Public Health Concerns Justify Compulsory Immunization.

I stand in negation of the resolution, "Resolved: Public health concerns justify compulsory immunization. " I will define Immunization: Sometimes called vaccination; a shot or injection that protects a person from getting an illness by making the person "immune" to it. (Center for Disease Control) I agree to my opponents value. And I would also like to agree to my opponents value criterion, and I will prove in my case how the negative world upholds his framework better than his case does. 1. Compulsory immunization violates the right to conceive and bear children. In 1927, Dr. Albert Sidney Priddy, the superintendent of the Virginia State Colony for the Epileptics and Feeble-Minded, filed a petition to his board of directors to sterilize one of his patients, Carrie Buck. She was an 18-year-old patient at the clinic that he claimed had a mental age of 9. The case was upheld in the Supreme Court of Appeals of the State of Virginia, but it was appealed to the Supreme Court. (Buck v. Bell, HR 200) The Court upheld a statute instituting compulsory sterilization of the unfit "for the protection and health of the state. " It was an 8-1 decision. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the ruling. He said, "It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. " This Supreme Court case proves that the term "compulsory vaccination" has a legal context of covering "compulsory sterilizations". Justifying compulsory vaccinations in the resolutional and legal context means that by affirming, you must also justify compulsory sterilizations. Bruinius, 2006 "scientists tried to trace and then eradicate the gene pool that caused what they casually referred to as "the three D's": dependency, delinquency, and mental deficiency. Hundreds of fieldworkers fanned out into the country to visit prisons, mental institutions, and the poor rural hamlets where many of their research subjects dwelled. They collected tens of thousands of pages of data on these subjects' family pedigrees. " The practice of eugenics is meant to prevent the "unfit" from re-populating as a means to create a "super-race". Black, 2003 "It started in 1904, when a small group of U. S. scientist launched an ambitious new race-based movement Their methods: forced sterilization, human breeding programs, marriage prohibition, and even passive euthanasia. The victims of eugenics were poor white people from New England to California, immigrants from across Europe, Black, Jews, Mexicans, Native Americans, epileptics, alcoholics, petty criminals, the mentally ill, and anyone else who did not resemble the blond and blue-eyed Nordic ideal the eugenics movement glorified. Through international academic exchanges, American eugenicists exported the movement worldwide. It eventually caught the fascination of Adolf Hitler. " After Virginia passed its sterilization act, Joseph DeJarnette, superintendent of Virginia's Western State Hospital, observed in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, "The Germans are beating us at our own game. " In order to preserve societal welfare you must protect the fundamental human right of the right to conceive and bear children. The only way you can do that is by taking a stand against eugenics and genocide. You can only do that in the negative world, so you must negate. Now moving onto the affirmative case. To his contention 1: 1. Compulsory efforts violate privacy with surveillance. Jaro Kotalik, Adjunct Professor, Department of Philosophy and the Director, Centre for Health Care Ethics(CHCE), and Professor of Northern Ontario School of Medicine, 2006 "Such an approach would erode the respect for autonomy in health care in general. In addition, such forceful measures would demoralize health care workers and make them less effective careï¿½givers. Coercive measures used on emergency physicians in Quebec and hospital nurses in Ontario were strongly resisted by the respective professions and thought to have undesirable side effects. In addition, the mandatory approach would require surveillance and enforcement that would increase the cost of pandemic response measures and interfere with the provision of patient care. " The right to privacy is a contractual obligation, and it is not upheld in the affirmative world. 2. Compulsory immunizations violate religious freedom. Andraz Melansek, student of Intenational Relations at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, February 1, 2004 "Vaccination, Compulsory? ," Indeternational Debate Education Association, ACC. 10-20-09, . http://www.idebate.org.... Many people have sincerely-held religious beliefs regarding vaccines in general. These individuals believe that God created the human body as a temple, and that the body should not be destroyed by injecting a virus into the body. By making vaccination compulsory, people's freedom to choose is curtailed and that is an infringement on human rights. In any case, it doesn't matter if a few people choose not to be vaccinated, as if the large majority of the population is protected from a disease, there will be too few carriers for it to become endemic, so the risk to those opting-out is very small. The right to religion is also a a contractual obligation, and that is not upheld in the affirmative world. 3. My opponent says in his case that compulsory immunizations violate autonomy, so there is another contractual obligation harmed in the affirmative world. 4. My opponent makes the point that the only way we can uphold the social contract is by protecting our right to safety, and the only way we can uphold this right is through compulsory immunizations. But we do not have to harm all these other contractual obligations to uphold the right to safety. My opponent never proved that voluntary immunizations are inneffective. If voluntary immunizations prove to be effective, then the social contract would only justify VOLUNTARY immunizations. 5. My opponent defines a concern as a matter that affects a persons happiness or welfare. Therefore, in the aff world the government can give you a shot because you aren't happy. To my opponents sub point B, herd immunity still preserves societal welfare. In the aff world, the obligations of religion, autonomy, privacy, and procreation are harmed all in the name of "preserving health". But since we are looking through a scope of "upholding contractual obligations" and not of "preserving health", contractual obligations are going to be more important in this round than the perceived health benefits. And since the aff world harms many more obligations than the neg ever could, you must negate.