5: The Anti-Vaxxxers Just Want To Make Their Own Choices

The big trouble with this can be summed up in two words: 

Herd immunity.

Anti-vaxxxers say they just want to choose what happens to their kids, or decide the schedule of vaccinations they'll partake of without regard to anyone else. But there's a little more to it than that.

Vaccinations are there to prevent communicable diseases, diseases that can be passed from one person to another. When person A gets sick, it's not just person B who gets it; it's every person, B though Z and beyond, who touches that door handle, gets coughed on or whatever. This is why diseases spread so fast in overcrowded conditions: they jump their vectors and start spreading super-fast from person to person. Before the person A can be isolated there's a whole alphabet full of people out there being their very own person As ans spreading the germs that cause the disease. The worst case scenario is where you have a big group of people, all kept together for long periods of time in unsanitary conditions and eating a substandard diet. If one person is sick, pretty soon everyone's sick. That's why some American jails have an MRSA rate 50 times the normal level and why one of the biggest sources of multidrug resistant tuberculosis is the Russian prison system.

READ Study: Adult Vaccination Rates 'Stubbornly Low'

So what does the best case scenario look like? Ideally, you'll have no infections. But there will always be some infections. The game isn't to stop anyone getting sick: it's to stop everyone getting sick. And the best way to achieve that is by surrounding everyone with a barrier of people who are immune from the disease, so they not only can't get infected: they can't infect other people. That's herd immunity. With it, you get the odd case of rare infections like measles or mumps or rubella. Without it, you get flareups that put hundreds of children in hospital and kill dozens. The only diseases herd immunity doesn't work for are those that change so fast, like the cold, that they can't be immunized against. Otherwise, herd immunity is the most effective form of prevention short of stamping out the disease altogether, and the key to achieving both is vaccination.

So when anti-vaxxxers want the freedom of choice to not vaccinate their kids, they're wrong. It's not their choice. It's your choice, to be safe from diseases that used to blight childhoods and kill millions, and they're taking it away from you. Anti-vaxxxers have the right to refuse vaccination for their kids the way Typhoid Mary had a right to go shopping in Times Square.