Anti-Vaccine Hysteria as Anti-Fascism

Via Respectful Insolence, here is anti-vaccine activist Barbara Loe Fisher equating mandatory vaccines with the Bush administration's assault on our civil rights:

Those who criticized the quality and quantity of government regulated vaccine science or questioned the ethics of mandatory vaccination laws were marginalized by those in positions of authority, who defended the status quo. The fear, prejudice and intolerance defining the first decade of the 21st century was eventually turned on parents of vaccine injured children, who were asking doctors and public health authorities how many vaccines their children were going to be forced to take in the name of protecting national security and the public health.

September 11, 2001 was a day of indescribable loss. And the losses America suffered that day have been magnified by the losses we have suffered since that day because some have used fear as a political tool to silence criticism of government policy.

The ironic point here is that Barabara Loe Fisher has herself been using libel lawsuits to shut up critics of her own organization, in particular a well-publicized suit against Wired magazine.

The serious point is that, yes, mandatory vaccines are indeed a limitation on your freedom. Some infringement of liberty is inevitable wherever people live together, and one of the functions of government is to adjudicate which liberties should be protected and which curtailed in the name of public order. Our society has decided that you do not have the right to send your children to public schools without vaccinating them against dangerous, contagious diseases, or work in a hospital without vaccinating yourself.

Is this the equivalent of the Patriot Act? I maintain that it is not. First of all, the degree of risk from pandemic disease is vastly greater. Measles, small pox, and other now tamed predators used to kill a 9-11's worth of children every few months. The influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 killed around 30 million people in a year. And not only is the danger real and great, but vaccines actually work against it. I have grave doubts about whether allowing the FBI to examine our library borrowing habits will ever prevent a single terrorist attack, but vaccines undoubtedly do save lives.

I suppose one thing vaccines and the Patriot Act have in common is that we don't know how much harm either has actually done. Vaccines may contribute to autism or hyperactivity or asthma in some way, although nobody has ever shown this and the studies done to date seem to rule out any very large effect. Likewise we don't know who may have been hurt by the Patriot Act, because its provisions prevent us from ever knowing who has been spied on, what the government has learned about them, and what use has been made of that information. Which is why nobody has successfully challenged even the law's weirdest provisions in court; without knowing who has been spied on, it is impossible to know if anyone has standing to file a complaint.

As an opponent of the Patriot Act and a passionate believer in vaccination, I resent Fisher's attempt to somehow equate the two. Vaccination is a rational policy that actually protects us from a very great harm; spying on Americans is a policy of dubious value, and even if recent legal changes have not done much identifiable harm, the history of how governments use domestic spying is bad enough to give anyone pause.