As a person of science, I respect each person’s choice …. “only if it doesn’t harm others around”.

Krishna: As a person of science, I respect each person’s choice …. “only if it doesn’t harm others around”.

For instance, I educate people on the importance of taking vaccines.

In the end it is your choice if you are staying in an isolated place, free from all human contact, even if you don’t take vaccines it is okay.

But if you don’t vaccinate your children and send them to school knowingly or unknowingly even if they catch a disease, they would spread it and what if other children get killed because of this ‘easily preventable by vaccine disease’? This is irresponsibility on your part. I just cannot watch helplessly and keep quiet when children are dying.

Spread of infectious diseases

Image source: News- Medical

Measles outbreak in the California state of the US ( spread to other states too) tells an interesting story.

Vaccines are not responsible for the woes people face but because of rejection of people to get vaccinated the problems arise!

Although the US is one of the most scientifically developed countries in the world, the children there are not getting vaccinated properly. Parents there lacked accurate medical information and held misguided beliefs that the vaccines were not necessary. Vaccinated children are dropping below the safety thresholds. When vaccinations drop below the herd immunity threshold—the proportion of immune individuals needed to prevent widespread transmission—outbreaks rise. According to public health experts, at least 92 percent of a population must be vaccinated in order to maintain the “herd immunity” needed to protect those who cannot be inoculated, including very young children and people with compromised immune systems due to illnesses such as leukemia. But over the past few years the percentage of families using the personal belief exemption in states like California has increased greatly, resulting in the loss of herd immunity in more than a quarter of schools in the state as of 2014. (1)

If enough parents in a community refuse or delay their children's vaccinations, an infectious disease can spread among many individuals. The outbreak can threaten all unvaccinated children, vaccinated children and adults who have weak immune systems, and babies who are too young to get their shots. And too many children in the US are going unvaccinated. Hence the outbreaks.

This is because some parents are opting out of vaccinating programmes because of mainly personal and religious reasons (2). Their concerns have no basis in science.

In at least one instance the courts have ultimately intervened to force children to get vaccinated. Public health officials in Philadelphia were granted a court order in 1991 after multiple children died from measles (3). The city forcibly vaccinated six children even though their families had refused the shots for religious reasons. Schools are banning children who are not vaccinated and courts are even ordering children in certain states of the US not to attend schools and stay at home if they are not immunised . These people are responsible for spreading the diseases by their irresponsible behaviours. They have to be stopped forcefully from doing that.

If I tell you to stop smoking and if you refuse to do so, that is okay because it harms only you. and you have every right to do what you want with your life.

But I will try to educate you again and again to make you understand the consequences of smoking. I need to do this by providing alternatives and showing you right ways of quitting because just asking people to quit smoking will not have the desired effect as smoking is a difficult to quit addiction and you have to go through a scientific process to succeed.

But if you refuse to get vaccinated or don’t vaccinate your children endangering others’ lives, I will not keep quiet.

I will tell you either to sit at home and not to come into contact with others or get vaccinated. You have no right to spread diseases and kill people.

Science is the field where democracy means "rule by the scientists , of the scientific method and methodology and for everyone's welfare"! - Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa

The problem with “I’m entitled to my opinion” is that, all too often, it’s used to shelter disastrous beliefs that should have been abandoned long back. It becomes shorthand for “I can say or think whatever I like” – and by extension, continuing to argue is somehow disrespectful. And this attitude feeds, I suggest, into the false equivalence between experts and non-experts that is an increasingly pernicious feature of our public discourse. Perhaps that’s one reason why enthusiastic amateurs think they’re entitled to disagree with climate scientists and immunologists and have their views “respected.” And do you respect ignorance, misconceptions and superstitions in the same way as facts based on evidence and true knowledge? How silly that looks!(4)

What you say misconception is just your perception but need not be based on facts.

In democracies it is increasingly becoming difficult to stop anybody saying that vaccines cause autism, no matter how many times that claim has been disproven by medical science . And anti-vaxxers keep saying it over and over again to mislead people.

But if ‘entitled to an opinion’ means ‘entitled to have your views treated as serious candidates for the truth’ then it’s a serious condition in science. Democracy doesn't work like that in this domain. You are entitled to have your opinions only if they don't harm the society you are living in. If you try to tell and mislead people that vaccination is a Government's conspiracy to sterilize you like the Taliban does in Pakistan or spread rumours like vaccination causes autism like people of religion do in the US, that right should be taken away from you! Because you are refusing to see facts and causing the societies to collapse with your irresponsible behaviour.(4)

Facts don’t need democracy. Facts need evidence based acceptance.(4)

Saving people is my prime concern as a microbiologist. Freedom of speech or right to have choices come next. If there is no life, the right to speech or right to have a choice have no meaning at all!

Your right to have choices shouldn’t kill other people. Period!

Footnotes:

1. Vaccine woes
2. http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/magazine/physicstoday/news/10....
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990%E2%80%931991_Philadelphia_measle...
4. In the field of science majority's opinion counts only when it matc...