...and have for a couple hundred years.
We've had public restrictions due to disease for thousands of years (quarantine for instance) and vaccinations in the US since 1800 when Benjamin Waterhouse brought them here, and from 1802 - 1810 vaccinations were endorsed by US officials (including scientists and president Jefferson), made compulsory, and federal agencies were set up to study and administer them. And that was just the beginning of this life and health saving humane and socially responsible enterprise.
Billions of lives have been saved by vaccination; in fact, many of us alive today wouldn't be if not for vaccinations saving our ancestors from early deaths in childhood: millions of children died in the US and other industrialized countries each year (with much lower populations btw) before widespread vaccinations started and steadily advanced in the 1800s and 1900s.
This documentary shows how the intellectual and moral poverty of the socially irresponsible anti-vaccination movement threatens to return our public health to the dire days before vaccinations when child (and adult) early death were commonplace (a family with 3 children could expect at least 1 child to die from now preventable disease; many adults died in their 30's - 50's from disease).
What is especially infuriating is that it need not be this way: because of human ingenuity and fearless, painstaking, concerted inquiry for centuries (often fighting against religious authorities that condemned such inquiry, with real threats of financial ruin, banishment, imprisonment and even death for such "heresy"), we have largely conquered the scourges of the past in affluent nations (look to the less affluent to see how wretched our pre-vaccination past was) to ensure human well-being is more widespread than at any other time in our species' history. The know-nothing pseudo-scientific anti-vaccination movement threatens all this reality based hard work and progress, all this freedom from pain, suffering and death. And of all the tragedies in the world, nothing is more regrettable, and just outright evil, than wholly preventable pain, suffering and death due to human ignorance, irrationality, immaturity, and unjustified arrogance.
Science is real, truth matters, reality is real (that's a tautology), freedom/bodily autonomy does not extend to allow individuals to infect others with deadly or crippling communicable diseases (the freedom from suffering and death, and the right to health and life, vastly outweighs the non-freedom and non-right to carry deadly or crippling communicable disease, full stop) and anyone who tells you otherwise has a malicious and personally beneficial political/financial agenda to advance.
