This country is all about equality, freedom, liberty to do as you please. Unless you are not party to the ruling elite’s agenda or ideology. Then you have no rights at all. That’s the message parents keep getting about vaccinations, especially in light of a new law in California that basically forces parents to vaccinate:

Gov. Jerry Brown wasted no time Tuesday in signing a contentious California bill [SB277] to impose one of the strictest school vaccination laws in the country following an outbreak of measles at Disneyland late last year.

Brown, a Democrat, issued a signing statement just one day after lawmakers sent him the bill to strike California’s personal belief exemption for immunizations, a move that requires nearly all public schoolchildren to be vaccinated. The bill takes effect next year.

“The science is clear that vaccines dramatically protect children against a number of infectious and dangerous diseases,” Brown wrote. “While it’s true that no medical intervention is without risk, the evidence shows that immunization powerfully benefits and protects the community.”

Anyone who uses “the science is clear” to bolster his policy opinion on basically anything is either stupid or trying to sell you oceanfront property in Nebraska. The science on vaccines is not entirely clear. For one, there are widely divergent narratives concerning the effectiveness of vaccines to rid the world of disease. Death by disease in the developed world dropped significantly around the time when vaccines started being introduced, but the statistics indicate that most of these vaccine-preventable diseases were already on their way out in developed countries due to increases in water sanitation, food quality, and hygiene.

Furthermore, many of the vaccines the civil government recommends are not entirely (or even very) effective. The flu vaccine has pathetic effectiveness rates, for instance. Most dead-culture vaccines have very short and sometimes faulty rates of immunity. But even live-culture vaccines are not disease-proof. Notice that some of the people at Disney who recently became part of the measles “epidemic” had already had their MMR vaccines.

It’s probably the case that most people in the US don’t get measles because most people in the US don’t get measles. As soon as someone from some other under-developed country comes across the border carrying measles or some other largely defunct disease, some people are going to get the disease, vaccinated or not.

And if you look at this situation as a simple risk-benefit analysis, some parents think the risk of vaccine-related harm outweighs the risk of vaccine-preventable disease. Other parents think the risk of vaccine-preventable disease is greater than the risk of adverse vaccine side effects. Both parents should have the right to do as they think is best for their own children.

It might make people feel better to vaccinate their children. It might make them feel better to force other parents to vaccinate their children. But it doesn’t seem like anyone but the power-hungry civil government and the drug companies are benefitting from this legislation.