But the list of mandatory vaccines should be pared down to the absolute minimum.
Even Benjamin Franklin regretted until the end of his life not having his son vaccinated for smallpox and who later died of the same.
Well, there could be special non-vaccination private schools, I suppose...but I sure wouldn’t send my kid to one.
I think they could allow religious exemptions, the way they do for Jehovah’s Witnesses on the blood transfusion issue, but even that is often decided in court because the risk to the child is so great. And those kids would simply have to go to schools where children are admitted without a vaccination certificate.
Childhood diseases are a sure thing in unvaccinated children, and they bring blindness, deafness, sterility or even death...all perfectly preventable, except that their parents are the victims of “witchdoctor science,” which is the thing that keeps African villagers from getting vaccination or even modern treatment for diseases that were disappearing from the civilized world and have taken root again in Africa.
The witchdoctor doesn’t have to have a religious connotation, btw; many of the parents who are not having their children vaccinated are middle class Evangelicals in the thrall of health quacks at their churches, or upper middle class atheist parents who think that Johnny is going to “get autism” from a non-Earth friendly vaccination, ignoring the fact that autism is actually most common among what is probably their major ethnic group and class.
Wha?
Even the most intelligent, best-informed of parents will make choices that they themselves regret.
It goes with the territory.
Exactly how much government should require of them is still being worked out.
Certain collective goods like border security can't be attained unless there are restraints on individual goods like freedom of movement.
In this life, there is always going to be tension between individual rights and the (hopefully very few) restraints on them that are needed for the good of the Republic.