Why is this unethical and for whom?
The vaccines work, so parents who choose to vaccinate their kids will be protected.
Parents who don’t trust the vaccine for whatever reason, they feel strongly that they might harm their child.
Isn’t it sort of unethical to force parents to inject their child with something they think is dangerous?
You’re basically asking parents to willfully harm (in their mind they think it’s harmful, I’m not saying it’s actually harmful) their own child, from their perspective why should they make that choice?
I just don’t see how this problem can be solved other than going back to square one and trying to educate people and convince them that vaccines are not harmful. The alternative is to force people to accept these injections even though people believe they are harmful, which just isn’t going to work well in the United States.
A moment's thought will tell you that it's to protect kids that are at risk from infectious diseases (e.g. immunocompromised cancer patients) that cannot be vaccinated.
So most people would agree that it's unfair that a cancer patient cannot attend a public school, through no fault of their own, because a parent wants their healthy kid to attend the school unvaccinated. We balance the rules accordingly.
Yes, they are. If your kids are not allowed to attend school, then you are being forced to vaccinate them because you may not have other options. Claiming otherwise is gaslighting.
> It's just that in sane societies we say you can't use a public school if you're not vaccinated and otherwise healthy.
So do those parents get a voucher for the funds pertaining to their child’s public education, if they’re prevented?
Should parents be allowed to kill their property?
Regardless - my point stands that children belong first to the parents. Using words like “abuse”, which aren’t applicable to this situation at hand, is just a way to appeal to emotion rather than acknowledging that states taking over parental judgment is explicitly authoritarian.
The people who actually study this say you could not be more wrong. They probably also say you should stop randomly making things up and should consider what else you're also wrong about.
"Approximately 1 in 4 children experiences child abuse or neglect in their lifetime ... 91% of the time, the perpetrator is a parent." - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK470337/
"Child abuse and neglect are common. At least one in seven children experienced child abuse or neglect in the past year in the United States." - https://www.cdc.gov/child-abuse-neglect/about/index.html#cdc...
"Statistics provided by the Department of Children and Families (DCF) ... show that in about 82% of substantiated abuse cases the alleged perpetrator was the birth parent." - https://www.cga.ct.gov/PS98/rpt/olr/htm/98-R-0509.htm (adoptive parents are in there too but counted separately, in case you're wondering)
I don't care how you slice the numbers, there's no way to get from 23% of children (90% of 25%) in the US having abusive parents to abusive parents being "extremely rare" unless your definition of "extremely rare" here is utterly insane.
As an example, your first link isn’t even a real study. Hosting some text on a .gov website doesn’t make it correct. And Statpearls is basically a low quality scammy source. But you don’t need to know that about its reputation - just reading your own link’s content would make it obvious that it is REALLY low quality - in this case written by a couple random grad students.
Since we’re cherry picking things, I’ll quote this from your own source, which shows that even when you use very broad definitions, abuse is extremely rare:
> In the United States, Child Protective Services estimated that 9 out of 1000 children are victims of child maltreatment.
Consider what else you're also wrong about.
That's in literally just the one year (2012), not across their childhood, and it's just from within cases reported to CPS. There's an absolutely massive difference between the two, and the CDC calls out CPS reports as likely under-representative.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210204022708/https://www.cdc.g...
Oh, woops, the GOP do support that last one.
Assuming you mean Muslim households and not Arab households, since not all Arabs are Muslim (today is the day you learn about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Christians and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Jews and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Druze and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bah%C3%A1%CA%BC%C3%AD_Faith and even https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreligion_in_the_Middle_East), everyone still eats during Ramadan, they just do it at night.
I take that to mean you understand the point?
I have never met in my entire life, in America, a family that engaged in religious starvation fasting. Not Catholic, not Jewish, not Muslim. Their fasting rules were eating bland food or only at certain times of the day. And it's for a limited period of time.
But if a family makes a child go without eating for any prolonged period of time not for a medical necessity (pre-surgery, for instance), yes, they should get a a check-in from social services.
And to go even further, if you only feed your child bad foods on purpose - like only bread and potatoes every day, when you can afford real food and diversity - you should also get a visit from social services.
I seriously don't get why you're defending people like the Turpins. Do you genuinely not understand why these laws are necessary and why it is pivotal we have basic protections for children from their parents? You don't even need to look past Hollywood with Honey booboo and Justin Bieber and all that lot to see how dangerous parents can be, let alone the insidiousness and commonality of the lower-profile cases.
Again, a number of sitting members of legislation in 2025 are arguing that children as low as the age of 12 should be allowed to be married off to adults who then (if they haven't already) rape them. And that child cannot legally get divorced without their parent's consent!
In one hearing the politician admitted to knowing an example! So you can't even say "well it never happens."
I can't believe it needs to be argued: in any just and equitable society, children have a right to a basically healthy upbringing. That means socialization, education (both physical and mental), healthcare, nutrition, and protection from those who would do them harm.
They are not "lesser people" or property of their parents. It is a practical reality that some of their rights must be ceded because they are incapable, but their parents are meant to be guardians and not owners.
2) with regard to gaslighting, should parents be allowed to send their kids to public schools naked? What's the difference in compulsion?
> The vaccines work, so parents who choose to vaccinate their kids will be protected.
This is false for a number of reasons.
1) Vaccines don't provide perfect protection, breakthrough infections can occur.
2) Some people can not receive vaccinations due to health conditions.
3) Immunocompromised people are not protected by vaccines.
We managed to make it illegal to beat the crap out of your kids even though there are still plenty of Americans who think not beating your kids is harmful to them.
In a just society they should have sole discretion. The current situation where kids aren’t even allowed to walk to school without CPS harassing parents, is because of this attitude where the state thinks it has any rights to your kids.
The CPS issue is because of litigation not protection. No one wants to be responsible for something bad happening.
Yes, they absolutely own their children more than the state does. I can’t believe there are any claims otherwise. Do you value the bond between parent and child and how special it is? Nothing should violate that. Not even the rare parent that is actually neglectful - meaning that should curtail the freedoms of the typical parent. And anyways, choosing to forego a vaccine isn’t abuse - on average it shifts outcomes very little. For example skipping a flu vaccine won’t change much.
A parental bond doesn’t overwhelm a child’s own rights as citizens and human beings.
Parents live in a society, even if it were a village, and there is no free pass to do just what you will if it crosses lines.
Collective health is one of those lines.
I think you need to spend some time thinking about how your idea of a just society is that child abuse is ok if parents do it.
I don’t believe there are any people who believe that NOT beating their children is dangerous. If you put yourself in these parents’ shoes, they basically see this stuff as poison. What you’re asking them to do (in their mind) is inject their children with poison and for no other reason than because the government says so. It’s just a losing battle, you need to educate these people and show them that they are safe, address their concerns directly.
I would not inject my children with mercury if the government told me to. I would need to be convinced that mercury is safe and beneficial before I allowed my kid to be injected with it. I don’t feel like equating this to physical violence is helpful at all because in this case these parents believe they are preventing harm to their children.
This is the suffering you are OK with because 'concerns':
I'm a vaxer But one community I hang with is strongly antivax. Many of them have been very harmed even if they didn't take the vaccines.
When something is that important to you (even for woowoo reasons or social media misinformation) then it is a fertile situation for mental health impacts.
Antivaxxers are a vulnerable population too (they have self selected into a circle by their beliefs and communities).
Disclosure: I've seen some good people severely harmed by overbearing government actions in New Zealand. I believe New Zealand did a good job of protecting everyone here from COVID, but that the collateral costs to everyone were very high (and extremely variable chronic costs to some).
Edit: apology that I've bucketed all vaccines together. E.g. Measles vaccine is quite different from covid vaccines.
Imagine if I said 'my religion doesn't allow running water, I should be allowed to defecate anywhere, and also science says toilets increase the risk of hemorrhoids, and you can't make me give my kids hemorrhoids'. You can't allow that, not because you don't agree with it, but because the way we live in groups needs artificial sanitation. Just like we need artificial stimulation of immune systems.
Each vaccination has costs and benefits. The science is amazing at reducing the physical risks.
I am just asking you to understand that some people are seriously psychologically harmed by requiring vaccinations (for themselves or for their children). It may be irrational, unscientific or selfish but I have seen how real the harm is for some people. That harm is a complex grey area. It should rarely trump the needs of children or society.
Society has a variety of ways to balance that harm against the expected benefits.
The second half of your comment is just a strawman story. And introducing religion as a topic is usually a poor idea.
The original anti-vax exemptions were given on religious grounds. All justifications after that have built on that initial allowance. It is very much not a straw man when it comes to vaccine allowances. It is the OG justification that opened the conversation.
After watching my santa cruz woo woo ex-wife's friends all literally talk themselves into believing in the damage of vaccines (while being fine taking MEGA/unhealthy doses of western science discovered vitamins), I consider vaccine hesitancy a form of Munchausen syndrome. One that should only be tolerated to a certain point, and this is well past that point.
But the medical community was acting with the best knowledge they had at the time as imperfect as it was. Tell me how did taking the vaccine harm any child? It wasn't painful. Immediate side effects were minimal to non-existent. Myocarditis and Carditis incidence was something like 65/million. Even then most of those recovered without any treatment. Median hospital stay for those that needed it was 2 nights and most recovered without permanent issues.
I think the final death toll from the vaccine was estimated at around 1/million. Meanwhile at the height of the delta strain the death toll for anyone infected was well over 1/100 ( more than 10% for the over 60s).
The fallout doesn't make rational sense.
You need to understand that herd immunization actually helps everyone, not just some small number of children who can't get vaccinated, because even the best vaccines don't offer 100% protection.
Your odds of getting sick are based on the odds that other people around you are contagious. That much should be extremely obvious, because every encounter with a contagion rolls the dice again.
What's less obvious is how much that matters because math is hard. Even if you have 95% immunity to some infectious disease, your probability of getting it at least once after 10 exposures is a whopping 40% (1 - 0.95^10). Everyone's protection, yours included, comes from reducing your chances of being unwittingly exposed because the people around you aren't getting sick, and that means vaccinating them too. When one person gets sick, everyone around them is put at increased risk. The way you fix that for everyone is by making it less likely that any member of the herd gets sick from any given exposure.
This doesnt work anymore because people are more individualistic than ever, unless something will directly harm them in a very obvious way in the next hour it's as if it didn't exist in their mind
Kind of like spouse of illegal migrants who voted trump, or people surviving thanks to medicaid voting against their own interest, they're so blinded by rage/outrage that they can't even understand basic logic. I personally think we're at a breaking point in most of the west and it'll only be going downhill from now on, so just as you I don't see any solution. The education system can't fight social media, and you can't "force" people you've been brainwashing for decades into believing the be all end all of human life is their little unlimited personal freedom
People with auto-immune disorders who can't safely take the vaccine lose the protection of herd immunity. (Edit: and the children who don't have control over their own health outcomes.)
Agreed that it's not an easy problem to solve.
Yes, it is unethical. The other comments don’t agree, but this is exactly the position a lot of people hold. In the end, parents should be allowed to judge the risk for their own children based on their experience. Not allowing for that is basically thought control.
The real issue is that parents who want herd immunity to protect their own children, don’t want to also protect their children by keeping THEM away from the public or having THEM take precautions (like wearing masks or whatever). Instead, they want the risk to be taken by other people, which is unethical.
> Yes, it is unethical
Agreed on that.
> The real issue is that parents who want herd immunity to protect their own children...
Arguably, for some, the "real issue" is whether viruses have even been reasonably shown to exist at all with something other than a) appeal to authority or b) other logical fallacy.
For instance, if one reads many virology papers (just a PubMed search away) for detail and understanding, one may find that there are not actually scientifically controlled studies proving the existence and causal nature of so-called viral particles, but instead the papers are a house of cards that undo themselves. There's no science in the The Science™ -- just enough to look like it and pass muster among people just trying to get along in this hectic and challenging world.
--> The cognitive dissonance (and conditioning) is so loud on the above point, that most people will label the claim a Conspiracy Theory and become instinctively distraught or look the other way in emotion, unable to bear scrutinizing the claim.
Thus, to assume that
> they want the risk to be taken by other people
is missing the point entirely, for a quite serious and well-informed contingent of conscientious objectors to vaccination requirements.
At that point, it is moot to point out that, if people are convinced by the likes of world's greatest omnichannel marketing campaigns that they need a certain product put into their body (for fear of death and disease), nothing stops those people from doing as they please to themselves.
After all, if the product really (a) is safe and (b) works, then the customers of that product certainly have nothing to worry about. (Nobody needs to convince *other people* to take a product, if it works for them.)
This is ethical only in the extremist libertarian view where personal choice trumps all. Some parents probably believe that beating their child or otherwise abusing them is good for the child.. so should we just let them do that? There IS an end to personal liberty, it's not unlimited. "Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man’s nose begins"
I totally get what you're saying about these people not trusting the vaccines and the education problems though, and maybe the solution will have to be to meet these people where they are and try to educate them out of the misinformation hole. Here's one small example of how that goes - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o69BiOqY1Ec (it does not go well..)
It's very very hard to change these people's minds and we genuinely don't have any answers to how to do that. It's a very hard problem because all of us take an experts word for it at some level of reasoning, the anti-vaxxers just believe in different "experts". You can't go deep enough into the science and papers and experiments to really undeniably show everyone the truth, so how does anyone prove anything? Not to mention these positions often aren't reasoned into, and can't be reasoned out of. Most of us have some experience in trying to change someone's mind on one of these issues and know it fails. A lot of the time some visceral experience has to hit them or something internal has to shift within them and we don't know how to do that.
Then isn't it unethical of these parents to force the other parents - the rest of society - who think illnesses are dangerous to cohabitate with their kids who could be highly contagious, and breed and mutate viruses?
It goes both ways. "Society" is made of humans too.
Is it unethical to say parents should feed their kids if they believe food to be dangerous? Is it unethical to stop them from giving their kids bleach if they believe it to be a cure?
The answer is that as a society we have limits around what a parent can or cannot do for the sake of the overall well-being of their children. If a parent refuses to vaccinate their child without a very good reason why (such as other exacerbating health issues or allergic reactions), it should be treated as child abuse. Because it is.
In case anyone thinks this is purely hypothetical: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c62v59621dro
The problem with FL not vaccinating is that people who are sick will spread disease (and die) at different rates than those who are vaccinated.
Prior to this, to get such a large subset of children to not take vaccines for an epidemiological study would probably be illegal or at best be considered highly unethical.
Convincing parents to enroll their children in such a study in the name of science and for a small stipend would probably be next to impossible considering the potential lifetime impacts.