[kryogen1c]

> no other reason than ignorance

Well, speaking of ignorance!

Vaccines are not perfectly safe. All medicine can harm, and vaccines are no exception. Mandating dozens of vaccines to billions of children is forcing parents, under threat of state-sponsored violence, to injure their children.

There are 10s of thousands of VAERS cases in the US per year. Now multiply that by 20 and we're in the ballpark for number of children youre so cavalierly arguing to force harm upon.

Now, there are diseases where vaccines make sense. However, the blanket statement "inject into your newborn whatever the government tells you" is pretty obviously stupid in my opinion; there are plenty of cases of known-toxins taking years to get removed from market with no corporate repercussions - the incentive structures arent perfect. See DDT, leaded gasoline, asbestos, Teflon, uranium mill tailings, cases too numerous to mention. However much you trust the government to do their best, there are agile corporations getting paid handsomely to outmaneuver them.

For my children, we make a disease-by-disease risk/reward determination and do a slower schedule once they're a little older.

[YZF]

I generally support vaccination and there is an argument that public health can sometimes trump individual rights or even health. That said, the example that has always bugged me though the default of giving babies Hepatitis B vaccine even if there is no possible vector for them to get the disease. The other example is chickenpox where we are trading off a potentially mild disease (everyone I know had it as a child) to the risk of getting it as an adult where it is more severe. These tradeoffs are not straightforward and the health authorities are also not transparent about how they weigh the risks.

I've also done something similar with my children. Make a determination for a specific vaccine and schedule. This is a combination of both weighing their health above public health and applying my particular circumstances (e.g. stay at home mom vs. daycare) to adjust the risks. They ended up getting most vaccines, just on a different schedule.

[atmavatar]

> That said, the example that has always bugged me though the default of giving babies Hepatitis B vaccine even if there is no possible vector for them to get the disease.

Hepatitis B is spread via bodily fluids, including blood. In this, Hepatitis B is particularly insidious: there is generally a large viral load in the blood relative to other diseases, so even microscopic amounts of blood are sufficient for infection, and the virus can remain active for up to a week on exposed objects.

Perhaps your children are different, but blood is a pretty common sight with most children.

Worse: when you contract Hepatitis B, it may become a lifelong infection.

Sadly, screening those people who have contact with your child is thwarted by the fact that roughly half of those infected don't realize it.

See: https://www.cdc.gov/hepatitis-b/about/index.html

See: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/hepatitis-b

See: https://www.stanfordchildrens.org/en/topic/default?id=hepati...

See: https://www.chop.edu/sites/default/files/vaccine-education-c...

See: https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2025/why-hepatitis-b-vaccinatio...

[kryogen1c]

> the default of giving babies Hepatitis B vaccine even if there is no possible vector for them to get the disease

Yeah absolutely. Another example, which is tangential since its not a vaccine but is a default medicine for some reason, is antibiotic eye ointment on literal hours-old infants. Im not concerned we have gonorrhea thanks, ill listen to your talks and sign your waiver.

Fwiw, the hep b recommendation just changed like a month ago :) sensibility wins out, sometimes eventually.

[fn-mote]

> we make a disease-by-disease risk/reward determination and do a slower schedule once they're a little older

This was honestly the weirdest part of that whole post.

So after all that “not everything is safe”, it sounds like you … wait a little while and then do it anyway? Is it less risky because your kids are a little older?? This seems so unlikely to me.

Anyway, I think a lot of that post demonstrates a failure of an ability to have a dialog (radicalized positions don’t lead to understanding imo).

[SpicyLemonZest]

What "state-sponsored violence" are you referring to? You can't go to jail for refusing childhood vaccines in the US, as far as I'm aware. But you also can't expect the rest of us to let you inflict violence on our children, by exposing them to deadly communicable diseases which you could easily vaccinate your own children against.

[kryogen1c]

> What "state-sponsored violence" are you referring to?

Not referring to a status quo, but to the implication of the parent, and yours after the fact, that we should consider mandating vaccines.

> deadly communicable disease

If you think this is the only thing on the US vaccination schedule, you should do a little research.

[B1FIDO]

What about the trillions of dangerous and live viruses that are cultured in order to make vaccines in the first place? Would those be harmful if they escaped into the wild? Or what about if they were ... deliberately released somehow?

Are they OK to stockpile those viruses and culture trillions more, on an industrial scale, in every American state? What about in Venezuela? North Korea?