social pressure (which is, unfortunately, often compulsive and not well-aimed by the people that exercise it, but such is life).
We have individual immunity, and the direct biological pressure for health and general genetic robustness, which is also a good thing, even though it kills some of us.
the cool thing is, we’re now at a point where there are lots of anti-vaxxers who are totally willing to throw their lives away for the benefit of the species. …and, their surviving genetic lines and the rest of the species, as their children interbreed with the rest of humanity, will be better off for it. That’s true, whether you like it or not. It’s also true that forcing vaccination rather than simply providing and incentivizing vaccination is a terribly, terribly flawed strategy which causes far more issues than it fixes.
I understand that you’re making social-pressure arguments, and that they are valid in the context you’re in. But they aren’t the end-all be-all, and they’re not fundamentally scientific (or even logical) just because you’re trying to support science by using them.
I also know this whole conversation brings up tons of uncomfortable topics, for which I’ll probably get yelled at. I just don’t care, because being more forceful about an argument, or getting the last word, really has no bearing on the truth of that word.
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.
Should they, yes, will they, not in the west.
Felony murder, in my opinion.
Even if the child dies, withholding a vaccine would have to be made illegal. You need to be committing a felony first, someone dies, then get charged with felony murder.
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.
If it can be proven. Yes. But there are too many variables to be able to prove it usually.
Antibodies?
I’m assuming you mean that the kid that wasn’t vaccinated wouldn’t have antibodies in his system? But how do you tie that to “This is definitely the kid that gave the measles to my child”.
Could have been that kid in his class that is unvaccinated. It could have been a kid he hung out with on the playground, or a kid he walked past in a mall.
There’s no way to prove beyond reasonable doubt that just because the kid in his class wasn’t vaxxed, that he was necessarily the specific vector for your child to get measles. It’s impossible. To many variables.
Yes.
If the other kid is vaccinated, shouldn’t they stay healthy instead?
There are a few considerations to make regarding the thought process of “if the other kid is vaccinated, then they should stay healthy,” even when exposed to illnesses that they are vaccinated for.
(1) Vaccines are not 100% effective. In the case of the Measles vaccine it is estimated to be 93-97% effective – this is a very effective vaccine. So, if someone is vaccinated, then yes, they likely will stay healthy even if they are exposed to a case of the Measles.
(2) Not everyone can be vaccinated for medical reasons whether it is due to allergies to something in the vaccine or another medical issue. So, these people are forced to rely on what is called herd immunity (everyone who can be vaccinated around them is vaccinated, so the virus or bacteria will not be around to infect the unvaccinated person). Unfortunately, for herd immunity to work specifically for the Measles scientists believe that 95% of the population needs to be immune to stop its spread. This is because the Measles is extremely spreads extremely easily – about 90% of people who are not immune to Measles will become ill when they are exposed to the Measles.
(3) The last point that I will make is that if a pathogen (virus or bacteria) is allowed to circulate in the population due to low vaccine uptake, then there is a stronger likelihood that the pathogen will mutate (change) to get around the protection of the vaccine. Then nobody is protected and scientists get the fun of trying to create a new vaccine for the mutated version.
Take what I say here with a grain of salt since I am not an immunologist, physician, or scientist. I just like to know the pros and cons of vaccines as well as how best to protect myself, my family, and my friends from preventable illnesses. I learned a lot of this information by talking to my doctor, reading from medical journals (Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, Nature Immunology, etc.), and also checking major medical center internet sites for information such as Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins, Mayo Clinic, MassGeneral, etc. There is a lot of excellent information to be had from our scientific community to help make an informed choice - much of what I located was open and free to the public to read.
Thanks, appreciate the write-up! I’m just wondering that myself, my question wasn’t meant as an anti-vax post.
Not all vaccines are 100% effective, and not everyone is able to get a vaccine (such as immune suppressed or immune compromised).
Even if the vaccine is only partially effective, it will reduce the viral load and speed up recovery time, which is very effective at reducing the number of people that a vaccinated person can spread their illness to.
To prevent an outbreak, an infected person must spread their disease to an average of less than 1 person. Having more people vaccinated is the easiest way to reduce this number.
An immune suppressed person can still be protected by having a majority of people vaccinated, and therefore unlikely to spread a disease to a person who interacts with them.
That makes sense, thanks for explaining! I do agree that vaccines are the best way to contain a virus. I was just wondering this, how a unvaccinated person could pose harm to others, vaccinated or not. But yeah, it’s better to not take that risk.
To put it simply, pathogens are like roach infestations. You can do everything in your power to keep your apartment clean and tidy and bug free, but if your neighbour’s apartment is a spawning ground for the little shits, sooner or later they’re going to make their way in no matter what you do.
It takes everyone, working together, to make us all safe from deadly diseases. That’s how herd immunity works.
