First, you’ll lose. I can’t guarantee that, because there is a chance, however small, that these specific vaccines could eventually be determined to be harmful. However, vaccines are one of the best technological advancements in medicine. That doesn’t mean every vaccine is stellar or even necessary. The risk versus benefit discussion should happen between you and your provider, and ultimately, the decision is still yours. The problem is that if you make this whole thing about the science, and the data indicates what you are trying so hard to say it doesn’t indicate, you’re going to end up with mandates and forced vaccinations.
You have bought the distraction and made the argument your purpose.
Read that again. Your opponents are making it about the science. Do you want to know why?
Vaccines are incredible. Vaccines have vanquished smallpox and rendered polio obsolete in first world nations. Measles, mumps and rubella, are easily controlled with massive vaccinations campaigns.
The science of vaccines is vastly superior to the science of anti-vaxxers. Despite their misinformation, conditions like autism have never been linked successfully to vaccines, and the conditions that they may cause are incredibly rare and isolated to those with other conditions. The safety measures that are already in place will stop the use of a vaccine if it starts to indicate it has more harm than benefit. I won’t lie to you and say those numbers are infallible or that the process is entirely above reproach. In the study they might err on the side of caution sometimes, and err on the side of a little risk in others, but when the evidence becomes obvious, they will pull a vaccine when the risks outweigh the benefits.
You’ll hear some people talk about the medical industrial complex. I will tell you that is actually a thing. It is a thing in the sense that there is a military industrial complex. Agencies set on performing a mission or reaching some result, will ultimately find little fault with themselves. The issue is that the military falls under the government monopoly on violence. They have no competitors. Further, the very existence of the private industries that support the military only exist BECAUSE of the military.
That is an important distinction. No private agency in medicine exists solely as a government sanctioned organization. It is the other way around. Government agencies have tried to usurp the powers that private medical agencies already had through voluntary interactions with their patients. The government embraces the fear people have about their medical conditions to gain power. Every industry has a government power that expands to the extent that the fear of those participating in the industry allow it.
This is all a distraction, though.
LIbertarians are unwise to make this about the vaccines or resist for the sake of resistance. Making this about the science is far more likely to wind up with libertarians looking like fools than it is with them looking like geniuses.
This is different than resisting vaccine passports, where history teaches us we are right to resist. Vaccines, however, have a long term history of being very safe and very effective. Unlike movement restrictions imposed on people by their governments, vaccines actually have helped people and groups of people.
Most libertarians are incredibly intelligent people. Like others that are intelligent in one area, they have a tendency to extrapolate from being intelligent in one or two areas, that they must be incredibly intelligent in every area. There are literally libertarians posting all sorts of fake news about vaccines because they want to be right about resisting the vaccines.
Here is the problem. They can be right about their resistance without making it about the vaccines. The whole thing is about autonomy. It is about individual rights. When libertarians focus on anything else, they have allowed their opponents to frame the argument in a way that they are most likely to lose.
Vaccines are safe. These vaccines appear to be safe. If libertarians make their arguments for patient choice and autonomy about the safety of the vaccines, they’ll end up losing their argument for patient autonomy altogether.
The most frustrating part is that there are some fairly prominent voices among the agorists and the anarchists forwarding the fake science argument and failing to focus on the real problems with the prominent narrative. Our jobs as proponents of liberty isn’t to make the case that every science is moot or every government policy is based on bad evidence. Those are fights we will lose.
The point is to advocate for freedom and assert how much freedom helps all people prosper. We don’t have to prove vaccines don’t work. If we did, libertarianism would be a lost cause. We have to make the case that autonomy and the patient and provider relationship is priority. That people will be more prosperous if they have access to the procedures and technologies they can afford, and if the government just gets out of the way.
Similarly, they should be pushing providers, like me, to simply educate people about the vaccines to help them make an informed decision. Telling people not to get it or scaring them with fake news, like magnets sticking to their arms, isn’t libertarian. If you are doing that, you overdosed on the red pills. Nobody is perfect, but your providers didn’t enter into medicine in order to harm patients. With our education, we still have limited understandings, and we seek to help you. Pretending the entire industry is part and parcel of some grand conspiracy to hide vaccine harms from the public, while vaccinating ourselves, and then coercing or forcing you to get vaccinated, you need to lower your dosage of the red pills.
Now, this is still a patient decision. You should address your own concerns and medical or family history to evaluate if you are at risk for having a bad reaction to a vaccine. But if you are reading or listening to someone else telling you they are risky or dangerous, understand how that movement started. Andrew Wakefield was a doctor, and he started this movement. He tried to link the MMR vaccine to autism. It was garbage work and fake science. The Doctor Who Fooled The World is a documentation of the events as they transpired and an evaluation of the work. It eviscerates his efforts.
Stop believing lies.
Enjoy this? Share it at least once…direct to a friend, or on your social media site of choice. Help spread the word! Subscribe below or join the Other Hands to make sure you don’t miss any new posts, and remember to like, share, and comment.
