Bioethicist Arthur Caplan thinks it is time for vaccine rejectionists to put their money where their mouth is. They should be legally and financially responsible for the damage and death caused by their decisions.
Anti-vaccine zealots say that whatever one’s reason for opposing vaccination for themselves or their kids, America must respect their choice. They yell about freedom, individual rights and liberty. A lot of Americans apparently agree with this view…
… But shouldn’t they be held accountable for that choice when it hurts others?
Caplan invokes the recent instance of a New Mexico woman who traveled through four US airports while infected with measles, but a better example might be the measles outbreak in San Diego in early 2008. As I wrote in How vaccine rejectionists hurt the rest of us, an unvaccinated 7 year old boy returned from a foreign vacation incubating the measles.
Ultimately 73 children, including intentionally unvaccinated children and children too young to be vaccinated, were quarantined for 21 days each because of significant exposure to measles.
… The outbreak was brought into the community by an intentionally unvaccinated child and initially spread by other intentionally unvaccinated children. Even though the outbreak was easily contained, one quarter of children who became ill were too young to be vaccinated, and the taxpayers spent $125,000 containing an outbreak that was entirely avoidable.
Caplan believes that the parents of the 7 year old boy should be legally liable for damages. He invokes two giants of American jurisprudence:
… Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes who said, “The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.” He was paraphrasing the great British philosopher John Stuart Mill who argued in a classic 1860 essay that the sole justification for interfering with another person’s liberty was to prevent harm to others….
… If you infect my newborn or my grandmom because you put your liberty over your duty to help protect the weak and the vulnerable and chose not to get vaccinated then you are responsible for the harm you do and you ought to be liable for it.
Vaccine rejectionists should be happy to accept legal responsibility. They are supposedly sure that vaccinations are unnecessary because diseases like measles disappeared “naturally” and no longer pose a health threat. If that’s the case, they have absolutely nothing to worry about.
On the other hand, the responsibility for hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of dollars in damages, might provoke a reassessment of the “risks” of rejecting vaccination. When the risks spread beyond danger to others, to danger to their own wallets, they may have an epiphany and decide that accepting vaccination makes far more financial sense.
Caplan concludes:
I don’t really don’t care to give lawyers more business but if the only way to get those who put other lives at risk by selfishly or stupidly not vaccinating is to sue them then so be it. If the lady from New Mexico is a Typhoid Mary spreading measles throughout America as she goes her merry uninoculated way then she ought to pay for those she disables, sickens or kills.
Let’s sue vaccine rejectionists for damages. Then we will learn if they are ready to put their money where their mouth is.
