Ozzies to Be Fined For Not Vaccinating Kids When the State Wants
Australians are some of my favorite people, but their government just seems insane to me. In the latest move, parents who don't vaccinate their kids will be facing biweekly fines until their kids are caught up
For a former penal colony, they don't seem to understand freedom much.
And I'm surprised I haven't seen this at the top of /trending or /hot on steemit.
My point here is not that vaccines are good or bad. I do vaccinate my own kids. My point is that if your government can compel you to inject yourself or your children with foreign substances, what can't they do?
In previous iterations vaccinations have been required to attend certain places/functions. If your daycare facility demands that your kids are vaccinated to attend, that is perfectly fine. They are running their own program and have the right to set their own rules about who can and cannot come.
If it's all about the public health, why stop there? Why not fine people if they do anything else that might be against the public health?
This is the problem with standing on the slippery slope. Advocates of policies like this say stupid things like "Oh, we would never do that" even though there is no philosophical difference between the current policy and an 'extreme' policy. You have to take the long view of these things and understand that what is new today becomes old fashioned and accepted 10 years from now. If it's OK to fine people until they inject their kids how you want, at some point it will be OK to fine people until they do every other kind of behavior the state wants. And at some point it won't just be fines. It will be straight out force of one kind or another. It's the road to totalitarianism.
The Real Problem
The real problem with vaccinations is the shield of no liability that doctors and vaccine manufacturers have. I don't know what the laws are like in AU on this matter, but here in the US if a kid has an adverse reaction to a vaccination then the parents have no recourse at all. And there is no justification for that, ever.
If a child has an adverse reaction to a vaccine both the doctor and the vaccine manufacturer should have to defend their actions in court. It could well be that everyone was following the best practices they knew at the time and it was just an unfortunate result. It could also be that the child shouldn't have been given that particular vaccine because of any number of medical reasons. Or maybe there was a bad batch of vaccines that slipped through the quality control process. The people handing these things out shouldn't get an automatic pass on liability.
Every year there are lots of elderly people who die from getting a simple influenza vaccine because their systems can't cope with the viral load from the vaccine. And their families can't do anything about it. How is it OK for someone in an office to figure that it's 'worth it' to kill a few people to save them from the chance of maybe catching something later?
Without this mechanism of redress the entire industry is missing one of the most important negative feedback systems that incentivizes further development and advancement. There is a positive pressure in the form of increased sales to create new vaccines, but they also need that negative pressure to make everything as safe and effective as possible.
Exactly right.
On another note, Australia has the highest proportion of minors in state care among OECD countries. The last figure I saw was something like a little over one in fifty Australian minors. Finland is second with 1.6 percent of all minors in care. The Finnish number has been going up lately despite the long-standing downtrend in violence, alcoholism and criminality in the country. The most developed countries in the world may not necessarily be the best places to raise a family for long. This is because the rest of the world has been catching up economically and because some vestige of family centric values might be left in some of them.
I wonder how much of that is because of Aborigine families being separated.
In the US there is a similar trend in that if you are from a black family you are much more likely to be split apart by child welfare services.
That's a good question. I found a newspaper article in the Guardian according to which the number of Aborigine children removed from families and placed with strangers since the year before the prime minister of Australia apologized for the policy of removing children from Aborigine families (2007) and the year before the article was published (2015) has been growing.
I've understood that this was done to Native American communities in the USA but at some point safeguards were put in place in the form of a higher legal threshold for removal.
The same thing has happened everywhere where there are minorities in Western countries including Canada to Inuits and Native Americans. Denmark was at it in Greenland. What the Norway, Sweden and Finland did up to the 1970's was force Sami children to go to boarding schools because schools could or would not be not built close to their homes. The children were forbidden from speaking their native languages at the schools. Because white kids in the Australian outback were allowed to be distance schooled using the radio, it is very clear that the same arrangements could've been made in the Nordic countries. There was clearly a malicious intent to wipe out their cultures at a high cost of human suffering.
(Perhaps it is wise of me to not elaborate what I would do to the people responsible (if alive), if I had to power to do so, on a public immutable blockchain.)