Should there be a penalty for not vaccinating yourself or your kids?

I got that Your body is your temple!!

Linkat wrote:

Although those states may be the less vaccinated - what is the %?

This website says 86 percent of local children are fully immunized in San Diego County. I believe the CDC claims that vaccination rates of at least 93% are needed to ensure 'herd immunity' against pertussis.

Ken August, a spokesman for the California Department of Public Health, said state officials do not believe there is any connection between immigration and the whooping cough outbreak.

"We absolutely do not think either legal or illegal immigration has anything to do with the California pertussis epidemic," August said.

Public health officials, he said, have a number of reasons for reaching this conclusion. His response, edited for clarity, continues below:

Pertussis did not need to be imported into California. It's always been here.
Mexico does a great job vaccinating for pertussis. Until just a few years ago, Mexico was using the whole-cell vaccine, which is probably more effective than the acellular vaccine that has been used in the U.S. since the 1990s.
There is no pertussis outbreak/epidemic in Mexico.
Immunization rates in Hispanic children are high.
All adults, whether they are from the U.S. or Mexico, are likely to be susceptible to pertussis. A 2008 survey found that about 6% of U.S. adults stated they had received Tdap, a whooping cough inoculation for adolescents and adults that was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2005. The number is actually likely to be lower since the responses were not verified.
Hispanic infants are overrepresented among pertussis cases, but this discrepancy disappears after six months of age when most infants have received three doses of Dtap -- the vaccine for infants -- and are much less vulnerable to pertussis.
Overall rates of pertussis disease are highest in whites. We think Hispanic infants are overrepresented among young infants because they are more likely to live in larger households, per census data, and have more contacts. More contacts means more opportunities to be exposed to someone with pertussis.

I think the difference in your own situation, Robert, is that you are an adult, responsible for yourself.

Yeah, I just kind of figured it was moving on from there.

I'm also marginally coherent at best, it would seem.

We pretty much all agree, I think, that laws ensuring safe cooperative use of roadways, harbors, airports, etc. are necessary for the general good as people travel between places.

Well, what about doing what is possible and practical to ensure the public good from a biological perspective? To require individuals entering areas where, say, yellow fever is endemic to be vaccinated prior to arrival is not just a question of the individual's safety, but of curbing the spread of disease throughout the globe.

But in theory I agree, if someone is endangering the public good beyond a certain degree I agree with some degree of coercion. And I'm genuinely curious as to whether any vaccines I don' t have may qualify.

Well, I think that's the tricky bit. If you're vaccinating a population against an endemic disease, individuals don't much matter. One person sidestepping the requirement doesn't matter, every other person sidestepping it matters a great deal. So punishing the individual seems draconian, but forgoing punishment invites failure.

Here's a thought, and surely it's already being employed to some degree all over the place: make it more onerous to go without the vaccine than to receive it. Require five times the paperwork and bureaucratic runaround to enrol an unvaccinated child than a vaccinated child. Have the processing time for a request to enter sans vaccine be longer than the 10 days required for the vaccine to be effective (doesn't, of course, have any bearing on those who purchase forged or misbegotten papers).