Steve Michaels :
once diagnosis is confirmed, the NHS provides necessary treatments without so much as a co-pay.

I wonder where you live, because it cannot be in the UK.

I think the first step would be to stop the spread of Pertussis by stopping mass vaccinating for it.

That has actually been tried. It didn’t work. From Impact of anti-vaccine movements on pertussis control: the untold story:

Japan—vaccination against pertussis began in 1947. By 1974, there were few cases and no deaths…. snip…After two infants died within 24 h of receiving DTP, the Ministry of Health and Welfare eliminated whole-cell pertussis
vaccine altogether. They later allowed it only for children older than 2 years. Pertussis coverage for infants fell from
nearly 80% in 1974 to 10% in 1976.13 A pertussis
epidemic occurred in 1979 with more than 13 000 cases
and 41 deaths. Japan began replacing whole-cell with
acellular pertussis vaccines in 1981, and a striking fall in
pertussis incidence followed (figure 2).

So I hope you come up with a better solution. You might start by addressing the toxin made by Bordetella pertussis bacteria (the true definition of a toxin is that it is a poisonous substance made by living organisms, like bacteria). Do try finding some kind of actual scientific evidence to back up your proposal.

Sovereign man :
What kind of moral code do you subscribe to that says if it is ‘legal’ it is ‘moral’?

No one has suggested this. You don’t seem able to discuss what people actually say, preferring to argue against things they did not say. I’m sure there is a specific name for this tactic.

Gattarian, you have probably offended a great many people when you make such glib statements like
“Life has survived on this planet for millions of years without religion too. And more most of those years when religion was the primary driver of human politics, life was short, brutish, and painful. This is not a record I would stand on myself. Having said that, I agree that people’s religious beliefs should be honored.”

Possibly, but only if it is taken out of context. It was directed specifically at your attempt at anti science here:

Life has survived on this planet for millions of years, and humans for at least thousands, without medical interventions. If these people’s religious beliefs prohibited medical intervention then that should have been honored. To do otherwise is to treat them as animals.

Specifically, it was meant to counter your claims that somehow an old religious belief is just as valid as a proven scientific belief when it comes to maintaining human health.

I am a little more concerned that you cannot see that the real issue is oppressive government and not the philosophical underpinning of the justification for oppressive government.

No, the issue is what constitutes an oppressive government. You seem to take an extreme anarchists view as evidenced by your next sentence:

The entire vaccine schedule here in the US is based on the same basic premise as Malawi. That is that somehow, the government has the right to force you to take medical treatment of any sort by compulsion.

No, not in the least. There is no principle that the government can force any treatment whatsoever. The principle involved has to do with public health. That is, your right to individual sovereignty ends when it begins to interfere with my right to the same. You have a right to conduct whatever activities you like on your property, for instance, but if those activities pose a public health hazard (open sewers, for instance), then I have some right to protect myself. Rather than relying on anarchistic brute force, civilized societies constitute themselves in such a way that the state is granted the use of force for the explicit protection of everyone’s rights. If your actions endanger others, then the state has the right to use force against you in order to protect these others.

In Malawi, these religious fanatics were barricading themselves in compounds preventing each other from seeking medical treatment for actual measles infections. To the point of death. That is, they were locking their children inside their compounds and allowing them to die from measles. In effect, they were perpetrating measles factories on the rest of the population. This posed a serious and deadly health risk for the rest of the community.

IMHO I simply don’t know if the authorities over reacted or not. I understand they negotiated with these people for more than a year to try to get them to comply with the law. I do know, however, that no broad “force … medical treatment of any sort” principle is claims by either the Malawi government nor the US government. That is a fabrication on your part.

You may like to split hairs about degrees of heinousness in the crimes of the Nazis. You may pay lip service to belief in individual sovereignty. The blindingly clear fact is that you use hair splitting definitions to try and morally justify the unjustifiable. Use of force isn’t use of force if the guns are not drawn. Don’t blame the charity for enlisting the force of the government to further it’s agenda, blame the government. The Nazi’s killed millions of people, so we can ignore the fact that they exercised the exact same claim to force people to undergo any sort of medical intervention without their consent. And then you accuse me of being someone else when you know absolutely nothing about me!

But you see, it is not a hair split if the facts simply don’t back you up. The Nazi’s did claim the right to treat some members of their society in truly inhuman ways. The Malawi government has asserted no such right. Neither has the US government. Meanwhile, the difference between gas chambers and protection from measles is so far from a hair split that I feel compelled to link this site:

http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm

Enforcing vaccination policy while guns are close at hand is wrong. Herding people into gas chambers is wrong. But if you think that herding people into gas chambers is just as wrong as threatening force in order to vaccinate, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.

I can see from here and other posts that Nathan and Gattarian are a bit of a double act.

You’re kind of coming across as a double act yourself, Sovereign man. I swear you sound familiar.

I don’t know about you Nathan, but the science the I learned was an objective search for truth, not a consensus which is used to subjectively create a desired reality.

You seem to prefer the latter. The truth is plain in the thousands of studies that show vaccines to be safe and effective. The scientific consensus reflects this truth. Your position does not.

When objective inquiry is replaced by consensus driven research upon which massive amounts of funding, both public and private, depend on certain outcomes, then it is right and proper to question the objectivity of the research itself.

You are welcome to question it. I question it regularly. It holds up, in terms of the quality of the studies themselves, and replication of their results. Virtually all scientists around the world agree, even the ones who don’t have a financial stake in the results. I’m sorry, SM, but there is a snowflake’s chance that all the studies are wrong, and the opposite is true, reguardless of your opinion of the funding sources. No amount of money can buy that scale of research fraud. There are too many people who would jump out and say “yeah, we faked that study. Didn’t happen.” In contrast, there are plenty of examples where the science showed a significant risk to a vaccine, and it was pulled. This hardly would happen if all of science was held in shackles by big pharma as you insinuate.

It would seem that Gattarian is a bit of a follower of yours Nathan. You mention governmental issues and then he/she latches on. Not much of an independent thinker, I suspect.

It’s not a lack of independence that makes Mr. Gattarian come to the same conclusion as I. It’s because the hole in your assertion is so glaring that one cannot miss it.

You both like to blame governments for their laws when a private charity comes in and enlists the brute force of government to force people to do something against their will.

Which they didn’t. The charity dd not “enlist the brute force of government” and bring those people back. I don’t see that they had anything to do with it at all. It is only you trying toimply that they did.

The ‘duly’ elected government says it is okay, so it is okay.

Again, no one said it was okay. How is it that you can so confidently make the same mistake over and over again? Beggars belief, as some might say.

What kind of moral code do you subscribe to that says if it is ‘legal’ it is ‘moral’?

Who said it was moral? This post is about providing vaccinations to those who need it most. It is not about forced vaccination. You are making it about forced vaccination, and putting words in everyone’s mouth.

Oh, and go ahead and grandstand more for us about your impression of us and Nazis and whatnot. It makes it clear that your position is not based on evidence and also how bizarre your side of the fence really is.

“What is, and is not, considered a vaccine reaction is dependent upon what the consensus of scientific study has determined is, and is not, a vaccine reaction.”

I don’t know about you Nathan, but the science the I learned was an objective search for truth, not a consensus which is used to subjectively create a desired reality. We have all heard for years now, primarily from PSU and East Anglia University in England that we are all doomed due to co2 and global warming. We were all told that there was a consensus which supported this ‘fact’. Now, neither one is backing away from their created version of reality even though they both admit that there has been no warming in 15 years, even as co2 outputs have continued to rise. Now, a new consensus has appeared claiming that an ice age cometh. I am not arguing the ins and outs of global warming, however, vaccine research and global warming have something in common. A whole lot of money is being made by the industries surrounding these fields of study. When objective inquiry is replaced by consensus driven research upon which massive amounts of funding, both public and private, depend on certain outcomes, then it is right and proper to question the objectivity of the research itself.

It would seem that Gattarian is a bit of a follower of yours Nathan. You mention governmental issues and then he/she latches on. Not much of an independent thinker, I suspect. You both like to blame governments for their laws when a private charity comes in and enlists the brute force of government to force people to do something against their will. The ‘duly’ elected government says it is okay, so it is okay. What kind of moral code do you subscribe to that says if it is ‘legal’ it is ‘moral’? Gattarian, you have probably offended a great many people when you make such glib statements like

“Life has survived on this planet for millions of years without religion too. And more most of those years when religion was the primary driver of human politics, life was short, brutish, and painful. This is not a record I would stand on myself. Having said that, I agree that people’s religious beliefs should be honored.”

I suppose you are aware that a lack of religious belief is also a religious belief. I am glad that you can see that totalitarianism and human suffering resulted from oppressive government when it was driven by your definition of religion. I am a little more concerned that you cannot see that the real issue is oppressive government and not the philosophical underpinning of the justification for oppressive government. The entire vaccine schedule here in the US is based on the same basic premise as Malawi. That is that somehow, the government has the right to force you to take medical treatment of any sort by compulsion. You may like to split hairs about degrees of heinousness in the crimes of the Nazis. You may pay lip service to belief in individual sovereignty. The blindingly clear fact is that you use hair splitting definitions to try and morally justify the unjustifiable. Use of force isn’t use of force if the guns are not drawn. Don’t blame the charity for enlisting the force of the government to further it’s agenda, blame the government. The Nazi’s killed millions of people, so we can ignore the fact that they exercised the exact same claim to force people to undergo any sort of medical intervention without their consent. And then you accuse me of being someone else when you know absolutely nothing about me!