If you make an arbitrary decision not to vaccinate your child, and a bunch of people get sick, should you go to jail, just like if you starve a child or let them live in feces?
If so, wealthy elites around San Francisco and Napa valley are going to be singing the Folsom Prison Blues - not for dirty diapers, wealthy progressives pay people to change those so they can fly off to Davos and talk about economic redistribution for the middle class, but rather for denying children vaccines. California is miles ahead of the rest of the country in "philosophical objections" (non-medical) to vaccines. Progressive elites, primarily on the coasts, believe that vaccines cause autism so they take advantage of herd immunity by letting poor kids get vaccinated, while they let their special snowflakes stay protected.
It doesn't really work that way when, as in one school in Marin Country, only 26% of kids are vaccinated. And Marin County is still 20% Republican, which may be all that saves them from being worse. If it were 100% Democrats the vaccination rate would be even lower.
Writing in USA Today, Alex Berezow makes the argument that anyone intentionally promoting a public health crisis should be legally culpable. Drastic? Maybe. In California we are letting real criminals out of jail because of overcrowding so putting stupid anti-science hippies into jail doesn't seem wise. And the small government sympathizer in me doesn't like the idea of forced inoculation, it feels a little too 1920s eugenics.
But if they were letting their kids make anthrax or stockpile assault weapons in their bedrooms, they'd be brought downtown - and measles can kill.
