Sarah Palin is Right About Chickenpox
Nearly everyone who tells parents not to vaccinate their children is misinformed, deceived, or lying intentionally. Discouraging people from vaccinating their children is an awful idea and the leaders of the anti-vaccine movement should all be ashamed of themselves.
Although I disagree strongly with Palin's general opposition to mandatory vaccination, I tend to agree with her that the government shouldn't mandate the chickenpox vaccine.
Since chickenpox is so mild and never kills anyone who doesn’t already have a severely compromised immune system, it doesn’t seem like there’s a really strong case for absolutely requiring the vaccine for all children everywhere.
I will personally be sure that my own son gets a chickenpox vaccine, but reasonable people can and have come to different conclusions about it. In fact, nobody anywhere considers chickenpox an urgent public health problem: the vaccine existed for more than 20 years before it became the norm to use it in the United States.
In the UK, where nearly all medical decisions are subject to the rigorous cost-benefit analysis of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), the chickenpox vaccine is not part of the standard regimen for kids entering school. Like everything else, the choice to vaccinate against chickenpox has its costs: it has some potential side effects (none of them very serious) and costs money to administer. There’s at least some chance that the net consequences of the side effects and costs might outweigh the consequences of having more cases of the disease.
The government has some broad powers to protect public health, it needs to quarantine those with particularly virulent diseases, mandate vaccinations before school, fight epidemics, and assure some overall standard of public hygiene — but these powers obviously have limits. Seasonal flu kills far more people — and even more children — than chickenpox does, but there’s no general mandate anywhere that I know of that ordinary adults get yearly flu shots.
There has to be some sphere of personal autonomy that includes parental autonomy. No parent should be allowed to, say, enroll a child in school who has not been vaccinated against anything, nor deny them antibiotics for a life-threatening infection. But hardly anyone would quarrel with a parent who suggests that a child with a mild fever rest and eat chicken soup rather than taking medicines that might have side effects. Is there a slippery slope towards an utterly heartless society that would satisfy only wigged-out Ayn Rand fans? Sure. But mandating any vaccine is an equally slippery slope towards a true nanny state. In the end, refusing a chickenpox vaccine is a lot more analogous to treating a fever with chicken soup than it is to withholding antibiotics from a child with a potentially life threatening infection. As much as I hate to say it, Sarah Palin is right about the chickenpox vaccine.
