Measles outbreak in Cheshire...

i think some of the ex-wombles were arguing it too, but then they also argued HIV doesn't cause AIDS, poppers and malnutrition do.

this is the crucial thing. this is not to judge those parents who didn't give their kids the MMR; any reasonable person could have thought there was a 'controversy' over its safety going by the media furore over what was a non-story. and if something might be unsafe, you want the best for your kid. however there was no evidence MMR was harmful, and even some that the triple jab is worse. as jack says framing something with massive collective implications as an individual decision is neither libertarian or communist imho, even though under capitalism 'collective' means 'state.'

assuming you mean 'owns', the relation of parent-child-society is a complex one with no single answer under any social relations. the idea that kids should owned by anyone is silly anyway, as i'm sure you agree. but some parents abuse their kids, which raises the thorny (and topical) question of societal intervention. arguably witholding medication for no reason, especially when it has consequences far beyond the health of the individual child, could be considered a form of abuse.

if this thread keeps on this track we might have to move it out of libcommunity...

ideally without a capitalist press peddling scares to sell papers and with a communist education system meaning a population who understands the importance of the critical evaluation of evidence, there's be no need to make vaccinations mandatory cos people wouldn't want their kids to get sick, so they'd get them vaccinated. however there is a good case for it if a significant minority refuse without any evidential basis, thus endangering others. but it's the age old collective-individual problem rearing it's head and there's no one satisfactory answer.

for vaccination, substitute... anything you like.

levels of risk are largely an empirical, evidential question. what risk we deem acceptable isn't, and with things that have collective implications, like vaccination or climate change, we have to come to a collective decision and act collectively, as a minority of people doing their own thing could fuck everyone else, which is neither libertarian or communist.

this is not in dispute, or the MMR scare would have been impossible.

yes, because my vision of a libertarian communist society involves people foregoing meaningful collective decision making in favour of my dictat? At present, i'm glad that the state compels people to have certain vaccines instead of leaving everyone up to their whims and letting preventable diseases become epidemic. obviously a well-informed population would be better, but that isn't the situation today, largely as a result of capitalist education and media.

in this case the risk of highly infectious preventable diseases with low mortality (~1/1000) but significant complications becoming endemic to the population.

i was reading the chapter on MMR in Ben Goldacre's book on the train this morning, and double-checked wikipedia before posting.

i would imagine the lack of deaths over the last 2 decades has more to to with low instances of infection due to herd immunity, herd immunity now compromised by a completely baseless media scare which has predictably led to an increase of cases, like the Cheshire outbreak.

are you saying there's no more evidence for the current outbreak of measles in cheshire than there is for Andrew Wakefield/the media's MMR-autism hoax?

the point isn't to take this or that authority figure's word as gospel (whether the media or a doctor or whoever) but to critically assess the evidence. in this case, a meta-analysis of all the published peer-reviewed studies conducted by the Cochrane Collaboration found no link between MMR and autism.

Of course the media are happy to now blame Wakefield for their own hoax and shift papers off actual measles ourtbreaks they helped to cause, but this isn't an argument against vaccination. in fact, you don't appear to be making one, only saying measles isn't very serious anyway. of course measles is a highly infectious disease, so even at a 1/1000 mortality rate there could be thousands of deaths in an unvaccinated population, plus many thousands more complications. even in a far from worst-case scenario this would overwhelm the public heath system, and so the mortality rate could rise.

What are you basing your skepticism towards MMR on? Andrew Wakefield's non-evidence; speculations of a causal link from loosely correlated anecdotes? The fact the government lie, so we should assume the opposite is true?

as Jack says, this is a silly strawman. i am in favour of compulsorary MMR vaccination (not that i make state policy, but i'd argue for it 'after the revolution' too), because an assessment of the evidence suggests the benefits of a protected population (herd immunity) outweigh the costs of a slightly higher incidence of minor side effects like irritability (and there's no evidence of the Autism link, which is the only reason we're talking about MMR not BCGs or whatever).

yes, and this is the ideal. probably impossible with capitalist eduction/media though. but you're employing a slippery slope fallacy here, a minority have no right to impose their will on a majority, and i'm surprised to see these consumer sovereignty type arguments from communists.