It IS a tough issue. Parents can choose to opt their kids out of vaccines. A friend’s grandchildren haven’t received the first inoculation, by their parents’ choice. So their liberties have not been taken away.
On the other hand, if those parents refused a vaccine from an air borne communicable disease for their children, the schools can and should deny them admission. I would submit that many diseases that we thought were history have made a resurgence because we have a new population that does not immunize their children who enter our schools. At that point, I don’t much care about their liberty. They made their choice, so let them educate their own kid(s) and keep them out of the classroom where my kids are sitting.
That doesn’t keep them out of the public forum, however, so they are subjecting me and mine to disease for no reason at all. Notice that supermarkets, hospitals, airports, etc (the public forum) now has antibiotic wipes at their entrances. Who’d have thought of such a thing even 10 years ago?
Now, as to sexually transmitted diseases, it is a somewhat different story. Except that kids today, many of them, are becoming sexually active at 12. By 15, even more so, and God only knows how many partners they’ve had. Multiply that out by all their partners’ partners, and you have some pretty serious numbers. By the time they graduate from high school they are ‘used up.’ It’s not just something that’s occurring in the barrio or ghetto, it’s common across the socio-economic spectrum. I’ve seen it up close and personal in what is frequently listed as the ‘richest’ county in the USA. It’s shocking and heartbreaking. Parents are too often kept in the dark, and are making decisions based on what they want to think their kids are (not) doing, not what’s actually happening.
Advances in medical science are the most astonishing phenomenon in my long life time. Not only the immunizations, but as you mentioned, fever reducers, open heart and other coronary surgeries, technology available for neonatal survival, and penicillin before them. Those are complemented by things like fitness, emphasis on healthy eating, lots of things. If these things, including immunizations, are available to us, I don’t know why anyone would choose not to take advantage of them. But if that’s their choice, I’d be the last to stop them.
We’ve actually had mandates in the past that were expressly for the purpose of protecting our liberty. I.e., the draft. That was good and mandatory in my day. And it sure as he!! had potentially adverse reactions for those drafted, at least as severe as adverse reactions to any immunization you’d want to name. Today, even that has an ‘opt out’ or rather ‘opt in.’ And, thankfully, many have chosen to opt in.
What about the parents who lost children to intestinal blockage caused by the rotavirus vaccine, which was subsequently pulled from the market because of those deaths.
Fortunately, localities can make those decisions about who attends their schools; folks theoretically can move or homeschool to deal with the more draconian localities (at least now that homeschooling is legal in most places; 30 years ago, it wasn't).
While we are at it, let's ignore the importation of disease through illegal immigration. Before picking on the citizenry for making informed (or uniformed - again, freedom is risky) decisions, let's take the authorities to task for failing in their Constitutional duty to protect the borders, allowing pertussis, TB, and all manner of goodies, to rejoin the mix.
Makes for interesting discussion, for sure.