Vaccination with the MMR vaccine should be mandatory

Thanks to Smooosh for his arguments. Time to kick off R3. I"ll start with some overviews. OV1: Concessions and Drops So, right off the bat, Con is conceding the vast majority of my case. He concedes the effectiveness and safety of vaccination, concedes all the numbers I provide (including the thresholds for herd immunity) and concedes the need to have vaccines in society. However, the key issues are the drops. Con drops much of my overview. I"ll get into this more on his contentions, but I must point out that I stipulated two conditions that are required for a mandate: they are both safe and effective, and the risk of remaining unvaccinated far outweighs the risk of vaccination. Con doesn"t challenge this, nor does he accomplish anything along the lines of what I pointed out next. He hasn"t shown that vaccines are markedly different from issues like traffic laws (more on that shortly), and he hasn"t even attempted to compare the harms caused by loss of personal freedoms to the societal good vaccines provide. He has no quantifiable impacts for any of his arguments. Con also drops the text of my plan. He mentions an uncertainty when it comes to enforcement, but it"s quite clear how the case functions: "Failure to vaccinate oneself or one's family results in a fine that scales with income." That means all the penalties of this policy are directed at the parents. If a child is not vaccinated, it"s up to the individual school (as in status quo) to decide whether they can attend. This penalty is solely restricted to not getting vaccinated, so any harms that come from a decision to pay the fine instead would not be subject to legal action. Much as Con calls this "an egregious violation of the constitution", he doesn"t justify this statement. There is no freedom of choice in the Constitution, and the Constitution often weighs societal good over personal freedoms. That"s the reason you can"t shout "fire" in a crowded theater, or refuse to pay your taxes. OV2: Lack of evidence Con"s case is also severely lacking in the source department. He makes a lot of assertions without any evidence to support them. That makes it impossible for him to quantitate his impacts, much less explain how they weigh against mine. Con will have to do a lot more in R3 if he hopes to have any chance in this debate. Onto Con"s contentions. I"ll reorganize these a bit. I. Warranting a Mandate Con is protests my case by arguing that the damage done by measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) is relatively minor compared to other issues. Multiple responses. 1. Con concedes my numbers, which show a clear harm to society in the form of lost life and reduced quality of life for many. He presents no numbers of his own to show that any of the issues he presents outweigh the harms caused by MMR. 2. Even if they did somehow outweigh, we can accept that there are a lot of issues that could and should be resolved for the public good while still resolving this clear problem. Con concedes that MMR are harmful, and that vaccines are effective against them. Any lives saved by increasing the spread of vaccines in the US is sufficient reason all by itself to implement this policy. Con hasn"t presented a reason that MMR doesn"t meet the threshold required to act, whereas I have provided extensive evidence supporting this kind of action. Just because the government cannot feasibly protect individuals from all potential sources of harm does not justify Con"s side of this debate, as this is clearly an instance where the harms can be effectively stemmed and peoples" lives can be saved. 3. Con didn"t respond to my overview, and that"s pretty damning to this argument. The reason we have traffic laws is to prevent a great deal of car accidents that would happen if they did not exist. They are also the reason we require individuals with a car to have a license when they drive, to get the car registered, and to have insurance. Car accidents represent such a significant danger that cars and their owners are highly regulated, and their personal freedoms are abridged to protect others from drivers who would put them at risk because of their poor choices. The same logic applies to vaccines: individuals pose a significant risk to others by carrying around a potentially deadly and easily transmissible disease. They made a poor choice by not receiving a vaccination. In doing so, they were free to harm others who could not make such a choice. Con"s argument may be driving at a slippery slope, but this is one instance where that slope favors my case. Vaccines should be mandatory because that"s what the law demands right now. Con also argues that addressing immigrants would be difficult and require other means than I"ve stated. He"s absolutely right " I provide no means to address an influx of immigrants that will almost certainly bring diseases with them. Neither does Con, nor does this reduce the impact of my arguments. Turn this argument against Con. He"s conceding that there will always be an influx of potential disease vectors into this country. The mandate offers the only possible means by which herd immunity can be achieved (remember how high those numbers are), and therefore the only means of protecting the population from these foreign diseases. There will always be a risk that immigrants will transmit deadly diseases to the population, but only my case effectively dilutes the effect. II. Convincing vs. Mandating Con argues that scientists should convince the masses to vaccinate, rather than having the government require people to do so. My response to this is simple: scientists have been trying their damnedest to clear up the misconceptions surrounding vaccinations, and people still aren"t listening. The evidence of just how successful vaccines have been (particularly the MMR vaccine) is readily available and commonly supported in public service announcements and in the news.[15-18] People are educated by their doctors, their schools, and by scientists in the news and communities.[19-22] Con keeps stating that they could do more, yet he provides no specific ideas beyond just educating them more and better. How, exactly, does Con think this can be accomplished? He doesn"t say. His point that people who are afraid of needles may be convinced is similarly unwarranted. He provides no basis by which people who are so afraid of the process could be convinced. I do agree with Con that there is a disconnect between science and much of society. However, I don"t agree with the unsupported assumption he"s making that it can be solved by simply educating more people. A lot of the people who aren"t getting vaccinated simply don"t accept the scientific findings, no matter how well supported they are.[23] Con will have to provide some means to overcome this barrier. In the meantime, mandating vaccination does two things. First, it ensures that these individuals do not endanger others by getting MMR. Second, it functions as a personal empirical evidence of their safety. Many of these people believe that vaccines are dangerous to their health, even when the evidence is very much against them.[24] Receiving a vaccine provides them with clear evidence that those concerns are overblown. III. Backlash This comes in a couple of different forms. Con asserts that many of the people who do not get vaccinations are antivaxxers who are convinced that the government is out to get them, that religious people will effectively lose their freedom of religion due to their inability to act on their religious beliefs, and that there will be violators who "wreak havoc on the public." I"ll respond to each in turn. Con acknowledges several times that antivaxxers are objectively wrong. He concedes that their behavior (i.e. their unwillingness to get vaccinated) is damaging to other people in society, even deadly to some. Yet he"s justifying a system that continues to leave those people in danger based on these same people. Con is effectively yielding to their demonstrably false concerns. Yet at the same time, Con drops my arguments regarding taxation, drug tests, and traffic laws. All of those have detractors as well. Why are they allowed to exist, despite the backlash? Because they provide a greater societal good than harm, and some subset of the population being upset about it doesn"t detract from that. He talks about "legitimiz[ing] their fears", yet he provides no substantive harms that they would cause. They already don"t get vaccinated, so a continued will not to be vaccinated doesn"t make them any more of a threat. If they pay the fine, then they are providing funds to society to address health issues that result from their injurious behavior. If they get vaccinated and are still upset, they are no longer a risk to those around them. That outweighs their negativity. The religion point looks remarkably similar to the religious freedom point, and it"s no more convincing. The only difference here is that Con points to freedom of religion instead of freedom of choice. However, this would hardly be the first instance where this freedom was abridged; there"s a reason you can"t get married at 12 or engage in human sacrifice, despite the restrictions those laws impose on religion.[25] There is no such thing as absolute freedom, even when it comes to religion. More importantly, Con provides no reason why religious freedom outweighs societal wellbeing. Some people being upset that they aren"t allowed to express their religious beliefs by allowing themselves to get measles seems like a rather petty issue compared to lives lost. 15. https://bit.ly... 16. https://bit.ly... 17. https://bit.ly... 18. https://bit.ly... 19. https://bit.ly... 20. https://theatln.tc... 21. https://bit.ly... 22. https://on.ny.gov... 23. https://bit.ly... 24. https://nyti.ms... 25. https://bit.ly...