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Anti-vax is not a "movement". Vax is a movement, and a recent one, always coming along with the government's bayonets. There are few reasons not to vax yourself in Finland, and incidentally there are no anti-vax problems there.

Where I live, the healthcare minister peddles placebo pills, cause she has a share in the business, and the secret services have their own media to "leak" private data of politically dubious people.

Every consistently christian family have many memories of government repressions. Most MDs talk to you as a cop in a bad Milwaukee neighborhood to a black teenager.

There are many good reasons to avoid any contact with the officials.

I'm not an anti-vaxer, but in a country where any slightly marginal social group is still alive in spite of the government, you can't blame them. It's a sound Bayesian strategy.

Wow. The first two comments on HN are anti-vax propaganda, obfuscation, and racism. It’s not a logical stretch to say that lower vaccination rates leads to higher infection rates. And it’s pretty well documented that herd immunity drops off pretty quickly with vaccination rate.

And the HN ideal should be to rigorously investigate even a logical inference like that. Yet when a post does just that, it’s met with a racist suggestion that middle eastern migrants are causing the uptick. No citations.

Very disappointing reaction.

Maybe journalism should come with a liability - as in spreading missinformation and blowing hot air into the flames of civil war like debate is something that you could be held liable for. If enough people cite you as the source of the information for their bad decisions, you should be held financially acountable.
I think the solution is even, uh, simpler than that. Refusing to vaccinate your children should be viewed internationally as child abuse, and parents who commit child abuse, especially in 1st world countries (where child abuse is already illegal), should be prosecuted.
There are other ways to not get sick.

Ways that don't involve a government registry, ways that don't involve police demanding papers, ways that don't involve mandatory behavior modification with negative reinforcement.

My instinct is to not resort to a knee-jerk presumptive desire to punish, because I feel I don't have enough dominion over my peers. I'm not interested in throwing more people in jail. I'm not interested in more traffic tickets. I'm not interested in putting my kids in another database.

Sorry, track your mandatory compulsory military draft in some other place. Raise your own kids far away from mine, thanks.

> There are other ways to not get sick.

[citation needed]

> I'm not interested in putting my kids in another database.

Shot records have been a thing, in the US at least, for decades. This is not a new thing.

>Sorry, track your mandatory compulsory military draft in some other place.

What the fuck does this have to do with anything I said?

> Raise your own kids far away from mine, thanks.

Yea, since it seems like your kids will be getting the measles (or worse), gladly.

Your fundamental error is philosophical.

I'm not against medical intervention. I think vaccinations are a good thing.

I'm against government mandated familial interventions.

I think there are 1,000 other more important things the government could be doing to improve people's lives. Alarmist, breathless hand-wringing about personal medical choices or parental responsibilities isn't the only way to approach pandemics or public health issues.

The last thing we should be doing is using government resources to apply retaliation or punishment. There are plenty of reasons to inflict harm, take money away from people, and generally stifle the hell out of people with laws, and all of them get over used, and just simply spread misery. This gives people more reasons to rationalize and passive-aggressively resist anything with a government's fingerprints on it.

Meanwhile, you said it yourself: those who do get vaccinated have nothing to fear. They'll live lives untouched by disease, so it's none of their business what happens to the rest. For the vaccinated, this is already a non-problem by default.

> I think vaccinations are a good thing.

I also think vaccinations are a good thing, but your original comment didn't come across that way.. In fact, it came across as being completely off topic.

The problem is, that your kids, handicapped after the disease has hit them, will have to live of the benefits his vaccacinated kids have to pay to them.

You are creating a unnecessary society debt by ideology. Illogic behaviour creates a damage to the allmende, that is redistributed in small quantities on the back of all of us.

I also value my privacy more than my children. Seriously, can't we do something so they just don't get sick?
I dunno, can we do something so that they just "grow up normal"? Let's make them all the same. How might we go about stamping out differences among humans?