Liberty On Tap OKC, a wonderful pro-liberty meeting of minds that holds their monthly gathering at Pelican’s restaurant in Oklahoma City, held it’s most recent meeting last night on the topic of vaccines. Organizer Craig Dawkins set the stage for the meeting by reading alternating views on the topic by two fairly prominent libertarian writers, confirming that this debate is alive and well within the pro-liberty community as well.
Speaker Carlos Ledesma, certified hematologist and program director for a medical lab technology and phlebotomy program at Rose State College, presented the pro-vaccine side of the argument, but in a very reasonable manner. While he advocated vaccines as necessary for the overall health of society, he did acknowledge that their were risks involved. Additionally, growing up in the Philippines gave him first-hand experience in the dangers of vaccines, specifically the Dengvaxia scandal that erupted in his home country two years ago. French pharmaceutical company Sanofi Pasteur manufactured the vaccine, designed as an inoculation against Dengue fever, and struck a deal with the government for a mass vaccination program. The vaccine ended up being given to over 700,000 Philippine students, many without parental consent. The vaccine ended up actually inducing a severe form of Dengue infection in children who received the vaccine but had had no prior Dengue infection, and causing an unknown number of deaths.
Ledesma’s presentation was very reasonable, and he didn’t appear to advocate mandatory vaccination at all. I couldn’t help but wonder, though, how his arguments would be handled by mainstream press, who seem to automatically catalogue anyone with any questions about vaccines at all into the “antivaxx” camp. The “vaccines are safe and effective” mantra probably wouldn’t have gone over so well in his home country after the Dengvaxia affair.
After Ledesma finished speaking, the conversation among attendees shifted to the more philosophical aspects of the vaccine debate, specifically whether its a violation of another’s right to expose them to disease.
I believe that most people involved in this debate are less concerned with the philosophical aspects than they are with the corruption of the pharmaceutical industry, the blanket legal immunity those entities enjoy, the almost invisible epidemic of autoimmune disease and chronic illness in children, an epidemic that appeared seemingly out of nowhere sometime around 1990, the $4 billion in vaccine injury payouts given to families by the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, the ballooning vaccine schedule, as well as the many scandals that have erupted surrounding vaccines, including Dengvaxia.
What sets off alarms bells for some, particularly those critical of the ‘War on Terror’ era propaganda campaign, is how much the current push for mandatory vaccination mirrors that effort, with mandatory vax bills essentially the Big Pharma equivalent of the Patriot Act. The “you’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists” attitude pushed by the major media outlets, with any view even mildly critical of vaccines enough to incite an ad hominem avalanche, and the effort to censor vaccine critics online has been highly disturbing to people who do have serious questions regarding the “safe and effective” mantra.
My own two cents: Aside from the question of whether vaccines are “safe and effective” or not, or from the question of whether many of these previously-normal childhood illnesses might actually be beneficial to our immune system over the long term, advocates of liberty should approach disease prevention in the same way that it does every other societal issue that it confronts. To understand the libertarian solution, you must first understand what libertarians are for. What we support is a system where voluntary interaction is expanded as far and wide as possible. We are for a system of rules that enforce voluntary interaction, and prohibit coercion as much as possible. This system is ends-independent, we libertarians have no idea of the direction society will evolve, but we support any direction that is arrived at via voluntary means. We support this system of rules because we trust that, even though we can’t know how or in what direction society will change, we do know that the outcomes will be far better for everyone involved than if top-down planning attempted to force an outcome.
Allowing people to plan their own lives and make their own decisions, shielding them only from coercion, produces a market order that provides thousands of benefits that no program of top-down coercion could ever hope to produce. Allowing people to plan their own lives has resulted in massive increases in standards of living, quality of life, and large leaps in health and sanitation.
So the solution to the vaccine question should be simply to remove monopoly power from vaccine manufacturers, restore liability, and either modify or abolish altogether the various public agencies(CDC, FDA, etc.) that have shown to be highly susceptible to influence by the industries they ostensibly regulate. The power of choice, highly underestimated, will force industry to also evolve, and create a better product.
