[hga]

Per my other comment, I'd use the word "stupid".

In that you're asking for the literally impossible given the current and foreseeable state of the art.

And comparing a often serious and deadly disease to the much less serious and deadly "common cold".

With no sign of knowledge of the principle of herd immunity, and how that's an argument to make to anti-vaxers. Right now, a particularly strong one: immunize your children or very appropriately get shunned.

Let me ask you this: how old are you? Are you young enough that neither you nor your parents remember the era when we didn't have vaccines against most of these diseases? I was born a couple of years before the first polio vaccine was approved, and my parents, my mother a RN, were very very glad they could immunize me and my younger siblings against many of the scourges of their lives.

ADDED REPLY: This is a dead (for now) topic, so I'll just point out you're ignoring the morbidity rate, especially the severe but non-fatal outcomes, which were seriously feared back the days. And unless Wikipedia is wrong, your fatality rate is off by 300, it's 3 per 1,000 cases in the years 1987-2000 in the US. In another part of the article, it says 1-2 deaths per 1,000 cases in developed countries.

[gotothrowaway]

Wiki suggests measles has 1 in 100000 mortality rate. It's really not a terrible prognosis, especially in the first world where the vast majority are not immunocompromised. More serious than a common cold, but I personally can't blame people for accepting that risk and using vaccine injuries as justification. I haven't found a way to present a convincing argument against them. Can you?

The best I have is that they're helping society. But putting kids at risk for the safety of others is not something many families are tempted to do. Think about the FDA recommendation against fish for pregnant woman. So many people took it too seriously that the FDA now has a minimum recommendation for fish.

What's really interesting is that several of these families, in addition to avoiding the vaccine, take any step possible to bolster their immune systems, thus trying to further reduce the chance of fatal prognosis. It's a totally non-western approach to medicine, and probably a Steve Jobs-level poor decision, but these people are fully conscious of the decision they're making, and are arguably acting rational given that decision.

So you're right, people are acting stupid. But I can't get too mad about it because it's predictable. We need to find a solution instead of just calling them stupid.

Yes I'm old enough. I don't think that really matters for this argument.