It'd be hard to legally separate things like vaccines where the industry says it's ok and activists say they cause problems with things like lead in fuel where for decades the industry said it was ok and activists said it caused problems.

Good example, but I still think it's better to have conflicting information out there, let people write what they write and read what they read. And above all, think for themselves, or at least try. Sure, a couple of people end up not vaccinating their kids. The rest shouldn't have a problem with that, after all, they do vaccinate, so their kids are protected. It's an extreme example but I don't see anything that warrants curtailing free speech here.

And also, I think science is never settled. Science is a never ending stream of questions, with every answer evoking multiple new questions to be answered. The idea that the "science is settled" has reared it's ugly head multiple times in the past, to be proven wrong every single time. What if bloodletting was as some point considered "settled science" and no discussion of alternatives was allowed? We would still be doing bloodletting, wouldn't we?

"Science is not settled" in most cases means that current understanding can be improved and refined, not that it will do 180° turn.

> they do vaccinate, so their kids are protected.

There is a small but noticeable component of kids who can't be vaccinated for other health reasons. It's also possible to catch illnesses before the scheduled vaccination date.

(A few years ago we were talking of the possibility of eradicating measles and polio, but the CIA blew that one with .. fake vaccinations)

>The rest shouldn't have a problem with that, after all, they do vaccinate, so their kids are protected. It's an extreme example but I don't see anything that warrants curtailing free speech here.

Are you honestly serious here? Do you not realize that there are many kids and people that legitimately can not vaccinate their own kids due to allergy or immune response issues? They compromise herd immunity and is the entire reason why we're seeing another measles outbreak!

Acting like there isn't a problem here is either being simply uninformed or deliberately ignorant. That's exactly why I have a problem with anti-vaxxers because they're threatening the lives of those around them because of some incredibly stupid and unfounded beliefs.

I think that guy may have a point though.

Take pertussis vaccine for example: pertussis may be deadly for newborns, but they cannot be vaccinated until they are of a certain age. We have here to vaccinate one group to protect another.

Is it ethical? Can we really mandate one group to risk their health to protect another?

One may say that in this case the risk is minimal and the benefits are great, but at this point we stop dealing with facts and go into emotional sphere.

One of the problems is that in the vaccination talks it's usually either "all vaccines are the godsend blessing" or "all vaccines are dealy poisons". A thought that some vaccines prevent thousands of deaths and some were just piggybacked by the "big pharma" is vehemently rejected by both sides.

No, the benefit and risks are not matter of opinion, but numbers.

The opinion is whether it is worth a very tiny risk of adverse reaction of a big group against a moderate risk of death of other people in a small group.

These amounts are all quantifiable, unlike a dumb trolley problem, but many people do not like tiny risks even if it were to save someone's life.

I hear what you say, but how tiny is tiny and how moderate is moderate? Can we blame the people for not willing to put their lives at risk, albeit small?

Can we blame parents for not willing to put their children's lives at small risk for saving some other adult?

I believe that should be the subject of the discussion, not whether vaccines cause autism (apparently they don't) or whether pharmaceutical corporations are greedy (yes, they are like any corporation).

And - as a separate, but related question - what do we do with religious exemptions here?

I get where you're coming from, but bloodletting wasn't based on randomised controlled trials, and the science on vaccines is as clear as it's going to get. The issue for me here is protection of children, as happens when kids are removed from abusive parents. "Sure, a couple of people end up not vaccinating their kids," feels a bit glib, because measles can be fatal. We draw the line elsewhere - racism, homophobia, libel. The arguments against this here feel like they amount to special pleading for social media, whereas in the rest of society certain speech is, rightly in my view, policed.

Like some of the discussions around GDPR, it feels like there may be a cultural difference between the USA and EU in terms of how much government is trusted, and I wonder if that's a large part of the disagreements in these comments. I'm in the UK and trust the government not to overreach (although in the light of Brexit that trust is wearing very thin), and even if it did our independent judiciary would reign it in, as it has done many times in the past.

Interested by the downvotes here. Genuine question - are people OK with anti-vaccine content being displayed unchecked? Or is it more a reaction to "doesn't feel complicated," which I can understand might feel like it's minimising an ethically fraught issue.

I also used to feel similarly. But in deciding to research exactly why anti-vax types feel the way they do I was a bit surprised. I still believe there is a social obligation to vaccinate, but claiming the "science is settled" on an issue like this is not entirely appropriate. This [1] is a rather monumental report from the National Academy of Sciences that took an extremely in depth look at this topic. It's from 2011 but things have not changed radically since then.

In that 866 page report the researchers analyze a great breadth of data and research on connections between vaccines and all sorts of nasty things. And one phrase you might find worth ctrl+fing is "The evidence is inadequate to accept or reject a causal relationship between". You'll find it repeated constantly throughout the report as the academy researchers come to their conclusion on the validity (or lack thereof) of a causal link between vaccines and all sorts of nasty stuff. And for many of these nasty correlations while the evidence is insufficient claim a causal link, it's also insufficient to reject it. Not exactly what you'd call settled science.

Of course this does not justify turning against vaccinations. Even if there is a causal link found between vaccines and some of these various issues, the possibility of significant numbers of people choosing to not vaccinate would be catastrophic. For instance we're right now on the cusp of completely eliminating polio, much as we did smallpox. In fact you are currently more likely to get polio from a vaccine than in the wild. And some people might use that as a reason to stop vaccinating. But if they did, that would rapidly change. The one and only thing that's bringing us to where we are is people choosing to vaccinate. So it comes down to a matter of social responsibility. Vaccines are not without risk but whatever risk there is greatly outweighed by the collective benefits.

http://nationalacademies.org/HMD/Reports/2011/Adverse-Effect...

You're right that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. But presumably you don't think that vaccines don't prevent serious diseases? If there were significant negative side effects of vaccines - of an order which negates the benefits of those vaccinations - I would argue that we'd know that by now.

> If there were significant negative side effects of vaccines - of an order which negates the benefits of those vaccinations - I would argue that we'd know that by now.

New vaccines are created and may have side effects. E.g. H1N1 vaccine causing narcolepsy in Europe recently: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/history/narcoleps...

Using the phrase "the science is settled" is silly, given that the creation and manufacturing of new vaccines isn't settled.

This isn't exactly what 'settled science' means. Let me give you an example:

Let's say I'm someone that really hates vaccines. I begin spreading rumors throughout the internet that vaccines cause cancer. My evidence? Most of the people that have cancer had vaccines at one point in the past.

Now how does science disprove this? Through years of study, research and data collection over many decades. Even then, it would be hard to accept or reject a casual relationship between cancer and vaccines, because that is an almost endless set of data. All I would have to do is make up some new casual correlation between vaccines and Y as an attack vector. This is exactly how arguments against climate change are made as well. Science is never really settled, but we can reach a high level of confidence on how something works.

This is commonly called the "gish gallop" - it's much easier to generate falsehood than refute it.

Worse, because of the way confidence intervals work, if you generate enough bad hypotheses and run experiments, eventually you find one where it appears to be true!