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Excellent comment. One thing I'd like to add is that opting out of vaccination is, to an extent, mooching off the commons.
Herd immunity doesn't work, if parents look at the existing vaccination rates, reasons that their kids will be fine without vaccination as "everyone else" does it, and thus defects.
Yes, it is absolutely being a freeloader, and that's one reason why I have opted out for my own children. I don't think enough other people have bought in to the common good, and so I don't see any reason to subject my children to autoimmune disease for some supposed public good that I see constantly denigrated by others. Another casualty of lowering the trust of society. I don't think it's worth it, but that trade has already been made without anyone asking me.
My kid had very bad eczema due to the oral rotavirus vaccine, and after that I simply said no thank you.
This comment is a travesty. If it wasn't clear, it is the majority of parents opting-in for scheduled vaccinations that's what creates the commons for you to free-ride off.
Even in a purely disinterested cost-benefit analysis, the odds of your child getting an autoimmune disease from vaccines is so low that the general benefit of them getting sick less often outweighs it. The number of people avoiding vaccination isn't at the point where you're benefiting from opting out, or pointing to others doing so as an excuse. The majority of vaccines are net positive in expectation, regardless of what others do.
Meta-rationality is a hard art to practice. You point to a minority of people hitting defect to defect just as hard.
It was very clear, and I know about the free rider problem from undergraduate economics. I am actively choosing to be a free rider, and relying on others to do what I am choosing not to. That's what free rider means. Other people are paying, I'm choosing not to.
I'm doing that because I am an individual, not a herd animal, and the things I do must actually benefit me in order for me to do them. I have no shepherd who owns me and is responsible for the herd to which I belong. There exists the possibility of a world where I do things for others altruistically, but that world is not this one, and the conditions for such a world are far from being met.
Defect is the rational response to defection, and tit for tat wins iterated prisoner's dilemmas.
I don't trust your calculations, mostly because I don't fear the diseases or believe in their prevalence. I see the risks as miniscule, but deliberately overblown in order to create a far response and enforce compliance. There is no guarantee I even encounter measles or hepatitis or haemophilic influenza b, but if I take the vaccine there is a 100% exposure rate to the contents of the shot.
Furthermore, my children can simply get the shots later in life, when they are grown and have a much larger body mass with which to accommodate, after development has been mostly completed.
The eczema finally went away, and there's no way to know the counterfactual, but I think if we were on schedule I'd still be seeing rashes all over the back and legs and ankles.
You can't trust what I haven't presented. I could do so, and I strongly expect to be correct, but I already do enough trawling of medical literature when I'm being paid for it.
It's your child, and I have some respect for your right to make decisions on their behalf, even if I think they're bad decisions.
My man, you're going from wrong to confused. There's good reason why you don't see doctors or nurses pull out dose calculators to account for body weight when giving every vaccine I can think of it. It's because it doesn't matter. If little Tommy is 4'6 and 35 kilos or 4'9 and 45 makes next to no difference, and this holds true once you're past the size of a premature infant on death's door, going to a land whale who needs a mobility scooter. Vaccines aren't like paracetamol, the dose-response curves are VERY different when it's the immune system we're talking about. Someone with a peanut allergy isn't twice as likely to die if you give them two peanuts versus one.
You're not doing a good job at probabilistic reasoning, but an eczematous rash is a minor vaccine reaction, and of very little consequence. If it was life threatening, I presume you'd have pointed that out, and even then, you'd be better off consulting your pediatrician about whether they could narrow it down to a particular constituent of the two common rotavirus vaccines in the States (fetal bovine serum or porcine circovirus, if I had to guess from looking at composition), and take precautions when administering future vaccines with similar compositions. Believe it or not, most doctors would be happy to answer those questions and offer reassurance if warranted, especially if you're paying them.
I suppose I am confused. Development is more important than body weight, but I'll concede the point rather than double down because of my misapprehension.
As for medical care, my child had a doctor, then she moved, and now we have a RN. As for calculations, of course you haven't presented any, but I have done my own sanity check, and I'm satisfied with my numbers.
To show my work I found this:
So, without any vaccine, we're talking 500 deaths per year, in a country of roughly 180 million (1960 census numbers). This is one death every 360,000 people, or an annual risk of .000002778 per person per year.
Traffic fatalities are about 1 per 100,000,000 miles travelled (0.8 in ten-year old data). Cancelling out all the tens and hundreds and thousands, and assuming about 10,000 miles driven in a year, I'm left with driving as 25-30x more dangerous than measles before the vaccines.
That's using pre-vaccine numbers and pre-vaccine prevalence. Post-vaccine, as a free rider, it's much lower. This doesn't justify an active intervention. It's firmly in the realm of take-it-or-leave-it.
And again, when I do these numbers on what is supposed to be the most useful, safest, most justified vaccine, I'm left wanting. When I consider Hep B which they want to give children in the first hour post-birth despite no plausible method of transmission, I'm left with the conclusion that nobody is willing to discuss the actual risks, they just want to enforce compliance. That the CDC people really do view me as sheep, or cattle, as part of their herd.
Hep B can be transmitted from mother to child at birth, if not medically prevented.
That requires the mother to have it, which means if she doesn't, there's no plausible method of transmission.
Most mothers do not have it.
Yeah, we're down to 1000 mother-to-child transmissions a year in the US. The tradeoff here is between "a lot of babies get a vaccine they could have gotten later" vs "a few babies get a disease they can't get cured later".
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