Canada just lost its measles-free status. So here’s the question…
If an unvaccinated child spreads measles to someone else’s kid, why shouldn’t the parents be liable in small-claims court?
I’m not talking about criminal charges, just basic responsibility. If your choice creates the risk you should have to prove you weren’t the reason someone else’s child got sick.
Is that unreasonable?
No, they should just not be allowed to prevent their children from being vaccinated.
I don’t believe people should be forced to do it, I think that they should be held liable tho.
Should they, yes, will they, not in the west.
Or their own. Lock them the fuck up.
Its impossible to prove you caught an airborne disease from a specific individual.
I’d argue that parents should be liable to the state, not the victim or their family. This is a societal issue, and civil liability won’t fix it.
Liable to the state but not your fellow citizen? I just don’t see it that way.
Otherwise we go the American route and end up fighting amongst ourselves.
If it’s between the parents and the victim, then our government has failed us.
We are not litigious as Canadians, but maybe we should be in this aspect.
Where do you draw the line ?
Also how do you sue/prove the 4th grader’s parents when a kindergartner catches measles. Maybe it was the kid down the street who spread it.
Probably better to strip them of their free Heath care and bill them for extra costs.
Actuaries love sorting out probable numbers by statistical groups
Felony murder, in my opinion.
Even if the child dies, withholding a vaccine would have to be made illegal. You need to be committing a felony first, someone dies, then get charged with felony murder.
Not an antivaxxer, but that sounds difficult to prove. Even for mere liability, how would you demonstrate on a balance of probabilities that someone got sick specifically because someone else didn’t vaccinate?
(Also I really hope small-claims court isn’t the appropriate avenue for trying something as serious as infecting a child with measles)
How are you going to deal with pesky things like religious freedoms and the Mennonites/similar cults?
Ignore them when they harm society. They don’t get the freedom to commit murder and they shouldn’t get the freedom to not follow public health requirement just because they have some mumbo jumbo excuse.
Gonna show my age here and I’m not from the USA, but I remember in the 80s the doctors and nurses would come to the school one day, we’d all have to line up, and we all got vaccinated with something. Pretty sure there was no parental consent involved.
We’ve gotten a bit too soft on some things.
I got those needle parades in the 90’s in the area I grew up in (Atlantic Canada), in much the same manner.
It wasn’t a choice for us and we didn’t have outbreaks.
Quarrentine - No public schools or markets, or public places if there is an outbreak and unvaccinated.
They are still free to practice their religion.
And if vaccinations are against their religion? I’m not siding with them btw just curious how other people want to handle cult members in regards to holding them liable.
If they choose to not vaccinate their child, fine. But they shouldn’t then expose other people to their children’s infections.
It gets messier when they are communicable before symptoms are showing. But if my Sally and your Bobby were at a party with 10 other kids, and the next day bobby is showing symtoms, and then a week later a binch of kids at the party are as well, then they should be held responsible.
Especially if they had reason to believe Bobby had been exposed to it days prior.
Make your choices, but if your religious choices are that important to you, then account for how that impacts other choices you make, and don’t put other people at risk.
“Religious freedom” doesn’t give people the right to endanger public health.
I still think they should be held liable, this is a preventable disease.
This right here, there’s nothing preventing the religion from being followed. And being in a religion doesn’t make you not responsible for your actions.
I doubt they’d see it that way and pull out the ol’ persecution complex but I agree with you guys. They can quarantine at least.
Fun fact: ancient religious texts don’t have shit to say about modern medical practices.
Religious freedom can go suck a dick when it harms other people.
According to the Church of the JustPulledANewReligionOutOfMyAss, our Chief Papa Ghost said I need to break your kneecaps then push you onto a busy highway: your sacrifice is nothing personal, but if I don’t do it, I’ll spend eternity being spanked by fire goats. Doesn’t make sense to me either, but Chief Papa Ghost works in mysterious ways, so I don’t have a choice, you see? It’s my religion!
…except if I actually tried that, I’d spend the rest of my life in prison, cuz even religious freedom doesn’t give me the right to kill people ‘because God’.
At least not directly: I can still kill you without consequence by spreading a completely avoidable pathogen to you, but giving that scenario the “wtf?!” treatment is pretty much why OP made this thread, lol.
Now if you’ll excuse me, Chief Papa Ghost had a kid out of wedlock with a lower-dimensional being, and it just so happens that he’s made of BBQ twist Fritos and Rootbeer, so I’m gonna go commune.
You keep them out of public schools to reduce the chance of them exposing other people as much as possible. Their co-religionists aren’t likely to press charges, and many of these extreme religious groups don’t want their kids in mainstream schools anyway.
In other words, you can use government-funded schools or you can refuse vaccination (and pay for your kids to attend a private school that allows unvaccinated students, or homeschool them and do the work yourself). You can’t have both. That’s how school vaccine mandates are supposed to work in the first place. We’ve just gotten way too lax about upholding and enforcing them.
I don’t disagree with this mindset, but I do want to say that it should be on the plaintiff to prove your child caused the problem rather than the defendant to prove they did not. Proving a negative is damn near impossible in court.
I don’t disagree with this mindset, but I do want to say that it should be on the plaintiff to prove your child caused the problem rather than the defendant to prove they did not. Proving a negative is damn near impossible in court.
If your choices raise everyone else’s risk, it’s fair that you carry some of the burden. Courts deal in probability every day.
No, we can’t start throwing out burden of proof when it suits us.
I’ve argued elsewhere in this thread that the solution is to obligate parents to provide vaccinations, just like they’re obligated to provide food, water, clothing, shelter, etc. This is the basic legal duty of care that all parents have towards their children, and it should extend to vaccines. This is both a logical application of existing law - rather than requiring new law - and incredibly simple to prove in court. If parents are obligated to vaccinate their kids, all a cop or social worker has to do is ask for the proof of vaccination. There’s no balance of proof to consider, and no knotty problems of untangling exactly how someone else’s kid got sick.
Agreed - it’s pretty unlikely that you’d be able to prove something like that.
I suppose you could try to apply precedents surrounding HIV disclosure, but I think it’d be a tough sell.
Edit: And to be clear, even in that situation, we’re talking about disclosure, not actual treatment-related choices.
It opens some weird ideas to the game. If you are unvaccinated, yet previously had the illness and recovered, do you need a vaccine. What if you’ve been vaccinated and still spread it. What if you can’t have the vaccines because if of health conditions. Anger does not fix the problem. We need a compromise, not a rule.
Kids shouldn’t be getting measles in the first place. No measles, no problems you described. No anger here.
Bacteria and viruses spread. It’s what they do. We need a way to adapt to them. Vaccines are good, being healthy probably helps more. What we need is real food, housing and health care and education. Instead we have arguments about vaccines. Sad really.
I mean, from a simple enforcement perspective “prove that you’re vaxxed” runs into the same problem as “prove that you’re a legal resident”.
Access to health care, access to documentation of that health care, and the ability to produce it on demand all require certain amenities that marginalized people don’t have. It’s a rule that inevitably penalizes people for being poor.
Shy of getting people chipped and slotting your medical records into the same system that we use for criminal enforcement, the folks enforcing the laws will default to the assumption that you’re at fault until you can prove otherwise.
If the other kid is vaccinated, shouldn’t they stay healthy instead?
Not all vaccines are 100% effective, and not everyone is able to get a vaccine (such as immune suppressed or immune compromised).
Even if the vaccine is only partially effective, it will reduce the viral load and speed up recovery time, which is very effective at reducing the number of people that a vaccinated person can spread their illness to.
To prevent an outbreak, an infected person must spread their disease to an average of less than 1 person. Having more people vaccinated is the easiest way to reduce this number.
An immune suppressed person can still be protected by having a majority of people vaccinated, and therefore unlikely to spread a disease to a person who interacts with them.
That makes sense, thanks for explaining! I do agree that vaccines are the best way to contain a virus. I was just wondering this, how a unvaccinated person could pose harm to others, vaccinated or not. But yeah, it’s better to not take that risk.
To put it simply, pathogens are like roach infestations. You can do everything in your power to keep your apartment clean and tidy and bug free, but if your neighbour’s apartment is a spawning ground for the little shits, sooner or later they’re going to make their way in no matter what you do.
It takes everyone, working together, to make us all safe from deadly diseases. That’s how herd immunity works.
There are a few considerations to make regarding the thought process of “if the other kid is vaccinated, then they should stay healthy,” even when exposed to illnesses that they are vaccinated for.
(1) Vaccines are not 100% effective. In the case of the Measles vaccine it is estimated to be 93-97% effective – this is a very effective vaccine. So, if someone is vaccinated, then yes, they likely will stay healthy even if they are exposed to a case of the Measles.
(2) Not everyone can be vaccinated for medical reasons whether it is due to allergies to something in the vaccine or another medical issue. So, these people are forced to rely on what is called herd immunity (everyone who can be vaccinated around them is vaccinated, so the virus or bacteria will not be around to infect the unvaccinated person). Unfortunately, for herd immunity to work specifically for the Measles scientists believe that 95% of the population needs to be immune to stop its spread. This is because the Measles is extremely spreads extremely easily – about 90% of people who are not immune to Measles will become ill when they are exposed to the Measles.
(3) The last point that I will make is that if a pathogen (virus or bacteria) is allowed to circulate in the population due to low vaccine uptake, then there is a stronger likelihood that the pathogen will mutate (change) to get around the protection of the vaccine. Then nobody is protected and scientists get the fun of trying to create a new vaccine for the mutated version.
Take what I say here with a grain of salt since I am not an immunologist, physician, or scientist. I just like to know the pros and cons of vaccines as well as how best to protect myself, my family, and my friends from preventable illnesses. I learned a lot of this information by talking to my doctor, reading from medical journals (Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, Nature Immunology, etc.), and also checking major medical center internet sites for information such as Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins, Mayo Clinic, MassGeneral, etc. There is a lot of excellent information to be had from our scientific community to help make an informed choice - much of what I located was open and free to the public to read.
Thanks, appreciate the write-up! I’m just wondering that myself, my question wasn’t meant as an anti-vax post.
You’re welcome! :)
Offering a generous tax credit for proof of vaccination ought to resolve the problem easily enough, given the simple-minded and grift-oriented nature of your average antivaxxer.
Naw gotta hit em in the pocketbooks.
I wonder if the numbers could back that up? Like the cost of treatment of an unvaccinated child getting a preventable disease, versus a vaccinated child getting the same disease? Also, the number of children in each group? No vaccine is 100% after all.
There could be an actual cost to the healthcare system for choosing to not vaccinate. If that’s the case, creating an incentive like a tax credit for vaccinating could be an effective way of reducing cost overall.
I’d like to see someone study this, if they haven’t already.
It seems so fundamental to the equation “how much of a village it should take”. To me, that’s the only hard metric that matters (not on an individual level, by any means, but averaged out, over the long term trend).
What is the cost to each of us as individuals so that we may all, on average, enjoy a better quality of life than we do today.
While I subscribe to that same kind of thinking, others will not. They will see it as being forced to share the rewards of their hard work with others who, in their opinion, didn’t work as hard. Put another way, they see themselves as having taken on the responsibility of caring and providing for themselves, and policies like that would force them to also care for someone else who isn’t meeting that responsibility.
It’s a simple take, but not completely wrong. There will be people who will take advantage of others generosity, shirking the responsibility to care and provide for themselves, and keep demanding more. And there’s also the reality of government waste and corruption siphoning that “hard work” away.
It ignores the many realities out there, like how not everyone gets the same starting point in life and not everyone has the same abilities. But its simplicity is its strength. It explains things in a way that is easy to understand. I worked hard, they didn’t. I didn’t get handouts when I was struggling, so why should they.
This is why I think the way to convince these people to do the right thing is to reward those who do vaccinate with a tax credit or payout. It makes it fair across the board, and makes those who still choose not to vaccinate understand the cost of that choice. Or at least see that there is a cost to the choice.
A study, that could give a hard number of the average cost per patient, broken down by vaccinated and unvaccinated, could go a long way to proving the point. The recent measles outbreak would be a great place to start.
I think there are a few issues:
-
How do you prove kid A gave kid B measels?
-
Why isn’t kid B vaccinated? Because they don’t need to be, group immunity. Well that is no longer true with anti vax so…
-
Kid B then gives kid C measels, so kid B’s parents are now liable.
-
Your in small claims court. You have to prove damages. So you’re going for loss of earning for an adult looking after the kid + pain and suffering. Is that payout going to be worth filing papers, legal advice etc.
You’d be better passing a law to mandate vaccines, but that won’t be politically viable.
Just my thoughts - am not Canadian.
pain and suffering.
Minus this, that’s not a thing in Canada. You could seek future earnings if the child died but that’s hard to prove when they don’t even have a GED and it’s unlikely when the child is dead. (Also would take it out of small claims)
-
Parents who don’t vaccinate their children without a good medical reason should be treated as any other parent who intentionally abuses, harms, mistreats, or abandons their children, simple as that.
If they harm other people on top of that, then that should probably count as attempted murder plus aggravated assault and battery, or some equivalent.
It’s a shame that rampant wilful idiocy with intent to cause harm and mayhem isn’t a criminal offence, though, because they should also be charged with that.
Completely agree. I said more in my own comment, but if you’re interested, here’s the relevant criminal code that backs up what you’re saying; https://www.criminalnotebook.ca/index.php/Failing_to_Provide_the_Necessaries_of_Life_(Offence)
Failing to Provide the Necessaries of Life
I’m not fluent in legalese, but that seems about right, yes.
You know, we eliminated smallpox in the wild, and mostly eliminated polio, by giving vaccines. Fuck these moronic idiotic parents not vaxxing their kiddos. It ABSOLUTELY should count as child abuse to not vax your kid.
Liable for what? Medical expenses, funeral costs? Expected life earnings? What about the homeschool/tutoring expenses of immunocompromised kids that didn’t catch measles because the were withdrawn from school due to fear of an outbreak. I’m not trying to throw out straw men to muddy the water, but where do you draw the line between someone’s actions and their consequences.
I’m not talking about criminal charges, just basic responsibility.
Maybe we should be. There are consequences to reckless driving and drunk driving independent of whether you actually harm someone because this actions are inherently dangerous to others.
Im not a judge.
