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by Eumenes 653 days ago
You must drive a smaller car so others around you are safer. Just like how you have to vaccinated to protect others. Its part of the social contract that you signed, duh.
1 comments

Actually medical ethics rejects herd immunity as the purpose of vaccination. All the recommended vaccinations are because the benefit to the individual vaccinated significantly outweighs the cost to them. Herd immunity is a public health benefit but ethically it wouldn't be enough to justify the intervention.

For HPV for example, the reason there's a period when it was given to girls not boys is that the evidence wasn't available to show a benefit for the boys. Obviously vaccinating boys means they're less likely to give the disease to anybody they have sex with, but that's not a personal benefit and so it's not an ethical reason to recommend vaccinating boys. The evidence that they wouldn't get a bunch of other rarer cancers caused by HPV was enough reason to vaccinate boys, and that arrived later.

That ethical dilemma about sacrificing one patient to save more? That's not a thing.

I caught the bad HPV variant early in my sex life (the one with buttons on the thighs, I think it's HPV 9 but my memory is fuzzy) and still have scars, as well as a long period of shame and shyness, so get vaccinated young guys, especially if you go in a hippy squat :D