According to a publication by the American public Health Association, Anti-vax Facebook groups have shifted the narrative from "vaccines are bad for your health" to "vaccines violate your freedom" in response to the overwhelming scientific data that suggests that in fact, vaccines are not that dangerous.
https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2020.305869I would challenge that assumption, on the grounds that although it is technically right on an individual level, it is wrong on a societal level. Vaccines promote overall freedom by saving lives, so unless you put very little value on life, you must concede that vaccines do in fact make more people more free, because less people are dead.
A dead person has no freedom whatsoever, so if your child (or someone else's child) dies because they were not vaccinated then they effectively have no freedom whatsoever. Is this complete loss of freedom worth the loss in getting pricked with a needle and suffering some minor but temporary pain? I don't think one could ever argue this as a valid point. Even in the case where only a few people do actually die as a result of not getting vaccinated and the majority do actually survive, how many vaccinations are worth that death of another? I don't think that there is a case to be made to suggest that even just one death is worth hundreds of millions of vaccines.
In this way, arguing for the anti-vax position on the grounds that it restricts freedom is like arguing that restricting slavery takes away your freedom to own people. While it is technically right on an individual level, it is wrong on a societal level because in order for someone to own a slave, they must necessarily restrict someone else's freedom. The exact same principal applies, if you have the freedom to restrict someone else's freedom, then overall freedom is diminished. If we have the explicit goal of maximizing freedom, then we ought to restrict those freedoms which allow some people to limit the freedoms of others.
How many times you would be willing to be pricked with a needle so that someone you don't know doesn't die?
At some point in the distant past, the universe went through a phase of cosmic inflation,
Stars formed, planets coalesced, and on at least one of them life took root.
Through a long process of evolution this life developed into the human race.
Humans conquered fire, built complex societies and advanced technology .
All of that so we can argue about nothing.
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