In the campaign to force parents to get their children vaccinated for measles, the rhetoric of the pro-vaccination people continues to grasp at new lows for sociopathic thinking. That the increased revenues enjoyed by pharmaceutical companies for peddling the vaccines outweighs the alleged benefit to children, is doubtless the major force driving the compulsory bandwagon. But perhaps the least-respectable argument on behalf of this campaign comes from persons claiming to be parents of a child who cannot be vaccinated because of his/her health conditions, and insist that all other parents get their kids vaccinated for their child’s sake.
Assuming these are legitimate concerns – rather than propaganda campaigns initiated by Big-Pharma – I can truly sympathize with the plight of such parents. But I am also sympathetic to the concerns of other parents who, in their best judgment and caring for the well-being of their own children, do not want to subject them to vaccinations that they see as a possible threat to their health. The issue thus comes down – as it always does whenever the state involves itself – to the question: should the interests of one child or one parent have priority over those of other children? Is the life of child A demonstrably superior to the lives of other children such that the latter may be sacrificed to it? This is just one more example of the fundamental evil that underlies collectivist thinking: to paraphrase Orwell, all of us may be equal, but some of us are more equal than others!
7:53 pm on March 1, 2015
