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We are not talking about people being guinea pigs or getting tortured or undergoing other horrors. Context matters. We are talking about jabs. That's it. Jabs that take a moment. I'm sure there are highly complicated philosophical questions I am not considering. But you know what? I couldn't give less of a fuck. The US is has gone way beyond the "break glass in case of emergency" point for vaccines and it gets worse all the time. Plus we are talking about jabs.
Yet. But we are talking about disregarding the lessons about the necessity of basic principles of autonomy in favor of "the greater good" and the ~~patriarchal~~paternalistic idea that the doctor and medical community knows better than the patient themselves what they should have done to their bodies, the exact same things that motivated the horrors that led to the development of modern medical ethics.
Yes, it does. It really does, and you are not taking it into account.
If we say that the state has a prima facie right to override the consent of the governed when it comes to their health, that is not merely a slippery slope, that is fully regressing and jumping down a hole we just got done climbing out of.
Do you trust the American government to make medical decisions for you? Do you think RFK and Doctor Oz should get a button that says "We can force people to do medical procedures"
There are arguments to be made for and against any kind of compulsory healthcare, but you need to remember what you are proposing.
Extremely funny way to put it. Most people who suffer from being denied available vaccines are children who's parents (including the daddy patriarchs) have made the decision on their behalf. Not patients who made such a decision on their own volition.
The real question is whether parents have the right to deprive their children of safe and effective medical care. This is functionally a "parent's rights", not "patient's rights" issue. Parents rights being here as in other situations a euphamism for treating children as property without rights at all, for whom society ought have no ability or obligation to intervene when the parents do not wish it.
Instead of making these vague allusions the darkness of history, why not be more specific?
To narrow things down and avoid having to write a whole thesis, specifically relevant here are population based interventions of a discrete nature. That is, not ongoing like fluoridated water or iodized salt which are both medicines given slowly and consistently without informed consent, I guess you also disapprove of. And not things done to only a few people based on criteria like a diagnosis. And not efforts made in the name of research. But we are talking about known efficacious procedures done once or a few times per lifetime, that every single person has done, except a teeny tiny number who have a bona fide medical reason that they can't have it.
Please show your historical examples of how proposing that every single child should benefit from standard vaccines is "the exact same things" as promoted the most recent developments in medical ethics.
Which hole is that?
Comparing iodised salt and mandatory medical interventions is absurd.
But no, i am against neither. And I am also not against a mandatory vaccination policy. But I find the glee with which you people will totally disregard any question of morality surrounding it, and the entire field of medical ethics worrying.
Because the list of medical interventions done with disregard for patient autonomy can, and do, fill books? The mandatory sterilisation of those deemed unfit parents in Scandivania, the nonconsensual medical procedures routinely performed on those deemed incompetent by virtue of disability all over the world, stipulating receiving social benefits on receiving medical procedures or taking specific medications.
Before that we had the enforced experimental treatment of the mentally ill, the medical experiments performed by duplicitous means on minorities or the poor, hysteria treatments, etc. Etc. Etc. Etc.
I actually meant to write paternalistic, but a wire got crossed somewhere. It works either way, since you zeroed in on it meaning the paternal role. The thing is that the doctor taking on a paternal, and usually patriarchal and domineering role, deciding what is right for the patient overriding their decision is in fact a very important critique of the beginnings of modern medicine. That is how you get doctors deciding to do further procedures on people they put in comas without asking, or test medications or procedures on uninformed patients. For more mundane examples, its why people hate their asshole doctor who won't listen to them. The compliance model of medicine is outdated, it is taught specifically as an example of how you get bad results.
It is not just children who do not get vaccinated. We have people who have grown up unvaccinated who have children who will then also not get vaccinated, and if we make demands of a medical treatment they do not desire they may instead forego medical assistance entirely.
Now if you want to deal with the idea of a medical practitioner giving a willing child a vaccine that the parent does not wish them to get, that is an interesting ethical dilemma.
The problem is that law is class power, we can not allow the bourgeoisie to inject us with whatever they want. I'd trust a socialist country to mandate vaccines, but a capitalist country would use it as an opportunity to sterilize or experiment on people.
They fucking do it anyway dawg wtf are you on, just fucking vaccinate and protect people with disabilities
No they don't. Or at least insofar as they do, it is not accomplished the way being talked about. Queermunist is not being antivaxx by pointing out that the American government has a bad history when it comes to being empowered to disregard medical consent.
So is your argument bounded by your American context? What are some present day states you think are competent to administer universal vaccine programmes? and some which like the US have not yet earned that power?
infectious disease is a collectivized global issue. I have a difficult time to imagine a coherent framework based on trying to allocate vaccinations to people based on the most nefarious actions taken by any government with jurisdiction over them.
I am not American, but America is what was discussed. And I think given the history of that country it is valid to be skeptical of any enforced medical program.
I assume you mean that it is a collective, global issue, not that it is collectivised. Because the fact that it is precisely not collectivised is why we have such disparate outcomes.
No one is suggesting that vaccines be banned in countries with bad human rights records, merely that trusting a state with the power to enforce medical treatment is a broad power.
There are a very small number of vaccines that would even be considered for such a program. About a dozen common ones and add maybe another dozen of epidemic or regional concerns. Vaccine manufacture is subject to high levels of scrutiny everywhere. There is nothing nefarious that can be done with a tdap or MMR vaccine when delivered via a comprehensive standardized programme. All examples I know of where bad actors used the cover of vaccines to do something else that was bad were outside those contexts. Having a known, published schedule that everyone adheres to rather than an alacarte pick n choose, is actually protective. Not as you are imagining, the perfect place to hide in plain sight. Having mass vaccine distribution and administration campaigns where everyone gets vaccines from the same source creates substantial logistical issues in doing whatever targeted mischief it is you are imagining could take place via the small number of injections over the course of a person's life.
Your argument is like saying that because police have used excuse of traffic enforcement to wreak violence on people they don't like, it ought not to be mandatory to build motor vehicles with seat belts.
There's a long history of people with disabilities being injected with random shit in the US before the Declaration of Helsinki. You shouldn't ignore this history just because you're rightfully angry at backwards anti-vax reactionaries.
What are these injections?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentation_in_the_United_States
This is not a complete list, of course. There's a reason the Declaration of Helsinki had to be made.
Thanks for providing some details. I appreciate your effort.
But I disagree with your logical premise that because a specific procedure (injection) has been used to do harm in some cases, that it is tainted forever.
And it's hard to believe that could be your true underlying objection. Some vaccines can be given other way, like drops in the mouth or a nasal spray. If, theoretically, all the basic vaccines could be administered without injection, would that fully allay all your concerns? I doubt it.
Reading through the examples, what strikes me they all have in common, more than the involvement of needles is that all the victims were institutionalized in situations of obvious power imbalance. Some voluntarily and others not. Injection was only one of various procedures performed in all cases. It is easily described and understood because it is so commonplace.
None of them were apparently conducted under the guise of vaccination. (not forgetting that your claim above was only that disabled people had been wrongly injected of course, not of any deception.) But presumably there is some kind of relationship being drawn with the concept of vaccination. It does seem relevant how unlikely any of the above procedures could have been mistaken for a vaccine. More likely it would have been described as an active treatment, or not described at all.
Must think about: the nitty gritty of how someone would actually go about doing this kind of "experiment". The reason all the above victims were physically confined is that this substantially reduces the complexity of the project.
Firstly, in order to coerce them into submitting to the "experiment". And then to observe the effects, probably in comparison to a control group. Assuming that it would be possible to disguise some sort of other substance as a vaccine and administer it in a completely discreet way that could not be distinguished from the actual vaccine. Does the doctor/nurse/worker who is administering the vaccine know about its actual non-vaccine content or does it come in like a fake package to fool them too? Someone has to coordinate getting the correct noxious injection into intended individuals. I'm not even talking about picking out who gets the "special" vaccine and managing the controls; just the actual physical work of it, and creating minimal records. It's a lot to organize! Generally if it is a normal, scheduled vaccines, all the doses are stored in a shared stock for anyone who needs them. So like many conspiracy theories, we run into the problem of how many low level workers with nothing to gain from exchanging vaccines for something else, would need to be involved and perfectly silent.
Then those people need to be followed somehow to observe the effects. Can you imagine trying to follow a bunch of toddlers out in the community whos parents didn't know they were being studied?
I will stipulate that the Helsinki Declaration was one component in a change in practice and philosophies among medical researchers and probably had some effect on some medical practice somewhere. But I really think one of the reasons why all those examples are from 50+ years ago is because just injecting random people with random shit is understood to not be very useful, even taking the most utilitarian viewpoint. There just isn't that much to be gained from it. If you do have something novel to inject people with, if you are looking to learn something and not just torture them, it's very difficult from free-range non consensual random subjects. And if you are looking to torture or harm, a vaccination campaign is a very circuitous and expensive way to go about it.
There would also be the problem of all the unvaccinated children in your target community. If there were to be a case of an outbreak of preventable disease where a lot of the infected people had had their vaccines done perfectly, then I might consider this on a list of explanations (nowhere near the top). In fact, since there have been no mystery outbreaks of measles, the idea of this is kind of refuted now that measles is getting everywhere. There is a vaccine failure rate of 3-10ish% and outbreaks only occurring in communities where big pools of unvaccinated.
This is a fun debate but mandatory vaccination refers to a known, common schedule that is the same for absolutely everybody in a jurisdiction. The concept of "experiment" is a total diversion in the first place. The bulk of experimentation, and certainly any potentially harmful experiments, involved in vaccines is done prior to placing them on a schedule of mandatory, suggested or even available vaccines.
Fucking around with people at the population level is much easier to do a million other ways.
That certainly wasn't the premise, and no, vaccines administered without injection wouldn't allay my concerns because that's not the only way people have been experimented on.
The University of Michigan deliberately infected patients with influenza virus by spraying the virus into their nasal passages, University of Iowa and Harpers Hospital and University of Nebraska College of Medicine deliberately fed infants radioactive iodine, similar radioactive iodine experiments were done on Alaska natives, and this really jumped out to me:
The underlying problem with allowing the ruling class disregard the Declaration of Helsinki is that they will use this to advance their own class power. That's it. It doesn't matter if it's injections, drops, pills, or feeding children feces. I support any AES country that pursues mandatory vaccination, but the history and the class character of the US makes me very wary of giving them the power to mandate any medical treatments.
Universal vaccination is contrary to the interests of the ruling class. It is slipping away along with various other remnants of softer social democracy since the workers power has been crushed and the USSR is no longer a countervailing force. Speaking of the USSR, since its demise and no longer enforcing vaccinations, conspiracy theories like these ones are rife and vaccine refusal has got its claws in. Capitalism brought many diseases. Now in the US where their own ruling class has freed itself from any kind of pretense that they care for anyone but themselves, we can see the culmination of their concerted, decades long project to destroy universal vaccination.
You have examples from 50 years ago of tenuously-related incidents. And there are others. In the vast majority of cases, and all the cases here, involving the abuse of institutional power to coerce vulnerable people to undergo gross or heinous procedures under the guise of research or experimentation. The fact that all the examples you use are viscerally evil feeling is not irrelevant. It can serve to smooth over the logical and factual problems in the anti-vaccine propaganda. I rebut, you respond by escalating ickiness. they made the children eat shit to give them diseases
All the examples being 50 years old isn't because ethics have been perfect since the 1960s. the Helsinki declaration didn't end it all. And its not because subsequent tortures have been perfectly covered up; actually lots of stuff is well known about. it's because modern methods of experimentation, even when completely misused, do not lend themselves to this kind of emotional argumentation quite as well. Same issue as how we got into this list of horrors, the conflation of all things that can be done via injection as equivalent.
None of your examples would even be impacted one way or the other by any framework regarding mandatory vaccinations. They could happen just as easily in a context of mandatory vaccines as one where vaccines are completely unavailable, or gently encouraged. Because they are different things. It is like opposing public transport because of the association of trains with the holocaust. or all ocean travel because of innumerable horror facilitated by boats. there are some superficial similarities, right?
anyway, maybe you are not able to understand the difference between a universal, population based deployment of a few extremely safe, effective and specific interventions vs undisciplined, unscrutinized sadists operating on relatively small scale hiding their activities within institutions under the pretense of science. A less exaggerated version of your examples/arguments would have the same underlying flaw. So changing to describe less ostentatious, more pervasive, more modern examples will not address this.
I would recommend if you have not already, seek out some of the work by Harriette Washington, best known for Medical apartheid : the dark history of medical experimentation on Black Americans from colonial times to the present. That 2007 book and her prior/subsequent work all pursuing the same line of investigation, is useful to learn how to grapple with the whole long history of scientific/medical horrors. There is viler stuff in that book than anything in this thread, believe you me. And she brings it up until present day in a comprehensive picture of experience and understanding, rather than a stream of horror vignettes. So you can move past this anti-vax illogic towards a consolidation of your solidarity and desire for mutual autonomy.
I don't know if this'll be good news or bad news but you can stop worrying about this in the hypothetical because it is already the case. E.g. Legally Mandated Treatment
So no more hand wringing about what might happen if a situation which is both different than what I am advocating for, and your own worries, should come to pass.
I keep saying that I support vaccine mandates in AES countries, this is not an anti-vaxx stance and I don't know how much clearer I can make it. After the revolution we need to put anti-vaxxers in reeducation camps and their children should be moved to safer homes. What I don't support is giving our current ruling class even more power than they already have over our bodies. They must be frustrated at every turn, because any power we give them will be used to advance their own class interests even further.
The fact that there is already a framework where the government can mandate medical treatment for prisoners is bad, and expanding it to everyone isn't really better. Any framework that disregards the Helsinki declaration will inevitably lead to more and more exceptions, because medical ethics restrain a predatory ruling class that salivates at the chance to pump our bodies with whatever they want. Even now, those exemptions you list are the prelude to what will be done to the rest of us soon enough.
Vaccines are extremely safe, but they wouldn't stop at vaccines. They never did before.
Get back to me when the US has cases of polio and then after that Americans relearn what an "iron lung" is.
Sure, and then we'll relearn why we can't let the current ruling class inject people with whatever they want: diseases, live cancer cells, radioactive elements, organic toxins, cow blood, whatever.
2 cases of mumps reported at Berkeley High School
Polio here we come!
"Think of the children!" stories are always effective tools by the bourgeoisie to trick people into giving up autonomy.
We will have mandatory vaccination after the revolution, and reeducation camps for anti-vax parents that abuse their children. Until then, we can't give the ruling class the power to inject us with whatever they want. That list of examples I gave were real things the US government actually injected people with before the Declaration of Helsinki - including the cow blood.
This whole argument is so silly, people act as if enforcing vaccination is the only way to prevent these illnesses to spread. That’s a faulty argument. There is so much data about how consistent and accessible information about vaccinations leads to high vaccination rates, and how forced vaccinations leads to distrust in the medical system as a whole. Instead of arguing for forced vaccinations these people should argue for banning misinformation about vaccines and national health programs in which healthcare workers go to peoples homes to provide correct information about the importance of vaccines while still respecting their bodily autonomy.