People often throw up absurd objections to factual research because they have a moral stake in the debate but limited evidence (or knowledge, time, or interest) to engage on a utilitarian front. Unfortunately, it seems to be more politically successful to fight via convolution of facts than to engage in the moral issue directly.

The public seems to undervalue legitimate moral arguments, so competing interests instead engage in a proxy war of claims about benefits and harms.

If you were to publish neutral research showing that, were the US were to draft all men 18-35, then the US armed forces would grow by X% and we could fight Y major wars at once while occupying Z square miles of foreign territory, then it would seem mostly senseless to direct anger or criticism at you if your claims were factually sensible.

If on the other hand, though, you were to promote the idea that the draft was needed, that it would produce a socially useful outcome, and that people who oppose your view are being irrational and selfish, then you've entered into a moral debate.

And further, if you own a large defense contracting firm, then your claims and your moral position about the necessity of forcing people to join the military would be subjected to additional, admittedly ad hominem, scrutiny.

Instead I analogize with drunk driving -- significantly fewere drunk drivers equates to significantly fewer 3rd party injuries and deaths as a result of drunk drivers. Similarly in the vaccination case, there are 3rd parties who stand to suffer from the actions of those who do not receive vaccines.

Edit: I forgot to put my second point, which is:

I agree with your analogy in that those who stand to benefit should be closely scrutinized when advocating a position.

I suspect you are opposed to drunk driving prohibitions, as lowered reaction times and lowered inhibition do not cause fatal collisions, just fail to prevent them. Or is this some how different? (Disclaimer, this statement can be seen as inflamatory, it is not meant as such, it was just ignored from my previous post, and I see the analogy as related.)

I think it applies here, but there was a study in which they made something default. Like by default they enrolled you into some fitness program, but you have the option of not doing it. The study found that more people actually went through with the program instead of trying to opt out. Compare to when the program was optional and people had to sign up to do the fitness program.

By stating that vaccinations are mandatory, his intentions might simply be trying to get as much people as possible to take the preventive care. Again, I am just trying to state one possible reason.

What if he was not attached to any company or any entity, but just merely a doctor who advocated the vaccination as mandatory? Would things be different?

If living a 'natural' life is higher on your value scale than preventing a possible infection, then you wouldn't want the vaccine even if no one else was getting it either.

Let's say your neighbors want to build a $1M lake. They want you to chip in $50k. You're going to get the 'benefit' of the lake one way or the other. But you don't even like lakes. In fact, you'd prefer they didn't build a lake, as lakes attract mosquitoes, and you are (perhaps irrationally) concerned about infections from mosquitoes. Would it be selfish for you to not chip in? Would it be rightful for them to take the $50k from you by force since you're getting the 'benefit' of the lake?

Edit: I'm not saying people should be forced into taking the shots or anything. Just that I'll laugh at people who use reasoning that doesn't begin to make sense to me.

So the argument has been lifted from the individual to society. The next logical step might be the species. There may be a strong argument against immunization for the sake of human kind. Are our immune systems still evolving? Will we need rely on technology to replace the improvements that were previously made by natural selection? If not, is the human race going to lose to a virus we can't defeat with medicine? Short term gains, and all that jazz.

Or more likely because the U.S. government lies to its citizens about health information all the time; I'm not getting the H1N1 vaccine for the same reason I didn't sign up to go breathe the air at ground zero.

Your position against the science vs pseudo-science statement seems to support that very statement.

That's not my argument. I'm just saying that if you trust what they say about health, you are seriously uneducated. Take a moment to consider Buck v. Bell, the test vets, MKULTRA, the air at ground zero, the drug war, farm subsidies, private insurance monopolies, legalized rape (KBR), abstinence only education, etc.

Apologies, but I'm not very good at guessing what people mean when they construct sentences of this general form. Could you say explicitly what your reason is?

For example, after September 11th the EPA and NYC government said that the air at ground zero was perfectly safe to breathe. What's more, no one is being held accountable even though dozens or hundreds are dying horrible deaths because of these lies. This is just one example, there are literally hundreds of cases like this that we can point to in the last fifty years.

Therefor, it's

A) Reasonable to assume that the government may be lying about the safety of this vaccine.

B) Reasonable to assume that if they are lying about the safety, no one will be held accountable.

I believe NASA landed on the moon because I've thought about it for myself. I don't automatically believe it because the government said it happened.

If the data says the the H1N1 vaccine is safe and effective then I'll get it, but I'm not going to put something into my body just because Donald Rumsfeld or whoever says its a good idea.

All I'm saying is that you shouldn't abdicate your thinking to someone else, especially when they may have an incentive to mislead you.

Well, the data do say the H1N1 vaccine is safe and effective. Discussing anything else is a red herring.

Or did you just want to throw up FUDdy innuendo?

Have you ever read RFK's article about the autism vaccine link in Rolling Stone?

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/7395411/deadly_im...

I've seen a lot of evidence since then saying the autism-vaccine link isn't true, but I've seen zero evidence saying that the cover up that RFK wrote about didn't actually occur. How are you supposed to make an educated decision when the head of the CDC goes on record saying they are hiding safety information from the public.

1) This has everything to do with pseudo-science. There are no credible studies pointing to ill health effects outside of extremely rare cases in which a person is allergic to some part of the vaccine or has some other pre-existing condition. And there are numerous studies indicating that you're more likely to get struck by lightning than to have any reaction to a vaccine, outside of a sore arm.

2) "The government" is hardly a single entity. You're displaying conspiratorial thinking here, which is pretty tough to take seriously. You're discussing the EPA and NY city government, which is not the same as the NIH and CDC. Additionally, it's not only the U.S. government which is strongly recommending these vaccines. If you'd like to continue that line of argument, you'll have to take it up with probably every single first-world government.

3) Being an intelligent and rational person means evaluating claims individually, regardless of the source. Starting from the position that the government is lying to you is just as stupid as assuming they're always telling the truth. Of course there are fuck-ups and cover-ups, but that doesn't mean everything is.

If this is true, then the rational position would be to assume that the government may or may not be lying to you. Which is what I believe.

"'The government' is hardly a single entity."

The people are different, but if the Milgram experiments (and sociology in general) have taught us anything, it's that a person's social influences are as important to their decision making as their intrinsic character. And the laws, rewards, and punishments are largely the same across departments.

I realize the EPA is different from the FDA. However, the reasons why the EPA buried studies about the amount of mercury in freshwater the day before issuing new guidelines on acceptable mercury levels are largely the same as the reasons why the FDA approved OTC plan-B only for women 18+.

The takeaway is that bad things don't (usually) happen because of bad people. They happen because organizational behavior, psychology, and sociology allow us to make an educated guess that if an organization looks like X, then what tends to happen will be Y.

Now if I see patterns across organizations that you don't see, maybe that makes me a conspiracy theorist and maybe I'm seeing patterns that aren't there. Or maybe I just see patterns that you don't see.

I agree that at the end of the day you have to think about these problems individually for yourself. I don't actually believe the vaccines are all that dangerous, but at the same time I'm not going to take them just because the CDC or NIH or whatever say they are safe. The reason is that the people running these departments are operating under largely the same structures and incentives as the people running every other government department, and history as a whole shows that these sets of structures and incentives tend to produce unsavory behavior.

Sounds like you're saying "don't trust all your decisions to the government", which is trivially true and apropos of nothing.

The cause of the illness was a substance not then known to be toxic.

The toxin did not remain airborne long enough for EPA samples to gather it.

The EPA tests were not capable of detecting the problem.

General incompetence.

A bad batch of test kits.

The toxin may have come from dust stirred up during work which quickly settled.

Any of the above being true would invalidate your conclusions. As someone totally ignorant of the illnesses you are talking about, I have only your statement to go on, which addresses none of the above, so these may be known.

As for government lies, many many cases of government lies can be equally attributed to ignorance as they can to malice, so I am challenging your basic proposition.

My argument more generally though is that I don't trust the government to make my health decisions for me. You may well be right that in this case the government was just incompetent and not malicious, but how is that supposed to convince me that I should trust them to make my health decisions for me?

That said, I'm taking the opposite position. My story is roughly as follows: I'm a twenty year old Canadian who has had open heart surgery twice, maybe half a dozen day surgeries of various natures, and gotten the government-distributed flu vaccine every year for as long as I can remember. All of this was organized and (mostly) paid for by the government, since that's the way the health care system works up here. I haven't died a horrible death yet. Why would this particular case be any different?

and we're tired of propagandists

Everything comes with a risk. If there is a problem here then it's the the average person does not make the effort to make that they are aware of the risks that they are taking.

The woman from the video has, I presume (did not watch the video, as I'm at work), suffered an extreme reaction, and that is indeed incredibly unfortunate, but I'd wager it's also incredibly rare.

Both the magnitude and the odds of any drawbacks must be considered. We human creatures are very prone to emotional reactions to such anecdotes, but we are making poor use of our invaluable rational minds if we don't try to overcome that.

So put YOUR money where your mouth is, and show some evidence that more than a miniscule percentage of the vaccinated had that sort of reaction. Otherwise the irony stands.