| bobjob, you've totally misunderstood me. Addressing your issue with brute force: Firstly, you should understand that I'm a logical person, capable of moral and philosophical thought. Looking at the problem in it's raw form, Polio needs to be eradicated before we can halt expenditure on the eradication program, which comes at a huge global cost. To eradicate the disease, we have to destroy it. To destroy it, we use vaccines to reduce the number of carriers and available hosts to zero. This requires hosts to forcefully, or willingly be vaccinated. Humanity finds itself staring at a few pockets of the disease which are proving difficult to wilfully, or forcefully vaccinate. Humanity has two choices: Give up, or carry on Carrying on produces further choices: Humanity can, through the process of negotiation, wait for these pockets wilfully vaccinate, reducing the number of carriers to zero. No more Polio. Problem solved. Humanity can wait for these pockets to develop their own wilful way of eradicating the disease from their population, reducing the number of carriers to zero. No more Polio. Problem solved. Humanity can find a way to forcefully vaccinate these pockets, reducing the number of carriers to zero. No more Polio. Problem solved. Humanity can find an alternative way to forcefully reduce the number of carriers to zero, such as selective murder or the less-selective, genocide. No more Polio. Problem solved. Humanity can wait for nature to reduce the number of carriers in these pockets to zero through natural disaster. No more Polio. Problem solved. These, whilst some of them horrifying, are solutions to the problem humanity faces, for the "greater good" and all that jazz. The cost and viability of these solutions are under constant consideration whether you like it or not. Why haven't they occurred? Well, People continue to resist the vaccine. Developing new methods of eradicating disease doesn't happen spontaneously in small populations. The moral price of forcefully vaccinating this population is probably on the cusp of acceptability. The practicalities are more challenging at this time, however I wouldn't be surprised if a solution of this type isn't being actively worked on. Nature works in it's own time. The global value of the lost life is too high for decision to be made to enact mass murder for the sake of eradicating Polio at this time. Upon finishing, answer not needed, let me ask: If we ran out of the ability to produce Polio vaccine for the world, would you rather: murder several million people, or, condemn humanity to a future with Polio, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives per year, on top of hundreds of thousands of new cases of disability? |
If you view deaths due to diseases that would be prevented by vaccination in that light the money that we're spending on fighting terrorism versus spending similar amounts (literally trillions of dollars) on eradicating diseases by any means necessary (yes, even boots on the ground & forceful vaccination) the situation starts looking very different.
Why can a few ignorant pockets of humanity hold the entirety of the rest of the species hostage in perpetuity? And unlike some needing to take out some insurgent group because they might attack the west it's pretty much guaranteed that these diseases will flare up again, with guaranteed deaths for untold amount of innocents. Just look at how close we came with the recent Ebola crisis.