State-mandated administration of childhood vaccines is justified.

Introduction: I am impressed by Pro's reply. I have more time to work on my argument now, so hopefully this argument will be better than the last. Analysis of the Resolution: Pro didn't say that this was a public forum debate. I'm only pointing out that the debate shouldn't hinge on things that the resolution is vague about. Rebuttals: CA1: Solvency Vaccination improves quality of life. It doesn't follow that it should be mandatory. Yacht ownership improves quality of life, but mandating it would be a harmful misallocation of resources. Pro's case is founded on unwarranted fears. In the United States today, there are only two states in which vaccine exemption is not allowed for any reason other than medical necessity: West Virginia and Mississippi [1]. I also stated that even among parents who believe vaccines are risky, 86% still fully vaccinate their children [2]. The percentage of people who believe that vaccines are dangerous appears to be small [3], and the majority of people, who believe vaccines are safe, use them at an even higher rate (98%) [2]. There is no immediate danger of falling below Pro's 90-95% herd immunity threshold. The crux of this argument is the following: if herd immunity is achieved without mandates then Pro cannot claim it as an advantage. I will further repeat my argument that government involvement in vaccination is the cause of irrational fears of vaccines in the first place. See: crazy Alex Jones type conspiracy theorists. Providing vaccines through sources that people trust instead of through a legitimately frightening bureaucratic mechanism of total state power would alleviate much of these worries. By trying to force their beliefs on everyone else, the scientific community is creating resistance to an idea that people could otherwise be reasonably persuaded to accept. Turn Pro's graph: we don't have vaccine mandates today, but numerous diseases have been eradicated or significantly reduced. CA2: Community This whole argument is predicated on the assumption that herd immunity will be lost without mandatory vaccination. We have herd immunity and no mandatory vaccination, so that can't be true. In spite of what Pro (and seemingly every other person who I've debated this with) thinks, I fully understand the concept of herd immunity. My argument is that herd immunity is achieved through voluntary vaccination. Pro claims that the number of parents choosing to exempt their children is rising so rapidly that herd immunity will be lost in the future. She has no evidence for that prediction. At the current moment, herd immunity is secure, and the backlash from the scientific community against the anti-vaccination movement has been significant. It is just as likely that vaccine resistance will once again decline. I want to reply to a specific comment from Pro: “My opponent also claims that at different times, different vaccinations are needed. This is outrageous - a constant vaccination of children is vital to ensure the safety of the people from the disease returning.” I don't see how my claim is disputable. In areas where disease X is more common, more vaccination against it is necessary than in areas where it is less common. When swine flu broke out, it was necessary to vaccinate against it. Now it is mostly gone, and there is no more need to vaccinate against it. Pro's argument seems to lead to the conclusion that we need to be fully vaccinated against every disease, all the time. But it should be obvious to everyone why vaccinating everyone against hundreds of strains of the common cold all the time would be an uneconomic waste of resources that could help people in other ways. Once this fact is conceded, we can see how it extends to every disease: total immunization isn't necessary. Voluntary choice has so far proven more than sufficient to meet the minimum threshold. CA3: Money I have found Pro's reply here difficult to understand. On the issue of people who cannot afford vaccines: I argued that it is non-topical. They can be provided with money to purchase vaccines without being required to do so. My calculations were simple arithmetic. Pro said that vaccines will save $231 billion over the next ten years. Assume this could be increased 10% through a mandate (very generous because more than 90% of children are fully vaccinated). That's $23.1 billion, which we divide by ten to get the annual savings: $2.31 billion. Now divide by the number of people in the US (about 350 million) to get the savings per person: it comes out to $6.60, which I rounded to $5. It is reasonable to assume that it would cost more money than this to implement a vaccine mandate. It will require an increase in administrative and law enforcement costs, which are already notoriously high. In 2011, there were 75 million children in the US[4]. That means that Pro has only about $30 to spend per child, which is considerably less than the cost of a single vaccine. In order to have the possibility of saving money, Pro's program would have to vaccinate more children than there are unvaccinated children. You will not save money by mandating vaccines for the same reason you will not save money by mandating teeth brushing: the savings of the mandate are so small compared to ordinary behavior that they will be outweighed by the cost of enforcing it. CA4: Authority I am going consider this argument conceded by Pro and not address it again. Affirmative Arguments: C1: Economic Calculation I am calling this argument dropped. Pro's reply was a complete non sequitur. The economic calculation argument says that you can never know whether an intervention in the free market is beneficial or not because the interactions between market variables are too complex. Any attempt at economic policy is just groping in the dark. Pro's reply had nothing to do with this. Just putting the same heading in and writing unrelated words isn't a response. It's not up to me to waste space repeating myself. Pro's own rule says that a drop is a concession. She must admit that she has no idea whether a vaccine mandate is really a better use of those resources than what the market would otherwise do. Replying with a non sequitur is a borderline abusive argument because I have to waste limited space explaining it. C2: Biopolitics This is a consequentialist argument based on Pro's criterion of justice: it says that by eroding certain barriers to political power, we risk grave expansions in government power. The difference between a free society and a totalitarian society is the existence on legal barriers to the state's use of force against the citizen's person. When we remove this restrictions, we create an environment that is legally and philosophical partial to totalitarianism. Pro's contention on authority does not address this. All it says is that it would be legal for the state to do this. I am talking about the consequences of actually doing it. Pro's argument just begs the question anyway: if I don't think the state has the authority to make these decisions, the fact that the state says it does isn't going to persuade me. The fact that the resolution applies to children does it help. It means that the state replaces the parent as the arbiter of the child's biological life. This is just as disastrous. If the state is responsible for stopping “bad parenting” as Pro says, then children are really wards of the state who their parents are allowed to care for at the state's whim. Conclusion: Pro's argument seems to assume that we have mandatory vaccination now (and this is commonly assumed). Far from it. Non-medical excuses are allowed in 48 states. Anyone who does not want their child vaccinated can cook up a religious or philosophical reason why. Thus, people who are against vaccination do in fact vaccinate their children at lower rates. But in spite of this, public vaccination has been remarkably successful. Sources: Will post all sources for the debate next round. Out of time and space. I can post them early if needed.