Spillover Cards

File Notes for Vaccine DAs

There are two ways this vaccination argument can be run:
1. Surveillance module: Surveillance functionally solves vaccination. The
evidence on this is more specific to disease surveillance and tracking, so its
questionable whether the plan links or not. I dont recommend reading the
surveillance module as much.
2. Culture of rights module: In the status quo, the pro-vaccination movement
is gaining influence, but the plan reverses it by boosting a culture of rights
that is used by anti-vaccination proponents to justify their beliefs. There are
some decent cards in here that say anti-vaccination activists will use the
rhetoric of things like Roe v. Wade and GMOs to anti-vaccination rights of
parental choice and freedoms.
For the aff section, there is not as much evidence, but I think it is fairly easy to win
no link and no impact.

1NC Materials

1NC Privacy Link

The plan builds on the virtuous cycle for privacy to create more
reforms.
Ozer 12 Nicole Ozer, the Technology and Civil Liberties Policy Director at the
ACLU of Northern California (ACLU-NC), where she developed the organization's
Demand Your dotRights online privacy campaign, 2012 (Putting Online Privacy
Above The Fold: Building A Social Movement And Creating Corporate Change New
York University Review of Law & Social Change, Lexis)
As noted in Part I, n226 one of the primary challenges of establishing a privacy
social movement is sustainability. While the privacy community has had
success in the past in addressing specific incidents, these successes did
not initially lead to a coherent and sustainable privacy social movement.
n227 More recently, however, advocates have successfully leveraged the
environmental changes discussed in Part II to win specific battles to protect
individual privacy. The privacy community has also used those victories to
reinforce the climate for change and support the discussion necessary to
sustain the nascent social movement. This has helped to create a muchneeded "virtuous cycle " n228 in which each successful advocacy effort
reinforces awareness of the ongoing issues concerning online privacy and
makes it easier both to challenge specific practices in the future and to
lay the groundwork for broader-reaching change.

1NC Vaccine Surveillance Module

Bulk surveillance solving disease now its key to efficient
medical databases that can predict patterns and detect
outbreaks prefer this in the context of evolving diseases and
rapid spread.
Santos and Bernardino 6 Ricardo Jorge Santos, holds a PhD Information
Sciences & Tech, faculty member of the Centre of Informatics and Systems of the
University of Coimbra; Jorge Bernardino, faculty member of Engineering Institute of
Coimbra at the Polytechnic Institute of Coimbra, 2006 (Global Epidemiological
Outbreak Surveillance System Architecture, 10th International Database
Engineering and Applications Symposium, December 14, Available Online at
10.1109/IDEAS.2006.27 via MSU Library, accessed 7/14/15, KM)
Diseases such as avian influenza, severe acute respiratory syndrome
(SARS) and Creutzfeldt-Jacob syndrome represent a new era of biological
threats. Nowadays, these hazards breed, mutate and evolve at
tremendous speed. Furthermore, they may spread out at the same speed
as which we travel. This reveals an urgent need for an agent capable of
dealing with such threats. Data warehouses are databases which provide
decision support by on-line analytical processing (OLAP) techniques. We present the architecture for an effective
information system infrastructure enabling the prediction and near real-time detection of disease outbreaks, using knowledge
extraction algorithms to explore a symptoms/diseases data warehouse in a continuous and active form. To collect such data, we take
advantage of the Internet and features existing in todays common communication devices such as personal computers, portable

the system can

detect an outbreak within hours or even minutes after its physical
occurrence, alerting health decision makers and providing quick
interaction and feedback between all users. The architecture is also functionally independent from
its geographical dimension. 1. Introduction A data warehouse (DW) provides information for
analytical processing, decision making support and data mining tools. A
digital assistants and cellular phones. We present a case-simulation based on a small country, showing

suitable data model is the core of representing part of the real world in the context of a database. Although many modeling
techniques expressed in extended multidimensional data models were proposed in the recent past [5], many major issues such as

Diseases such as avian

influenza, SARS and the Creutzfeldt-Jacob syndrome represent a new era
of biological threats. New stripes of viruses and bacterias are becoming
increasingly aggressive and rapidly adapting to resist vaccines and
medication. The speed at which these diseases are mutating and evolving,
combined with the fact that they may spreadout at the same rate as
people and animals travel, greatens the risk for a major epidemic or
pandemic outbreak. It is therefore crucial to detect when a potential
outburst might by taking place in order to contain it as quickly as possible and minimize damage it may cause. Our
information system architectures for specific health issues are not properly reflected.

architecture fulfils that need, using knowledge extraction algorithms to explore a symptoms/disease DW, looking for patterns of
symptoms to predict the occurrence of a potential outbreak. We also present an experimental evaluation using a case-simulation for
a small country. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In section 2, we refer issues and existing solutions in epidemics and
health information systems. In sections 3, 4 and 5, we respectively present our architecture, its database and the main algorithms
and methods for outbreak prediction and detection. In section 6 a simulation of the system working for a small country such as
Portugal is presented and the final section contains concluding remarks and future work. 2. Background and related work Accessing
the Internet today, we can find several institutional and enterprise web portals which provide trustworthy health information
(including epidemic and pandemic) such as in [1] by the Aberdeen Group, [7] by Great Britains NHS, the World Health Organization
[10]. We can also use web applications to perform a risk analysis on contagious diseases which can be disseminated through animal
contact [9]. The work in [4] refers the importance of mathematical models given historical disease data as a mean of predicting and
evaluating forms of action in certain situations.

We can also use the Internet for reporting

diseases to adequate health services, like what is done by the United States Centre for Disease Control
in what they refer to as communicable diseases. However, with new emerging diseases, using historical data based contention

Innovative solutions have

emerged based on telecommunication and informatics technology , such as the
plans will not be an efficient way to handle the problem, as shown in [8].

EMPHIS Project [2], following the perspective and vision of the future presented in [6] by Great Britains NHS. The architecture

combining database, knowledge extraction and

telecommunication technologies to aid global health in rapidly predicting
and/or detecting the occurrence of epidemic outbreaks, which is vital for minimizing
losses and containing potential hazards. 3. The surveillance systems architecture The technological evolution
in telecommunications and portable computerized devices makes it
possible today to have real-time information availability , practically without geographical
presented takes the next step,

dependencies. Taking advantage of an agent with the highest level of availability such as the Internet, our architecture provides the

and points examples on how to effectively and

efficiently process this data to discover symptom and disease associations.
This is done achieved by inserting patient symptoms and diseases data in
a web server database, which collects all information in a given geographical region and
infrastructure for collecting data of occurring symptoms and diseases,

ships it to a DW located in a health decision centre. If the number of discovered cases within that region is considered relevant as a
possible epidemic indicator, health decision makers and medical staff are immediately alerted. The architecture has 3 bottom-up
tiers or levels, as seen in Figure 1. Symptom/disease data is uploaded by medical staff using personal devices with internet access,
such as mobile phones, PDAs or common personal computers, getting stored in the second tier web servers. Each web server has
the database and software applications needed to support the first tier requested services. The decision making server in the last
tier holds a DW processing non- stop knowledge extraction algorithms finding disease record counts and symptoms/disease patterns
in a defined geographical area. If a relevant number of suspicious patterns of symptoms or confirmed occurrences of diseases are
detected, health decision makers and medical staff are immediately alerted. Figure 1 represents an example of an implementation

once the disease/symptom

data is recorded, the detection process is much faster than bureaucratic
processes used today. Nowadays, when a major disease is observed, medical staff fill in
paperwork reporting those cases to entities such as the CDC in the United States or the NHS in
Great Britain. These entities process and analyze the amount of cases received
from each region and decide if that amount should be considered relevant.
These processes usually take days, or, at least, many hours. Furthermore, if a minor
disease is observed, such as a simple flu, for instance, it is not considered as relevant to
report. Although it may be a minor disease, if it were to occur in a considerable amount of cases within the same
region, it could become an important issue. With our system, this would be
almost immediately detected and alerted; in the traditional existing processes it would not be
covering three defined geographical areas. A major advantage in our proposal is that

detected, or, in the best case, would be noticed only after some time. For each medical staff disease or symptom input, they may

medical records will be

matched almost in a real-time manner, detecting the possibility of an
epidemic occurrence. Each second tier web server must contain the following components in order to insure the
not even physically know, see or even be in contact with each other, but their

systems interaction and functionality: a) a data mart containing the database structure and all supporting data for the geographical
region and population it serves; b) a web interface for first tier users to input data and to promote interaction between third tier
users (health decision makers) and first tier users (medical staff); c) a software application available to first tier users for
downloading, which allows working offline the Internet and capable of uploading that data to the second tier web servers whenever
requested. This would allow medical staff to work at any location without Internet access; d) a software server component
responsible for shipping the collected data to update the third tier DW server. 4.

The surveillance systems

database Today, most database systems offer features that go beyond management of static data and most information
systems are powered by a database. The job of a database is to store data and answer queries. By contrast, the job of an
information system is to provide a service, which are semantic entities entailing considerations that span the life cycle of the larger
system [3]. Traditionally, database systems have been passive, storing and retrieving data in direct response to user requests
without initiating any operations on their own. As the scale and complexity of data management increased, interest has grown in
bringing active behaviour into databases, allowing them to respond independently to data-related events. Therefore, given the
usage we wish to provide our database, we can look at it as an active database as discussed in [3], for it will be continuously

holds
patient symptoms and disease data records, including both humans and
animals. Based upon the characterization of these entities and their attributes, we propose in Figure 2 the partial DW schema
querying and analyzing data and reporting it to the users makers involved in an interactive form. The database

supporting human disease outbreak detection. The schema for outbreak prediction is similar and given by adding tables relating to

symptom data. The schema for animal disease outbreak detection and prediction are similar to the human schema, linking each
animal with the human to which it belongs.

Anti-vaxxers cause outbreaks of dangerous diseases highly

contagious diseases means it will spread quickly.
Sifferlin 14 Alexandra Sifferlin, Alexandra Sifferlin is a writer for TIME. She
covers public health issues including infectious and chronic disease, big ideas in
medicine, and breaking news, 3-17-2014 ("Here are some diseases we're seeing
thanks to anti-vaxxers," TIME, 3-17-2014, Available Online at
http://time.com/27308/4-diseases-making-a-comeback-thanks-to-anti-vaxxers/,
Accessed 7-14-2015)
These should be avoidable
New York City isnt an anomaly, though. Diseases that are and have been
avoidable in the U.S. thanks to vaccines, are resurfacing all across the
country. Measles, for instance, was considered wiped out in 2000, but there
have been several outbreaks in the past few years. This map shows outbreaks of
vaccine-preventable diseases since 2008 (click on Map and select which diseases
and regions you want to see).
The emergence of these diseases especially measles is alarming, and
mostly due to parents in the U.S. not vaccinating their kids. If you are
unvaccinated and you come in contact with measles, theres a 90% chance
you will get it, says Jason McDonald, a spokesperson for the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention (CDC).
Though measles outbreaks are primarily linked to unvaccinated people, McDonald
notes that some vaccines arent foolproof. For example, the whooping-cough
vaccine may lose its efficacy over time. And, overall, most people do get their
vaccinations. A CDC report looking at children entering kindergarten for the 2012
13 school year in all U.S. states found that more than 90% of these kids had their
vaccines.
Still, there are people including public figures and celebrities who
dont vaccinate their kids and promote their choices. Most infamously, Jenny
McCarthy has espoused her antivaccination position because she believes vaccines
are full of toxins and cause autism. When she recently posed a question on Twitter
about finding a mate, the vaccination backlash was loud and clear.
Just how harmful are these notions, though? Below are some preventable
diseases making a vicious return thanks to people not getting their
vaccinations.
Measles
According to the CDC, for every 1,000 children who get the measles, one or two will
die. Currently, public-health workers are worried about the situation in New York, but
just in the past three months, there have been reported cases of the disease in
Massachusetts, Illinois and California. The CDC reports that from Jan. 1 to Feb. 28,
2014, 54 people in the U.S. have reported being infected with measles. On average,
there are about 60 cases reported in the U.S. every year. Most people in the U.S.
are vaccinated against the measles, but since measles is still around in other
countries, those who travel outside of the U.S. can contract it if they are not
vaccinated. New York City has not been able to confirm the source of the disease.
Mumps

As recently as Monday, health officials confirmed 23 cases of mumps at Ohio State

University. In 2011, there was a mumps outbreak on the University of California at
Berkeley campus, with 29 reported cases confirmed by the CDC. The source of
the outbreak was thought to be an unvaccinated student who had spent
time traveling in Western Europe where there is still a presence of mumps. In 2013,
a slightly smaller outbreak of the disease broke out among students at Loyola
University in Maryland. The last major occurrence was in 2006, when there
was a multistate outbreak of 6,584 reported cases. Less than 20 cases a
year was considered usual at the time.
Whooping Cough
Whooping-cough outbreaks are thought to be spurred by waning immunity from the
vaccine. However, a 2013 study published in the journal Pediatrics reports
that Californias worst whooping-cough outbreak, which infected more
than 9,000 people, was also encouraged by a large number of kids who
were unvaccinated.
Chicken Pox
In 2012, a county in Indiana experienced a major chicken-pox outbreak of
more than 80 cases, which was thought to start from an unvaccinated
child. The vaccine is 90% effective, so its possible for people who have been
vaccinated to contract the disease.

1NC Vaccine Culture of Rights Module

Thanks to anti-vaccination proponents, measles risk is high
now pro-vaccination public opinion is reversing the trend.
Salzberg 15 Steven Salzberg, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Biomedical
Engineering, Computer Science, and Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins University,
former researcher at The Institute for Genomic Research with a focus in sequencing
the genomes of many bacteria, including those used in the 2001 anthrax attacks,
member of the Human Genome Project and the co-founder of the influenza virus
sequencing project, 2015 (Anti-Vaccine Movement Causes Worst Measles Epidemic
In 20 Years, Forbes, February 1, Available Online at
http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensalzberg/2015/02/01/anti-vaccine-movementcauses-worst-measles-epidemic-in-20-years/, accessed 7/20/15, KM)
Measles is now spreading outward from Disneyland in California, in the worst
outbreak in years. The epidemic is fueled by growing enclaves of unvaccinated
people. The CDC reports that in just the past month, 84 people from 14 states contracted measles, a number
that is certainly an under-estimate, because the CDC doesnt record every case. California alone has 59 confirmed
cases, most of them linked to an initial exposure in Disneyland. A majority of people who have gotten sick were not
vaccinated. For years, scientists (including me) have warned that

the anti-vaccination movement

was going to cause epidemics of disease.

Two years ago I wrote that the anti-vaccine

movement had caused the worst whooping cough epidemic in 70 years. And now its happening with measles.

Finally, though, the public seems to be pushing back. Parents are starting to
wake up to the danger that the anti-vax movement represents to their
children and themselves. Whats sad about this tragic, really is that we eliminated
measles from the U.S. in the year 2000, thanks to the measles vaccine. As
this CDC graph shows, weve had fewer than 100 cases every year since. But we had 644 cases in 27
states in 2014, the most in 20 years. And 2015 is already on track to be
worse. Measles may become endemic in the U.S, circulating continually,
thanks to the increasing numbers of unvaccinated people. Until now, each
outbreak was caused by someone traveling from abroad and bringing
measles to us. The anti-vaccine movement has turned this public health
victory into defeat. Anti-vaxxers have been relentless in the efforts to spread misinformation. Despite
overwhelming scientific evidence that vaccines are beneficial, they endlessly repeat a variety false claims, such as:
Vaccines cause autism. They dont. The preservative thimerosal in vaccines causes autism. It doesnt. Natural

Measles infects 90% of people exposed to it unless

they are vaccinated. A healthy lifestyle will protect you from measles. It wont. Now, finally, some
parents are pushing back. Parents and schools in California, where the epidemic began, are
concerned that their children will be exposed to measles from unvaccinated children in schools. And the schools
are starting to do something they should have done long ago: send the unvaccinated kids
home. The problem arises from Californias vaccine exemption policy: although public schools require kids to be
immunity is all you need. It isnt.

vaccinated, parents can exempt their kids simply by saying they have a personal objection to vaccination. Its not
just California: only two states, Mississippi and West Virginia, dont allow parents to claim a philosophical or religious
exemption to vaccines And Colorado has the worst rate of vaccination, at just 82%, primarily due to parents

we now have
large pockets of unvaccinated children through whom epidemics can
spread further and faster than weve seen in decades. The CDC reports that in
2014, 79% of measles cases in the U.S. involving unvaccinated people
were the result of personal belief exemptions. Anti-vaxxers dont recognize the threat
claiming a philosophical exemption. These parents are the anti-vaxxers. Thanks to them,

their behavior poses to others, especially to children whose immune systems arent functioning properly. CNN
reported this week on the case of Rhett Krawitt, a 6-year-old California boy who has gone through 4 years of
chemotherapy for childhood leukemia. His leukemia is in remission and hes back in school, but the treatment wiped
out his immunity, and hes still not ready to get vaccinated. If Rhett gets measles, he might not survive. His father
Carl wrote to school district officials to ask them to ban unvaccinated children from school. Krawitt expects the
schools to deny his request. Meanwhile, the parents who refuse to vaccinate their kids arent budging. The New York
Times reported on one mother, Crystal McDonald, who refused to vaccinate any of her four children, after
researching the issue by reading anti-vaccine websites. When their high school sent her daughter home for two
weeks, the daughter asked if she could get the measles shot so she could return. As quoted in the Times, McDonald
told her daughter I said No, absolutely not. I said Id rather you miss an entire semester than you get the shot.
Where does this breathtaking science denialism come from? Its been building for years, as I and many others have
written. The wave began with a 1998 paper published in The Lancet by Andrew Wakefield, claiming that the MMR
vaccine was linked to autism. Wakefields work was later shown to be fraudulent, and his claims about the vaccine
dishonest and irresponsible. After lengthy investigations, the paper was retracted and Wakefield lost his medical
license. Despite this very public repudiation, Wakefield has stuck to his claims, though, and has spent much of the
past 15 years speaking (or perhaps preaching would be a better term) to anti-vaccine groups, to whom he is a
kind of folk hero. Its not just Wakefield, though. Anti-vaccine messages have been broadcast aggressively by the
group Generation Rescue, led by former Playboy playmate and MTV host Jenny McCarthy, and by Age of Autism, a
group dedicated to the proposition that vaccines cause autism. (Age of Autism is doing it again right now.) And just
last summer, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. published a new book further promoting the long-discredited claim that
thimerosal causes autism. Most of the anti-vax crowd have no scientific training or expertise, which might explain
(but doesnt excuse) their complete ignorance of the science. Over the past 15 years, dozens of studies involving
hundreds of thousands of people have shown convincingly that neither vaccines nor any of the ingredients in them
are linked to autism. Vaccines are not only safe, but they are perhaps the greatest public health success in the
history of civilization. Measles, though, is dangerous. The CDCs Anne Schuchat had a message for parents this
week: I want to make sure that parents who think that measles is gone and havent made sure that they or their

measles is still around and it can be serious. And

that MMR vaccine is safe and effective and highly recommended. Make no mistake , measles is a very
dangerous infection. In the current outbreak, 25% of victims have ended
up in the hospital. And it is extremely infectious : the CDCs Schuchat explained that:
You can catch it [measles] just by being in the same room as a person with
measles even if that person left the room because the virus can hang
around for a couple of hours. Perhaps the Disneyland epidemic, which has now spread to 14
children are vaccinated are aware that

states, will finally convince parents, schools, and state legislatures that they need to insist that children get
vaccinated before going to school. Perhaps it will also convince parents to stop listening to nonsense, and choose
wisely by getting their children vaccinated against measles. We won this battle before, and we can win it again.

Anti-vaccination parents view the debate as a matter of the

right to choose plan gives their views legitimacy.
AP 15 The Associated Press, 2015 (Anti-vaccination parents explain their
perspectives: 'We are not anti-science', AP, February 23, Available Online at
http://www.oregonlive.com/health/index.ssf/2015/02/antivaccination_parents_expla.html, accessed 7/14/15, KM)
Anti-vaccination parents include a mix of views -- from religious communities to families
practicing alternative medicine and libertarians who shun government interference.

But
many are Americans with college degrees living in liberal communities such as Santa Monica or Marin County in
California and Portland, said Gary Freed, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Michigan. Most hesitant
parents do not avoid all vaccinations. They typically under-vaccinate, either delaying the shots until their child is
older or refusing certain vaccines while continuing with others, Freed said. The parents who spoke to AP recounted
spending hundreds of hours reviewing medical studies, books and news stories and networking on social media.
They cited cases of children who were supposedly hurt by vaccines and the existence of a government-run vaccine
injury-compensation program. And they worried about the oversight of pharmaceutical companies that reap profits
from vaccines and are shielded from liability when a vaccine causes harm. Moore said she read a 1998 study
published in The Lancet journal by Dr. Andrew Wakefield, who raised the possibility of a link between the measlesmumps-rubella vaccine, bowel disease and autism. She said she knows the study was later discredited and
retracted. She believes the research was inconclusive. Moore concedes that the vast majority of studies show

vaccines are safe, but she says some research points to inconsistencies, unknowns or negative effects that deserve
further investigation. And while autism is still a concern, Moore and others also worry about how exposure to
chemicals, bad nutrition and stress can affect genes and health. They say large doses of synthetic additives found
in vaccines, including aluminum and mercury, can harm the immune and digestive systems and brain. They're
believers in living naturally and eating organic food who also question the safety of genetically modified organisms,

"There are so many environmental

anything in my children's world that I can influence I do," Moore

pesticides and other common substances such as flame retardants and plastics.
toxins, but

said.

The CDC has phased out a mercury-containing preservative in vaccines as a precautionary measure, and
the agency says vaccines containing aluminum pose extremely low risk to infants. Federal officials also say GMOs in

These parents say they should be

able to decide whether their child undergoes a medical procedure -- a
decision, they say, that goes to the core of what it means to have freedom
of choice. "I have the right to decide what to put into my child's body,"
said Heather Dillard, a mom in Springfield, Missouri, who is also a registered nurse. "Nobody has the
right to put toxic chemicals into my son's bloodstream. That's taking my
rights away , and it's very scary to me." Dillard said she decided against vaccinating because
foods are safe, as are pesticides if used according to labels.

her first child was born a preemie and has autism. Dillard does not believe vaccines caused the autism, but the
disease led her to do a lot of research about health. She says she now chooses to build her son's immunity
naturally, through diet, while avoiding shots or other medication. Dillard and others say they are not worried about
measles because their children have strong immune systems. They cite statistics: Out of the 1,000-plus measles
cases in the past decade, there was not a single death. "What I'm more nervous about is the hysteria that would
result," if her children were to get ill, Moore said. Moore said she does worry about affecting children who are
immune-compromised and cannot be vaccinated. Before visiting friends with babies or young children, she said, she
always informs them her twins are not vaccinated "so they have the power to make a choice." She also keeps the
girls home at any sign of sickness. Researchers say berating parents who oppose vaccines will not persuade anyone
and only puts people on the defensive. Educational messages from health officials may also make little difference
and could, in fact, be counterproductive, said Brendan Nyhan, assistant professor of government at Dartmouth
College. A study conducted by Nyhan and his colleagues last year showed that when parents were presented with
evidence that vaccines do not cause autism or that measles cause great harm, some ended up feeling even more
ambivalent. "We tend to be skeptical toward information that contradicts our existing views," Nyhan said. If Oregon
were to take away the right to a vaccine exemption, Moore said, she would likely home-school her twins. She's
keeping an open mind about vaccinating as her children get older, but hopes more studies on the long-term effects

"I worry about living in a society that's

progressively more intolerant toward any dissent," Moore said. "All scientific
of vaccines can help dispel her doubts.

advances have come from questioning the status quo."

Anti-vaxxers cause outbreaks of dangerous diseases highly

contagious diseases means it will spread quickly.
Sifferlin 14 Alexandra Sifferlin, Alexandra Sifferlin is a writer for TIME. She
covers public health issues including infectious and chronic disease, big ideas in
medicine, and breaking news, 3-17-2014 ("Here are some diseases we're seeing
thanks to anti-vaxxers," TIME, 3-17-2014, Available Online at
http://time.com/27308/4-diseases-making-a-comeback-thanks-to-anti-vaxxers/,
Accessed 7-14-2015)
These should be avoidable
New York City isnt an anomaly, though. Diseases that are and have been
avoidable in the U.S. thanks to vaccines, are resurfacing all across the
country. Measles, for instance, was considered wiped out in 2000, but there
have been several outbreaks in the past few years. This map shows outbreaks of
vaccine-preventable diseases since 2008 (click on Map and select which diseases
and regions you want to see).
The emergence of these diseases especially measles is alarming, and
mostly due to parents in the U.S. not vaccinating their kids. If you are

unvaccinated and you come in contact with measles, theres a 90% chance
you will get it, says Jason McDonald, a spokesperson for the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention (CDC).
Though measles outbreaks are primarily linked to unvaccinated people, McDonald
notes that some vaccines arent foolproof. For example, the whooping-cough
vaccine may lose its efficacy over time. And, overall, most people do get their
vaccinations. A CDC report looking at children entering kindergarten for the 2012
13 school year in all U.S. states found that more than 90% of these kids had their
vaccines.
Still, there are people including public figures and celebrities who
dont vaccinate their kids and promote their choices. Most infamously, Jenny
McCarthy has espoused her antivaccination position because she believes vaccines
are full of toxins and cause autism. When she recently posed a question on Twitter
about finding a mate, the vaccination backlash was loud and clear.
Just how harmful are these notions, though? Below are some preventable
diseases making a vicious return thanks to people not getting their
vaccinations.
Measles
According to the CDC, for every 1,000 children who get the measles, one or two will
die. Currently, public-health workers are worried about the situation in New York, but
just in the past three months, there have been reported cases of the disease in
Massachusetts, Illinois and California. The CDC reports that from Jan. 1 to Feb. 28,
2014, 54 people in the U.S. have reported being infected with measles. On average,
there are about 60 cases reported in the U.S. every year. Most people in the U.S.
are vaccinated against the measles, but since measles is still around in other
countries, those who travel outside of the U.S. can contract it if they are not
vaccinated. New York City has not been able to confirm the source of the disease.
Mumps
As recently as Monday, health officials confirmed 23 cases of mumps at Ohio State
University. In 2011, there was a mumps outbreak on the University of California at
Berkeley campus, with 29 reported cases confirmed by the CDC. The source of
the outbreak was thought to be an unvaccinated student who had spent
time traveling in Western Europe where there is still a presence of mumps. In 2013,
a slightly smaller outbreak of the disease broke out among students at Loyola
University in Maryland. The last major occurrence was in 2006, when there
was a multistate outbreak of 6,584 reported cases. Less than 20 cases a
year was considered usual at the time.
Whooping Cough
Whooping-cough outbreaks are thought to be spurred by waning immunity from the
vaccine. However, a 2013 study published in the journal Pediatrics reports
that Californias worst whooping-cough outbreak, which infected more
than 9,000 people, was also encouraged by a large number of kids who
were unvaccinated.
Chicken Pox
In 2012, a county in Indiana experienced a major chicken-pox outbreak of
more than 80 cases, which was thought to start from an unvaccinated

child. The vaccine is 90% effective, so its possible for people who have been
vaccinated to contract the disease.

2NC/1NR Materials Privacy Link

2NC Privacy Winners Win Link

Plan shores up support for privacy which spills over.
Ozer 12 Nicole Ozer, the Technology and Civil Liberties Policy Director at the
ACLU of Northern California (ACLU-NC), where she developed the organization's
Demand Your dotRights online privacy campaign, 2012 (Putting Online Privacy
Above The Fold: Building A Social Movement And Creating Corporate Change New
York University Review of Law & Social Change, Lexis)
Unlike modern software, privacy practices and laws do not auto-update.
There must be sustained public pressure to support real change. Since
2009, the privacy community has been able to leverage factors to start to
build a viable social movement to push for legal and policy change. The
next several years will be significant in determining whether a privacy
social movement is able to grow and mature like the environmental movement
by utilizing recent successes and current attention to put down roots,
mobilize broad public support, and achieve major reforms. It is my hope
that, by reflecting on recent successes related to online privacy, identifying factors
that have contributed to these advances, and [*281] suggesting a focus for privacy
work that can reinforce these factors and break down remaining obstacles, this
article contributes to the discussion of why and how the privacy community should
build and sustain a viable social movement. If the privacy community can continue
building the necessary infrastructure and taking the strategic policy steps necessary
to increase transparency about how an individual's own information flows through
the data ecosystem, it will be possible to sustain a large-scale social movement to
ensure that, as technology advances, privacy protections are safeguarded in the
modern digital world.

Studies prove that awareness of privacy consequences create

impetus for more privacy.
Lewis, Kaufman, and Christakis 8 Kevin Lewis, Ph.D. candidate in the
Department of Sociology at Harvard University, Jason Kaufman, Ph.D., is a research
fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, Nicholas
Christakis, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H., is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and
Health Care Policy at Harvard University, 2008 (The taste for privacy: An analysis of
college student privacy settings in an online social network Journal of ComputerMediated Communicaiton 14(1) Wiley)
Finally, our data are relevant to understanding online privacy more
generallyespecially within fledgling communication technologies like SNSs. In
Ruling the Waves: Cycles of Discovery, Chaos, and Wealth From the Compass to the
Internet, Debora Spar (2001) argues that new technologies tend to undergo a
predictable pattern of transitions. At first, they are concentrated only
among a small group of innovators. This phase is characterized by
excitement, freedom, and creativity. Next, the technology becomes
commercialized, as the lay public rushes en masse to adopt it. Eventually,
however, this rapid growth outstrips the spirit of the innovative period.
Problems of coordination and competition foster creative anarchy and
the search for freedom is replaced by a demand for property rights. Finally,

government enters the scene, restoring order at the behest of the very pioneers
who once sought to escape it. While not identical in form, the negotiation of
privacy in online settings may be characterized by a similar pattern. When
a new technology such as Facebook is released, there is a high degree of
ambiguity over appropriate norms of conductthe very definition of this
space as public or private is contested. College students, professors, parents,
employers, and Facebook itself each have different and potentially conflicting
interests in the way the technology is used. Students are surely aware that the
information they post is publicbut the full extent and possible
consequences of this display may not be recognized by all. Slowly but inevitably,
excitement outstrips precaution. The technology diffuses throughout the population,
and users provide ever more data on their profilesall the while maintaining the
(rather permissive) default privacy settings, not yet having reason to do otherwise
(see Mackay, 1991). Eventually, however, this behavior becomes
consequential. The boundary between public and private is suddenly and
unequivocally asserted by virtue of being overstepped. Users venture too far
into public space with private details, and the consequence is a crashed party, a lost
job opportunity, orat an extremesexual assault or identity theft. Awareness is
suddenly raised for a certain type of user: those users concerned with safety, or
with maintaining a division between their public face and their online profile, or
whose own high level of online activity gives them a better perception of their
surroundings; this awareness spreads, most directly through the social ties
represented by Facebook friendships and cohabitation. Communication
about the importance of noncommunication takes place. The upshot of this process
is that a normative boundary emerges where before none existed. Facebook is
increasingly recognized as a space within which some precaution must be
exercised, and users respond by retreating behind a virtual line of privacy
in proportion to the extent to which their awareness has been raised by a
concern that applies to them personally. Here, we have considered such a
progression from excitement and ambiguity to (self-) regulation. However,
rather than regulation being at once explicit, legal, and externally
imposed (by government), the public/private boundary on Facebook is
implicit, normative, and internally negotiated. We may thus see new
online spaces as self-regulating systems where awareness is the
impetus for change and equilibrium the final productboth proceeding
along a pattern of predictable regularities. In the meantime, researchers of
SNSs will watch their study populations wax and wane, and the sites themselves
may become less open and more exclusive. Whether users will still Facebook in
the future to share ideas and social ties, or whether the form and/or site of these
interactions will change, remains to be seen.

2NC Congressional Action Link

The plan enables reform and self-regulation it reclaims
congressional decision-making authority on intelligence and
spurs executive action
Berman 14 Emily Berman, Visiting Assistant Professor of Law, Brooklyn Law
School, LL.M. (Masters of Law) from New York University School of Law, J.D. from
New York University School of Law, B.A. from Duke University, 2014 (Regulating
Domestic Intelligence Collection, Washington & Lee Law Review (71 Wash. & Lee L.
Rev. 3 ), Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via EBSCO Host)
The FBIs mandate to protect civil liberties can be viewed as a
secondary missionone that frequently comes into tension with its primary
mission of preventing security threats.256 Studies show that an agency will focus
on what it considers to be its primary mission, and it will shirk on performing
secondary or less easily evaluated goals.257 As a secondary mission,
protection of civil liberties is, therefore, sure to be short-changed in favor
of security in the same way that environmental concerns have so often
gone under-addressed in favor of development or other economically
profitable activities.
2. Relieving the Tension Among Multiple Missions
Fortunately, several administrative law strategies suggest ways to ensure
that the Guidelines regime sufficiently takes into account civil liberties
concerns as well as security concerns.258 Though all of the options discussed
below are possible paths to follow, the final two approaches discussed below seem
particularly promising.
Congress Reclaims Authority.
One option, of course, is for Congress simply to relieve an agency of
responsibility for one of [End of p. 67] the competing goals, reclaiming that
decision-making authority for itself .259 Following revelations of civil
liberties violations in the 1970s, Congress reclaimed some decision-making
authority regarding the executives surveillance powers by enacting the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).260 Or Congress could generate
more piecemeal limitations, barring particular techniques that pose
threats to civil liberties, or defining the circumstances under which such
techniques could be used.
Congress could, for example, statutorily reinstate the rule regarding the use of
undercover agents to investigate First Amendment protected activities as it existed
in the Guidelines in 2001, which required that the FBI have probable cause or a
reason to believe a crime had been committed before sending an agent into the
meetings of a religious or political group.261 Congress need not legislate to bring
such changes about. If Congress wanted to alter particular investigative tactics, or
even to pressure the Justice Department to adopt of its own volition the type of
procedural framework suggested in this Article, it has an array of tools at its
disposal to press for its desired policy change. Just the threat of legislation, so
long as it is credible, can spur executive action . Recall that the original Attorney
Generals Guidelines were implemented to sap the momentum from Congresss

efforts to enact a legislative charter for the FBI.262 So long as the option of
enacting an FBI charter remains a viable means for Congress to limit the
Attorney Generals discretion when it comes to FBI investigations, the threat of
such legislation can be used to press for Congresss desired policy
outcomes. Congress possesses carrots as well as sticksits control over the FBI
and Justice Departments budget also can impose a great [End of p. 68] deal of
pressure for policy change. Given the political economy of this policy area,263
however, reliance on Congress to reconcile the tension between the FBIs security
mission and civil liberties is not the most promising route.

2NC Privacy Policy Link

Privacy policies like the aff build the infrastructure for future
privacy social movements
Ozer 12 Nicole A. Ozer, the Technology and Civil Liberties Policy Director at the
ACLU of Northern California, developed the organization's Demand Your dotRights
online privacy campaign, 2012 (Putting Online Privacy Above The Fold: Building A
Social Movement And Creating Corporate Change, New York University Review of
Law & Social Change (36 N.Y.U. Rev. L. & Soc. Change 215), Available Online to
Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-Nexis)
Conclusion
Unlike modern software, privacy practices and laws do not auto-update. There must
be sustained public pressure to support real change. Since 2009, the privacy
community has been able to leverage factors to start to build a viable
social movement to push for legal and policy change. The next several
years will be significant in determining whether a privacy social
movement is able to grow and mature like the environmental movement
by utilizing recent successes and current attention to put down roots,
mobilize broad public support, and achieve major reforms. It is my hope
that, by reflecting on recent successes related to online privacy, identifying factors
that have contributed to these advances, and [*281] suggesting a focus for privacy
work that can reinforce these factors and break down remaining obstacles, this
article contributes to the discussion of why and how the privacy community should
build and sustain a viable social movement. If the privacy community can
continue building the necessary infrastructure and taking the strategic
policy steps necessary to increase transparency about how an individual's
own information flows through the data ecosystem, it will be possible to
sustain a large-scale social movement to ensure that, as technology
advances, privacy protections are safeguarded in the modern digital
world.

2NC New Reform Link

Even limited reform created some momentum plan creates
the opportunity for further reform
Kopstein 15 Joshua Kopstein, cyberculture journalist and researcher focusing
on Internet law and disorder, surveillance and government secrecy, 2015 (USA
Freedom Act gives NSA everything it wants and less, Al-Jazeera America, June
2nd, Available online at http://america.aljazeera.com/blogs/scrutineer/2015/6/2/usafreedom-act-gives-nsa-everything-it-wants--and-less.html, Accessed 7-21-15)
Even people within the NSA have been candidly celebrating the Freedom
Act's surveillance reforms, calling it a nothingburger for the privacy
community. And they might be right with so many overlapping and
redundant surveillance authorities, it'd be foolish to think the Freedom Act has
ended bulk collection in any significant capacity.
That doesn't mean there's no reason to celebrate the first step, but Congress will
have to hit the ground running if it wants to build on the Freedom Act's
momentum .
In the House, Reps. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and Zoe Lofgren, D-Ca., are already
proposing an amendment to an upcoming must-pass Department of
Justice appropriations bill that would stop the agency from compromising
encryption standards, a measure that was removed from the original
Freedom Act. (In September of 2013, Snowden revealed that the NSA and its
British counterpart GCHQ routinely inject vulnerabilities into commonly used
encryption software and influence the development of crypto standards from within
the scientific community.)
A separate amendment to the same bill, by Lofgren and Republican Ted Poe of
Texas, would also block the FBI from demanding these encryption
backdoors. And another from Colorado Democrat Jared Polis would block the Drug
Enforcement Administration from collecting bulk phone records a response to
recent reports that the agency for decades ran a domestic phone records database
that preceded the NSA's.
Barring all that, the next major opportunity to challenge NSA surveillance
won't be until 2017, when Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act is due to expire. But now that more transparency is in place,
Congress has a chance to make up for the Freedom Act's shortcomings by
putting the wheels in motion for real, comprehensive reform.

They Say: Link Non-Unique Generic

Privacy movement is losing momentum success strategies
havent translated into wins.
Hosein 09 Gus Hosein, Executive Director of Privacy International and Previous
Visiting Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science, 2009
(Challenges in Privacy Advocacy, Reinventing Data Protection, Edited By Serge
Gutwirth, Yves Poullet, Paul De Hert Cecile de Terwangne, Sjaak Nouwt, pg. 254255)
Over the past decade the landscape for privacy protection has
transformed. A decade ago, privacy groups were focused on a number of policing
and national security campaigns (e.g., closed-circuit television cameras),
communications surveillance (e.g., surveillance being designed into the
infrastructure), communications security (the crypto-wars) and free expression
issues (particularly on-line issues). Privacy campaigners also focused on the private
sector surveilling its customers, whether through collecting medical records (e.g.,
US laws on health insurance), financial records (e.g., credit records), or the thenbudding area of electronic commerce. Campaign successes were achieved
through coalition building and educational campaigns on the importance
of privacy. Media organisations were becoming more aware of these
challenges and began regularly covering some of these issues, though
they were often too arcane for the general population. Politicians were
coming to terms with the new political realities of the globalisation of markets, the
movement of people and data across borders and technological advancements. It
was still a nascent field in many ways, with a few strong leaders and small
groups making the most out of their small resources. In the last ten years,
the challenges grew, the coalitions fragmented and the moods of the
public and the media fluctuated. The level of uncertainty rose, along with the
stakes. Privacy groups were caught in the storm of trying to research the
policies while rushing out responses to media and political developments.
A number of successful response strategies emerged. Media
organisations around the world documented the greater incursions upon
the private lives of the individual, with a particular focus on the actions of
the US government even if it meant ignoring domestic programmes. Parliaments
and privacy commissioners issued condemnations and damning analyses of
proposed plans to collect, profile and share data. Legal and academic
institutions released studies assessing proposed policies and identifying
the fault lines. Some national constitutional courts released opinions that upheld
the right to a private life, though surprisingly the number of cases brought before
these courts dwindled. Despite these response strategies there have been
practically no clear wins in the past decade . Indeed, some amendments to
policies have increased oversight and reduced harms. Some policies have
withered, such as the data profiling of US citizens, whether under the Total
Information Awareness project (TIA) or the Computer Aided Passenger PreScreening Program (CAPPS II), though the creators of these systems are insisting
that these programmes be offered lifelines. Meanwhile, Europe seems set to
become the next home of data-mining as these systems are the subject of

government-funded research and play a key component in future government plans.

As examples, the EU-funded iTRACS consortium is conducting research into data
mining techniques that can be applied to financial, travel and communications data,
albeit in a privacy protective way (if this is possible); and the EU plans for next
generation border management that involves the collection and mining of travel,
biographic, biometric and behavioural data. Just as bad policies travel
worldwide, rarely has a privacy-invasive bill not become law, a
technological infrastructure not been developed, a data collection scheme
abandoned. Even the withering programmes and policies have returned under new
guises. As examples, data profiling systems re-emerged in the US to be applied at
the border under the Automated Targeting System; UK Parliamentary initiatives to
reduce the invasiveness of plans to analyse communications records were corroded
when the UK government managed to push a more invasive policy through the
European Union; data breach legislation is being watered down to minimise
the impact upon companies while disarming the rights of consumers. Many of
these surveillance initiatives outlast the campaigns to oppose them. Often
the decisions to implement surveillance systems take place behind closed
doors, after controversies have subsided to some extent. The Passenger
Name Record debate is a key example of this: original campaigns in 2003 against
the US plans seem to lead somewhere as the EU was rejecting US demands for data
from EU carriers. By 2004 a limited agreement was settled upon and another
campaign followed that questioned the legality of the agreement. Many twists and
turns later, we ended up in 2006 with an interim agreement that was worse and in
2007 with an agreement that was even worse than that. In the end, the EU agreed
to an expansive regime of data sharing with the US because, behind closed doors,
the EU was hoping that the US would offer data from its own carriers to the EU for
its own expansive purposes. Campaigners tried as much as they could to follow this
arcane issue during its 5 year gestation period but they were eventually shut out of
a negotiations process involving secret agreements and oversight arrangements
that involved non-disclosure agreements.

No momentum for privacy reform now only the most privacy

conscious of individuals disrupt big datas control
Mohan 13 Vivek Mohan, Associate with the Science, Technology and Public
Policy Program's (STPP) Project on Technology, Security, and Conflict in the Cyber
Age (Cyber Project) at the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and
International Affairs, J.D. from Columbia, 2013 (Privacy Consciousness in the Big
Data Era, Hive, May 13th, Available online at
http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/publication/23095/privacy_consciousness_in_the
_big_data_era.html, Accessed 7-20-15)
Exploring how we are coping with our inability to answer the questions "who owns
my data? Andwhy do they have it?" has become an increasingly popular topic for
the mainstream media (notably, the Slipstream column in the New York Times). But
prayers for regulation aside, the collection, use, and resale of data that was
once exceptionally private is here to stay.
I'm not here to vilify data collectors far from it. Despite my strong inclination
towards maintaining the traditions of days past (I'm probably the only person in his

twenties who still reads physical newspapers), societal inertia cannot be held
up ipso facto to argue for stronger privacy protections when we ourselves
are responsible for sharing the data that is now traversing the endless
servers of cyberspace. The benefits of the big data revolution are myriad,
cut across sectors, and the best is surely yet to come.
But how did we get to the point where I theoretically a privacy and cybersecurity
expert find myself inured to the amount of data that I'm signing away the rights
to at any given time? (Although, I must say it is comforting to say that it's not quite
1984 in the land of big data Google Now seems to think I'm a Cubs fan). To focus
the conversation a bit, let's focus on mobile and let's talk about how application
and ecosystem developers together have, for lack of a better word, conspired
to remove bargaining power over data ownership from the individual.
We are all (presumably) familiar with the process of installing an app on a
smartphone. Once an app has been located on Google Play or the Apple App Store,
we tap "install," whereupon we are presented with a list of device features that the
app requests permission to access. I'm sure many of you like me have asked
yourself "Why does that program need access to my GPS location?" It's even
possible that when faced with a particularly egregious misrepresentation as to
what's new in an app, you have refused to update. But that puts you in the minority
the rest of us absentmindedly tap "Accept and Download" and move on living our
monitored lives.
How many crashes do you think were fixed by Facebook having more access to
location data?
How did we end up here? Well, app developers have a pretty sweet deal given the
current mobile ecosystems. In a classic case of fine print combined with unequal
bargaining power, the ability of consumers to control their data have been
eviscerated in a totally legal way. If you don't agree to the proposed permissions,
you can take your smartphone and go home you don't get to play with the latest,
greatest apps. Those responsible for the major mobile ecosystems Apple and
Google made a decision at some point, perhaps for technical reasons, to disallow
users from toggling individual permissions on an app it is all or nothing.
In this world, why wouldn't Facebook throw the kitchen sink of permissions in? Only
the most privacy conscious of individuals would be willing to give up the
benefits of such a critical app for the marginal, ineffable privacy benefits
after all, the preinstalled Google Maps is already collecting your location what's
the matter if Facebook has it as well?
In essence, the bigger and more valuable the app, the more able the
developer is to collect data on the terms that he or she sees fit. If the terms of
service of the app say the data can be resold, that's that the consumer has
entered into a contractual relationship with the developer in law school, we called
this a "meeting of the minds." I'd argue that given current data collection
practices, consumers and data collectors are about as far as possible from
reaching a "meeting of the minds" each time an app is downloaded.
From a legal standpoint, this is all squeaky-clean. There isn't much law
enforcement can do about it disclosure cures all, and the major ecosystems
are quick to disclose what apps are, at a hardware level, able to do. The Federal

Trade Commission and state attorneys general, the agencies empowered to protect
consumers, find themselves hamstrung absent a misrepresentation and even in
the most egregious cases, this usually ends up leading to a minor civil settlement
and a change in the privacy policy not exactly the biggest win for consumers.
As an entrepreneur developing applications that take advantage of the plentiful
data collected and disseminated by today's app economy, it's easy to be of the
mindset that collecting all the data that you can and sorting it out later is the best
way to go. But it is important to take a strategic view the present
inequality in bargaining power will not last forever. Those developers are
privacy conscious, and expressly so, will be hailed as leaders when the
pendulum of privacy norms in our society swings the other way. That said
don't hold your breath for Congress .

No momentum for change actors like Verizon and Google

have historically determined the future of surveillance
Agur 13 Colin Agur, a PhD candidate in communications at Columbia University
and a visiting fellow at Yale Law Schools Information Society Project, 2013
(Negotiated Order: The Fourth Amendment, Telephone Surveillance, and Social
Interactions, 1878-1968, Information & Culture: A Journal of History, Volume 48,
Number 4, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Project Muse)
For researchers of telecommunications and the law, the history of telephone
surveillance offers important lessons. In telephone surveillance [End of p. 441]
we see how decisions by actors gave a device a particular social meaning
and how that meaning evolved over time and space thanks to an ongoing
negotiation process among the key actors. Human agency played a
significant role in the formation of rules on telephone surveillance, and the
social organization that emerged in the late 1960s was the result of a long-term
negotiation involving a wide range of participants. Thus, rather than a case of a
technology determining or (in the words of Thomas Hughes) giving
momentum to a set of social changes,112 the jurisprudence governing
telephone surveillance has been constructed by those who were able to
establish practices and norms in telephony. In our efforts to understand the
negotiation of telephone surveillance law and Fourth Amendment jurisprudence,
Balkins theory of cultural software serves us well. By examining a long-term
economy of exchange involving technological, institutional, and cultural
inputs, we can understand the social organization of the law. And by
focusing on the negotiations and contexts in which they took place, we can
understand the role of ideology in institutional practices, Supreme Court decisions,
and legislation. At the same time, the history of telephone surveillance law
helps us see the limitations of ideology and the importance of human
agency. The actions of key agents, from engineers to administrators to
lawmakers to judges, each contributed to ideology, which in turn shaped the
evolution of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence.

They Say: Link Non-Unique NFA

The link is unique the New Freedom Act allowed momentum
to dissipate and extended 215
Raimondo 14 Justin Raimondo, an American author and the editorial director
of Antiwar.com, 2014 ("The USA Freedom Act Is A Fraud," Antiwar.com, November
17th, Available Online at http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2014/11/16/the-usafreedom-act-is-a-fraud/, Accessed 7-21-2015)
Some civil liberties groups, like the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, argue that the present bill is "a first step," and is better than
nothing. This is nonsense: this bill is worse than nothing. With the passage
of the USA Freedom Act the momentum for real reform will be blunted and
allowed to dissipate . Further efforts to roll back the awful power of the
NSA will be met with cries of "Didnt we already do this?" If this bill passes,
the Washington insiders will win out, and the Surveillance State will remain intact
arguably even more powerful than before.
Some may say: But arent you taking an all-or-nothing attitude? The answer is: not
at all. A real reform means a partial reining in of the NSA, with no new
extensions of its reach. This bill includes a full-scale codification of abuses
coupled with ambiguous and easily reinterpreted "reforms" that dont
mean what they appear to mean.

New surveillance reform reaffirms a changing political climate

The Hill 15 The Hill, 2015 (Spy critics eye next targets, Byline Julian Hattem,
June 4th, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-Nexis, Accessed 07-142015)
Critics of government surveillance hope they're in the middle of a sea
change.
Passage of legislation this week to rein in the National Security Agency was the
first major congressional action to limit government spying in a generation,
and it was a move away from the aggressive national security measures
put in place after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
But whether the congressional view of surveillance has changed for good
remains to be seen , with the battle over NSA reform set to play out again during
the 2016 race for the White House.
Civil libertarians on both sides of the aisle vowed to harness the
momentum of their victory on the USA Freedom Act to push for other
protections.
"This is only the beginning," said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), one of Congress's
most vocal privacy hawks. "There's a lot more to do."
The USA Freedom Act renews Section 215 of the Patriot Act and two other
provisions that had expired on Monday morning. But in doing so, it also ends
the NSA's bulk collection of U.S. phone records and other data.
The bill reauthorizes the Patriot Act provisions through Dec. 15, 2019, setting the
stage for another showdown during the next administration.
But civil libertarians want to go much further to curb government spying.

2NC/1NR Materials Vaccine

Surveillance

Uniqueness Surveillance now good

Vaccination surveillance solves preventable disease now
surveillance is key to refining coverage goals, effectiveness,
and research.
Smith et al 11 Philip J. Smith, PhD, Professor of Chemical Engineering at the
University of Utah; David Wood, MD, nationally and internationally recognized
cancer surgeon; and Paul M. Darden, MDc, General Pediatrics Professor and Section
Chief at the College Of Medicine/Peds at the University of Oklahoma, 2011
(Highlights of Historical Events Leading to National Surveillance of Vaccination
Coverage in the United States, National Center for Biotechnology Information,
Available Online at h http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3113425/,
accessed 7/14/15, KM) **edited for gendered language
The number of cases of most vaccine-preventable diseases is at an alltime low,147 and hospitalizations and deaths from these diseases have also
shown striking decreases. Our national vaccine recommendations in the U.S. target an increasing
number of vaccine-preventable diseases for reduction, elimination, or eradication.148 This success has
been achieved at least in part because vaccination coverage among young
children in the U.S. has reached record highs with estimated national coverage that
exceeds 90% for many recommended vaccines.110 Achievement of this success has been
due in part to the assessment of vaccination coverage. Assessment
enables vaccination program managers to learn the extent to which their
efforts have achieved vaccination coverage goals and to implement
interventions or change policies to improve coverage. Also, assessment is an
essential component in evaluating vaccine effectiveness, examining the
relationship between increased coverage and population disease burden,
monitoring vaccine safety, and studying public perceptions about
vaccines. Across the U.S., both the rich and poor149 live with little concern for many infectious diseases
because of the great effort and sacrifice that has been made to develop and implement vaccination programs.150

For the first time in the history of humankind, there is a nation where there is
freedom from the fear of illness or death from what were formerly endemic killer diseases.
Maintenance of that freedom depends, in part, on remembering what has gone before us,
removing the barriers that remain in affording access to safe and effective vaccines for all people, using science to

remaining diligent about

continued assessment of how well the nation is
protected from vaccine-preventable diseases.
discover ways to prevent other diseases we have not yet conquered, and
knowing where we are through

Link Surveillance/tracking
Surveillance and tracking is key to effective vaccination polio
proves.
Ahmed 15 Beenish Ahmed, World Reporter at ThinkProgress, former NPR Kroc
Fellow, holds an MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies from the University of
Cambridge as a Fulbright Scholar to the United Kingdom, 2015 (How One Country
Deals With Anti-Vaxxers: Arrest Them, Think Progress, March 4, Available Online at
http://thinkprogress.org/world/2015/03/04/3629337/pakistan-polio-arrests/,
accessed 7/14/15, KM)
Last year while I was in Pakistan, a bus I took from Peshawar to Islamabad was hailed down by a small team of polio
vaccinators. This wasnt surprising we had after all, left a city the World Health Organization has called the single
largest reservoir of the polio virus but what proceeded seemed to undermine any hope that the disease which
has been eradicated in most of the world can be fully snubbed out in Pakistan. The bus driver pulled over to a small
gravel patch just as stretches of mustard fields and mud huts turned into modern walled bungalows with tidy little
gardens. The vaccinator who had hailed us down strode over, pulled open the door, and pointed at two small
children clinging sleepily to their mothers in the first row of seats. Have your kids been given drops? one of the
health workers asked, using a general term for polio vaccines, which are to administered orally for times before a
child turns six. The two women nodded. My son was given drops at school, one woman added for good measure.
All right, the vaccinator said, You can go. He slammed the sliding door closed and tapped on it twice. With that,
the bus rumbled away from the city from which a full 90 percent of polio cases in Pakistan and where the majority
of cases in Afghanistan originated in 2013. Along with Nigeria, the two neighboring countries of Pakistan and
Afghanistan are the last hold-outs against full vaccination against the virus which can forever cripple or even kill its
victims. Given the dire situation, authorities are taking more severe measures to combat the spread of the disease.
On Tuesday, police in Peshawar arrested more than 450 parents for refusing to vaccinate their children against
polio. [The arrests were] the last resort as there was no other option. There is a lot of pressure on the local
administration to tackle these refusals, Pervez Kamal Khan, the head of health services in the province of Khyber
Pakhtunkhwa said. According to national figures, 60,000 children have not received the polio vaccine because their

Among the three countries where polio is endemic,

Pakistan is the worst at containing the spread of polio not least because of a violent
parents did not consent to it.

campaign on the part of terrorist groups to kill polio vaccinators and to discredit the actual intention of the polio
vaccine. The threat posed by groups like the Taliban is not to be understated: its estimated that more than twice as
many people were killed while administering the vaccine than people who died because of polio last year. Still,

extremist ideologies are not the only reason Pakistan has

struggled to eradicate polio. Its also just hard to keep tabs on which
children have been vaccinated and which have not as I saw firsthand on that bus to
militant attacks and

Islamabad last spring. The vaccinator didnt ask for identification numbers for the children. He didnt ask for the
vaccination documents children are given when they are vaccinated. He simply took their mothers responses as
the truth and, in so doing, may have let two cases of the highly contagious disease infect others.
Surveillance

underpins the entire polio eradication initiative , notes the Polio

surveillance, it would be impossible to
pinpoint where and how wild polio virus is still circulating, or to verify
when the virus has been eradicated in the wild. And yet, from what I saw while in
Pakistan, very little in the way of surveillance is actually taking place. Polio vaccinators risk their
lives to prevent children from developing the virus, but without tracking who they reach,
their work and their deaths may all be in vain.
Global Eradication Initiative. Without

National surveillance and data collection is crucial to solving

preventable disease disease reporting, vaccination history,
hospital records, and medical databases are all surveillance
techniques that are necessary and sufficient.
Roush 14 Sandra Roush, MT, MPH, Surveillance Officer for the National Center
for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, former Director of the Florida Hepatitis and Liver Failure Prevention and
Control Program in the Florida Department of Health, 2014 (Chapter 19: Enhancing
Surveillance, Center For Disease Control and Prevention, April 1, Available Online at
http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pubs/surv-manual/chpt19-enhancing-surv.html,
accessed 7/14/15, KM)
Surveillance activities are critical to detecting vaccine-preventable
diseases and gaining information to help control or address a problem.
However, complete and accurate reporting of cases is dependent on many factors, such as reporting source,
timeliness of investigation, and completeness of data. In addition, various methods for conducting surveillance are
used to collect information, depending on disease incidence, specificity of clinical presentation, available laboratory
testing, control strategies, public health goals, and stage of vaccination program. For vaccine-preventable diseases,
passive surveillance is the most common method, although active surveillance may be needed in special
surveillance situations. Active surveillance is often short-term and usually requires more funding than passive

Common systems used for disease surveillance include national

notifiable disease reporting; physician, hospital, or laboratory-based surveillance, populationbased surveillance.[1] Sentinel surveillance involves a limited number of recruited participants, such as
surveillance.

healthcare providers or hospitals, that report specified health events that may be generalizable to the whole

The National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System (NNDSS)[3]

is the passive surveillance system that includes all the diseases and
conditions under national surveillance. Efforts are being made to integrate
and enhance the surveillance systems for national notifiable diseases. A
population.[2]

collaborative effort between CDC and state and local health departments is in progress to enhance surveillance
system capabilities with the implementation of the National Electronic Disease Surveillance System (NEDSS).[4,5,6]
NEDSS will eventually replace the National Electronic Telecommunications System for Surveillance (NETSS) and will
become the electronic system used to report national notifiable diseases and conditions in the United States and
territories. Enhancing the surveillance system is only one part of improving surveillance data; data for notifiable
diseases are still dependent on reporting, timeliness and completeness. This chapter outlines activities that may be
useful at the state and local level to improve reporting for vaccine-preventable diseases. Some are more routinely
used (encouraging provider reporting), while others, such as searching laboratory or hospital records, may be more
helpful under certain circumstances. Encouraging Provider Reporting Most infectious disease surveillance systems
rely on receipt of case reports from healthcare providers and laboratories.[7-8] These data are usually incomplete
and may not be representative of certain populations; completeness of reporting has been estimated to vary from
6% to 90% for many of the common notifiable diseases.[9] However, if the level of completeness is consistent,

data provide an important source of information regarding disease

trends and characteristics of the persons affected. Some mechanisms to encourage
these

healthcare provider reporting are described here. Promoting awareness of the occurrence of vaccine-preventable
diseases Some healthcare providers may be particularly likely to encounter patients with vaccine-preventable
diseases. For example, they may see immigrants and travelers returning from areas where vaccine-preventable
diseases are endemic. Promoting awareness of reporting requirements Although there is a list of diseases
designated as nationally notifiable by the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists in conjunction with CDC,
[10-11] each state has laws or regulations stipulating which diseases are reportable.[7][11] Efforts should be made
to increase healthcare providers awareness of their responsibility to report suspected cases.[12-16] The list of
reportable diseases with detailed instructions explaining how, when, and to whom to report cases should be widely
distributed within each state. Mailings, e-mail list serves, websites, in-service and other continuing education
courses, and individual provider interaction may be used to accomplish this goal. However, while these are all
examples of possible methods to raise awareness of reporting requirements, studies of interventions have
demonstrated that telephone and other personal contact with individual healthcare providers, rather than groups, is
most effective.[17] For example, interaction with healthcare providers in the Vaccines for Children program offers

an opportunity to promote awareness of reporting requirements. Face-to-face communication is the most direct and
dynamic means of communication, allowing feedback and responses to overcome objections and concerns.[18] A
study on mandatory chronic disease reporting by physicians suggests that public health should emphasize both the
legal and public health bases for reporting.[19] Giving frequent and relevant feedback Providing regular feedback to
healthcare providers and others who report cases of vaccine-preventable diseases reinforces the importance of
participating in public health surveillance.[20] Feedback should be timely, informative, interesting, and relevant to
the providers practice. Ideally, it should include information on disease patterns and disease control activities in
the area. Some examples of methods of providing feedback are monthly newsletters, e-mail list serves, regular oral
reports at clinical conferences such as hospital grand rounds, or regular reports in local or state medical society
publications. Contact with individual providers may be most effective. Examples of positive individual interaction for
giving feedback on disease reporting include the following: Providing feedback to the provider on the epidemiologic
investigations conducted for their patients; Providing feedback to the provider, in addition to the laboratory, for any
cases that were first reported to the health department by the laboratory (or other source); Using every
professional interaction with the provider to at least briefly discuss surveillance issues. Simplifying reporting
Reporting should be as simple and as painless as possible for the healthcare provider. State health department
personnel should be easily accessible and willing to receive telephone reports and answer questions. Reporting
instructions should be simple, clear, and widely distributed to those who are responsible for disease reporting.
Ensuring Adequate Case Investigation Detailed and adequate case information is crucial for preventing continued
spread of the disease or changing current disease control programs. The following steps are essential to ensuring
adequate case investigation. Obtaining accurate clinical information During a case investigation, clinical information
(e.g., date of symptom onset, signs and symptoms of disease) about a case-patient is often obtained by a
retrospective review of medical records and interviews with the case-patient, family, friends, caretakers, and other
close associates of the case-patient. Detailed and accurate information (e.g., date of onset, laboratory results,
duration of symptoms) may indicate the source of the infection and possible contacts, allowing interventions to
prevent the spread of disease. This clinical information also may be aggregated by disease to study other aspects of

For vaccine-preventable diseases,

vaccination history is particularly important for determining whether the case represents a
the diseases (e.g., trends, incidence, prevalence).

vaccine failure or a failure to vaccinate. In addition to medical and school records, the states immunization registry
may be used to provide the most complete vaccination history information. Obtaining appropriate laboratory
specimens Efforts should be taken to ensure that healthcare providers obtain necessary and appropriate laboratory
specimens. For example, specimens for bacterial cultures should be taken before administering antibiotics, and
paired sera are often required for meaningful serologic testing. For more information on laboratory support for
vaccine-preventable disease surveillance, see Chapter 22, Laboratory Support for the Surveillance of VaccinePreventable Diseases. Ensuring access to essential laboratory capacity Availability of laboratory testing needed to
confirm cases of vaccine-preventable diseases must be assured. Additional testing, such as serotype, serogroup,
and molecular testing provides epidemiologically important information that can support disease control and
prevention activities. Healthcare providers should be encouraged to contact the local or state health department for
assistance in obtaining appropriate laboratory testing. Laboratory testing needed to confirm diagnoses of public
health significance is a public responsibility and should be made available at no cost to the patient. For information
on laboratory support available in individual states, contact the state health department. Investigating contacts
Identification of all case contacts and follow-up of susceptible persons may reveal previously undiagnosed and
unreported cases. This investigation will also reveal persons eligible for any indicated prophylaxis, thereby
facilitating disease control efforts.[21] Improving the Completeness of Reporting Complete reporting involves
accounting for as many cases of vaccine-preventable diseases as is possible. Completeness of reporting can be
enhanced in many ways,[22] including using electronic laboratory reporting,[23-28] searching hospital and
laboratory records, using administrative datasets, and expanding sources of reporting. Searching hospital and

For some vaccine-preventable diseases, a regular search of laboratory

hospital
discharge records may also be reviewed for specific discharge diagnoses ,
[12], [27] such as Haemophilus influenzae meningitis, tetanus, and other vaccine-preventable diseases. Such
searches may assist in evaluating completeness of reporting and may help
improve reporting in the future.[20], [30] Identifying the source of missed cases may lead to
modifications that make the surveillance system more effective and complete.
laboratory records

records for virus isolations or bacterial cultures may reveal previously unreported cases.[13] Likewise,

Although not a substitute for timely reporting of suspected cases, such searches can supplement reporting when

Administrative
datasets, such as Medicare or Medicaid databases or managed care organization databases, may be useful
for surveillance; when linked to immunization records, administrative
records have been useful for monitoring rare adverse events following
vaccination.[31-32] However, unless extensive efforts are made to validate diagnoses, misclassification is
resources for more active surveillance are unavailable. Using administrative datasets

likely.[33] Most vaccine-preventable diseases are now rare, and data quality may be insufficient for these datasets
to be useful adjuncts to vaccine-preventable disease surveillance.[34]

2NC/1NR Materials Vaccine Culture

of Rights

Uniqueness pro-vaccination trends now

Pro-vaccination movement gaining steam now plan reverses
the trend.
Alcindor 14 Yamiche Alcindor, USA TODAY national breaking news reporter,
holds a Master's degree in Broadcast News and Documentary Filmmaking from New
York University and BA in English and International Relations from Georgetown
University, 2014 (Anti-vaccine movement is giving diseases a 2nd life, USA Today,
April 8, Available Online at
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/04/06/anti-vaccine-movement-isgiving-diseases-a-2nd-life/7007955/, accessed 7/20/15, KM)
Now Mitchell, who takes care of her son full time, and Jeremiah, who faces more reconstructive surgeries, work with
Meningitis Angels, a non-profit that supports families affected by bacterial meningitis and advocates for

organizations including the National Meningitis Association, Every Child By Two, and
PKIDs combine personal stories and scientific evidence to encourage
vaccinations. From the medical side of the equation, some physicians have
resorted to their own defenses to protect their patients from those who
won't vaccinate. Doctors at Olde Towne Pediatrics in Manassas, Va., won't take new
patients if the parents don't plan to vaccinate their children. It's not clear how
vaccinations. Other

many other physicians do the same, as experts say no comprehensive studies of the practice have been done. "We
don't want to put our patients at risk because people for their own personal reasons don't want to vaccinate," said
Anastasia Williams, a managing partner of the practice who has been a pediatrician for 15 years. "We are doing our

Several states have also

worked to make getting an exemption tougher. In Colorado, where 4% of kindergartners
last year didn't have their shots for non-medical reasons, a proposed bill sponsored by State Rep.
Dan Pabon, a Democrat from Denver, would require parents to get a doctor's note or
watch a video about risks before opting out of vaccines. VACCINE SKEPTICS Such
measures offend Sarah Pope, a Tampa mother of three, and Shane Ellison, a father of three in Los
Angeles. They both decided against vaccinating their kids because they fear the
due diligence to protect our children who wait in our waiting room."

potential side effects. In 2006, all three of Pope's children now 9, 11 and 15 contracted whooping cough, the
same disease that killed Brady. Seven years earlier, Pope had decided against vaccinating any of her children. After
seven weeks of coughing, and with treatment by a holistic doctor and natural supplements, all three recovered
without complications, she says. "I wasn't scared by it," says Pope, 49, who runs The Healthy Home Economist, a
healthy living website and blogs about vaccines. "People only see the bad with infectious diseases. But infectious
diseases do help children strengthen their bodies."

pressure parents

Pope and Ellison say it is unfair to

into using vaccines that aren't 100% effective. However, doctors note that all drugs
even aspirin have risks, and none is 100% effective. High vaccination rates can protect even unvaccinated
people by lowering the level of infectious disease in the community, a phenomenon known as herd immunity, says
Hinman, a senior public health scientist at the Task Force for Global Health. The more people who are vaccinated,
the less likely anyone in that community will be infected. Though vaccines are considered safe, Schuchat points out
that they can cause reactions in some children, which in rare cases can be serious. But one of the most publicized
fears of the anti-vaccine movement that they cause autism has been debunked by dozens of studies that have
found no link. Even so, parents like Ellison, 39, don't buy it, and he points out that he comes to the issue with some
expertise: He has a master's degree in organic chemistry and used to work in the pharmaceutical industry
designing medicines. His children 6 months old, 8 and 12 were all born at home. Aside from one visit to an
emergency room for a bruised finger, none of them has ever been to a doctor, and they're all healthy, he says,
except for the occasional sore throat or common cold. "The doctors all have the same script for vaccines," says
Ellison, who runs The People's Chemist, a website about health. He is working to build and support his children's
natural immune system using three healthy meals a day, exercise and sunshine. He says if his kids get sick he
would rather rely on emergency care than vaccines. "It's much more soothing to trust emergency medicine than a
vaccine, which for me is like playing Russian roulette," he says.

Preventable diseases are making a comeback numerous

areas are potential hotspots the amount of influence of the
anti-vax movement is the critical factor.
Alcindor 14 Yamiche Alcindor, USA TODAY national breaking news reporter,
holds a Master's degree in Broadcast News and Documentary Filmmaking from New
York University and BA in English and International Relations from Georgetown
University, 2014 (Anti-vaccine movement is giving diseases a 2nd life, USA Today,
April 8, Available Online at
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/04/06/anti-vaccine-movement-isgiving-diseases-a-2nd-life/7007955/, accessed 7/20/15, KM)
Kathryn Riffenburg decided on a closed casket for her baby's funeral. She didn't want her family to see what
whooping cough, her son's first illness, had done to 9-week-old Brady Alcaide. The nearly forgotten disease, which
has in recent years afflicted thousands of Americans, left Brady's tiny body swollen and unrecognizable. So his
mother dressed him in a white baptismal suit and hat and tucked him into a tiny white casket. Brady's burial came
just four weeks after his first laugh inspired by her version of I'm a Little Teapot and two weeks after his family
learned that he had contracted a vaccine-preventable illness. "It just seemed like it was impossible," says
Riffenburg, 31, of Chicopee, Mass. "It felt like we were dropped in The Wizard of Oz. We went from sitting in the
hospital day by day, waiting for him to get better for almost two weeks, to doctors telling us we had a 50/50 chance
he was going to make it." The mother, who was inoculated years before giving birth to Brady, later learned that she
could have gotten a booster shot during her pregnancy that likely would have saved Brady's life. Although

people actively choosing not to are helping

diseases once largely relegated to the pages of history books including
measles make a comeback in cities across the nation, according to the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention. Recent measles outbreaks in New York, California and
Texas are examples of what could happen on a larger scale if vaccination
rates dropped, says Anne Schuchat, the CDC's director of immunizations and respiratory diseases. Officials
declared measles, which causes itchy rashes and fevers, eradicated in the United States in 2000. Yet this year, the
disease is on track to infect three times as many people as in 2009. That's
because in most cases people who have not been vaccinated are getting infected
by others traveling into the United States. Then, Schuchat says, the infected
spread it in their communities. The 189 cases of measles in the U.S. last year is small compared
with the 530,000 cases the country used to see on average each year in the 20th century. But, the disease
which started to wane when a vaccine was introduced in 1967 is one of the most contagious in
the world and could quickly go from sporadic nuisance to widespread
killer. Measles kills about once in every 1,000 cases. As cases mount, so does the risk. "We
really don't want a child to die from measles, but it's almost inevitable ," says
Schuchat. "Major resurgences of diseases can sneak up on us." Michaela Mitchell
Riffenburg didn't know to get revaccinated,

watches her son Jeremiah, 10, play Xbox in his bedroom in Tulsa. Mitchell is teaching Jeremiah how to live again
after meningitis contracted from an outbreak at his school forced doctors to amputate both his arms and
legs.Michaela Mitchell watches her son Jeremiah, 10, play Xbox in his bedroom in Tulsa. Mitchell is teaching
Jeremiah how to live again after meningitis contracted from an outbreak at his school forced doctors to amputate
both his arms and legs. Vaccination rates against most diseases are about 90%. Fewer than 1% of Americans forgo

the anti-vaccine movement, aided by

religious and philosophical state exemptions, is growing, says Paul Offit, chief of infectious diseases at
Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. He points to states like Idaho, Illinois, Michigan, Oregon
and Vermont where more than 4.5% of kindergartners last year were unvaccinated for non-medical
reasons as examples of potential hot spots. Such states' rates are four times the national average
all vaccinations, Schuchat says. Even so, in some states

and illustrate a trend among select groups. "People assume this will never happen to them until it happens to
them," Offit says. "It's a shame that's the way we have to learn the lesson. There's a human price for that lesson."

The most vulnerable are infants who may be too young to be vaccinated,
children with compromised immune systems and others who may be

unable to be vaccinated for medical reasons, scientists say. In communities

across the nation, Americans of all stripes are making dangerous decisions
to reschedule or forgo immunization, says Alan Hinman, a scientist who sits on the scientific
advisory board of Voices for Vaccines, which supports and advocates for on-time vaccinations. The anti-vaccination
movement has picked up steam in the past decade with support from celebrities such as actress Jenny McCarthy,
actor Aidan Quinn and reality TV star Kristin Cavallari, who last month said not vaccinating was "the best decision"
for her children. Many continue to believe the debunked idea that vaccines cause autism, while others don't trust
the federal government or the pharmaceutical companies responsible for these vaccines. DISEASE CAN STRIKE
ANYWHERE Riffenburg hopes her family's experience will serve as a wake-up call. At first, Brady seemed to have a
simple cold. As his symptoms worsened, Riffenburg and her fianc, Jonathan Alcaide, took him to the hospital,
where doctors suspected he had whooping cough. Two weeks later, Brady stopped breathing. His brain was without
oxygen for some time, and he was put on life support, where Riffenburg said the horrific effects of the disease made
her child become unrecognizable. A day later, she made the excruciating decision to take him off machines. The
child died while cradled in her arms. "I hope Brady has saved babies and protected them because we have spread
his story," RIffenburg says. Since then, Riffenburg has made sure that her fianc and her two daughters, now 7 and
10, get all of their booster shots. She was also inoculated while pregnant with her now 1-year-old son, Jaxon. And
she insisted everyone including doctors, family members and even the hospital photographer got booster
shots before they came near Jaxon. It is not clear where Brady contracted whooping cough. Schuchat says that is

communities must maintain high vaccination rates. Many might

not know they are carrying a disease but can still be contagious and pass
it on before symptoms arrive. "It doesn't have to be on an airplane or at an airport. It could be at a
precisely why

grocery store or the concert you went to," Schuchat says. During a 2008 measles outbreak in San Diego, CDC
officials were shocked to find school districts where one in five children were not vaccinated against the disease,
she says. Last year, California had the largest number of unprotected kindergartners not vaccinated for their
parents' philosophical reasons: 14,921. This year, 49 cases of measles had been reported by March. The state had
four cases by that time last year.

Uniqueness Yes influence

Changing the minds of anti-vaccination parents is possible
now is key.
Palmer 15 Katie Palmer, senior associate editor at Wired covering science and
health, member of the Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program
(SHERP) at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, recipient of the Jeffrey Owen
Jones Fellowship in Journalism, 2015 (How to Get Silicon Valleys Anti-Vaxxers to
Change Their Minds, Wired, February 12, Available Online at
http://www.wired.com/2015/02/get-silicon-valleys-unvaccinated-change-minds/,
accessed 7/22/15, KM)
THERES BEEN A lot of shaming and blaming of the anti-vaccination crowd in response to the Disneyland measles
outbreak ( even we did it). And when we released our investigation of vaccination rates at Silicon Valley preschools,
people were justifiably angry: Every unvaccinated kid at those schools threatens the greater communitys
protection against disease. But

yelling at anti-vaxxers wont change their minds which

That begs the question: What can turn

is what we need most to prevent more outbreaks.

them around?

After writing about how vaccinated people got measles in California, I read the comments

posted about it on Facebook.

Among the anti-vax commenters, there were a few science-hating,

vitriol-slinging, homeopathy-hawking kooks. But the vast majority werereasonable. Take this
person, for example: Someone strong enough to get the vaccine (and thus be conferred limited immunity for 2-10
years) is likely strong enough to handle the disease and consequently have real life-long immunity, which is what is
really needed for herd immunity to actually work. This person is wrong, of course, but theres some scienceor at

Refusing vaccines is a
bad choice, but anti-vaxxers arent evil for making that choice. Every parent who
turns down a vaccine is simply trying to make the right decision for their
kid. As long as that motivation exists, theres a chance that a parent can
be convinced that vaccination is the safest choicefor their child, and
those around them. To figure out how to turn that no into a yes, its important to know how that
decision occurred in the first place. As Amy Wallace explained in a WIRED cover story, vaccine refusal
comes down to one emotion: fear. Or, in the current environment, the lack of it. Thanks to the
least some attempts at using sciencein there. Its worth repeating, clearly:

success of vaccination programs, many Americans have never seen a single case of measlesthey didnt get it
themselves, and probably dont know anyone whos had it. That interferes with how they process fear in two ways.
Number one, we get responses like this one (from that same story, on Facebook): Measles is not a dangerous
disease, it is just a normal childhood disease, its safer to get antibodies from the actual virus than from vaccines.
Unvaccinated children have higher and stronger immune systems, so they fight it fast Measles has, for many,
become a hypothetical disease. And a hypothetical disease isnt scary. People become desensitized to the
seriousness of the disease when theyre not exposed, says Kristin Hendrix, a pediatric researcher at Indiana
University School of Medicine. Measles was eradicated in the US in 2000, so even if youve seen a case, you
probably havent met someone who pulled the short straw: The one person in 10 who gets an ear infection,
potentially resulting in deafness, or the one in 20 who gets pneumonia, or the one in 1,000 who develops
encephalitisor dies. Which leads us to number two. The risk of vaccinesthe one in 3,000 chance of seizure for
the MMR, or the one in more than a million chance of a serious allergic reactionstarts to seem much bigger in
comparison to those fading memories of measles past. Parents can be scared very easily by hearing about
potentially negative consequences, says Gary Freed, a pediatric researcher at the University of Michigan. And the
act of stabbing your kid in the arm with a needle is far more immediately threatening than the potential exposure to
measles, especially if youre counting on her not being exposed to the disease in the first place. My husband nearly
died from the tetanus vaccine when he was a kid. Fear is a powerful, often irrational emotion. No matter how many
times you drive home the statistical near-impossibility of a negative vaccine reaction, its often overlooked in the
face of a personal anecdote. If someone has a relative who had a bad reaction to a vaccineor even a great-aunt
on Facebook whose friends daughter became withdrawn after onethe immediacy of that story will carry more
cognitive weight than numbers. Humans are big on narrative. Science (usually) is not. So now, medical
professionals and researchers must figure out how to use informationcold, impersonal factsin a way that can
counteract the power of that primal (and inaccurate) risk calculation. That job is far harder than it used to be.
Doctors once were the primary source of medical information, but now its everywhere onlinesome of it true,

some of it not, and the vast majority somewhere in between. Thats a problem, because humans suffer from a
major case of confirmation bias. We seek out and gravitate toward information that confirms what we know to be
true, says Hendrix. Sometimes confirmation bias is so extreme that it even turns positive messages into negative
ones: One paper last year found that while pro-vaccine information corrected some misperceptions about vaccines
like the fallacy that it causes autismreading it actually made some resolutely anti-vax parents even less likely to

recent research has shown that presenting provaccine

messages and evidence to anti-vaxers only makes them become more
ingrained in their misguided beliefs. Researchers dont have any great ideas about how to
change the stickiness of bad information once it gets that distorted. But theres hope. There always
vaccinate. Unfortunately,

have been a certain number of staunchly anti-vaccine parentsresearchers estimate about 2 percent of parents fall

a second group of parents and patients

the so-called vaccine-hesitantthat are the ones fueling the fire of vaccine refusal. But theyre
also the ones that still may be open to change . Doug Opel is a pediatrician at Seattle
Childrens Hospital working to target those fence-sitters with individually tailored
information. Parents themselves can have a hard time knowing where they are, or they dont fully disclose
into that camp, and that number isnt changing much. Its

what they think about vaccines in an appointment, says Opel. That turns a pediatric appointment into a chess
match. Opels shot at a solution is a 15-question survey that gives parents a score on a scale of 0 to 100over 50,
and youre much less likely to vaccinate. Hes most interested in targeting parents in that 50-to-80 range, by
addressing their specific concerns in one-on-one conversations instead of relying solely on an impersonal Vaccine
Information Statement from the CDC. Its not an easy job: Any conversation he has with a parent is going head-tohead with personal horror stories from Facebook friends and anti-vaccine celebrities. We know that personal
narratives and anecdotes that are emotionally laden are very persuasive, says Hendrix, and that people play into
fear-based information more than positive information. Anti-vaccine stories are so powerful because they capitalize

With this major outbreak

which has racked up 103 cases at last countto play into the fear of
parents, and a potent narrative to boot (Wow, were not even safe in the Happiest Place on
Earth), this might just be a pro-vaccine story that can change some minds.
Normally, pro-vaccine messages dont have the splash and the buzz of a
crisis, says Freed. Now we do. It may just be that the anti-vaccine movement
has created the outbreak that could kill it.
on both of those persuasive techniques. But two can play at that game.

Pro-vaccination is changing minds recent California measles

outbreak is persuading vaccine-hesitant parents to get
vaccinated.
Frankel 15 Todd Frankel, reporter for the Washington Post, teaches journalism
at University of Washington-St. Louis, won several journalism awards, including a
National Headliners Award, Livingston Award finalist, and a member of the 2009
Pulitzer Prize finalist team for breaking new, 2015 (Forget anti-vaxxers. The
Disney measles outbreak could change the minds of an even more crucial group.,
The Washington Post, January 26, Available Online at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline/wp/2015/01/26/forget-anti-vaxxersthe-disney-measles-outbreak-could-change-the-minds-of-an-even-more-crucialgroup/, accessed 7/22/15, KM)
The child was behind on her vaccinations. Wendy Sue Swanson took note of this as she talked with the girls parents

Swanson, like many

pediatricians, sometimes needed to coax parents to get the shots for their
children. A few might be unmovable in their objections. But most were like this couple: A
mom and dad who might harbor doubts or were just behind schedule. They
were at least willing to listen. Now, Swanson had a new way to prod
last week at a medical clinic in Mill Creek, Wash., outside Seattle.

parents like them: Discussing the Disney measles outbreak in California ,

which has spread to at least 68 people in 11 states since Jan. 1 and raised alarms about the reemergence of a
disease once considered all but vanquished. There was something powerful about the disease hitting a popular,

The girl got her vaccination. Her parents were on board.

Their eagerness was different, Swanson said later. I think it is changing
people. Much of the scrutiny in the Disney measles outbreak has fallen on an entrenched anti-vaccination
recognizable vacation spot.

movement in places such as Orange County, Calif., home to the two Disney theme parks where the outbreak gained

doctors believe the

current outbreak could change the minds of a less-known but even larger
group: parents who remain on the fence about the shots. These vaccinehesitant parents have some doubt about vaccinations, leading them to
question or skip some shots, stagger their delivery or delay them beyond the recommended
its foothold. These anti-vaxxers are viewed as dead-set against vaccinations. But

schedule. An estimated 5 to 11 percent of U.S. parents have skipped at least one vaccination or delayed a shot,

Boosting
compliance among the vaccine hesitant population could have major
public health implications, doctors say, especially because last year the United States had its highest
according to studies. That compares to only 1 to 3 percent of parents who object to all vaccinations.

number of measles cases since 1977. The topic of vaccine hesitant patients has become the focus of a growing
body of medical research in recent years. Doctors are trying to understand what triggers vaccine worries and which
strategies work best for overcoming those fears. Doctors spend many office hours trying to convince these parents
that the scientific evidence proves the shots are, in fact, safe and effective. But these hesitant parents have been
bombarded by conflicting information. And they dont view all of the shots the same way. The vaccine to protect
against measles, mumps and rubella faces particularly strong resistance as a result of thoroughly discredited
studies linking the vaccine to autism. So some parents, even those generally open to other vaccines, push to delay
or skip this one. The shot is supposed to be given at 12 months and again at age 4. One of the problems that
vaccines face now is they work too well, said Michael Smith, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the
University of Louisville School of Medicine in Kentucky, who has studied vaccine-hesitant parents. Parents dont
have experience with measles, how children can become very ill and in rare cases suffer brain swelling or even die,
Smith said. At the same time, these parents are confronted with stories about the unexplained rise in the U.S.
autism rate. I can understand as a parent why youd skip the vaccine if youd been convinced that its a choice

the Disney outbreak

changes the discussion. Now, doctors have an event to point to. The
threat is no longer abstract or distant. This is definitely going to be a talking point that
between giving my kids a shot or giving my kid autism, Smith said. But

pediatricians should keep in their back pockets, Smith said. Studies have shown that anti-vaxxer parents are
likely to remain steadfast in their opposition. Barbara Loe Fisher, president of the National Vaccine Information
Center, a group that raises doubts about the shots, said she was not convinced that the Disney outbreak was even
a story about the dangers of being unvaccinated. I dont think we know completely whats going on, Fisher said.
But physicians such as Kathryn Edwards of the Vanderbilt Vaccine Research Program said the measles vaccine is at
least 99 percent effective after the second dose. And measles is one of the most communicable diseases, much
more so than the flu. The dangers posed by the disease have been forgotten. Many U.S. doctors have never even
seen it. Edwards still recalls the only patient she ever saw with measles, years ago when she was a medical
resident. He died. So I have a lot of respect for measles, Edwards said. At Boston Childrens Hospital, pediatrician
Claire McCarthy said she is always happy when parents decide to vaccinate their children against measles in
particular. She worries about the current situation in California. And she plans to use the Disney outbreak to try to
convince hesitant parents that vaccinations are the right choice. I am planning on talking this one up a lot with
families, McCarthy said. I think this probably will make a difference.

Uniqueness booster anti-vaccination brink

Anti-vaccination movement is gaining momentum now thats
leading to outbreaks of preventable disease case studies
prove the long-term effects will be catastrophic.
Offit 14 Paul Offit, American pediatrician specializing in infectious diseases and
an expert on vaccines, immunology, and virology; co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine
that has been credited with saving hundreds of lives every day; Maurice R. Hilleman
Professor of Vaccinology and Professor of Pediatrics at the Perelman School of
Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania; Chief of the Division of Infectious
Diseases; member of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Advisory Committee on
Immunization Practices; Founding Board Member of the Autism Science Foundation,
2014 (The Anti-Vaccination Epidemic, Wall Street Journal, September 24, Available
Online at http://www.wsj.com/articles/paul-a-offit-the-anti-vaccination-epidemic1411598408, accessed 7/20/15, KM)
Almost 8,000 cases of pertussis, better known as whooping cough, have been
reported to California's Public Health Department so far this year. More than 250 patients have been
hospitalized, nearly all of them infants and young children, and 58 have required intensive care. Why is this
preventable respiratory infection making a comeback? In no small part thanks to
low vaccination rates, as a story earlier this month in the Hollywood Reporter pointed out. The
conversation about vaccination has changed. In the 1990s, when new vaccines
were introduced, the news media were obsessed with the notion that vaccines
might be doing more harm than good. The measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine might cause
autism, we were told. Thimerosal, an ethyl-mercury containing preservative in some vaccines, might cause
developmental delays. Too many vaccines given too soon, the stories went, might overwhelm a child's immune

Then those stories disappeared. One reason was that study after
study showed that these concerns were ill-founded. Another was that the famous 1998
system.

report claiming to show a link between vaccinations and autism was retracted by The Lancet, the medical journal
that had published it. The study was not only spectacularly wrong, as more than a dozen studies have shown, but

But
the damage was done. Countless parents became afraid of vaccines. As a
consequence, many parents now choose to delay, withhold, separate or
space out vaccines. Some don't vaccinate their children at all. A 2006
study in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that
between 1991 and 2004, the percentage of children whose parents had
chosen to opt out of vaccines increased by 6% a year, resulting in a more
than twofold increase. Today the media are covering the next part of this story, the inevitable
also fraudulent. The author, British surgeon Andrew Wakefield, has since been stripped of his medical license.

outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases, mostly among children who have not been vaccinated. Some of the
parents who chose not to vaccinate were influenced by the original, inaccurate media coverage. For example,
between 2009 and 2010 more than 3,500 cases of mumps were reported in New York City and surrounding area. In
2010 California experienced an outbreak of whooping cough larger than any outbreak there since 1947. Ten children
died. In the first half of 2012, Washington suffered 2,520 cases of whooping cough, a 1,300% increase from the
previous year and the largest outbreak in the state since 1942. As of Aug. 29, about 600 cases of measles have
occurred in the U.S. in 2014: the largest outbreak in 20 yearsin a country that the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention declared measles-free in 2000. Who is choosing not to vaccinate? The answer is surprising. The area
with the most cases of whooping cough in California is Los Angeles County, and no group within that county has
lower immunization rates than residents living between Malibu and Marina Del Rey, home to some of the wealthiest
and most exclusive suburbs in the country. At the Kabbalah Children's Academy in Beverly Hills, 57% of children are
unvaccinated. At the Waldorf Early Childhood Center in Santa Monica, it's 68%, according to the Hollywood

Reporter's analysis of public-health data. These are the kind of immunization rates that can be found in Chad or
South Sudan. But parents in Beverly Hills and Santa Monica see vaccines as unnaturalsomething that conflicts
with their healthy lifestyle. And they have no problem finding fringe pediatricians willing to cater to their irrational
beliefs. These parents are almost uniformly highly educated, but they are making an uneducated choice. It's also a

Children not vaccinated against whooping cough are 24 times

more likely to catch the disease. Furthermore, about 500,000 people in the
U.S. can't be vaccinated, either because they are receiving chemotherapy for cancer or immunesuppressive therapies for chronic diseases, or because they are too young. They depend on those
around them to be vaccinated. Otherwise, they are often the first to suffer.
And because no vaccine is 100% effective, everyone, even those who are
vaccinated, is at some risk. Parents might consider what has happened in other
countries when large numbers of parents chose not to vaccinate their
children. Japan, for example, which had virtually eliminated whooping cough by 1974, suffered an
anti-vaccine activist movement that caused vaccine rates to fall to 10% in
1976 from 80% in 1974. In 1979, more than 13,000 cases of whooping cough and 41 deaths occurred
as a result. Another problem: We simply don't fear these diseases anymore. My
dangerous choice:

parents' generationchildren of the 1920s and 1930sneeded no convincing to vaccinate their children. They saw
that whooping cough could kill as many as 8,000 babies a year. You didn't have to convince my generation
children of the 1950s and 1960sto vaccinate our children. We had many of these diseases, like measles, mumps,

young parents today don't see the effects of vaccinepreventable diseases and they didn't grow up with them. For them,
vaccination has become an act of faith. Perhaps most upsetting was a recent study out of
Seattle Children's Hospital and the University of Washington. Researchers wanted to see
whether the whooping cough epidemic of 2012 had inspired more people
to vaccinate their children. So they studied rates of whooping cough
immunization before, during and after the epidemic. No difference. One can
rubella and chickenpox. But

only conclude that the outbreak hadn't been large enough or frightening enough to change behaviorthat not

Because we're unwilling to learn from history, we are

starting to relive it. And children are the victims of our ignorance. An
enough children had died.

ignorance that, ironically, is cloaked in education, wealth and privilege.

Vaccination critics are gaining influence can even sway antivax legislation.
Gumbel 15 Andrew Gumbel, foreign correspondent for The Guardian in Europe,
the Middle East, and the United States, 2015 (US states face fierce protests from
anti-vaccine activists, The Guardian, April 10, Available Online at
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/10/anti-vaccine-protest-californiafacts, accessed 7/20/15, KM)
state legislators seeking to tighten
immunisation laws across the country are running the gauntlet of antivaccination activists who have bombarded them with emails and phone
calls, heckled them at public meetings, harassed their staff, organized
noisy marches and vilified them on social media. Three states blindsided
by the activists sheer energy Oregon, Washington and North Carolina have either
pulled back or killed bills that would have ended a non-specific personal
belief exemption for parents who dont want to vaccinate their children.
Four months after a measles outbreak at Disneyland,

Now the battleground is California, which bore the brunt of the measles outbreak at the beginning of the year and
saw school closures, extraordinary quarantine measures and

a vigorous public debate lamenting the

fact that a disease declared eradicated 15 years ago is once again a public health threat. A health committee

turned into a tense showdown

between lawmakers seeking to argue that the science is unequivocally on
the side of universal vaccination, and activists accusing them of being in the
meeting in Sacramento, the state capital, on Wednesday

pocket of unscrupulous big pharmaceutical companies. One activist, Terry Roark, told the state senate committee
her child had died from a vaccine and feared others could be next if

parents lost the right to

decide what was in their best interests.

Innocent people will die, she said tearfully.

Innocent children will be killed. The meeting degenerated at points into yelling and screaming, and two activists
were removed. Lawmakers promoting the new law were tenacious in their own way, challenging the claim that the
bill would force vaccinations even on children with legitimate medical reasons not to have them. A doctor
sympathetic to the anti-vaccination movement was ultimately forced to concede the bill contained no such
language. The danger I feel as a policymaker is that when assertions are made in public comment that arent fact-

state senator Holly Mitchell said. She and the co-sponsors of

the bill, a doctor from northern California and the son of a polio survivor from southern California, have
become hate figures to the movement and they and their staff have been
chased and shouted at. The southern California co-sponsor, Ben Allen, told the Guardian that while
based, thats irresponsible,

many of his detractors were respectful hed also been bewildered by Facebook memes of me as a Nazi doctor. He
added: Some of them have definitely crossed a line. The activists were boosted by the participation of a Kennedy:
the environmentalist and civil rights activist Robert F Kennedy Jr, son of the murdered attorney general and nephew
of the murdered president, who has written a book denouncing the use of mercury traces in a vaccine ingredient,
which repeated peer-reviewed studies have found to be safe and which has now largely been phased out. Kennedy
showed a documentary based on his book, spoke at a rally and likened vaccinations to the Holocaust. Medical
experts and legislators supporting the bill say vaccinating as many people as possible is vital to provide so-called
herd immunity a degree of protection strong enough to cover infants too young for vaccinations or those too sick
to receive them. The more alarmist, contrary story of an out-of-control medical establishment covering up the
truth that vaccinations are responsible for an alarming spike in children diagnosed with autism is the view of a
tiny minority, perhaps 5% of the population. But the minority is a strikingly vocal one. In North Carolina, state

the backlash to a bill she sponsored as very swift and very

created an environment that made it difficult to just even talk

senator Terry Van Duynsa described

furious. It

about it, she told the NPR radio affiliate in Charlotte.

Link Generic
Framing the debate in terms of rights is dangerous the
language of choice and freedom conveniently justifies
anti-vaccination that endangers society as a whole.
Thornton 15 Paul Thornton, Los Angeles Times letters editor, 2015 (Opinion
Vaccine skeptics and Chris Christie say it's about choice. They're wrong, LA Times,
February 2, Available Online at http://www.latimes.com/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-chrischristie-vaccines-choice-20150202-story.html, accessed 7/14/15, KM)
Chris Christie and vaccine skeptics say they want choice. What about those who
can't be vaccinated? Vaccine skeptics have exchanged autism for an appeal to choice as their cri de coeur

"Choice" is a great word -- it has a universal, empowering appeal, and it's

useful for winning a debate. Women's rights activists were smart decades ago to call their side of
the abortion debate "pro-choice," asking us to ignore our feelings on the procedure itself and trust women enough

So it's no surprise that vaccine skeptics have now

changed the subject from their rightly ridiculed nonscientific claims on autism to
the freedom to parent as they wish -- in other words, to make their own
choices. And it appears they've convinced New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (or maybe not),
who says that even though vaccinating children is crucial and that his own kids got
their shots, choice is great too, and parents deserve to have some when it
comes to stopping the spread of communicable illness. Yes, we can note the irony of
to make their own medical decisions.

this being the same governor who recently locked a nurse in a tent to protect New Jersey from an Ebola virus this

Christie's statement (you

represents the latest strategy for the vaccine skeptics:
They're trying to win apologists for their cause, not an argument on the
efficacy of vaccines. Whether you agree with them doesn't matter -- you could even ridicule their efforts
to pass off fraud as science in linking vaccination to autism. But freedom is a core American
value, and everyone deserves to make his or her own choices, especially
when it comes to parenting. This is Christie's logic. Christie isn't the only
one making this argument. As I've noted before, this appeal to choice has
replaced autism as our letter writers' preferred anti-vaccine argument. In response an
woman wasn't carrying, but that's beside the point. What's important is that
might even call it gaffe)

editorial last week calling for an end to California's personal-belief exemption for parents who would rather not

a small handful of readers hyperbolically accused The

Times' editorial board of favoring totalitarianism (one said, "Sorry, but we
dont live in Nazi Germany"). Previously, a reader from Nevada whose letter was
vaccinate their children,

published -- much to the dismay of at least a dozen others who sent us their own responses to their letter --

wrote that "freedom means choice. Plain and simple. Without choice, we
are not a democracy." He continued: "It is my choice whether or not I want to be
vaccinated. It is your choice whether or not to wash your hands or take
basic public health precautions. It is an individual's choice whether he or
she wants to gamble with their child's life. It is not your place to say what
they have to do." Heres the problem: This isnt about choice, and vaccine
skeptics' use of freedom instead of autism as their new cri de coeur exposes the
joyful self-centeredness of their obstinacy. Any pediatrician (well, perhaps not all
pediatricians) will tell you a parent's decision to vaccinate is as much about other children as their own. Parents who
vaccinate their children not only protect their own kids as well as pick up some of the slack for the mothers and
fathers who refused vaccination, they also help to protect those who cannot get immunized. It's sad for anyone to

come down with a preventable disease, but lost in our focus lately on the children of vaccine-skeptical parents who
have come down with measles are those who rely on the rest of us who can choose to immunize to make the right

organ transplant recipients, cancer survivors and infants,

among others -- might not have the choice that Christie and others champion.
choice. These people --

The vaccination debate will come down to rights SB 277

proves.
Herbert 15 Steven Herbert, Night Editor of City News Service, 2015
(Opponents of new California vaccination law gathering signatures to overturn it,
LA Daily News, July 15, Available Online at
http://www.dailynews.com/health/20150715/opponents-of-new-californiavaccination-law-gathering-signatures-to-overturn-it, accessed 7/16/15, KM)
Opponents of SB 277, a recently signed law requiring almost all schoolchildren
in California to be vaccinated against diseases such as measles and whooping cough, received
permission Wednesday to begin gathering signatures that would qualify a
referendum to overturn it. This referendum is not about vaccinations. It
is about defending the fundamental freedom of a parent to make an
informed decisions for their children without being unduly penalized by a
government that believes it knows best, said former Assemblyman Tim
Donnelly, the referendums proponent. Valid signatures from 365,880 registered voters 5
percent of the total votes cast for governor in the 2014 general election must be submitted by Sept. 28 to qualify
the measure for the November 2016 ballot, according to Secretary of State Alex Padilla. Q&A: What you need to
know about Californias new SB 277 If the attempt to overturn SB 277 qualifies for the ballot, its provisions would be
suspended. The bill, signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown on June 30, eliminates vaccination exemptions based on
religious or personal beliefs. It will require all children entering kindergarten to be vaccinated unless a doctor
certifies that a child has a medical condition, such as allergies, preventing it. The legislation was prompted in part
by an outbreak of measles traced to Disneyland that began in late December and ultimately spread to more than
130 people across the state. Cases were also reported in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nebraska, Oregon, Utah and
Washington state.

Making broad claims about the importance of civil liberties is

hazardous antivaxers will be making the same assertions
listen to how this pro choice antivaxer frames the debate
Fisher 14 Barbara Loe Fisher, Co-founder & President of the National Vaccine
Information Center, 2014 (Vaccination: Defending Your Right to Know and Freedom
to Choose, National Vaccine Information Center, November 13, Available Online at
http://www.nvic.org/nvic-vaccine-news/november-2014/vaccination--defending-yourright-to-know-and-free.aspx, accessed 7/16/15, KM)
Following is a referenced excerpt from a keynote presentation given by Barbara Loe Fisher at the 2014 U.S. Health
Freedom Congress in Minneapolis, Minnesota. View the video of her full 75 minute presentation here. The public
conversation about whether we should have the freedom to choose how we want to maintain our physical, mental,
emotional and spiritual health has become one of the most important public conversations of our time. It is a
conversation that challenges us to examine complex public policy, scientific, ethical, legal, philosophical, economic,
political and cultural issues. This may appear to be a new conversation but it has been around for centuries. 1 At
the center of this new and old public conversation about health and freedom, is the topic of vaccination. 2 3 What
unites those defending an open discussion about vaccination and health is a commitment to protecting bodily
integrity and defending the inalienable right to self-determination, which has been globally acknowledged as a
human right. 7 8 9 Whether you are a health care professional practicing complementary and alternative medicine
or specializing in homeopathic, naturopathic, chiropractic, acupuncture, or other holistic health options, 10 or you
are a consumer advocate working for the right to know and freedom to choose how you and your family will stay

well, many of you have a deep concern about health and freedom. Vaccination: Most Hotly Debated of All Health
Freedom Issues The most divisive and hotly debated of all health freedom issues is the question of whether

individuals should be at liberty to dissent from established medical and

government health policy and exercise freedom of thought, speech and
conscience when it comes to vaccination. 11 12 13 In the health freedom movement, there
are some who will defend the legal right to purchase and use nutritional supplements, drink raw milk, eat GMO free
food, remove fluoride from public water systems and mercury from dental amalgams or choose non-medical model
options for healing and staying well, but are reluctant to publicly support the legal right to make vaccine choices. A
Sacrosanct Status for Vaccination Vaccination is a medical procedure that has been elevated to a sacrosanct status
by those in control of the medical-model based health care system for the past two centuries. Vaccination is now
being proclaimed as the most important scientific discovery and public health intervention in the history of
medicine. 14 15 16 Using religious symbols and crusading language, medical scientists describe vaccination as the
Holy Grail. 17 18 19 20 Vaccines, they say, are going to eradicate all causes of sickness and death from the earth
and anyone who doubts that is an ignorant fool. 21 22 23 24 25 In the 1970s, pediatrician and health freedom
pioneer Robert Mendelsohn, who described himself as a medical heretic, warned that medical science has become a

In the 21st century,

if you refuse to believe that vaccination is a moral and civic duty and dare to question vaccine
safety or advocate for the legal right to decline one or more government
recommended vaccines, you are in danger of being branded an anti-science heretic, a traitor and a
threat to the public health. 27 28 You are viewed as a person of interest who deserves
to be humiliated, silenced and punished for your dissent. 29 30 31 32 Exercising
religion and doctors have turned the act of vaccination into the new sacrament. 26

Freedom of Thought, Speech and Autonomy To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed
to criticize, said Voltaire, 33 34 the great 18th century writer during the Age of Enlightenment, who was imprisoned
several times in the Bastille for defending freedom of thought and speech before the French Revolution. As
contentious as the public conversation about vaccination, health and autonomy has become, we cannot be afraid to

There has never been a better time to challenge those ruling our
health care with an iron fist. We have the power and all we need to do is exercise it. Information is
Power We have the tools in the 21st century to bring about a modern Age of Enlightenment 35 that
will liberate the people so we can take back our freedom and our health. The
have it.

electronic communications revolution has provided a global platform for us to access the Library of Medicine 36 and
evaluate the quality and quantity of vaccine science used to make public health policy and create vaccine laws. The
World Wide Web allows us to circumvent the paid mainstream media dominated by industry and governments and
publicly communicate in detail on our computers, tablets and smart phones exactly what happened to our health or
our childs health after vaccination. 37 38 39 40 We are connected with each other in a way that we have never
been before and it is time to talk about vaccines and microbes and the true causes of poor health. It is time to face
the fear that we and our children will get sick and die if we dont believe and do what those we have allowed to rule
our health care system with an iron fist tell us to believe and do. Who Will Control the Multi-Trillion Dollar U.S. Health

What is at stake in this debate between citizens challenging the

status quo and those resisting constructive change is: Who will control the
multi-trillion dollar U.S. health care system? 41 If people have the right to know and
Care System?

freedom to choose how to heal and stay healthy, a free people may think independently and choose to spend their
money on something different from what they have been carefully taught to spend their money on right now. 42

free people may reject sole reliance on the expensive and , some say,
ineffective pharmaceutical-based medical model that has dominated US health care for
two centuries. 43 44 45 A free people may refuse to buy and eat GMO foods. 46 A free people may
walk away from doctors, who threaten and punish patients for refusing to
obey orders to get an annual flu shot or decline to give their children
every single government recommended vaccine on schedule no
exceptions and no questions asked. 47 The most rational and compelling arguments for
defending health freedom, including vaccine freedom of choice, are grounded in ethics, law, science and

The human right to voluntary, informed consent to vaccination is

the best example of why Americans must not wait any longer to stand up
and defend without compromise the inalienable right to autonomy and
economics.

protection of bodily integrity.

Anti-vaccination advocates see the debate as a civil liberties

issue protests prove.
Mara 15 Janis Mara, covers education for the Marin IJ and has won many awards
for business coverage, live-blogging, and investigative work, 2015 (Vaccination law
critics hold protest at Golden Gate Bridge, Marin Independent Journal, July 3,
Available Online at http://www.marinij.com/health/20150703/vaccination-law-criticshold-protest-at-golden-gate-bridge, accessed 7/16/15, KM)
Corte Madera chiropractor Donald Harte addresses protesters about the new California school vaccines law before

About 200
opponents of Californias new law mandating vaccination for nearly all the states
schoolchildren protested at the Golden Gate Bridge on Friday, wearing bright red and
vowing, Were not going away. The protest took place three days after Gov. Jerry Brown signed
demonstrating on the Golden Gate Bridge on Friday. Alan Dep Marin Independent Journal

into law Senate Bill 277. The law requires immunization against diseases including measles and whooping cough in
order to attend public or private school. Before the bill passed, parents could cite personal or religious beliefs to
decline vaccination. Some medical problems, such as immune system deficiencies, will still be exempt under the
new law. We are large, we are powerful and we are going to be heard, said event organizer Brandy Vaughan of the
Council for Vaccine Safety during the rally. Adults, children and even one German Shepherd dog wore bright red Tshirts, many of them emblazoned with anti-vaccine slogans and images of syringes. All of the nation of Islam are
sincerely concerned about any law that imposes needles into the arms of men, women and children, said Minister
Keith Muhammad, an official speaker at the event and a local student representative of Louis Farrakhan, the leader
of the religious group Nation of Islam, in Oakland. Autism in black children increased with the MMR, Muhammad
said, referring to the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine. VACCINE, AUTISM In 1998, Andrew Wakefield and 11 other
co-authors published a study in The Lancet, a respected medical journal, suggesting a link between this vaccine and
autism. Subsequently, the study was retracted by The Lancet and Wakefields medical license was revoked. Study
after study has not found a link between vaccines and autism, Marin Public Health Officer Matt Willis said at a
March vaccination forum in San Rafael held by Marins public health department, the Marin County Office of
Education and Kaiser Permanente. The incidence of measles in California is very small and many of those who
suffered were vaccinated, Muhammad said. The speaker was referring to an outbreak of measles that started in
Disneyland in December and eventually sickened more than 140 people. Of the California measles cases reported in
January in which vaccination status was known, 80 percent werent vaccinated, according to Dr. Gil Chavez, state
epidemiologist. The majority of people who got measles were unvaccinated, according to the website of the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The assertion was referring to the 178 measles cases reported in the

Are you ready to fight for your

rights? asked Rachelle Emery, who lobbied against the bill. The crowd
roared back, Yes! Emery called for an investigation of our legislators,
specifically Sen. Richard Pan, D-Sacramento, a pediatrician and an author
of the bill. Joshua Coleman of Roseville, who lobbied in Sacramento against SB 277, said, We need to recall
Senator Richard Pan. He also urged the audience to educate the public on the issue. Is not injecting
poison into a child, child abuse? Think about this! Donald Harte, a Corte
Madera chiropractor, told the group. PROCESSION After the speakers held
forth, the group marched across the bridge, carrying signs with slogans
such as No forced vaccination, and, In matters of conscience, the law
of the majority has no place Mahatma Gandhi. A wagon with a bright red canopy
United States between Jan. 1 and June 26 of this year.

holding three children was part of the procession. Two of the children belonged to Megan Fleming. I have a
background in Ayurvedic medicine and I read a lot of studies on holistic healing modalities before I had children,
the Mill Valley resident said. I had a different perspective of what it means to create health. I did my research. I had

I did not want to just go along with what I was being told,
Fleming said. Medical choice is a human right. One of the issues with this is that vaccine
an instinct that

studies are done by the companies that manufacture the vaccines. It would be good to have independent studies,
Fleming said.

Link Privacy
The right to privacy becomes a tool for anti-vaccination
parents to refuse vaccination immunization is seen as an
intrusion.
Friedersdorf 15 Conor Friedersdorf, staff writer at The Atlantic, where he
focuses on politics and national affairs, holds a Masters degree in Journalism from
New York University and BA in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics from Pomona
College, 2015 (Should Anti-Vaxers Be Shamed or Persuaded?, The Atlantic,
February 3, Available Online at
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/02/should-anti-vaxxers-be-shamedor-persuaded/385109/, accessed 7/14/15, KM)
While anti-vaxer ignorance has caused great damage, the vast majority are not, in fact, especially selfish people. But I part with the
commentators who assume that insulting, shaming, and threatening anti-vaccination parents is the best course, especially when

Chris Christie is getting flak for "pandering" to antivaccination parents. He said, "We vaccinate ours kids, and so, you know thats the best expression I can give
you of my opinion. You know its much more important what you think as a parent
than what you think as a public official. Thats what we do. But I
understand that parents need to have some measure of choice in things as
well, so thats the balance the government has to decide." Those remarks could be
they extend their logic to politicians. For example,

improved upon. Indeed, Christie's office released a clarifying statement after his original comments came under criticism. But isn't
Christie's approach more likely to persuade anti-vaccine parents than likening their kids to bombs? Let's emulate the New Jersey
governor. If I could address any anti-vaccine parents reading this article: Like you, I looked into the scientific evidence with an open
mind. When I regard conventional wisdom or the ruling establishment to be wrong, I'm always eager to publicly dissent. In this case,
I came to the same conclusion as my own hyper-cautious mother: Not only would I definitely vaccinate my own kid if I had onethe
case is so strong that, were standard vaccinations more expensive, I'd spend 20 percent of my income to get my kids their shots.
That's how high my confidence is in their safety and importance. And if you're surprised by this measles outbreak, you
underestimated the costs of your choice, which you'd be smart to reverse as soon as possible. Testimony from people who actually
have kids is, of course, going to be more credible. (See Roald Dahl's story about his daughter for a particularly affecting testimony.)
I'd urge parents with the impulse to shame and insult to try that approach instead, not just because it strikes me as more likely to
persuade the typical anti-vaccine parent, but due to the conviction that while anti-vaxer ignorance has caused great damage, the
vast majority are not, in fact, especially selfish people, and characterizing them as such just feeds into their mistaken belief system.
Put another way, the parents I know who vaccinated their children, mine included, were not acting selflessly or sacrificially to protect
the herd. They were appropriately confident that vaccinating their kids would significantly increase rather than reduce their chances
of surviving and thriving in this world. Well-informed selfish people get vaccinated! Like Chris Mooney, I worry about this issue
getting politicized. As he notes, there is presently no partisan divide on the subject. "If

at some point,
vaccinations get framed around issues of individual choice and freedom
vs. government mandatesas they did in the 'Christie vs. Obama' narrativeand this in turn starts to map onto
right-left differences ... then watch out," he writes. "People could start getting political signals that they ought to align their
views on vaccinesor, even worse, their vaccination behaviorswith the views of the party they vote for." As a disincentive to this
sort of thinking, folks on the right and left would do well to reflect on the fact that the ideology of anti-vaxers doesn't map neatly
onto the left or right, with the former willing to use state coercion and the latter opposing it. For example, consider some of the

If you're a progressive who believes in both a

constitutionally guaranteed right to privacy and a moral right to autonomy over one's body, do
you also believe that choices about vaccinations ought to be between
patients and doctors, and that the state has no right to intrude on such a
sensitive matter? If you're a conservative who believes that the community has a role in safeguarding innocent babies,
standard language used to talk about abortion.

even when that infringes on a parent's choices and bodily autonomy, do you also believe vaccinations can be compelled by the
state? I don't mean to suggest that the abortion and vaccination debates map onto one another perfectlyonly to illustrate that
legally compelling vaccinations would be both consistent with and in tension with other positions taken by both the left and right.
Personally, I can think of hypothetical situations where I'd support compelled vaccination and others where I'd staunchly oppose
them, based not only on specific facts about the world, a given disease, and the vaccine against it, but also on the question of
whether such a law would really improve public health outcomes.

Link Constitution
Anti-vaccination proponents base their arguments in the
Constitution too according to this anti-vaxer, its a fight for
inalienable rights to freedom
Fisher 14 Barbara Loe Fisher, Co-founder & President of the National Vaccine
Information Center, 2014 (Vaccination: Defending Your Right to Know and Freedom
to Choose, National Vaccine Information Center, November 13, Available Online at
http://www.nvic.org/nvic-vaccine-news/november-2014/vaccination--defending-yourright-to-know-and-free.aspx, accessed 7/16/15, KM)
NVIC: Defending Ethical Principle of Informed Consent I and the more than 100,000 followers and supporters 48 of

the National Vaccine Information Center, take an informed

consent position with regard to vaccination. Since our founding in 1982, we have defended
the non-profit charity,

the ethical principle of informed consent to vaccine risk-taking because vaccines are pharmaceutical products that
carry a risk of injury, death and failure, 49 and because informed consent to medical risk taking is the central
ethical principle guiding the ethical practice of medicine. 50 We support the first do no harm precautionary
approach to public policymaking, which focuses on how much harm can be prevented from a policy or law and not

We do not
advocate for or against use of vaccines. We support your human and legal
right to make informed, voluntary health care decisions for yourself and
your children and choose to use every government recommended vaccine,
a few vaccines or no vaccines at all. 52 NVIC has worked for more than 30 years to secure
how much harm is acceptable. 51 NVIC Supports Your Health Choices & Vaccine Exemptions

vaccine safety and informed consent provisions in public health policies and laws, including flexible medical,

We are doing this in an increasingly

hostile environment created by an industry-government-medical trade
alliance that is lobbying for laws to compel all Americans to use every government recommended without
religious and conscientious belief vaccine exemptions.

deviation from the official schedule or face a growing number of societal sanctions. 53 Although historically,
children have been the target for vaccine mandates, authoritarian implementation of federal vaccine policy is not
just for children anymore, it is rapidly expanding to include all adults. 54 55 Californians Stood Up for Personal Belief
Vaccine Exemption In 2012, many California residents traveled to Sacramento to protest a law introduced by a
pediatrician legislator to make it harder for parents to file a personal belief vaccine exemption for their children to
attend school. They responded to Action Alerts we issued through the online NVIC Advocacy Portal and lined the
halls of the state Capitol building, many with their children, and waited for hours and hours to testify at several
public hearings. Mother after mother and father after father, grandparents, nurses, doctors and students of
chiropractic, came to the public microphone. Some talked about how vaccine reactions left their children sick and
disabled but they cant find a doctor to write a medical exemption so their children can attend school; others talked
about how their babies died after vaccination; and others simply opposed restriction of the legal right for parents to
make medical decisions for their minor children. It was a remarkable public witnessing by articulate, courageous
citizens pleading with their elected representatives to do the right thing. The right thing would have been for
lawmakers to vote to leave the personal belief vaccine exemption alone so parents could continue to make vaccine
decisions for their minor children without being forced to beg a hostile doctor or government official for permission
to do that. That didnt happen. 56 Today, parents in California are forced to pay a pediatrician or other stateapproved health worker to sign a personal belief vaccine exemption and the doctor can refuse to sign and parents
are reporting many pediatricians ARE refusing to sign. Californians Inspired Colorado Citizens to Stand Up in 2014
Yet, because in 2012 California citizens made a powerful public statement by participating in the democratic
process and taking action with calls, letters, emails and personal testimony, in 2014 Colorado citizens were inspired
to do the same when the personal belief vaccine exemption was attacked in that state. Because in 2012 enough
people in California did not sit back and assume the job of defending health freedom would get done by someone
else, in 2014 enough people in Colorado did not assume it would get done by someone else. 57 And this time, we
were able to hold the line and protect the personal belief vaccine exemption in that state from being eliminated or
restricted. 58 This time, there were enough lawmakers in Colorado, who listened and carefully considered the

pressure from drug industry, government and

medical trade lobbyists labeling a minority of citizens as ignorant,
selfish, crazy and in need of having their parental and civil rights
evidence. 59 They did not cave in to

taken away for defending the human right to self determination and
informed consent to vaccine risk-taking. The Right to Make a Risk Decision Belongs to You I
do not tell anyone what risks to take and never will. The right and responsibility for making a
risk decision belongs to the person taking the risk. When you become informed and
think rationally about a risk you or your child will take - and then follow your conscience - you own that decision.
And when you own a decision, you can defend it. And once you can defend it, you will be ready to do whatever it

fight for your freedom to make it, no matter who tries to prevent you
from doing that. Einstein: Never do anything against conscience Albert Einstein, who risked arrest in
takes to

Germany in the 1930s when he spoke out against censorship and persecution of minorities, said, Never do
anything against conscience even if the State demands it. 64 It takes strength to act independently. When the herd
is all running toward the cliff, the one running in the opposite direction seems crazy. People who think rationally and
act independently even when the majority does not, may be the only ones to survive! Gandhi: Speak Your Mind
Gandhi was often persecuted by the ruling majority for challenging their authority and using non-violent civil
disobedience to publicly dissent. He said, Never apologize for being correct, for being ahead of your time. If youre
right and you know it, speak your mind. Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is still the truth. 65 Sharing
what you know to be true empowers others to make conscious choices. Jefferson: The Minority Possess Their Equal

The authors of the U.S. Constitution made sure to include strong

language securing individual liberties, including freedom of thought,
speech and conscience. They did that because many of the families immigrating to America had
Rights

personally faced discrimination and persecution in other countries for holding beliefs different from the ruling
majority. In his first Presidential inaugural address, Thomas Jefferson warned: All, too, will bear in mind this sacred
principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable;
that the minority posses their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression. 66

There is no liberty more fundamentally a

natural, inalienable right than the freedom to think independently and follow
your conscience when choosing what you will risk your life or your childs life for. And that is why
voluntary, informed consent to medical risk taking is a human right.
Getting Vaccinated Is Not A Patriotic Act

Link Util
Theres no getting out of the link anti-vaccination advocates
would love to get down with the 1AC and criticize utilitarianism
together listen to this deontological spiel by an anti-vaxer.
Fisher 14 Barbara Loe Fisher, Co-founder & President of the National Vaccine
Information Center, 2014 (Vaccination: Defending Your Right to Know and Freedom
to Choose, National Vaccine Information Center, November 13, Available Online at
http://www.nvic.org/nvic-vaccine-news/november-2014/vaccination--defending-yourright-to-know-and-free.aspx, accessed 7/16/15, KM)
A Utilitarian Rationale Turned Into Law It is important to note that the Supreme Court ruling in Jacobsen v

a utilitarian rationale that a

minority of citizens opposing vaccination should be forced to get
vaccinated in service to the majority. Utilitarianism was a popular ethical theory in the late
Massachusetts at the turn of the 20th century was clearly based on

19th and early 20th century in Britain and the U.S. and was used by government officials as a mathematical guide
to making public policy that ensured the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. 112 113 Today,
utilitarianism has a much more benign and lofty name attached to it: the greater good.

Minorities At

Risk When State Employs Militant Utilitarianism

Perhaps that is because utilitarianism

went out of fashion in the mid-20th century after, beginning in 1933, the Third Reich employed the utilitarian
rationale as an excuse to demonize minorities judged to be a threat to the health and well being of the State.114
Enlisting the assistance of government health officials, 115 116 117 118 the first minority to be considered
expendable for the good of the State were severely handicapped children, the chronically sick and mentally ill, the

And when the reasons for why a person was

identified as a threat to the health, economic stability, or security of the State grew
longer to include minorities who were too old or too Jewish or too Catholic or too
opinionated or simply unwilling to believe what those in control of the
State said was true.as the list of those the State branded as persons of interest
to be demonized, feared, tracked, isolated and eliminated grew, so did the
collective denial of those who had yet to be put on that list. 121 122 Jacobsen v Massachusetts
Used to Embrace Eugenics in U.S. Prophetically, in 1927, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver
useless eaters they were called. 119 120

Wendall Holmes invoked the Jacobsen v. Massachusetts greater good utilitarian decision to justify using the heel
of the boot of the State to force the sterilization of a young Virginia woman, Carrie Buck, who doctors and social
workers incorrectly judged to be mentally retarded like they said her mother was. 123 In a chilling statement

the morally corrupt core of utilitarianism

props up mandatory vaccination laws in the U.S. Pointing to the Jacobsen vs.
endorsing eugenics, 124 Holmes revealed

that still

Massachusetts decision, Holmes declared that the state of Virginia could force Carrie Buck to be sterilized to protect
society from mentally retarded people. Coldly, Holmes proclaimed, three generations of imbeciles are enough and
The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes. 125 The
1905 U.S. Supreme Court majority made fundamental scientific and ethical errors in their ruling in Jacobsen v.
Massachusetts. It is clear that medical doctors cannot predict ahead of time who will be injured or die from

Utilitarianism
is a discredited pseudo-ethic that has been used to justify horrific human
rights abuses not only in the Third Reich but in human scientific
experimentation and the inhumane treatment of prisoners and political
dissidents here and in many countries, which is why it should never be
used as a guide to public policy and law by any government. Although we may
vaccination and that is a scientific fact. 126 127 Utilitarianism Is A Discredited Pseudo-Ethic

disagree about the quality and quantity of the scientific evidence used by doctors and governments to declare

while the State may

have the power, it does not have the moral authority to dictate that a
minority of individuals born with certain genes and biological susceptibilities give up their
vaccines are safe at the population level, at our peril do we fail to agree that,

lives without their consent for what the ruling majority has judged to be
the greater good.

Spillover
Yes spillover anti-vaccination advocates use Court cases, prochoice rhetoric, and even GMOs to justify their beliefs.
McGough 15 Michael McGough, Los Angeles Times senior editorial writer that
writes about law, national security, politics, foreign policy and religion, holds a
Masters degree in law from Yale Law School, 2015 (Opinion: A Supreme Court
quote anti-vaxxers will love, LA Times, February 5, Available Online at
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-vaccines-supreme-court-parents20150203-story.html, accessed 7/14/15, KM)
The Supreme Court has recognized the right of parents to make choices
for their children The anti-vaccination movement has an interesting connection to the judicially created
right to abortion Vaccination is the latest test of parental authority The refusal of many parents to
vaccinate their children against measles has become a political story. Some
(but not all) Republican presidential hopefuls are giving aid and comfort to
anti-vaxxers. Meanwhile, some have argued (unpersuasively) that President Obama is guilty of the same
sort of pandering. Outside the realm of electoral politics, a debate rages over
whether credulity about the dangers of vaccination is primarily a feature of
right-leaning libertarians or liberals who also harbor ridiculous fears about
genetically modified food. No one to my knowledge has mentioned that the antivaccination movement also has an interesting connection to the Supreme
Court and the judicially created right to abortion. In 1925, in Pierce vs.
Society of Sisters, the court struck down on constitutional grounds an
Oregon law that required children to attend only public schools. Ruling in favor
of an order of Catholic nuns and a military academy, the court held that the law
unreasonably interferes with the liberty of parents and guardians to
direct the upbringing and education of children. The decision includes this famous
sentence: The child is not the mere creature of the state; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the

This ringing
affirmation of parental authority continues to resonate in conservative and
libertarian circles. The website of the Home School Legal Defense Assn. says it was established to
right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.

defend and advance the constitutional right of parents to direct the education of their children and to protect family
freedoms." In American law as well as in American culture, parents rule. - But
does the Constitution really give parents the power to decide how their kids will be educated? Not explicitly, but the
court located such a right in the 14th Amendment, which says that no state may deprive any person of life, liberty,

the court had said that liberty

denotes not merely freedom from bodily restraint but also a
constellation of other fundamental rights. Now for the abortion connection. The
landmark Roe vs. Wade decision cites Pierce vs. Society of Sisters. Like
the right to shape your child's education, a womans right to abortion
(rooted in a larger right of privacy) is derived from a broad reading of
liberty. Many Americans are offended by the idea that abortion rights
are fundamental; but some of those same people would enthusiastically
agree with the court that parents have a constitutional right to shape the
upbringing of their children -- whether the issue is education or medical
care. Im not saying that the Supreme Court necessarily would strike down a law requiring vaccination with no
exemptions. But the courts statement that the child is not the mere creature
or property, without due process of law. In a previous decision,

of the state isnt that far removed from New Jersey Gov. Chris Christies
insistence in his vaccination comments that parents need to have some
measure of choice in things as well. A reader complained that I "said, basically, that the U.S.
Supreme Court supports parents' rights over health concerns on vaccinations, citing a parochial school case from
1925. The analogy is incorrect; the Supreme Court clearly stated in 1905 that health concerns justify mandatory
vaccinations." Actually I didn't say that the Supreme Court would strike down a requirement that children be
vaccinated. In fact, I wrote: "I'm not saying that the Supreme Court necessarily would strike down a law requiring

was the Supreme Court had used very

expansive language about parental rights similar to that employed by
opponents of vaccination (and supporters of home-schooling). But I should have mentioned the 1905
vaccination with no exemptions." My point

ruling, which involved the prosecution of an adult who declined to be vaccinated for smallpox. (Here's the court's
ruling in Jacobson vs. Massachusetts.)

Spillover will occur both politicians and advocates will make

the connection between the plan and anti-vaccination rights
Roe v. Wade proves.
Napolitano 15 Andrew Napolitano, former judge of the Superior Court of New
Jersey, senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel. Judge Napolitano has written
nine books on the U.S. Constitution. The most recent is Suicide Pact: The Radical
Expansion of Presidential Powers and the Lethal Threat to American Liberty, 2015
(To Vaccinate or Not To Vaccinate? Why We Should Consult Roe v. Wade,
Reason.com, February 5, Available Online at
http://reason.com/archives/2015/02/05/to-vaccinate-or-not-to-vaccinate, accessed
7/16/15, KM)
New Jersey Gov.

Chris Christie unwittingly ignited a firestorm earlier this week when

he responded to a reporter's question in Great Britain about forced vaccinations of children in New Jersey by
suggesting that the law in the U.S. needs to balance the rights of parents
against the government's duty to maintain standards of public health. Before Christie could soften
the tone of his use of the word "balance," Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul jumped into the fray to
support the governor. In doing so, he made a stronger case for the rights of
parents by advancing the view that all vaccines do not work for all children and the
ultimate decision-maker should be parents and not bureaucrats or judges. He
argued not for balance, but for biasin favor of parents. When Christie articulated the pro-balance view, he must
have known that New Jersey law, which he enforces, has no balance, shows no deference to parents' rights, and
permits exceptions to universal vaccinations only for medical reasons (where a physician certifies that the child will
get sicker because of a vaccination) or religious objections. Short of those narrow reasons, in New Jersey, if you
don't vaccinate your children, you risk losing parental custody of them. The science is overwhelming that
vaccinations work for most children most of the time. Paul, who is a physician, said, however, he knew of instances
in which poorly timed vaccinations had led to mental disorders. Yet, he was wise enough to make the pro-freedom

To Paul, the issue is not science. That's

because in a free society, we are free to reject scientific orthodoxy and
seek unorthodox scientific cures. Of course, we do that at our peril if our
rejection of truth and selection of alternatives results in harm to others.
The issue, according to Paul, is: WHO OWNS YOUR BODY? This is a
question the government does not want to answer truthfully, because if it
does, it will sound like Big Brother in George Orwell's novel 1984. That's
case, and he made it stronger than Christie did.

because the government believes it owns your body. Paul and no less an authority
than the U.S. Supreme Court have rejected that concept. Under the natural
law, because you retain the rights inherent in your birth that you have not
individually given away to government, the government does not own
your body. Rather, you do. And you alone can decide your fate with respect to the ingestion of
medicine. What about children? Paul argues that parents are the natural and legal custodians of their children's
bodies until they reach maturity or majority, somewhere between ages 14 and 18, depending on the state of
residence. What do the states have to do with this? Under our Constitution, the states, and not the federal
government, are the guardians of public health. That is an area of governance not delegated by the states to the
feds. Of course, you'd never know this to listen to the debate today in which Big Government politicians, confident
in the science, want a one-size-fits-all regimen. No less a champion of government in your face than Hillary Clinton
jumped into this debate with a whacky Tweet that argued that because the Earth is round and the sky is blue and
science is right, all kids should be vaccinated. What she was really saying is that in her progressive worldview, the
coercive power of the federal government can be used to enforce a scientific orthodoxy upon those states and

In America, you are free to reject it. Clinton and

her Big Government colleagues would be wise to look at their favorite
Supreme Court decision: Roe v. Wade. Yes, the same Roe v. Wade that 42
years ago unleashed 45 million abortions also defines the right to bear and
raise children as fundamental, and thus personal to parents, and thus largely
immune from state interference and utterly immune from federal interference. Paul's poignant
individuals who intellectually reject it.

question about who owns your bodyand he would be the first to tell you that this is not a federal issuecannot be
ignored by Christie or Clinton or any other presidential candidate. If Paul is right, if we do own our bodies and if we
are the custodians of our children's bodies until they reach maturity, then we have the right to make health care
choices free from government interference, even if our choices are grounded in philosophy or religion or emotion or

if Paul is wrong, if the government owns our bodies, then

the presumption of individual liberty guaranteed by the Declaration of
Independence and the Constitution has been surreptitiously discarded,
and there will be no limit to what the government can compel us to do or
to what it can extract from usin the name of science or any other of its
modern-day gods.
alternative science. But

Link booster rights key

The defense of personal freedoms are the largest internal link
outweighs any other anti-vax defenses.
Earl 15 Elizabeth Earl, citing Nadja Durbach, a professor of history at the
University of Utah, 2015 (The Victorian Anti-Vaccination Movement, The Atlantic,
July 15, Available Online at
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/07/victorian-anti-vaccinatorspersonal-belief-exemption/398321/, accessed 7/20/15, KM)
After germ theory was expanded upon and researchers developed vaccines, the British government outlawed
variolation, which still carried some risk of killing the person it was meant to protect, in the Vaccination Act of 1840.
Safer vaccines, which contain a weakened form of a particular disease, replaced variolation, which was a controlled
exposure to a disease by injecting a healthy person with some of the infected pus or fluid of an ill person. To
encourage widespread vaccination, the law made it compulsory for infants during their first three months of life and
then extended the age to children up to 14 years old in 1867, imposing fines on those who did not comply. At first,
many local authorities did not enforce the fines, but by 1871, the law was changed to punish officials if they did not

Activists raised an
outcry, claiming the government was infringing on citizens private affairs
and decisions. Many of the concerns of the 19th century, such as the role
of government in personal choices, have reemerged. Over the course of a decade,
enforce the requirement. The working class was outraged at the imposition of fines.

multiple prominent scientists threw their support behind the anti-vaccination movement as well. Every day the
vaccination laws remain in force parents are being punished, infants are being killed, wrote Alfred Russel Wallace,
a prominent scientist and natural selection theorist, in a vitriolic monograph against mandatory vaccination in 1898.
He accused doctors and politicians of pushing for vaccination based on personal interest without being sure that the
vaccinations were safe. Wallace cited statistics from a report by the Registrar-General of deaths from vaccination
from 1881 to 1895, showing that an average of 52 individuals a year died from cowpox or other complications after
vaccination. Wallace pointed to the deaths to assert that vaccination was useless and caused unnecessary deaths.
Pro-vaccinationists cited other statistics from London, where the number of deaths from smallpox fell significantly
between the 18th and 19th centuries, after the discovery of vaccination. The National Vaccine Establishment figures
claiming that nearly 4,000 people died in the city each year from smallpox before the discovery of vaccination,
which Wallace and other anti-vaxers claimed was a grossly inflated figure. The Statistical Society of London noted in
its journal in 1852 that smallpox has greatly prevailed, saying that vaccination was insufficient but that the
registrars of the various counties were optimistic that it could work in the future. British government chose not to
answer, staying silent behind the law as protests mounted. Epidemic disease was a fact of life at the time. Smallpox
claimed more than 400,000 lives per year throughout the 19th century, according to the World Health Organization.
Nadja Durbach, a professor of history at the University of Utah and the author of Bodily Matters: The AntiVaccination Movement in England, 1853-1907, says a major difference between the 19th century movement and
todays is that anti-vaxers in the past were more aware of the consequences of their choice: Disease was still
rampant. Despite the existence of vaccines, thousands still died of infectious disease every year. Today, in most
developed countries, large-scale epidemics are confined to the annals of history or to flash-in-the-pan flare-ups such
as MERS in South Korea. By the time of the Leicester protest, public opinion was souring toward vaccination. The
injections were not completely without risk, with a percentage of those who received the vaccination becoming ill,
and riots broke out in towns such as Ipswich, Henley, and Mitford, according to a 2002 paper in the British Medical
Journal. The Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League launched in London in 1867 amid the publication of multiple
journals that produced anti-vaccination propaganda. Another chapter cropped up later in the century in New York
City to spread the warning about vaccines to the United States. Under this pressure, the British government
introduced a key concept in 1898: A conscientious objector exemption. The clause allowed parents to opt out of
compulsory vaccination as long as they acknowledged they understood the choice. Similar to todays religious
exemptions in 47 U.S. states and the personal belief exemptions in 18 states, according to the National Conference
of State Legislatures, the parents signed paperwork certifying that they knew and accepted the risks associated
with not vaccinating. Modern vaccination activists come from a different world than those in the 19th century. While

anti-vaxers today are largely upper middle class, the crowd opposing vaccination in the 19th century was
largely composed of lower- and working-class British citizens, according to Durbach. They felt that they were
the particular targets, as a class group, for vaccination and for prosecution under the compulsory laws, she says.
This

was part of a larger expression of their sense of themselves

as second-

who thus lacked control over their bodies in the way that the middle and upper
Unless the root issues are addressed, the anti-vaccination
movement will continue to resurface with different faces. By the close of the 19th
class citizens

classes did not.

century and the dawn of the 20th, the protests had come to a head. The anti-vaccination sentiment had spread to
the U.S., garnering support in urban centers such as New York City and Boston. The British government ceded its
stringent line to the protests of the people. The law was amended yet again in 1907 to make the exemptions easier
to obtainbecause of an extensive approval process, many parents could not obtain the necessary paperwork to
claim the exemption before the child was more than four months old, past the deadline. The U.S. government,
however, took a harder tack. In the 1905 Supreme Court ruling in the case of Jacobson v. Massachusetts, the court

The Massachusetts AntiCompulsory Vaccination Society lobbied hard for the court to rule in favor of the plaintiff,
but all they won from the decision was the provision that individuals
cannot be forcibly vaccinated. The protests quieted after these two decisions, but small pockets of
unease have now bubbled up again. Durbach said that unless the root issues are addressed
the boundaries of personal freedom versus social obligationsthe
movement will continue to resurface with different faces.
upheld the state governments right to mandate vaccination.

2NC/1NR Impacts Privacy Link

Privacy movements hurt economy

The privacy movement could tank the economy hurts
advertising, small business, and innovation
Wheeler 12 Eric Wheeler, CEO and co-founder of 33 across, a company
specializing in building tools for online publishers, 2012 ("How 'Do Not Track' is
poised to kill online growth," CNET, 9-20-2012, Available Online at
http://www.cnet.com/news/how-do-not-track-is-poised-to-kill-online-growth/,
Accessed 7-20-2015)
Most painful, consumers themselves would end up suffering, gaining
"privacy" (whatever that means in the context of anonymous data collection) at
the cost of online subscription fees, less interesting and innovative online
experiences, and less relevant advertising. On top of that, get ready for
maximally confusing, overboard, opt-in mechanisms on every Website you
visit. We are headed for what feels like an anti-Internet, not a privacy
movement.
New "Do Not Track" policy could come out as soon as next year, so before it's too
late, we need to step back and consider what's really at stake.
Compromising a $300 billion industry
Online advertising has been one of the few unqualified success stories in
our economy in recent years. By building a better infrastructure -- enabling
brands to underwrite content and show relevant advertising -- the online ad
industry has achieved an enviable growth rate. The Interactive Advertising
Bureau (IAB) recently reported record ad revenues of $8.4 billion for the
first quarter of 2012, a 15 percent increase year-over-year. According to a
recent Harvard study commissioned by the IAB, the online advertising
ecosystem now accounts for $300 billion of economic activity and 3.1
million jobs within the U.S.
But take away ad targeting, and the anonymous data collection that makes
it possible, and the bottom drops out virtually overnight . Goodbye, relevant
and effective ads, healthy rates, and healthy growth; welcome back, paywalls,
jumping monkey ads, static tech growth, opt-in consent mechanisms and deep
profiles tied to your personal information to replace anonymous, cookie-based
behavioral advertising.
Handicapping small business
The perils of "Do Not Track" extend well beyond the ad industry. Small
publishers and startup ventures alike stand to lose the most under more
stringent online restrictions. Most of these companies depend heavily on
advertising to generate revenue. Not just any advertising--but interestbased advertising provided by responsible third parties committed to
strict industry regulation. Unable to leverage a targeted ad model, they'll likely
drive consumers away when left only with paltry generic ads that scream for
attention rather than attracting it through relevance -- and they'd have to run a lot
more of them, cluttering the screen and infuriating consumers.
Better yet, they would have to employ subscription models where consumers pay a
la carte to visit websites, for email, social networking, music, casual games, and

other services. A double hit on the economy: take away small businesses' means to
make money and make consumers spend more. Good luck with that one.
Stifling innovation
Anonymous user data is far more than just a lens for ad delivery; for many
startups, it's the life's blood of innovation . Once upon a time, a startup called
Amazon revolutionized online retail, in part by leveraging behavioral
shopping data that it gathered about its customers: by all accounts, this data
has become a core piece of its shopping recommendation engine.
Similarly, Netflix uses anonymous, real-time user data to inform
recommendations for its customers. The data Trulia processes helps real
estate agents improve their listings, and enables consumers to buy or sell
homes at the optimal time. Groupon uses mobile location data, as well as
anonymous information on users' habits and interests, to help local
businesses deliver daily deals to the right consumer at the right time and place.
The common denominator among all of these companies is that they use
anonymous data to gain insight into their customers' favorite activities,
interests, and connections, enabling them to create highly valuable online
experiences that otherwise would have been impossible to deliver. Is the
FTC or W3C really aiming to prevent the next Amazon or Netflix from emerging?

Privacy movements threaten autonomous cars

Any advantages of autonomous cars require data collection
and coordination that is threatened by privacy movements
Kohler and Colbert-Taylor 14 William J. Kohler, Chief Legal Officer and
Corporate Secretary at Dura Automotive Systems, LLC, and Alex Colbert-Taylor, J.D.
Student at University of Michigan Law School, 2014 (Current Law And Potential
Legal Issues Pertaining To Automated, Autonomous And Connected Vehicles, Santa
Clara High Technology Law Journal (31 Santa Clara Computer & High Tech. L.J. 99),
Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-Nexis)
V. Privacy and Data Use
Far more profusely than today's vehicles, mature and market-ready
autonomous vehicles will generate and broadcast personal data, the use
and storage of which will implicate important privacy rights in complicated
ways that will likely have to be faced well before Level 3 and Level 4
vehicles become a commercial reality. n131 Although exclusively sensor-based
autonomous vehicles are certainly a possibility, n132 many of the most
compelling reasons for adopting self-driving cars are dependent on the
vehicles sharing and coordinating data with each other, both locally and
through centralized infrastructure. It is self-evident that the efficient management
of traffic at intersections, the intelligent distribution of traffic to minimize
congestion, and the ability of autonomous vehicles to safely travel in closepacked platoons, for instance, are all largely or completely reliant on
communication both between the individual vehicles and other cars in the
vicinity, and between the autonomous vehicles and an external network.
Even if this [*121] data is scrubbed of unique individual identifying
markers, for instance VIN-numbers, or IP-or MAC-addresses, data-mining
techniques will almost certainly be able to reconstruct personal
identifying information about particular vehicles and by extension their
regular occupants. n133 The way this data is used will be the subject of
regulation and legal controversy. Concerns about user privacy have already
drawn substantial attention from the media. n134
[Note to fellow students: Level 3 Limited Self-Driving Automation, Level 4 Full
Self-Driving Automation]

Autonomous cars are threatened by privacy movements

Kohler and Colbert-Taylor 14 William J. Kohler, Chief Legal Officer and
Corporate Secretary at Dura Automotive Systems, LLC, and Alex Colbert-Taylor, J.D.
Student at University of Michigan Law School, 2014 (Current Law And Potential
Legal Issues Pertaining To Automated, Autonomous And Connected Vehicles, Santa
Clara High Technology Law Journal (31 Santa Clara Computer & High Tech. L.J. 99),
Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-Nexis)
The 2012 push for consumer privacy protections seems to have made little
progress, but there is some recent movement in Washington with respect
to automakers' usage of personal data. In a December 2, 2013 open letter to
auto industry executives, Senator Edward Markey of Massachusetts raised
concerns about the disclosure of individual user data and aggregated data

from vehicles currently on the market, seeking information from automakers as

to whom this data is shared with or sold to, how long the data is kept, whether
vehicle users have any option to delete this data or else to have it not retained at
all, and similar questions. n191 Senator Markey requested that automakers
respond to his inquiry no later than January 3, 2014. n192 The Senator has
not disclosed whether any responses were submitted, and if so, whether
these responses will be made public.

2NC/1NR Impacts Vaccine DAs

Warming/Environment
Vaccinations are key to adapt to warming.
Schulman 15 Jeremy Schulman, Jeremy Schulman is based in Mother Jones'
Washington bureau and works on the Climate Desk partnership. He was previously
editor-in-chief of The American Independent and research and investigative director
at Media Matters for America, 2-11-2015 ("Vaccines are one of our best weapons
against global warming," Mother Jones, 2-11-2015, Available Online at
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/02/vaccines-measles-rotavirusclimate-change, Accessed 7-16-2015)
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has suggested that vaccines cause "profound mental
disorders." Paul has also said he's "not sure anybody exactly knows why" the
climate changes. So the likely presidential contender would probably find this fact
pretty confusing: According to leading scientists, vaccines are among the "most
effective" weapons in our arsenal for combating the threats that global warming
poses to human health.
In its landmark report (PDF) last year, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change warned that global warming poses a range of health
threatsespecially in the developing world. Warmer temperatures and changes in
rainfall will reduce crop production, leading to malnutrition. Foodborne and
waterborne illnesses will become a bigger problem. And, some scientists argue,
diseases like malaria will spread as the insects that carry them migrate to
new areas.
So how should humanity adapt to these dangers? The IPCC report lays out a
slew of public health interventions, including widespread vaccination:
The most effective measures to reduce vulnerability in the near term are
programs that implement and improve basic public health measures such
as provision of clean water and sanitation, secure essential health care including
vaccination and child health services, increase capacity for disaster
preparedness and response, and alleviate poverty.
There are a number of reasons that vaccines will play an important role in
our efforts to adapt to a warming world. The most obvious is their ability
to protect vulnerable populations from diseases that will be made worse
by climate change.
A prime example is rotavirus, a vaccine-preventable disease that can
cause severe diarrhea. It killed roughly 450,000 children in 2008mostly in
South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, according to the World Health Organization.
"There is evidence that case rates of rotavirus are correlated with warming
temperatures and high rainfall," according to Erin Lipp, an environmental health
professor at the University of Georgia and a contributor to the IPCC report. This is
particularly true in developing countries with poor sanitation and drinking water
sources, Lipp explained in an email.
"A child weakened by measles is more likely to die from the malnutrition
caused by climate change."
There are other, less direct, ways in which climate change can exacerbate a wide
range of existing public health problems. Take measles, which is currently making a
comeback in the United Statesthanks in large part to the unscientific claims of the

anti-vaccination movement. Measles killed nearly 150,000 people worldwide

in 2013; it's particularly common in parts of sub-Saharan Africa and South
Asia that have extremely low vaccination ratesareas that will be hit
especially hard by the impacts of climate change.
Unlike with rotavirus, there's no direct relationship between measles and global
warming. But Kirk Smithan environmental health expert at UC, Berkeley, and a
lead author of the IPCC chapter on health impactspoints out that "a child
weakened by measles is more likely to die from the malnutrition caused by climate
change." In other words, anything we can do to reduce the impact of existing
health problems will be even more important in a warming world. And
vaccinating children, he says, is one of the most cost-effective public
health tools we have.
Diseases like measles pose another threat, as well, says Alistair Woodward, who is
also a lead author of the IPCC chapter. Woodward, an epidemiologist at the
University of Auckland, points out that extreme climate eventscrop failures in
Africa, flooding in Bangladesh, and even storms like Hurricane Katrinacan
displace large numbers of people. "In these circumstances, with crowding
and poor living conditions, all the basic public health services are put
under great strain," said Woodward in an email. "The risks of infection go
through the roof, for all communicable diseasesSo ensuring that people
are vaccinated is a logical thing to do as part of managing the risks of a
rapidly changing climate."
Of course, making sure people are inoculated against deadly diseases isn't easy. In
the developing world, vaccination campaigns have to overcome transportation and
security issues, as well as poor local health care systems. And these challenges,
says Woodward, can dwarf the problems caused by the anti-vaxxer movement.

Anti-Vaxxers lead people to question environmental science.

Romm 15 Joe Romm, Joe Romm is a Fellow at American Progress and is the
Founding Editor of Climate Progress, which New York Times columnist Tom Friedman
called "the indispensable blog" and Time magazine named one of the 25 "Best
Blogs of 2010." In 2009, Rolling Stone put Romm #88 on its list of 100 "people who
are reinventing America." Time named him a "Hero of the Environment and The
Webs most influential climate-change blogger." Romm was acting assistant
secretary of energy for energy efficiency and renewable energy in 1997, where he
oversaw $1 billion in R&D, demonstration, and deployment of low-carbon
technology. He is a Senior Fellow at American Progress and holds a Ph.D. in physics
from MIT, 2/9/2015 ("Medical Ethicist: Anti-Vaxxers Are Like Climate Science
Deniers," ThinkProgress, 2/9/2015, Available Online at
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/02/09/3620665/anti-vaxxers-like-climatescience-deniers/, Accessed 7-14-2015)
If you feel a moral obligation to embrace science-based strategies to protect
unsuspecting infants from serious dangers, should you be more concerned
about those who oppose mandatory vaccinations for childhood diseases or
those who oppose mandatory action against climate change?
That was a trick question: You should be exceedingly concerned about both,
even though the dangers are very different in both timing and scale. Arthur Caplan,

director of the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU Langone Medical Centers

Department of Population Health, explains in the Washington Post:
Thankfully, only a few physicians in America have embraced fear-mongering
in the middle of this dangerous and costly measles epidemic. They
deserve a place of honor next to climate-change skeptics, anti-fluoridation
kooks and Holocaust deniers. They doubt the facts, ignore established
evidence and concoct their own pet theories. They shouldnt be allowed near
patients, let alone TV cameras. But because their suggestions are so
surprising and controversial, they often find themselves on cable news
shows and in news reports about the anti-vaxx crowd. Their power,
therefore, is radically disproportionate to their numbers.
Precisely.
Yet from MSNBCs Morning Joe Scarborough to the Wall Street Journals editorial
board, many leading conservatives want you to think that its only that vaccine
science that provides enough certainty to require government action. They are
wrong. They ignore established evidence that the worlds leading scientists and
governments have high confidence the world faces severe, pervasive and
irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems devastating impacts that occur
even with adaptation if we keep listening to the do-little or do-nothing crowd.
Last week, :
There is not, at least in the science community, a debate about [vaccines
causing autism] anymore, MSNBCs Scarborough said last week. This is not
even close, this is not even close there is still a debate on climate change,
the effects of climate change, how quickly climate change is coming on us.
How much man contributes. There are a thousand different variables in that
debate.
Not quite. There is very little debate in the scientific community about the
conclusion that humans are the primary contributor by far to recent
warming. The worlds largest general scientific society, the American Association
for the Advancement of Science, explained this in its blunt 2014 climate report,
What We Know:
The science linking human activities to climate change is analogous to the science
linking smoking to lung and cardiovascular diseases. Physicians, cardiovascular
scientists, public health experts and others all agree smoking causes cancer. And
this consensus among the health community has convinced most Americans that
the health risks from smoking are real. A similar consensus now exists among
climate scientists, a consensus that maintains climate change is happening, and
human activity is the cause.
We have a similar obligation to protect people from the dangers posed by climate
change that we do to protecting people from the dangers posed by second-hand
smoke
Scarborough apparently has no idea that the best estimate of climate scientists is
that humans are responsible for all of the warming we have suffered since 1950. As
the most recent IPCC report summarizing the recent scientific literature
observations explains, The best estimate of the human-induced contribution to
warming is similar to the observed warming over this period. That line was

sufficiently uncontroversial it was signed off on by all the major governments in the
world.
The main debate on climate change among scientists is just how
catastrophic the irreversible warming we face will be if we keep doing
little or nothing to sharply reverse emissions trends, which is to say, if we
keep listening either to people like Scarborough (aka the cocksure
ignorati) or to the professional deniers.
Amazingly, the foremost climate-science-denying editorial page in the
country which belongs to Rupert Murdochs Wall Street Journal is shocked,
shocked that leading Republican politicians like Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ)
and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) have indicated doubt about vaccine science:
As for Mr. Paul, he will have to avoid these libertarian dormitory passions if he wants
to be a credible candidate. Government doesnt force parents to vaccinate
children. The states impose penalties (such as barring attendance in public
schools) on those who pose a risk to public health by refusing vaccinations against
infectious diseases. This strikes us as a legitimate use of state police powers
under the Constitution. It is also a reasonable and small sacrifice of liberty to
prevent the potentially fatal infection of unsuspecting infants at Disneyland.
So it is a reasonable and small sacrifice of liberty to protect unsuspecting
infants from serious harm by having the state impose penalties for those
who dont adhere to what science says is the optimal prevention strategy,
in the case of vaccines. But for the Journal, it is wildly unreasonable and a
major assault on liberty to protect unsuspecting infants and billions of
others from serious harm by having the state impose penalties for those
who dont adhere to what science says is the optimal prevention strategy,
in the case of climate change.
The Journal routinely spreads long-debunked disinformation, smears
climate scientists and denigrates the entire climate science enterprise. A
particularly inane a May 2013 op-ed actually urged more atmospheric
carbon dioxide! Scientifically, that would be comparable to an op-ed
urging less vaccination.
The Journal editors have a real contender in their pro-vaccine editorial for the most
unintentionally hypocritical science piece of the year, especially with its final
paragraph lecturing us on human progress:
Lets chalk up the weird science of Messrs. Paul and Christie to a lack of
information, and were happy to send them 13 years of vaccine editorials if they
want to study up, the editorial concludes. The not-so-great measles vaccine
debate of 2015 is one of those events that makes us wonder if there is such a thing
as human progress. But then we live in America, so we know theres hope.
Seriously, the Journal bemoaning whether there is such a thing as human progress
is like Bernie Madoff bemoaning whether there is such a thing as business ethics or
Chief Justice John Roberts bemoaning the overabundance of corporate money in
politics.
Again, its OK to use state power to protect unsuspecting infants from
unvaccinated kids because science says so and the WSJ will send you 13
years of editorials on the subject. But if you want to use state power to
protect unsuspecting infants and everyone else from catastrophic

climate change because science says so, well, the WSJ can send you 13
years of anti-science climate denial opposing all action and trashing our
leading scientists.
One final note: In his Washington Post piece, Caplan puts anti-vaccination
doctors in the same category as climate-change skeptics and Holocaust
deniers. I discussed my views on the term deniers in my December, post about
the statement issued by four dozen leading scientists and science
journalists/communicators urging the media to Please stop using the word
skeptic to describe deniers of climate science.

Disease Measles Expensive

Measles outbreaks cost a lot of money.
Mnookin 15 Seth Mnookin, 7-14-2015 (" The financial implications of the US
measles outbreaks," No Publication, 7-14-2015, Available Online at
http://blogs.plos.org/thepanicvirus/2011/05/25/the-financial-implications-of-the-usmeasles-outbreaks/, Accessed 7-14-2015)
Earlier today, the CDC released a report about the measles outbreaks that
have been occurring across the country since the beginning of the year.
(Hat tip to USA Todays Liz Szabo for this story.) I wrote a fair amount about measles
in my book, and one reason measles outbreaks are so scary (and so difficult
to contain) is that measles is the most infectious microbe known to man
its transmission rate is around 90 percent. It has also killed more children
than any other disease in history.
If youre skeptical about the correlation between measles vaccination rates and the
spread of the disease, or about the danger deliberately unvaccinated members of
the population pose to infants, you should check out the CDCs figures. Theyre
pretty stunning:
* There have been 118 reported measles cases in the first nineteen weeks
of the year which is the highest number of infections for that period
since 1996. Thats particularly noteworthy because, as the CDC points out, as a
result of high vaccination coverage, measles elimination (i.e., the absence of
endemic transmission) was achieved in the United States in the late 1990s and
likely in the rest of the Americas since the early 2000s.
* Eighty-nine percent of all reported cases have been in people whove
been unvaccinated. Almost 20 percent of that figure is made up of children who
were less than a year old. That means they were too young to have received the
first dose of the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine, which is given once
between the ages of twelve and fifteen months and again when a child is between
four and six years old. Another twenty percent of the total number of reported
infections were in children between the ages of one and four.
* Forty percent of the infections recorded so far this year have resulted in
hospitalization and 98 percent of the people who were hospitalized
were unvaccinated. In its typically understated manner, the CDC noted that nine
[of the hospitalized patients] had pneumonia, but none had encephalitis and none
died which is another way of saying that encephalitis and death are potential
complications of serious cases of pneumonia.
The most significant factor in the spread of measles in the United States is
the increase of pockets of the country where vaccination rates have
declined below the level needed to maintain herd immunity` and, similar to
what occurred in the UK in the early part of the last decade, that decline can be
traced back to the press-fueled panic sparked by anti-vaccine messiah
Andrew Wakefields discredited, retracted, and possibly fraudulent twelvechild case study linking the MMR vaccine to autism.
Indeed, its striking just how many of the infections are clustered around Minnesota,
where anti-vaccine activists have been for years targeting an immigrant Somali

communityand where Wakefield has made multiple trips over the past several
months:
Reported measles cases in US, Jan 1-May 20 2011
Anyone curious about how quickly a series of small measles conflagrations can
spread horribly out of control should check out the situation currently unfolding in
France, which is in the third year of a nation-wide outbreak.^ In 2007, the
number of reported cases in France was around forty. The next year, they
jumped to six hundredand theyve been rising ever since. So far in 2011, there
have been more than 6,400 infections in the country. Translated to a population
the size of the USs, that would represent a jump from 188 cases to more
than 28,000.
The toll that would take on the nations health-care infrastructure is mind-boggling.
Consider this: In 2008, a deliberately unvaccinated patient of Dr. Bob Sears
caught measles while on vacation in Switzerland. That single infection
ultimately resulted in a total of 12 casesand the total cost of containing
the outbreak topped $150,000.
FOOTNOTES
` The beginning of this sentence had previously read, The most significant factor in
the spread of measles in the United States is declining vaccination rates. As some
readers have pointed out, the overall vaccination rates in the country have more or
less stayed the same; the issue is the increase in individual communities where
vaccine refusal has grown.
^ France also illustrates how the result of vaccine panics can be similar even when
the roots causes are completely unrelated: A recent British Medical Journal story
titled Outbreak of measles in France shows no signs of abating points out that
the publication in the Lancet in 1998 of the research article by Andrew Wakefield
purporting to show a link between the MMR vaccine and autism had no significant
effect on uptake of the MMR vaccine in France. The main vaccine controversy in
France has centred on that against hepatitis B, and this has taken its toll on
immunisation campaigns as a whole.

Measles are really expensive

Haelle 15 Tara Haelle, I am a freelance science journalist and photojournalist
who specializes in reporting on vaccines, pediatric and maternal health, parenting,
nutrition, obesity, mental health, medical research, environmental health and the
social sciences. My work has appeared in Scientific American, the Washington Post,
Politico, Slate, NOVA, Wired, Science and Pacific Standard, and I write regularly for
HealthDay, Frontline Medical Communications and my science and health mom blog
Red Wine & Apple Sauce. I was the health editor at Double X Science and am
currently co-authoring an evidence-based parenting book due in late 2015. I
received my master's in journalism at the University of Texas at Austin (also my
undergrad alma mater), and I teach journalism at Bradley University in Peoria, Ill. I
previously taught high school and often think of my journalism as a form of
teaching, by helping others understand science and medical research and by
debunking misinformation about vaccines, chemicals and other misunderstood
topics, 2-11-2015 ("Measles Outbreak in Dollars and Cents: It Costs Taxpayers
Bigtime," Forbes, 2-11-2015, Available Online at

http://www.forbes.com/sites/tarahaelle/2015/02/11/measles-outbreak-in-dollars-andcents-it-costs-taxpayers-bigtime/, Accessed 7-14-2015)

The official measles count is up to 121 cases in 17 states, the CDC reported
on Monday, and 85 percent of those resulted from the outbreak stemming from the
Disneyland exposure. Thats more cases than were seen in all of 2012 and
its only February.
Much virtual ink has been spilled in the past several weeks about what an awful
disease measles can be, about the impact of irresponsible doctors advice, and
about the ramifications of not vaccinating on those unable to be vaccinated.
But only a handful of folks have talked about costs. Measles is expensive. Really
expensive. And even if you live in a highly vaccinated area with no
outbreaks, a measles case in your state thats a third of the U.S. right
now still means health department tax dollars diverted from other
programs to deal with a disease that was eliminated from the U.S. in 2000.
These outbreaks have economic costs. They are disruptive, said Gregory Poland,
head of the Mayo Clinic's Vaccine Research Group. The smaller ones have cost
a couple hundred dollars in public resources, and one cost nearly a million
dollars. Its on the lesser side health is more important but it consumes public
health resources that could be applied to the other pressing problems we
face.
In 2011, the cost of 107 cases spread across 16 outbreaks cost local and
state health departments an estimated $2.7 million to $5.3 million.
Because measles is so contagious, infecting 90 percent of susceptible
individuals and remaining airborne up to two hours after an infectious person
has left the area, the number of contacts a single case can generate grows
exponentially once an outbreak begins. The cases in 2011 involved
contacting somewhere between 8,900 and 17,450 individuals, which
required 42,000 to 83,000 personnel hours.
The outbreak tied to Disneyland is responsible for approximately 85% of the cases
to date. Photo from the CDC.
The outbreak tied to Disneyland is responsible for approximately 85% of the cases
to date. Photo from the CDC.
During another outbreak in 2008, during which an intentionally unvaccinated 7year-old boy returned from Switzerland with the virus, San Diego grappled with
11 additional cases, costing taxpayers $10,376 per case. That outbreak
involved more than 800 exposed individuals, including 48 children too young
to be vaccinated who had to be quarantined at a family cost of $775 per child.
Among the ten measles cases in Illinois, eight are infants too young to be
vaccinated, which means its highly likely that other infants in those classrooms
were exposed and may need to be quarantined for up to three weeks. If so, the
costs will very likely be higher than they were in 2008.
Then there are the family costs of an actual measles case, which lasts about seven
to ten days, though those costs are a bit harder to measure, according to health
economist Adam Powell, president of Payer+Provider Syndicate Healthcare
Consulting.
While this cost can be absorbed by many employees through the use of sick days,
employees with lower incomes are the least likely to have sick leave,

Powell said. The Economic Policy Institute reported that the median wage for
people without sick days is $10 per hour. Assuming the person works five days
a week, missing a week of work would cause a loss of $400. If the absence
extended to eight days of work and two days of weekend as a result of a
ten day illness, the loss would be $640.
But that figure only accounts for an estimate of lost wages, not the any additional
costs such as hospitalization. After factoring in the cost of medical care,
expenses could be even higher, Powell said.
Contrast those numbers with the cost of the MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine,
which prevents the measles in 95 percent of those who get one dose and 99
percent of those who get both doses. A provider under a CDC contract, such as
those using the Vaccines for Children program, pays $19.91* for a single
pediatric dose of MMR (or $37.04* for an adult dose), and the private sector price
is $59.91*.
Even those costs are not ones that consumers would have to pay, however.
Although there is a cost to the vaccine, it is not borne by insured patients, Powell
said. The Affordable Care Act requires that the MMR vaccine be fully covered
without patient cost sharing in its provisions requiring the coverage of preventive
services.
Its long been clear that the risk-benefit calculation from a health and scientific
perspective comes down heavily in favor of the vaccine. Measles kills
approximately one in 1,000 to 3,000 cases, and it causes brain damage
from encephalitis in one in 1,000 cases, not including the individuals who
develop pneumonia or other complications. The vaccine, by contrast, most
commonly causes a fever, joint pain or mild rash and can cause a fevercaused seizure in one of 3,000 doses, a low platelets count (that usually
resolves on its own) in one of 30,000 doses, or, in extremely rare situations, a
severe allergic reaction in one in a million doses.
The cost-benefit calculation in dollars and cents looks pretty similar.

Racism
Diseases like measles disproportionately hurt African American
communities.
Walks 15 Dr. Ivan Walks, Dr. Ivan C. A. Walks,M.D. serves as Chief Executive
Officer of Ivan Walks and Associates LLC. Dr. Walks served as Chief Health Officer of
the District of Columbia. Dr. Walks serves as Director of VisionQuest National, Ltd.
He served as Director of the District's Department of Health. Dr. Walks developed
proactive community partnerships, reduced infant mortality, insured immunization
for all children attending schools, and served as its incident commander during the
2001 anthrax attack. Dr. Walks' contributions to public health policy have been
recognized by various state and national organizations and he is the recipient of the
Leadership Washington Founder's Award for Leadership and Community Service. Dr.
Walks also serves on the faculty at the public health schools of George Washington
University and Howard University. He received his medical degree from the
University of California, Davis and he is a graduate of the Neuropsychiatric Institute
at UCLA, 2-4-2015 ("Irresponsible Anti-Vax Politics Could Transfer the Risks of
Disease to Communities of Color," Root, 2-4-2015, Available Online at
http://www.theroot.com/articles/politics/2015/02/anti_vaccine_politics_puts_people_o
f_color_at_risk.html, Accessed 7-14-2015)
As the Center for American Progress Sam Fulwood III aptly pointed out in
his recent analysis of the impact of the economic downturn in
communities of color, theres an old saying that also applies when were
talking about health outcomes: When white folks catch a cold, black
folks catch pneumonia .
And with the concerns of urban communities already less heard and less
addressed in general, its crucial that science and data dictate vaccination
policynot politics. So when our leaders make misguided and misinformed
statements outside their space of expertise, it can undermine medical
professionals who are trying to save lives.
Of course, that may not be the first thing on the minds of Republican presidential
aspirants like Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey and Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who
made irresponsible assertions this week that its OK for parents to choose to ignore
the science when it comes to decisions about the vaccination of their children. While
Christie quickly backpedaled on his statements after a firestorm of public criticism,
Paulwho is a physiciandoubled down, stating that vaccines were to
blame for profound mental disorders such as autism. This is simply not
true.
These scientifically baseless assertions can lead to profoundly dangerous
public health policy, particularly in communities of color. The ramifications
for many African Americans and other minority groups are greater than for
those who have better access to quality health careas has been shown
even as the Affordable Care Act takes shape. These concerns are primary
in densely populated urban centers or metropolitan areas, where
communities of color are disproportionately concentrated.

As The Guardians health editor Sarah Boseley correctly points out, infectious
diseases spread horrifyingly fast in cities. This was one major reason why,
during my time as chief health officer of Washington, D.C., we instituted an
ambitious citywide emergency school immunization campaign in 2002 upon finding
21,000 public school students who had not been vaccinated to meet established
standards. This was considered one of the largest immunization drives in U.S.
history, and within just eight weeks we experienced a 99 percent success rate.
There was no conversation about choice, simply a conversation about how
we could best protect the nearly 600,000 residents in the nations capital and the
tens of millions of people from across the world who visit each year. And at that
time we were extremely sensitive about contagions and the spread of lethal
infections, especially in the immediate wake of managing the countrys first
bioterrorism attack.
Whats significant to note here is that we did this in a city that had, at the time, a
majority-black population (more than 56 percent) and a public school population
that is overwhelmingly African American.
In describing these communities, we frequently use the term underserved. But in
reality, communities of color in highly populated metro areas are highly
underresourced. This makes these communities much more vulnerable to
major epidemics, including measles. The need for surge capacity and an
adequate emergency health care response is critical.
Measles is actually much more contagious than another disease that recently
grabbed headlines, Ebola. Which makes the current political debate
peculiar. Elected officials like Christie didnt hesitate to quarantine medical
staff returning from fighting the disease in West Africa but appear somewhat
nonchalant about fast-infecting measles. More alarming, and what some
political leaders wont say, is that diseases like measles will spread faster in cities.
That will put people of color, especially African Americans, in the direct
line of epidemiological fire, since nearly 20 of the largest cities in 13 states have
black populations of 50 percent or higher.
The last major outbreak of measles in the United States erupted less than
25 years ago. More than 56,000 Americans were infected, including 11,000
nationwide who were hospitalized and, sadly, 123 reported fatalities. And as the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention later found, a disproportionate
share of those infected were inner-city, American Indian, Hispanic, nonHispanic black and low-income children aged five years [or younger] who
had not been vaccinated. In fact, the CDC discovered that [r]acial/ethnic
minority children were at three to 16 times greater risk for measles than
were non-Hispanic white children.
This risk disparity is of particular concern to public health professionals and
planners, and it was a main driver behind the federal governments creation of the
Childhood Immunization Initiative in 1993.
For those who advocate for choice, its not an urban issue, but it is an
example of mostly more affluent individuals imposing their preference on
underresourced and vulnerable populations of colorwhich means,
ultimately, that they are transferring the risk.

Anti vaxxers are privileged, although diseases mainly impact

people of color.
Broadbent 15 Elizabeth Broadbent, 2-9-2015 ("Why Vaccination Refusal Is a
White Privilege Problem" xoJane, 2-9-2015, Available Online at
http://www.xojane.com/issues/vaccination-refusal-white-privilege, Accessed 7-162015)
Vaccines work.
Anti-vaxxers will argue otherwise, but if theyre given airtime, this will degenerate
like most vaccine discourse into comparative science, misinformation, namecalling, and finally heated charges of baby-killing.
Someone will say all anti-vaxxers should be locked up, and someone else will invoke
Hitler. So were skipping that part. If youre interested in reading it, see the
comment sections of every vaccine article ever.
Instead, lets look at the parents who refuse routine childhood vaccinations and
what that means.
There are two categories of kids without a full complement of routine
vaccinations. Researchers call the first category the undervaccinated: kids
who have not received, for one reason or another, their all of their childhood
shots. According to a study published in Pediatrics, these children tend to share
several characteristics. Most live near the poverty level, in a central city.
Their mothers are unlikely to be married or to have a college degree. And,
most tellingly, undervaccinated children tend to be black.
Children without vaccinations, on the other hand, are generally referred to
as free riders**: kids whose health gets a free ride from the immunity of
the vaccinated people surrounding them (i.e. the herd). Their parents
present a radically different profile from those of the undervaccinated
kids. Free riders mothers tend to be married and college-educated. Their
household income generally averages above $75,000. And those free
riders are overwhelmingly white.
Ouch.
It doesnt take a methodological study to make sense of these numbers. Lowincome city-dwelling mothers are less likely to enjoy easy access to the vaccinations
themselves; one Los Angeles mother told a reporter that she had to schlep two kids
on two different buses to get to her local clinic.
These simple things were pretty difficult to get through, she says. This doesnt
count the difficulties of making appointments in between full-time work and
childcare, not to mention navigating the bureaucracy of Medicaid. These childrens
parents may worry about the ramifications of vaccine-preventable disease. But
poverty can make it hard to do much about it. When youre worried about keeping
the lights on, the rent paid, and the car running, routine vaxes understandably
arent high on your priority list.
Free riders, on the other hand, have easy access to vaccines but choose
not to use them. Free riders parents believe vaccination itself to be far more
dangerous than the risk of contracting a vaccine-preventable disease. The maladies
they attribute to standard childhood shots go way beyond the Jenny
McCarthy/Andrew Wakefield autism debacle; they now include mercury and

aluminum poisoning, increased risk of asthma, allergies, ADHD, ear infections,

sinusitis, and brain damage of all stripes. If you can imagine a health concern, you
can blame it on vaccines.
These parents tend to get their information about vaccination from likeminded parents, listservs, online groups, and natural-health gurus like Dr.
Mercola and Dr. Tenpenny both notoriously anti-vaccination. They rely, in fact,
not on pediatricians, with their one-size-fits-all vaccine schedule, but on their own
research: conducted mostly on the Internet, where stories of legitimate
vaccine injury pass through news sites and Facebook groups like a horrorshow version of Telephone.
Instead of vaccinations, free riders parents claim other means of keeping
their kids healthy. As Public Health professor Jennifer Reich argues, parents of
non-vaccinated children believe breastfeeding, superior nutrition, and controlled
environments (i.e., not daycare) keep disease at bay.
Unfortunately for most kids, these are all benefits of privilege.
With the lack of adequate maternity leave and laws to protect mothers rights to
pump breast milk, nursing in America has become a purview of the privileged
mother, whose job or whose decision to stay home allows a stable nursing
relationship. And despite WIC, SNAP, and other variations of food stamps, access to
fresh, healthy food is also often out of reach for the poor, especially those who
inhabit so-called food deserts. Finally, working mothers must rely on some kind of
childcare, often institutionalized daycare. Undervaccinated children simply
dont have access to the mythical protection free riders parents invoke. As
one such mother tells Reich, "I think there are some vaccines that maybe some
kids, maybe its okay for them to have, because maybe their parents. . . arent at all
educated and . . . so maybe they do need to rely more on outside sources, because
that is being done to them.
Moreover, in general, children living in poverty have more government intervention
in their lives. While it varies from state to state, and even social worker to social
worker, many WIC recipients are required to produce shot records for their children.
Social Services may use a lack of vaccinations as evidence of neglect. And as Reich
says, more privileged parents address experts as consultants and refuse their
advice without fear of reprisal, choices less readily available to less privileged
families, whose rejection of expert advice more easily results in state intervention,
even around vaccination. A poor black woman refusing to give her kid an MMR shot
might not just get the side-eye. She might earn herself a visit from Social Services.
Free riders parents also often claim vaccine-preventable diseases are less
dangerous than the vaccines themselves, particularly with illnesses like measles.
Chicken pox (varicella) is seen as particularly innocuous, partly because most adults
remember suffering through it with little more than an itch or two, and partly
because of rumors that the vaccine will leave children vulnerable to shingles later in
life (it wont). Whatever the dangers of the diseases, allowing children to catch them
costs time and money: time taken off work to care for them, lost wages, and
doctors bills. Its more than many parents can afford, especially those without
access to family or medical leave. As a rule, poor people dont throw pox parties.

Basically: It takes money and time to refuse vaccinations. And its a lack of that
same money and time that often unintentionally keeps parents from fully
vaccinating their children.
This has serious public health repercussions. The head of the Sabin Institute for
Vaccine Research, Peter Hortez points out that when vaccine rates start to drop, the
people who suffer will be people who live in poor, crowded conditions. So its going
to affect the poorest people in our country.
Privileged, usually white, free riders, who enjoy limited social contact,
superior nutrition, and better medical care will likely have a lower
incidence of complications of death from those diseases. The
undervaccinated will be the ones to suffer: overwhelmingly black children
from low-income families.
The anti-vaccine movement, then, affects more than just the privileged
children whose parents choose to forgo vaccination. As scientists at Johns
Hopkins recently said while investigating a whooping cough outbreak, geographic
pockets of vaccine exemptors pose a risk to the whole community.
That whole community doesnt just include the usual suspects: infants,
the elderly, the immuno-compromised, the vaccinated for whom the
antigen simply didn't take. It also includes the marginalized who lack easy
access to basic health care. Those marginalized communities are usually
people of color. The anti-vaccination community is overwhelmingly white. In a
very real sense, this leaves two distinct undervaccinated populations in
America: privileged (largely) white people whove chosen to eschew
modern medicine, and underprivileged minorities whose poverty has
placed them, unwillingly, in that position. And its the latter who will suffer
more gravely for it, because the same economic and health factors that
make their children vulnerable to undervaccination make them vulnerable
to the worst effects of the diseases themselves.
Privileged white people refuse the vaccines in the name of individual freedom.
And public health suffers; this especially affects the lives of the poor. This
will, of course, provoke unmitigated outrage from the anti-vaccination community as
a whole.
Is the anti-vax movement itself racist? No. But its buttressed by class and
race privilege.
A drop in vaccination rates poses a danger to us all. But it poses a special danger to
those least able to cope with serious illness, and least likely to be (unintentionally)
fully vaccinated: minority, city-dwelling children.

Anti-Vaxxers = Anti-science
Anti-vaxxers are proponents of anti-science.
Huppke 15 Rex W. Huppke, after earning a masters degree from the University of
Missouri Graduate School of Journalism, he launched his career working for the
Associated Press in Indiana, In 2003, he joined the staff of the Chicago Tribune,
writing about everything from gang violence and inner-city poverty to the glory of
competitive arm wrestling and a southern Illinois town famous for its albino
squirrels, 2-3-2015 ("The anti-vaccine crowd could use an anti-science expert," The
Chicago Tribune, 2-3-2015, Available Online at
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/huppke/ct-talk-huppke-vaccines20150203-story.html, Accessed 7-16-2015)
Im not exactly sure what "science" means. I could look it up in a dictionary, but I
don't believe in dictionaries. I've heard they cause brainwashing and are in the
pocket of Big Lexicography.
Besides, as a word-user, I think I'm best-qualified to determine the meanings
of my words. That's why I pancake eggplant every chance I schadenfreude.
It's thanks to that kind of logic that America faces the return of the onceeradicated measles virus. A small, vocal and highly insufferable portion of
the population has taken it upon themselves to doubt the irrefutable
scientific evidence that childhood vaccinations are safe and effective. And
so they don't vaccinate their kids.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there are now
more than 100 measles cases in 14 states. And that's just in January. For all
of last year, there were 644 cases in 27 states.
"We are very concerned by the growing number of people who are susceptible to
measles, and to the possibility that we could have a large outbreak in this country
as a result," CDC Director Tom Frieden said Sunday on CBS's "Face the Nation."
President Barack Obama also addressed the vaccination debate, telling NBC News:
"You should get your kids vaccinated it's good for them. We should be able to get
back to the point where measles effectively is not existing in this country."
The problem is, we've got too many people who believe in "ecneics"
(pronounced eck-nakes), which is "science" spelled backward. While
scientists study the physical and natural word and reach consensus based
on experimentation and observation, ecneictists (eck-nake-tists) look at a
scientific consensus and then decide the opposite is true because that's
what they want to believe.
A new Pew Research Center study highlights the growing gap between scientists
and ecneictists. Asked if childhood vaccines, including one for measles,
should be required, 68 percent of adults said yes compared with 86
percent of scientists with the American Association for the Advancement
of Science. There was a 37-point gap between scientists and the public on
whether climate change is "mostly due to human activity," with 50 percent
of adults saying yes versus 87 percent of scientists.
And on whether it's safe to eat genetically modified foods, nearly 90
percent of scientists said yes compared with only 37 percent of nonscientists.

In most rifts between scientists and those who doubt them, someone
claiming a certain level of expertise jumps in and sides with the regular
folks, giving "proof" that their anti-science belief must be true. It could be
anyone from a Greenpeace agricultural activist to a global-warming-denying
politician to an anti-vaccine doctor.
One such pseudo-expert who has stood up for the anti-vaccine crowd
lately is Jack Wolfson, an Arizona-based cardiologist, formerly of Chicago.
According to his website, Wolfson became aware of the "brainwashing of
medical training" after meeting the woman who would become his wife, a
chiropractor with "a heavy focus on nutrition and healthy, chemical-free living."
It's your classic cardiologist-meets-chiropractor, cardiologist-falls-in-lovewith-chiropractor, caridologist-becomes-opponent-of-well-establishedmedical-science story. Totally legit.
Now Wolfson is saying things like this to the Washington Post: "Don't be mad at me
for speaking the truth about vaccines. Be mad at yourself, because you're, frankly,
a bad mother. You didn't ask once about those vaccines. You didn't ask about the
chemicals in them. You didn't ask about all the harmful things in those vaccines. ...
People need to learn the facts."
The fact is that people like Wolfson are shameless opportunists who
encourage parents to embrace an arrogant, reckless and unhealthy belief.
And because people want so desperately to believe what they believe
science be damned Wolfson and his ilk probably make good money
being contrarians.
So count me in. If you're a practicing science-denier and need someone to
shamelessly vouch for your harebrained belief, I'm the expert for you assuming
you have a lot of money.
It's a well-established fact(oid) that journalists know a little about everything and a
lot about nothing. That makes me the perfect person to speak with great authority
about things with which I am barely familiar.
Say you don't believe in electricians. I wholeheartedly agree, and will stake my
years of occasionally using the word "electrician" in newspaper stories on the belief
that no "trained and licensed expert" knows the wiring in your house better than
you do.
If that wiring is faulty and your house burns down, that's just nature's way of saying
you need a new house. And if the fire from your house spreads across the whole
neighborhood, that's not your fault. You can't be held responsible for the
flammability of other people's homes.
See how easy this is?
Based on the swift and utterly absurd resurgence of measles, it seems
being an advocate for incorrect causes might be a growth industry. And if
people continue to doubt science, it seems like measles might be the least
of our problems.
Which is why I shall pancake eggplant every chance I schadenfreude.

Antiscience is growing
Otto 12 Shawn Lawrence Otto, Co-founder of ScienceDebate.org and author of
Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America. He is recipient of IEEEUSA's Award for Distinguished Public Service and writes for the Huffington Post and

blogs at Neorenaissance.org, Shawn Lawrence Otto is an American novelist,

nonfiction author, filmmaker, political strategist, speaker, science advocate, and
screenwriter and co-producer of the movie House of Sand and Fog, 10-16-2012
("Antiscience Beliefs Jeopardize U.S. Democracy," No Publication, 10-16-2012,
Available Online at http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/antiscience-beliefsjeopardize-us-democracy/, Accessed 7-20-2015)
It is hard to know exactly when it became acceptable for U.S. politicians to
be antiscience. For some two centuries science was a preeminent force in
American politics, and scientific innovation has been the leading driver of U.S.
economic growth since World War II. Kids in the 1960s gathered in school cafeterias
to watch moon launches and landings on televisions wheeled in on carts.
Breakthroughs in the 1970s and 1980s sparked the computer revolution and a new
information economy. Advances in biology, based on evolutionary theory, created
the biotech industry. New research in genetics is poised to transform the
understanding of disease and the practice of medicine, agriculture and other fields.
The Founding Fathers were science enthusiasts. Thomas Jefferson, a lawyer
and scientist, built the primary justification for the nation's independence on the
thinking of Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon and John Lockethe creators of physics,
inductive reasoning and empiricism. He called them his trinity of three greatest
men. If anyone can discover the truth by using reason and science, Jefferson
reasoned, then no one is naturally closer to the truth than anyone else.
Consequently, those in positions of authority do not have the right to impose their
beliefs on other people. The people themselves retain this inalienable right. Based
on this foundation of scienceof knowledge gained by systematic study and testing
instead of by the assertions of ideologythe argument for a new, democratic form
of government was self-evident.
Yet despite its history and today's unprecedented riches from science, the
U.S. has begun to slip off of its science foundation. Indeed, in this election
cycle, some 236 years after Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence,
several major party contenders for political office took positions that can
only be described as antiscience: against evolution, human-induced climate
change, vaccines, stem cell research, and more. A former Republican governor
even warned that his own political party was in danger of becoming the
antiscience party.
Such positions could typically be dismissed as nothing more than election-year
posturing except that they reflect an anti-intellectual conformity that is
gaining strength in the U.S. at precisely the moment that most of the
important opportunities for economic growth, and serious threats to the
well-being of the nation, require a better grasp of scientific issues. By
turning public opinion away from the antiauthoritarian principles of the nation's
founders, the new science denialism is creating an existential crisis like few
the country has faced before.
In late 2007 growing concern over this trend led six of us to try to do something
about it. Physicist Lawrence M. Krauss, science writer and film director Matthew
Chapman (who is Charles Darwin's greatgreat-grandson), science philosopher
Austin Dacey, science writer Chris Mooney, marine biologist Sheril Kirshenbaum and
I decided to push for a presidential science debate. We put up a Web site and began

reaching out to scientists and engineers. Within weeks 38,000 had signed on,
including the heads of several large corporations, a few members of Congress from
both parties, dozens of Nobel laureates, many of the nation's leading universities
and almost every major science organization. Although presidential hopefuls
Barack Obama and John McCain both declined a debate on scientific
issues, they provided written answers to the 14 questions we asked, which were
read by millions of voters.
In 2012 we developed a similar list, called The Top American Science Questions,
that candidates for public office should be answering [see Science in an Election
Year for a report card by Scientific American's editors measuring how President
Obama and Governor Mitt Romney did]. The presidential candidates' complete
answers, as well as the responses provided by key congressional leaders to a subset
of those questions, can be found at www.ScientificAmerican.com/nov2012/sciencedebate and at www.sciencedebate.org/debate12.
These efforts try to address the problem, but a larger question remains: What has
turned so many Americans against sciencethe very tool that has
transformed the quality and quantity of their lives?

Antiscience grows on the political system

Otto 12 Shawn Lawrence Otto, Co-founder of ScienceDebate.org and author of
Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America. He is recipient of IEEEUSA's Award for Distinguished Public Service and writes for the Huffington Post and
blogs at Neorenaissance.org, Shawn Lawrence Otto is an American novelist,
nonfiction author, filmmaker, political strategist, speaker, science advocate, and
screenwriter and co-producer of the movie House of Sand and Fog, 10-16-2012
("Antiscience Beliefs Jeopardize U.S. Democracy," No Publication, 10-16-2012,
Available Online at http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/antiscience-beliefsjeopardize-us-democracy/, Accessed 7-20-2015)
A Call to Reason
Today's denial of inconvenient science comes from partisans on both ends
of the political spectrum. Science denialism among Democrats tends to be
motivated by unsupported suspicions of hidden dangers to health and the
environment. Common examples include the belief that cell phones cause
brain cancer (high school physics shows why this is impossible) or that vaccines
cause autism (science has shown no link whatsoever). Republican science
denialism tends to be motivated by antiregulatory fervor and
fundamentalist concerns over control of the reproductive cycle. Examples are
the conviction that global warming is a hoax (billions of measurements show it
is a fact) or that we should teach the controversy to schoolchildren over
whether life on the planet was shaped by evolution over millions of years
or an intelligent designer over thousands of years (scientists agree evolution
is real). Of these two forms of science denialism, the Republican version is more
dangerous because the party has taken to attacking the validity of science itself as
a basis for public policy when science disagrees with its ideology.
It gives me no pleasure to say this. My family founded the Minnesota Republican
Party. But much of the Republican Party has adopted an authoritarian approach that
demands ideological conformity, even when contradicted by scientific evidence, and
ostracizes those who do not conform. It may work well for uniform messaging, but in

the end it drives diverse thinkers awayand thinkers are what we need to
solve today's complex problems.
This process has left a large, silent body of voters who are fiscally conservative, who
believe in science and evidence-based policies, and who are socially tolerant but
who have left the party. In addition, Republican attacks on settled scientific
issuessuch as anthropogenic climate change and evolutionhave too often
been met with silence or, worse, appeasement by Democrats.
Governor Romney's path to endorsement exemplifies the problem. I don't speak for
the scientific community, of course, but I believe the world is getting warmer,
Romney told voters in June 2011 at a town hall meeting after announcing his
candidacy. I can't prove that, but I believe based on what I read that the world is
getting warmer, and number two, I believe that humans contribute to that. Four
days later radio commentator Rush Limbaugh blasted Romney on his show,
saying, Bye-bye nomination. Bye-bye nomination, another one down. We're in the
midst here of discovering that this is all a hoax. The last year has established that
the whole premise of man-made global warming is a hoax! And we still have
presidential candidates who want to buy into it.
By October 2011 Romney had done an about-face. My view is that we don't
know what's causing climate change on this planet, and the idea of spending
trillions and trillions of dollars to try and reduce CO2 emissions is not the right
course for us, he told an audience in Pittsburgh, then advocated for aggressive oil
drilling. And on the day after the Republican National Convention, he tacked back
toward his June 2011 position when he submitted his answers to ScienceDebate.org.
Romney is not alone in appreciating the political necessity of embracing
antiscience views. House Speaker John A. Boehner, who controls the flow of
much legislation through Congress, once argued for teaching creationism in
science classes and asserted on national television that climate scientists are
suggesting that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen. They are not. Representative
Michele Bachmann of Minnesota warned in 2011 during a Florida presidential
primary debate that innocent little 12-year-old girls were being forced to
have a government injection to prevent infection with human papillomavirus
(HPV) and later said the vaccine caused mental retardation. HPV vaccine
prevents the main cause of cervical cancer. Religious conservatives believe this
encourages promiscuity. There is no evidence of a link to mental retardation.
In a separate debate, Republican candidate Jon Huntsman was asked about
comments he had made that the Republican Party is becoming the antiscience
party. All I'm saying, he replied, is that for the Republican Party to win, we
can't run from science. Republican primary voters apparently disagreed.
Huntsman, the lone candidate to actively embrace science, finished last in
the polls.
In fact, candidates who began to lag in the GOP presidential primaries would often
make antiscience statements and would subsequently rise in the polls.
Herman Cain, who is well respected in business circles, told voters that global
warming is poppycock. Newt Gingrich, who supported doubling the budget of
the National Institutes of Health and who is also a supporter of ScienceDebate.org,
began describing stem cell research as killing children in order to get
research material. Candidates Rick Perry and Ron Paul both called climate

change a hoax. In February, Rick Santorum railed that the left brands
Republicans as the antiscience party. No. No, we're not, he announced. We're
the truth party.
Antiscience reproductive politics surfaced again in August, this time in one of
the most contested U.S. Senate races. Todd Akin, who is running in Missouri against
Claire McCaskill, said that from what he understood from doctors, pregnancy from
rape is extremely rare because if it's a legitimate rape, the female body has
ways to try to shut that whole thing down. Akin sits on the House Committee
on Science, Space, and Technology, which is responsible for much of the U.S. federal
science enterprise, so he should be aware of what science actually says about key
policy issues. In fact, studies suggest that women are perhaps twice as likely to
become pregnant from rape, and, in any event, there is no biological mechanism to
stop pregnancy in the case of rape. Akin's views are by no means unusual among
abortion foes, who often seek to minimize what science says to politically justify a
no-exception antiabortion stance, which has since become part of the 2012 national
GOP platform.
A look at down-ticket races suggests that things may get worse. The large crop of
antiscience state legislators elected in 2010 are likely to bring their views into
mainstream politics as they eventually run for Congress. In North Carolina this
year the state legislature considered House Bill No. 819, which prohibited using
estimates of future sea-level rise made by most scientists when planning to protect
low-lying areas. (Increasing sea level is a predicted consequence of global
warming.) The proposed law would have permitted planning only for a politically
correct rise of eight inches instead of the three to four feet that scientists predict for
the area by 2100.

Knowledge and facts are key to prevent anti-science

Otto 12 Shawn Lawrence Otto, Co-founder of ScienceDebate.org and author of
Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America. He is recipient of IEEEUSA's Award for Distinguished Public Service and writes for the Huffington Post and
blogs at Neorenaissance.org, Shawn Lawrence Otto is an American novelist,
nonfiction author, filmmaker, political strategist, speaker, science advocate, and
screenwriter and co-producer of the movie House of Sand and Fog, 10-16-2012
("Antiscience Beliefs Jeopardize U.S. Democracy," No Publication, 10-16-2012,
Available Online at http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/antiscience-beliefsjeopardize-us-democracy/, Accessed 7-20-2015)
An Existential Crisis
Facts, John Adams argued, are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes,
our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts
and evidence. When facts become opinions, the collective policymaking
process of democracy begins to break down. Gone is the common
denominatorknowledgethat can bring opposing sides together.
Government becomes reactive, expensive and late at solving problems,
and the national dialogue becomes mired in warring opinions.
In an age when science influences every aspect of lifefrom the most
private intimacies of sex and reproduction to the most public collective
challenges of climate change and the economyand in a time when

democracy has become the dominant form of government on the planet, it

is important that the voters push elected officials and candidates of all
parties to explicitly state their views on the major science questions
facing the nation. By elevating these issues in the public dialogue, U.S.
citizens gain a fighting chance of learning whether those who would lead
them have the education, wisdom and courage necessary to govern in a
science-driven century and to preserve democracy for the next
generation.

Anti-science Impact Authoritarianism

Antiscience leads to authoritarian regimes, dominant
narratives win and the voter remains uninformed.
Otto 12 Shawn Lawrence Otto, Co-founder of ScienceDebate.org and author of
Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America. He is recipient of IEEEUSA's Award for Distinguished Public Service and writes for the Huffington Post and
blogs at Neorenaissance.org, Shawn Lawrence Otto is an American novelist,
nonfiction author, filmmaker, political strategist, speaker, science advocate, and
screenwriter and co-producer of the movie House of Sand and Fog, 10-16-2012
("Antiscience Beliefs Jeopardize U.S. Democracy," No Publication, 10-16-2012,
Available Online at http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/antiscience-beliefsjeopardize-us-democracy/, Accessed 7-20-2015)
An Antiscience Philosophy
If both Democrats and Republicans have worn the antiscience mantle, why not just
wait until the pendulum swings again and denialism loses its political potency? The
case for action rests on the realization that for the first time since the
beginning of the Enlightenment era in the mid-17th century, the very idea
of science as a way to establish a common book of knowledge about the
world is being broadly called into question by heavily financed public
relations campaigns.
Ironically, the intellectual tools currently being used by the political right to such
harmful effect originated on the academic left. In the 1960s and 1970s a
philosophical movement called postmodernism developed among humanities
professors displeased at being deposed by science, which they regarded as rightleaning. Postmodernism adopted ideas from cultural anthropology and relativity
theory to argue that truth is relative and subject to the assumptions and prejudices
of the observer. Science is just one of many ways of knowing, they argued, neither
more nor less valid than others, like those of Aborigines, Native Americans or
women. Furthermore, they defined science as the way of knowing among Western
white men and a tool of cultural oppression. This argument resonated with many
feminists and civil-rights activists and became widely adopted, leading to the
political correctness justifiably hated by Rush Limbaugh and the mental
masturbation lampooned by Woody Allen.
Acceptance of this relativistic worldview undermines democracy and leads
not to tolerance but to authoritarianism. John Locke, one of Jefferson's trinity
of three greatest men, showed why almost three centuries ago. Locke watched
the arguing factions of Protestantism, each claiming to be the one true
religion, and asked: How do we know something to be true? What is the
basis of knowledge? In 1689 he defined what knowledge is and how it is
grounded in observations of the physical world in An Essay Concerning
Human Understanding. Any claim that fails this test is but faith, or opinion,
but not knowledge. It was this ideathat the world is knowable and that
objective, empirical knowledge is the most equitable basis for public policythat
stood as Jefferson's foundational argument for democracy.
By falsely equating knowledge with opinion, postmodernists and antiscience
conservatives alike collapse our thinking back to a pre-Enlightenment era,

leaving no common basis for public policy. Public discourse is reduced to

endless warring opinions, none seen as more valid than another. Policy is
determined by the loudest voices, reducing us to a world in which might
makes rightthe classic definition of authoritarianism.
Reporters who agree with this statement will not dig to get to the truth and
will tend to simply present both sides of contentious issues, especially if they
cannot judge the validity of scientific evidence. This kind of false balance
becomes a problem when one side is based on knowledge and the other is
merely an opinion, as often occurs when policy problems intersect with science. If
the press corps does not strive to report objective reality, for which
scientific evidence is our only reliable guide, the ship of democracy is set
adrift from its moorings in the well-informed voter and becomes
vulnerable once again to the tyranny that Jefferson feared.

Anti-science Impact Warming

Warming and public health are inextricably linked.
Abrams 15 Lindsay Abrams, Lindsay Abrams is an assistant editor at Salon
and a former writer and producer for The Atlantic's Health Channel, 2-6-2015 ("What
the anti-vaxx backlash can teach us about climate change: We need to be way
angrier," Salon, 2-6-2015, Available Online at
http://www.salon.com/2015/02/06/what_the_anti_vaxx_backlash_can_teach_us_abou
t_climate_change_we_need_to_be_way_angrier/, Accessed 7-20-2015)
The words were barely out of the 2016 hopefuls mouths before they were quickly
made to regret them.
The backlash to comments made by Chris Christie and Rand Paul this week
suggesting that parents should be able to choose whether to vaccinate
their children was fast, furious and nearly universal, even among
conservative news outlets. To wit: Fox News host Megyn Kelly stood up for Big
Brother as a means of ensuring herd immunity. Breitbart News argued that
Christie and Paul deserved the media criticism being hurled their way. And,
in a stinging rebuttal, the Wall Street Journal editorial board rebuked Paul for
indulging bad science, calling vaccination laws a reasonable and small
sacrifice of liberty to prevent the potentially fatal infection of
unsuspecting infants at Disneyland.
It was a bipartisan takedown driven not by politics, but a much deeper sense of
moral outrage: that it is wrong to ignore science, and a downright crime
when, in so doing, you put our childrens health at risk. And as a society,
we will not tolerate it.
Now, if only we could take that same outrage and channel it at climate
change and the denialists running our government.
The scientific consensus on man-made climate change, after all, is
incredibly strong, and the health impacts of burning fossil fuels are
undeniable. Air pollution is the single largest environmental health risk
facing the world today, as well as a leading cause of cancer, and children are
particularly vulnerable to its effects. Last June, when the EPA introduced its plan to
limit pollution from coal-fired power plants, it emphasized the fact that wed feel the
benefit, first, in our lungs. Indeed, the American Lung Association predicted the
rules could prevent up to 4,000 premature deaths and 100,000 asthma attacks in
their first year alone. The agency took the same tack this past November when it
unveiled its proposal to crack down on smog-causing ozone, arguing that the
current standard of 75 parts per billion is too weak to protect public health.
Even if mitigating climate change was only a side effect of creating cleaner air, such
policies would still be worth pursuing. But climate change is a public health threat in
its own right, creating the conditions for new and intensified risks, many of which
were already experiencing.
In an investigative piece for Mother Jones, David Ferry attempts to garner outrage
for the plight of prisoners in Californias Central Valley, thousands of whom have
fallen ill from valley fever. The potentially fatal disease, contracted from
fungal spores and kicked up by dust, is raging through the Southwest,
fueled in part by a climate thats becoming increasingly hot and dry. If

valley fever was endemic to the hills above Rodeo Drive or the boulevards of Palo
Alto and struck down Caucasians with the ferocity it lays out African Americans,
Ferry charges, it would be the kind of public health emergency that sends
Anderson Cooper into the field with a face mask. And as climate change
worsens, experts say, so too will the epidemic.
Then, there are the mosquitoes, which are growing in number and range
where climate change leads to warmer and wetter conditions. As the
insects continue to creep north, as scientists predict, the U.S. could see
dengue fever epidemics of the sort that created a public health emergency
in Central America last summer. (Globally, a recent study found, billions
more will become newly vulnerable to the disease.) Meanwhile, other
diseases Americans have barely if ever even seen before like the
painful, mosquito-born chikungunya are posing a brand-new threat:
Researchers at Yale University have warned of the potential for a historic
epidemic on U.S. shores. And Chagas disease, which is already gaining a
foothold in Texas, is similarly poised to explode. Referring to the need for
expensive, long-term treatment and the diseases disproportionate effect
on the poor, tropical disease experts at Baylor College of Medicine in
Houston dubbed it the new AIDS of the Americas.
The list of climate-change threats goes on: air pollution from increased wildfires, the
rising threat of waterborne illness, the health risks and hazards posed by natural
disasters and the mental health impacts that can arise in their aftermath. A recent
survey of members of the American Thoracic Society physicians who specialize in
respiratory and critical care revealed that the majority are already seeing
symptoms in their patients that they believe are linked to climate change. That
includes an increase in chronic respiratory disease from air pollution, but also
increases in symptoms of allergies and in injuries attributed to extreme weather.
And thats to say nothing of the threats of extreme heat, itself already the
leading cause of weather-related deaths in the U.S. The National Climate
Assessment warns that heat waves are projected to increase in frequency,
intensity and duration, putting urban populations, and the poor in
particular, at risk of death due to heat stroke, as well as cardiovascular,
respiratory and cerebrovascular disease.
Over and over again, its the most vulnerable children and the elderly,
the sick and the immunocompromised, the poor and certain minority
groups who get thrown under the bus when leaders ignore the risks in
favor of scoring political points.
If the U.S. could get a handle on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, a recent study
in the journal Climatic Change concluded, we could save between $6 billion and $14
billion in healthcare costs in 2020 and between $10 billion and $24 billion if we
really cracked down. Climate policy, in other words, is public health policy, and
ignoring the science behind the former is a direct attack on the latter. This isnt a
new idea, but its one thats failed, thus far, to trigger our primal desire to protect
the commons from the anti-science antics of the few.
Why arent we angrier? Climate change is a more abstract issue, to be
sure, as well as one that lacks a clear villain its easier to castigate a small
group of people for threatening the larger public than to acknowledge the

culpability we all share in climate change, not to mention the sacrifices well all
have to make to address it head-on. The anti-vaxxer community may be an
intractable force, but theyve got nothing compared to the money and
power wielded by special interests insisting that climate change is a giant
hoax and who, in so doing, lead others to believe that the science isnt nearly as
settled as it in fact is.
But where anti-vaxxers and climate deniers differ, the same logic that
caused us to lash out at politicians pandering to the former should carry
over to the latter. Science denial, in all its forms, has consequences. And
its about time we stopped tolerating it.

Economy
Vaccinations greatly help third world economies.
Berkley, 12 Seth Berkley, Seth Berkley is the founder and former president
and CEO of IAVI. A medical doctor specializing in infectious disease epidemiology,
Seth currently serves as president and CEO of the GAVI Alliance. Before launching
IAVI in 1996, Berkley was an officer of the Health Sciences Division at the
Rockefeller Foundation. Prior to that, he worked for the Center for Infectious
Diseases of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Massachusetts
Department of Public Health, and for the Carter Center, where he was assigned as
an epidemiologist at the Ministry of Health in Uganda. Seth played a key role in
Ugandas first national HIV sero-survey and helped develop its National AIDS Control
programs. He has been featured on the cover of Newsweek, recognized by TIME
magazine as one of the "100 Most Influential People in the World" and by Wired
Magazine as among "The Wired 25"a salute to dreamers, inventors, mavericks
and leaders. He has consulted or worked in more than 25 countries in Asia, Africa
and Latin America. Berkley received his undergraduate and medical degrees from
Brown University, and trained in internal medicine at Harvard University, 12-7-2012
("How vaccines save lives, grow economies," CNN, 12-7-2012, Available Online at
http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/07/opinion/vaccine-gavi-seth-berkley/, Accessed 7-212015)
We all know that vaccines save lives by protecting people against disease.
What is less well-known is that vaccines also are an engine for economic
growth -- far beyond their health benefits.
I am reminded of this in Tanzania this week, where my organization, the GAVI
Alliance, is hosting a conference for its partners. GAVI's mission is to save children's
lives and protect people's health by increasing access to immunization in
developing countries.
We don't do this alone. We have many partners, including prominent companies
that work closely with GAVI. They recognize that in addition to the humanitarian
need, countries such as Tanzania are emerging markets that can fulfill their
economic ambitions only if they also can ensure good health for their
citizens.
The private sector is a critical part of the equation. Our corporate partners know
they can do well by doing good.
Consider Tanzania. It has an ambitious five-year development plan that
aims to transform the country into a middle-income economy by 2025. The
plan includes critical funding to ensure a healthy population by
strengthening the health system, which will significantly improve child
and maternal mortality rates.
Tanzania already has begun this process by working closely with GAVI and
its partners to significantly increase its routine vaccine coverage rates to
above 90% today from 79% in 2001, the year before GAVI began its work
there, according to data from the World Health Organization and UNICEF.
At the same time, Tanzania's GDP growth has been astounding, rising to
$23.7 billion last year from $10.2 billion in 2001, according to the World
Bank.

Is there a connection? Further study is needed in the case of Tanzania. But we

know for a fact that vaccines -- in addition to saving lives and improving
health -- are the cornerstone of a vibrant economy, fuel growth and serve
as a magnet for foreign investment. Indeed, research has shown vaccines
to be among the most cost-effective investments in global development.
This has been borne out of several independent studies that look beyond
the health impacts toward areas such as cognitive development,
educational attainment, labor productivity and financial attainment.
In other words, healthier children -- spurred by immunization -- attend
school more often, learn more while they are there and remain in school
longer. As adults, they therefore are more productive, earn more money,
save and invest more, and live longer. Healthier children also spread less
disease through the adult population, further increasing productivity.
These academic papers, including one recently published that focuses on how to
measure the economic benefits of the HPV vaccine, are getting noticed in African
countries -- not only by health ministers, but also by finance ministers and other
officials.
For instance, I attended a landmark meeting in Tunis in July organized by the African
Development Bank, where its President Donald Kaberuka brought together a variety
of ministers and experts to discuss how to allocate budgets and make healthcare a
national priority.
I was in Tunis because of the wide recognition that immunization can be the highoctane fuel that leads to increased trade, capital infrastructure projects and
technological improvement.
This brings me back to the private sector and the benefits many companies now see
in playing a role in supporting global health, including immunization services. One
benefit, of course, is humanitarian. The GAVI Alliance -- with help from partners such
as UNICEF, WHO, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Bank and donors -has helped countries immunize 370 million people, saving more than 5.5 million
lives since 2000.
GAVI now is in the midst of helping immunize another quarter billion people, which
could save an additional 4 million lives by 2015. The private sector is involved,
providing core business skills to tackle key obstacles to immunization in the
developing world.
For example, GAVI is working with a leading telecommunications company to
explore the use of its mobile technology with hopes of improving vaccine stock
management in implementing countries and alerting parents when children are due
for vaccines.
GAVI is constantly looking for partners to lend their business savvy to help us
accomplish our mission. An increasing number of them are responding,
compassionate in their outlook while aware of the underlying economic value of
vaccines.
They understand that this is the highest return on investment they could ever make.

Vaccination saves a ton of money

Naprawa, 15 Amanda Z. Naprawa, Amanda Z. Naprawa is an attorney and
will receive her Masters of Public Health from the University of California, Berkeley,

in spring 2015. She is also the mother of 2 young children. She is passionate about
immunization as a mother, lawyer, and public health advocate, 6-9-2015 ("Vaccines
Don't Just Save LivesThey Save Money," @berkeleywellness, 6-9-2015, Available
Online at http://www.berkeleywellness.com/healthy-community/contagiousdisease/health-care-policy/article/vaccines-save-more-lives, Accessed 7-21-2015)
Vaccines are considered to be among the greatest human inventions of all
time. They are directly responsible for the increased life expectancy we
enjoy by preventing childhood death from diseases such as measles,
pertussis, and diphtheria. The CDC estimates that, among children born in
the last 20 years, vaccinations will prevent more than 21 million
hospitalizations and 732,000 deaths.
But beyond saving lives, this reduction in disease means a reduction in
the cost of treating these illnesses. Which translates into vaccines being
not only lifesaving, but money-saving as well.
How exactly do vaccines save money? When a child gets sick with a vaccinepreventable illness (as with any very serious illness), she will need to seek
treatment and this of course is going to cost something. Now if the child gets a
serious complication, she may need to be hospitalized. So there are hospital bills,
medications, and doctor visits before, during, and after the illness. Tragically, if
there are long-term complications, such as deafness from mumps or brain damage
from measles, there will be costs associated with this as well (adaptive devices,
special education requirements, etc).
One study in the journal Pediatrics examined the total costs associated with a
variety of vaccine-preventable diseasesand thus the savings incurred by
vaccinatingand the results were impressive. For example, the cost per
hospitalization for an infection with haemophilus influenza type B (Hib), a very
serious bacterial illness,with resulting meningitis can cost over $43,000.
An estimated 19,000 cases of Hib infection will be prevented over the lifetimes of
children born in 2009 because of routine immunization, saving an estimated $1.8
billion in disease-treating costs. When you add in all the other diseases that we
routinely vaccinate against in the United States, the estimated savings are
staggering.
In economic terms, those are considered "direct costs"that is, the money that
goes directly to the care of an ill child. But it's important to remember that when a
child gets sick and hospitalized, there are costs beyond simply treating the illness.
Her parents may have to take time off of work, incurring lost income. There may be
insurance copayments to meet. If the child has long-term consequences from the
illness, there may also be lost opportunities for income. And should this child have
inadvertently exposed others, there might be a cascading public health crisis, with
daycares shut and public health agencies mandating quarantines.
Public savings
The public can incur significant expenses from nonvaccination as well,
often referred to as "societal" or "indirect" costs. For example, it can cost public
health departments close to $10,000 per day to contain an outbreak such
as the recent measles outbreakincluding identifying all possible infections,
making contact with people who may have been exposed and following them for the
entire incubation period, issuing orders to exclude unvaccinated children from

school, working with other local health departments and hospitals on containment
and treatment protocols, and providing additional vaccinations. The average
outbreak control period is 18 days; thats $180,000 to control a disease
that could have been prevented through vaccination.
These costs, both direct and indirect, are so impressive that its
considered financially irresponsible to limit access to routine
immunizations based on family income or insurance status. In 1994, the U.S.
government began a program called Vaccines for Children, which provides vaccines
to children who would otherwise not be able to afford them. This program is
estimated not only to have saved countless children from illness and
death, but also to have saved nearly $259 billion in direct costs and

$1.38 trillion

in total societal costs.Think about that: $1.38 trillion

saved by vaccines. Honestly, that number makes the 238,857 miles between here
and the moon sound like a short stroll, doesnt it?
The money-saving effect of vaccines is not limited to the United States.
Worldwide, the three vaccine-preventable diseases that lead to the greatest
mortality in children age 5 and under are pneumococcal disease, rotavirus, and Hib
infection. Those children who survive these diseases may suffer long-term
complications such as blindness, deafness, or mental retardation. It is estimated
that if, over the next decade, we were to begin widespread vaccination against just
three diseases (Hib, pneumococcal, and rotavirus) in the world's 73 poorest
countries, it would save an estimated $63 billion in treatment and lost
productivity costs.
So there you have it. We know vaccines save lives. But it turns out they also save
money, directly and indirectly. Yet one more reason to make sure you and your
loved ones are fully vaccinated.

Vaccination saves over a trillion dollars.

Whitney et al. 14 Cynthia G. Whitney, MD1, Fangjun Zhou, PhD2, James
Singleton, PhD2, Anne Schuchat, MD1, 1 National Center for Immunization and
Respiratory Diseases, CDC; 2Immunization Services Division, National Center for
Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, CDC, 4-25-2014 ("Benefits from
Immunization During the Vaccines for Children Program Era United States, 1994
2013," No Publication, 4-25-2014, Available Online at
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6316a4.htm, Accessed 7-222015)
The Vaccines for Children (VFC) program was created by the Omnibus Budget
Reconciliation Act of 1993 (1) and first implemented in 1994. VFC was designed to
ensure that eligible children do not contract vaccine-preventable diseases because
of inability to pay for vaccine and was created in response to a measles resurgence
in the United States that resulted in approximately 55,000 cases reported during
19891991 (2). The resurgence was caused largely by widespread failure to
vaccinate uninsured children at the recommended age of 1215 months. To
summarize the impact of the U.S. immunization program on the health of all
children (both VFC-eligible and not VFC-eligible) who were born during the 20 years
since VFC began, CDC used information on immunization coverage from the
National Immunization Survey (NIS) and a previously published cost-

benefit model to estimate illnesses, hospitalizations, and premature

deaths prevented and costs saved by routine childhood vaccination during
19942013. Coverage for many childhood vaccine series was near or above
90% for much of the period. Modeling estimated that, among children born
during 1994 2013, vaccination will prevent an estimated 322 million
illnesses, 21 million hospitalizations, and 732,000 deaths over the course
of their lifetimes, at a net savings of $295 billion in direct costs and $1.38
trillion in total societal costs. With support from the VFC program,
immunization has been a highly effective tool for improving the health of
U.S. children.
Data from the 1980s suggested that measles outbreaks were linked to an ongoing
reservoir of virus among high-density, low-income, inner-city populations (2).
Although most children in these settings had a health-care provider, providers
missed opportunities to give measles vaccine when children were in their offices,
sometimes referring low-income children to another clinic where vaccines were
available at no cost (3). Approximately 50% of children aged <19 years are eligible
to receive vaccines through VFC (Immunization Services Division, National Center
for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, CDC, unpublished data, 2014).*
Children can receive VFC-provided vaccine if they are Medicaid-eligible, uninsured,
American Indian/Alaska Native, or, for underinsured children (i.e., whose health
insurance does not fully cover immunizations), when they are receiving services at
a federally qualified health center or rural health clinic (1). By providing vaccine for
eligible children, at no charge, to public and private health-care providers who are
enrolled in VFC, the program helped reinforce the "medical home." Inclusion of
specific vaccines in VFC is determined by recommendations of the Advisory
Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP).
To assess improvements in coverage during the VFC era, data were obtained from
the United States Immunization Survey (USIS) for the period 19671985, the
National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) for 19911993, and NIS for 19942012
(3,4). Children included in USIS and NHIS were aged 2435 months and those in NIS
were aged 1935 months. USIS and NHIS data were from parental recollection of
vaccines received, and NIS data were obtained through provider report.
The cost-benefit model for U.S. children born during 19942013 employed methods
previously used for children born in 2009 (5). A decision analysis birth cohort model
was constructed using data on immunization coverage; vaccine efficacies from
published literature; historical data on incidence of illnesses, hospitalizations, and
deaths from vaccine-preventable diseases before immunization was introduced; and
recent vaccination period data (through 2013, if available; otherwise 2012 data
were used for 2013) on these same disease outcomes. Vaccines included all those
universally recommended for children aged 6 years except influenza vaccine,
which has been modeled separately (6), and hepatitis A vaccine. Infants in
hypothetical birth cohorts from the period 19942013 were followed from birth
through death. Benefits of immunization included savings in direct and indirect
costs that accrued from averting illnesses, hospitalizations, and deaths among the
20 birth cohorts. Program costs included vaccine, administration, vaccine adverse
events, and parent travel and work time lost. Costs were adjusted to 2013 dollars,
and future costs related to disease were discounted at 3% annually. The cost

analysis was conducted from both health-care (direct) and societal (direct and
indirect) perspectives, and net present value (net savings) was calculated.
When the VFC program began in 1994, vaccines targeting nine diseases were
provided: diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, polio, Haemophilus influenzae type b
disease, hepatitis B, measles, mumps, and rubella (Figure). During 19952013, five
vaccines were added for children aged 6 years: varicella (1996), hepatitis A (1996
1999 for high-risk areas, 2006 for all states), pneumococcal disease (7-valent in
2000, 13-valent in 2010), influenza (ages 623 months in 2004 and ages 659
months in 2006), and rotavirus vaccine (2006). Since 1996, coverage with 1 dose of
a measles-containing vaccine has exceeded Healthy People targets of 90%, up
from <70% before the 19891991 outbreak (Figure). For other vaccines licensed
before VFC, coverage also was higher in the VFC era, as measured by NIS, than in
the pre-VFC era, as measured by USIS. In general, coverage for new vaccines
introduced during the VFC era increased rapidly.
Among 78.6 million children born during 19942013, routine childhood
immunization was estimated to prevent 322 million illnesses (averaging 4.1
illnesses per child) and 21 million hospitalizations (0.27 per child) over the course of
their lifetimes and avert 732,000 premature deaths from vaccine-preventable
illnesses (Table). Illnesses prevented ranged from 3,000 for tetanus to >70 million
for measles. The highest estimated cumulative numbers of hospitalizations and
deaths that will be prevented were 8.9 million hospitalizations for measles and
507,000 deaths for diphtheria. The routine childhood vaccines introduced during the
VFC era (excluding influenza and hepatitis A) together will prevent about 1.4 million
hospitalizations and 56,300 deaths.
Vaccination will potentially avert $402 billion in direct costs and $1.5
trillion in societal costs because of illnesses prevented in these birth cohorts.
After accounting for $107 billion and $121 billion in direct and societal
costs of routine childhood immunization, respectively, the net present
values (net savings) of routine childhood immunization from the payers' and
societal perspectives were $295 billion and $1.38 trillion, respectively.

Ableism
Reject the ableist discourse surrounding vaccination debates
whether vaccines cause autism or not is irrelevant treating
autism as a negative condition comes from an incredibly
neurotypical position of privilege.
Thriault 15 Anne Thriault, Toronto-based writer and activist, 2015 (What
vaxxers and anti-vaxxers are missing: Autism isnt the worst thing to happen to a
child, Quartz, February 11, Available Online at http://qz.com/340623/what-vaxxersand-anti-vaxxers-are-missing-autism-isnt-the-worst-thing-to-happen-to-a-child/,
accessed 7/20/15, KM)
Here are some typical arguments put forward by parents who choose not to
vaccinate their otherwise healthy child (by healthy I mean theyre not asking for an exemption because the
child is immunocompromised or otherwise couldnt medically tolerate vaccinations). For this example, I will pull
quotes directly from a recent New York Times Article, Vaccine Critics Turn Defensive Over Measles: Its the worst

Do you want to
wake up one morning and the light is gone from her eyes with autism or
something? and Kelly McMenimen, a Lagunitas parent, said she meditated on it a lot before deciding not
shot, [Missy Foster, mother to an 18 month old daughter] said, with tears in her eyes.

to vaccinate her son Tobias, 8, against even deadly or deforming diseases. She said she did not want so many
toxins entering the slender body of a bright-eyed boy who loves math and geography. Youll notice a common
theme in these defensesthe brightness of or light in their childrens eyes. This is a direct reference to Jenny
McCarthys narrative of the light leaving her sons eyes after he was vaccinated. Its used by parents who dont
want to say the word autism but want to imply that theyre scared their kid will become autistic (or something
similar). Heres what McCarthy said to Oprah in 2007: Right before his MMR shot, I said to the doctor, I have a very
bad feeling about this shot. This is the autism shot, isnt it? And he said, No, that is ridiculous. It is a mothers
desperate attempt to blame something, and he swore at me, and then the nurse gave [Evan] the shot, she says.
And I remember going, Oh, God, I hope hes right. And soon thereafterboomthe souls gone from his eyes.

Now consider the standard response from vaccine advocates to stuff like thisits
always, without fail, Vaccines dont cause autism. Because they dont, right?
They absolutely, scientifically do not cause autism. Thats a solid fact. But
heres what everyone gets wrong: regardless of whether or not vaccines
cause autism, our entire conversation surrounding them is completely
ableist. When those in the anti-vaccination movement treat autism as a
calamity far worse than a debilitating disease or death, that is ableism.
What we also need to recognize is that every time we respond to fearmongering about vaccines and autism with the words, dont worry,
vaccines dont cause autism, that is also ableist. Because instead of
pointing out that, hey, autism and neurodiversity are far from the worst
things that could happen to a parent, vaccines dont cause autism falls into the same
narrative as vaccines cause autismboth suggest that autism is this boogeyman that
lives under our kids beds that could strike at any time. Even though telling people
that vaccines dont cause autism is factual, the way in which its said only validates peoples negative view of
autism. Says Allison Garber, an autism activist whose most recently claim to fame is being blocked by Jenny
McCarthy on Twitter, The language from both sides of the vaccine camps is definitively ableist. Whats even more
jarring is that neither side seems to ever want to invite someone who is, you know, actually autistic to the party. I
guess thats because it would be awkward if they were actually in the room when we were all talking about how

Instead of
reassuring parents that vaccines dont cause autism (which, again: factually true),
why dont we start refuting anti-vaccination advocates with the fact that
somebodys neurological makeup is a tragedy to be feared and avoided at all costs.

autism isnt a catastrophe . Why not start sending them links to blogs and articles written by people
who actually have autism. Why not say something like, its been proven that theres no link between vaccines and
autism, but I think it would be great for you to re-evaluate why you think so negatively of autism. And for the love
of Pete can we please stop talking about how autistic people have no light in their eyes or no soul or whatever. First
of all, youre confusing vampirism with autism. Second of all, how can you talk about real, living people like that?
Would you tell Temple Grandin to her face that the light (whatever that even means) is missing from her eyes? If
you went to a book reading by John Robison, would you greet him afterwards with the words So, whats it like not
Autistic people
arent gone. Their brains function differently than neurotypical brains,
which often leads to them becoming overwhelmed by outside stimuli in a
way that other people might not. So, in a sense, theyre more present than many of us are
having a soul? Do you still have a reflection? Can you eat garlic? Do you sleep in a coffin?

theyre bombarded by sights, sounds and smells that neurotypical people can ignore or dismiss. They are very
much here, trying way harder than most to process what here is. So get out of here with your misinformed
ideas about autistic people having no light in their eyes or no soul. Get out of here and maybe go meet an actual
autistic person. At the end of the day,

words matter and how we talk about issues

matters. And when those of us who believe its important for children to be vaccinated keep pulling out but
vaccines dont cause autism without following it up with some kind of explanation that also autism isnt a tragedy,

of course the end goal is to

vaccinate every child eligible for vaccination, but we dont need to throw
autistic people under the bus to accomplish that goal. The debate about
vaccination should be autism-inclusive, and that means re-evaluating the
way we talk about autism and vaccines. Because while its great to raise a happy healthy kid,
we need to consider the impact our words might have. Because

you can do that without turning them into an anti-autism bigot.

The anti-vax propaganda tactic of characterizing autism as

worse than death is dehumanizing and false voting neg
against anti-vaccination is the first step to deconstructing
ableism in society.
Raygender 15 Raygender, social justice blogger that focuses on police
brutality, racism, LGBTQ issues, and mental health issues, 2015 (Ableism,
Disability, and The Conversation About Vaccines: An Autistic Perspective,
Raygender, February 6, Available Online at
https://raygender.wordpress.com/2015/02/06/ableism-disability-and-theconversation-about-vaccines-an-autistic-perspective/, accessed 7/21/15, KM)
Theres been a lot of talk about vaccines lately, and how diseases that were once almost eradicated are starting to
come back because unvaccinated children are being exposed, or exposing others, to viruses. Im glad this issue is
getting more attention. Its something we need to talk about! Vaccines have genuinely improved society by
preventing people from contracting some illnesses they could potentially die from. Now that people are avoiding
them, some of those diseases are coming back, and putting peoples lives at risk. I would be even happier if the
mainstream conversation reflected the conversation thats been happening in the autistic community for years.

autistic people have been speaking out about vaccines ever

since the anti-vaccination movement began. From the very beginning, the
anti-vaccination movement has been an autism issue. You cannot talk
about one without the other. Peoples reasoning for avoiding vaccines
stems from the idea that childhood vaccines cause autism, and that
autism must be avoided at all costs. To leave this out is to skip over one of the many ways the
Thats right

anti-vaccination movement is hurting people. The anti-vaccination movement has its origins in the work of Andrew
Wakefield a former medical researcher who published a study in 1998 claiming that the measles vaccine was
responsible for the supposed autism epidemic. No researchers could reproduce Wakefields claims a sure sign
in the scientific community that a theory is false and in 2004, an investigation revealed that Wakefield had

conflicts of interest and had committed misconduct. This included subjecting the children involved in his study to
unnecessary, abusive medical procedures. Sadly, debunking Wakefields study was not enough to stem the tide of

The idea that childhood vaccines caused autism fits

perfectly into peoples ideas about the so-called autism epidemic. Its a fact
the anti-vaccination movement.

that autism diagnoses are on the rise, but its not a fact that this is because of vaccines, or chemicals, or television,
or smart phones, or anything else. In fact, the most likely cause is simply that doctors are getting better at
diagnosing people. Theres nothing sinister behind it, and theres certainly nothing sinister about autism itself

Even if vaccines did

cause autism which, seriously, we have no actual proof that they do why
is that enough motivation to risk destroying herd immunity and creating a
measles epidemic? You can die of measles; you cant die of autism. The answer, of course, is
ableism. People are afraid of disability. And it goes beyond just worrying that if disabled, they
wont be able to work or theyll be excluded from society. People think disability is a fate worse
than death, when really its just another aspect of human diversity. And
this attitude of fear is extremely harmful. Just look at Jenny McCarthy and her organization
something else that autistic people have had a hard time convincing others of.

Generation Rescue, who have led the anti-vaccine movement, at the cost of thousands of lives. Generation Rescues
name refers to rescuing children from autism, or rescuing society from the autism epidemic.

Autism isnt

something anyone needs to be rescued from; it is not holding children hostage, like
another organization, Autism Speaks, has claimed. It is not depriving families of the
normal child they feel they deserve to have, and it is not a danger to
society. In fact, rescuing children from autism is far more dangerous. Therapies used to treat autism, like
Applied Behavior Analysis, use the same principles as gay conversion therapy in other words, the goal is to
make the patient behave in socially acceptable ways, which means suppressing their own, natural ways of behaving
something that is best accomplished by abuse, and can lead to lifelong trauma. Parents have also been known to
give their children bleach enemas, beat them, and train them like dogs, all in an attempt to rescue them from

Now, that this issue is hitting the mainstream, we have a unique

opportunity to talk about autism and abliesm. The anti-vaccination
movement is based on fear of autism. It is based on the idea that autistic
children are soulless that, in the words of one horrific advertisement, you cant die from autism, but
you cant really live with it either. This attitude just creates even more fear. People with a range of
disabilities are affected by the vaccination issue. People with vulnerable immune
autism.

systems are put at risk, with the message that if they cant survive without the aid of medical science, theyre

anyone else with a condition thats

supposedly caused by vaccines, is told that they are soulless monsters,
not even really alive, and that parents are right to do everything in their
power to avoid having a child like them. Even well-intentioned pro-vaccine advocates have
somehow a drain on society. And autistic people, or

fallen into the trap of ableism. Its very easy to ignore the deeper issues all together. The facts say vaccines dont
cause autism. So many people have assured parents that they have nothing to worry about; vaccines wont cause

autism isnt a horrible disease. It isnt

monstrous or tragic. And as long as people think it is, and avoid speaking
out against fear, autistic people will continue to suffer. Just as all disabled
people suffer when people think our lives are tragic, and that we are
burdens. I hope that the mainstream conversation on vaccines has room for these issues. Illnesses like those
their child to come down with a horrible disease. But

we vaccinate against in early childhood are terrible, and can affect anyone. They can kill. This is not preferable to
autism. It is not preferable to the disabilities that might result from illnesses like polio or meningitis. Disabled people

so many lives
are being threatened by the anti-vaccine movement. People are at risk for
dying from preventable diseases, and autistic people are at risk for dying
at the hands of caretakers and parents who see them as a burden. My greatest
are better off alive because all people are better off alive. This should be the focus, because

hope is that we can eliminate these deaths completely if we stand together and remember that autism isnt
anything to be scared of.

Autism is not a tragedy, burden, or crisis challenging

the ableist logic of things like anti-vaccination is key to
breaking down neurotypical constructions of disability that
shape policies and cause violence.
Kurchak 15 Sarah Kurchak, writer and autistic advocate, 2015 (Autistic people
are not tragedies. My life has value and joy, The Guardian, April 30, Available
Online at http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/30/autism-is-not-atragedy-take-it-from-me, accessed 7/21/15, KM)
The existence of autistic people like me is not a tragedy. Yet many autism awareness
narratives insist it is because they prioritize the feelings of neurotypicals (non-autistic people) and dismisses the
rest of us as little more than zombies. And when people buy into this idea, it actively hurts autistic people. When I
was finally diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder six years ago, I wouldnt shut up about it. In part, this was
because I, like many autistics, tend to perseverate about the things that intensely fascinate me and, at that
moment, there was nothing more fascinating to me than discovering that there was an explanation for all of my
sensory sensitivities, social issues, repetitive behaviors and obsessive interests. I also believed in the importance of
autism awareness. But once I started participating in awareness campaigns I found the same overly simplistic and
fear-mongering message over and over again: autism is a crisis. According to the highly influential charity Autism
Speaks (which doesnt have a single autistic person on its board), autistic people are missing we leave our
family members depleted. Mentally. Physically. And especially emotionally. Defining our existences solely as a

No one deserves to be told that

they are nothing but a burden to the people who love them and everyone has the
right to feel like their lives have value. But it also has troubling implications
for public policy. If autism is only presented as an unequivocally terrible
curse that must be cured and eliminated, then charities that are
primarily focused on finding a cure like Autism Speaks will continue to receive
the bulk of ASD-related funding and volunteer hours. Even if a cure is possible or
preferable (both of which are arguable) these wild stabs at hunting down genetic bogeymen in the hopes of
eliminating them in the future do nothing to improve the lives of the autistic people and their
caregivers who are struggling with a scarcity of both resources and
understanding right now. This line of thought also eclipses more nuanced
discussions that might help to make life more manageable for the people who
make up this so-called autism epidemic. If you spend time following hashtags like
tragedy for non-autistic people is hurtful on a personal level.

#ActuallyAutistic and the work of organizations like the Autistic Self Advocacy Network and the Autism Womens

We want to talk about autism

acceptance. We want people to understand that everyone on the
spectrum, verbal or otherwise, has value and we want to work so that
everyone has a voice, be it verbal, written, assisted or otherwise. We want to
Network, a cure is the last things on any of our minds.

talk about which therapies and treatments are actually effective for us and which ones are detrimental to our well-

And we want to know how we can create an environment in which

autistic children are not at constant risk of wildly disproportionate
punishment due to misunderstanding and fear. This is a particular concern
with autistic children of color who face both ableism and racism , like 12-year-old
Kayleb Moon-Robinson, who was charged with a felony after kicking a garbage can. Genuine awareness
of autistic people, of our lives, our needs and our value, could greatly
improve the lives of people both on and off the spectrum. Autistic people and our
being.

allies just need the rest of the world to stop spreading autism awareness long enough to actually listen and gain
some.

The anti-vaccination movement is wrong its not vaccines

versus autism, but vaccines versus ableism discussion
now is key to reverse the ableist fallacy of anti-vaccination.
Kurchak 15 Sarah Kurchak, writer and autistic advocate, 2015 (Im Autistic,
And Believe Me, Its A Lot Better Than Measles, The Archipelago, February 6,
Available Online at https://medium.com/the-archipelago/im-autistic-and-believe-meits-a-lot-better-than-measles-78cb039f4bea, accessed 7/21/15, KM)
Vaccines dont cause autism. But even if they did, is being like me really a fate worse than death? The autistic brain
is not particularly good at understanding irony, and yet most people Ive met on the autism spectrum have, over
time, developed a pretty strong grasp of the concept. Many of us have even managed to teach ourselves how to
wield it. Ive begun to suspect that this is due to our constant hands-on experience. Having an autism spectrum
disorder in an ableist world means that youre constantly exposed to cruel irony. Most frequently, this comes in the
form of neurotypical (i.e. non-autistic) people who tell you, incorrectly, that you cant or dont feel empathy like
them, and then stubbornly refuse to care about your feelings when they claim that youre lost, that youre a burden,
and that your life is a constant source of misery for you and everyone who loves you. Theres also my current

parents who are willing to put the lives of countless human beings at
risk because theyre so afraid that the mercury fairy will gives their kids a tragic case of
autism if they vaccinate. Gotta protect the kids from not being able to feel empathywho cares
whether other children live or die? No matter what other lofty ideas of toxins and vaccine-related injury
anti-vaxxers try to float around in their defense, thats really what all of
this is about: were facing a massive public health crisis because a
disturbing number of people believe that autism is worse than illness or
death. My neurology is the boogeyman behind a completely preventable plague in the making. The antivaccination movement is a particularly bitter issue for me because it doesnt
just dehumanize me as an autistic person; it also sets off two of my biggest triggers. Like many people on
favorite:

the spectrum, I dont handle it well when people are 1) wrong, and 2) unfair. Ive always struggled to be patient with
people who are clearly and obstinately wrong. Most of my elementary school report cards contained some variation
of Sarah does not suffer fools gladly and I cant honestly say that Ive made significant improvements in that

people who refuse to vaccinate their children because they

believe that vaccines cause autism are wrong. Andrew Wakefields infamous study that
arena since then. And

linked autism to the MMR vaccine, which first sparked anti-vax panic in 1998, was called into question in 2004 and
fully retracted in 2010. Wakefield, who misrepresented or altered the subjects medical histories over the course of
his research, lost his license that same year. No scientist has been able to reproduce his results. Major studies by
The Journal of Pediatrics and the Institute of Medicine have failed to find any link between vaccines and autism. This

vaccines are safeor at least as safe as

there is nothing even remotely rational about
the anti-vaccination movement. Its a dangerous and infuriating melange: poorly articulated fears
should be more than enough to persuade a rational person that
any other simple medical procedurebut

of toxins, a failure to understand the difference between correlation and causation, misleading articles on truther

I cant even
begin to wrap my head around anti-vaxxers reasoning. How can you find
fault with every single bit of evidence that we have, from every single
source, about the safety of vaccines? How can you continuously misread
every single fact about their contents? How can you disregard the efficacy of vaccines in the
websites, and conspiracy theories that would make Fox Mulder and The Lone Gunmen blush.

fight against deadly and debilitating illnesses across the globe? If you cant disregard it, how can you not care? If
there really is a connection between autism and vaccineswhich theres notand Big Pharma and/or The Man
really are causing autism through vaccinations, what on earth do you think the end game of this conspiracy is?

What upsets me more than the wrongness, though, is the dangerously

unfair behavior that results from it. When someone believes asinine things
about vaccines, it hurts humanity on an intellectual level. When they put
those beliefs into action and refuse to vaccinate their children, it puts all
of us at risk of serious illness and death. The current measles outbreak, which has now
infected over 100 people in 14 states and is currently spreading into Canada, is a glaring example of what can

happen when people put their (ignorant) personal whims against the well-being of their community. Through no
fault of their own, unvaccinated children, immunocompromised people, babies too young to receive the vaccination
and the occasional vaccinated person (no vaccine is 100 per cent because science is not magic) across the

a
group of mostly-privileged parents have decided that reviving a
group of life-threatening diseases and potentially inflicting them on their loved ones and
neighbors is infinitely preferable to having an autistic child. I take the decision not to
continent are suffering from an infection that was essentially eliminated from the U.S. in 2000. All because
sizable

vaccinate personally. Ive tried to have empathy for the other side, Ive tried to tell myself that its none of my

Someone who refuses to vaccinate their children

because theyre afraid of autism has made the decision that people like
me are the worst possible thing that can happen to their family , and theyre
business, but I cant and it is.

putting everyone at risk because of it. Ive been told by some anti-vaxxers that they dont mean my brand of
autism; they mean non-verbal autism, or as they are so fond of calling it, profound autism. Im not about to take
any solace in the idea that theyre willing to make exceptions for autistic people who can perform as neurotypical,
or at least pose as little annoyance to neurotypicals as possible. That just means that I will cease to be of any value
to these people if I am no longer able to pass as one of them, and that they see no value and no humanity in
anyone who communicates or behaves differently from them. Tell me again who has the empathy problem? The
best that I can muster in the anti-vaxxers defense is that theyre not 100 per cent responsible for the anti-autism
sentiment fueling their movement. The idea that autism is an unparalleled tragedy didnt happen in a vacuum. It
came from the very people who claim to support us. Take Autism Speaks, for example. The worlds most prominent
autism-related charity has a pretty cuddly exterior. Celebrities toss money at it. People wear blue things to help it
raise awareness. It claims to help autistic people and their families. Why would anyone question its intentions? It
would be absolutely absurd to run a charity for people you hate, after all. Right? But Autism Speaks isnt really a
charity for autistic people. Its a charity for neurotypical people who have been afflicted with the horror of having
autistic people in their lives. Since its inception in 2005, Autism Speaks has perpetuated the idea that people with
autism are a burden and somehow lost, and theyve refused to listen to any actual autistic people who disagree
with their party line. Its supported a number of dangerous and dubious treatments, like electroshock therapy and
chelation, a lead poisoning treatment that has many risks and no proven benefit as an ASD cure, all in the name of
making autistic people appear more neurotypical. Its official statements consistently refuse to acknowledge any
humanity in autistic people, or recognize that their families experience anything other than abject misery. In its
2013 Call For Action, founder Suzanne Wright, who has an autistic grandson, wrote that families with an autistic
member are not living. They are existing. Breathingyes. Eatingyes. Sleepingmaybe. Workingmost
definitely24/7. This is autism. Life is lived moment-to-moment. In anticipation of the childs next move. In despair.
In fear of the future. This is autism. And honestly, thats one of the less offensive things shes said about us. This is
far from true for the countless families who have spoken out against Autism Speaks. Its certainly not the case for
mine. We are all, last I checked, living. We work together to bridge our differences in communication, sensitivities,
attributes, and detriments to go about our lives in a way that expands far beyond the moment-to-moment. Were no
more or less imperfect or tragic than the average family. We dont even have measles. I have good days where my
strange and intense interests give me a unique perspective in my writing and my focus helps me get it down on
paper. I have bad days where I cant ride public transit without having a panic attack and I have to leave the room
when my husband chews food because I find the sound of it unbearable and overwhelming. I have stimmed to my
hearts content and I have hit myself. Throughout all but the worst of itdepression is a common comorbidity of
autism, likely because living in the neurotypical world is often tryingIve been pretty sure that I am living, and
better for it. Throughout all of it, my loved ones have preferred my autism to my possible illness or death, or the
deaths of others. Id say I was grateful, but really, this should be a given. Autism Speaks is currently urging parents
to vaccinate their children, though it was funding and supporting vaccine-related research as recently as 2009. But
it continues to spout the kind of anti-autism rhetoric that made people who arent so great with critical thinking so
scared in the first place. Im not sure what the cure is here. Anti-vaxxers are very dedicated to being wrong. As The
New York Times Brendan Nyhan discovered last year, theyre more resistant to irrefutable facts than vaccinated

renewed interest in antivaxxer rhetoric, spurred by the current measles outbreak, will inspire a
more thorough discussion about autism like Anne Theriaults and Jen Zorattis excellent work
kids are to preventable diseases. But Im at least a little bit hopeful that

on the topic (full disclosureIm quoted in the latter piece)and that this discussion will do some good. For
starters, we could talk about people on the spectrum like were better than measles, like were human, or like were

the fear of autism threatened everybodys lives and well-being via the antivaccination movement, it threatened the lives and well-being of autistic people
through isolation, improper treatment, and even outright murder. Even if we
there at all. Long before

cant eliminate these deathsand I hope to Temple Grandin that we canthe way that people respond to the
current public health clusterfuck still offers us a chance to save lives.

We must actively reject ableism and confront abled privilege

ableism shapes our assumptions and understanding of the
world, dehumanizing those lacking privilege.
Phillips 15 Kiah Phillips, contributor to Respectfully Connected, a blog that
focuses on ableism and emphasizes neurodiversity, 2015 (So, What is Ableism?,
Respectfully Connected, February 27, Available Online at
http://respectfullyconnected.blogspot.com/2015/02/so-what-is-ableism.html,
accessed 7/21/15, KM)
Ableism

is a form of discrimination or prejudice against individuals with physical, mental, or developmental

is characterized by the belief that these individuals need to be

fixed or cannot function as full members of society (Castaeda & Peters, 2000). As a
result of these assumptions, individuals with disabilities are commonly
viewed as being abnormal rather than as members of a distinct minority
community (Olkin & Pledger, 2003; Reid & Knight, 2006). Because disability status has
been viewed as a defect rather than a dimension of difference, disability
has not been widely recognized as a multicultural concern by the general
public as well as by counselor educators and practitioners. Laura Smith, Pamela F. Foley, and Michael P. Chaney,
disabilities that

Addressing Classism, Ableism, and Heterosexism in Counselor Education, Journal of Counseling & Development,
Summer 2008, Volume 86, pp 303-309. When our boy was first diagnosed as autistic, I had never heard the term
"Ableism". I have to be honest, I probably still didn't hear it until well beyond the first anniversary of that day. I had
no idea of just how much this concept, this idea, this reality was going to coincide with our boy's life then - and to a
lesser but still significant extent, our lives as parents too, for very different reasons of course. However, once my
thinking shifted from the pathology perspective; common among most professional "experts" and vast numbers of

the thinking of many

neurotypical people revels in the inherent discrimination, prejudice and
privilege of ableism. These same people would be aghast at comments containing racism, sexism or
parents, to the neurodiversity model, I began to recognise the degree to which

homophobia as but three examples, yet when it comes to ableism, somehow there is a collective societal blind spot

Could it really be that people simply do not

know what ableism is? - at least in the sense that they don't see it as obviously as they would other
forms of discrimination, or are people aware and as a society, we willfully turn our
heads in ignorance the way we used to in relation to discrimination in other areas such as race or
- or so it would seem. So what is going on here?

sexuality? In other words, is this an issue of recognition or willful ignorance? For me personally, I have to own it; I
was painfully ignorant of the issues facing people with disabilities but I cannot ignore the fact that I also carried a
privilege that I was not even aware of:

I am neurotypical

and in a society where (currently) the majority is

which means I have

advantages conferred upon me that I do not have to think about, hence - to
some extent - my lack of awareness. That makes my life easier - and even possible, in some instances.
These are things that a person with a different neurological make-up, such
as autism, cannot take for granted. Every institution of society is based around a neurology that
neurotypical and all infrastructure and societal norms fit around that majority,

differs from theirs and this places them at an immediate disadvantage. You might think, well, autistic people should
just try to fit in, or that society has a right to expect all people to conform to the socially acceptable ways of
behaving, socially acceptable values or ideas of what a successful, "functioning" person looks like. If you do, either
by accidental default or by willful ignorance, you are exhibiting ableism. Just as I used to, before my beautiful boy
opened my eyes and tore open my mind and my heart. When was the last time someone insisted on using
functioning labels in a conversation with you about a person who is autistic? How often have you heard "experts"
claim that autistics must be able to pass as indistinguishable from their neurotypical peers? How often have you
heard it said that autistics must not engage in self-stimulatory behaviour because it makes them stand out? What
about repetitive actions or "hyper-focus on a specific interest"? I know that you'll have heard people tell you that

this prevents the autistic person from functioning. I know that I have. But break it down......please; Functioning as
what? Because as far as I understand it, an autistic whom is engaging in those self-regulatory actions, is functioning
well as an autistic person, which is who they are, after all is said and done. But wait - the assumption is that the
goal is to function as closely to neurotypical as possible, right? To fit into the society that is established around the
normative values of it's majority? You see I have an issue with that right there; because that is ableism. There are
many variations on this theme. I read commentary constantly where parents concern themselves that their autistic
child may never marry and have children; that they may not achieve financial success (whatever that means) or
have a career. Aside from the fact that many autistic people do, despite all obstacles, meet those measures of

there is a
generally held assumption that an autistic person only meets with deemed
success when they are able to pass as a neurotypical person or adopt the
values of a society whose majority does not speak for them ? The
undercurrent of every conversation that involves autistic people needing
to be fixed, to fit in, to be cured, to be avoided in the first place, to
engage in normative behaviour, to not perseverate on specific interests, to
change who they are, is underpinned by the ableist assumption that to be
neurotypical is better, that neurological variance is "less than". Less than what?
success, there are many people with a neurotypical neurology who do not. I wonder why

Let me try that another way, if you will: how would it sit with you if I said that women were less valuable than men?
That Asian people were better than Europeans? That homosexual people should be forced to marry into
heterosexual couplings? You see the nonsense - not to mention the outrage that these views would cause? Yet I can
be told that my beautiful child should be everything that he is not and cannot ever be (without destroying himself in

scant few of my neurotypical brethren are here to pick up the

mantle of outrage and demand change. I ask myself: Is it because they are
willfully looking the other way? But you. I am hoping that you, you will stand with me.
the process) - and

Ableist Discourse bad

Discourse matters the language of anti-vaccination
proponents can and does hurt people with disability.
Marcotte 15 Dawn Marcotte, creator and CEO of www.ASD-DR.com, an online
searchable database to help autistic teens and young adults identify colleges that
provide support services specifically for autistic students, 2015 (Accidental
Ableism, Autism Daily Newscast, February 23, Available Online at
http://www.autismdailynewscast.com/accidental-ableism/23452/dawnmarcotte/,
accessed 7/21/15, KM)
It was not something I concerned myself with too much as I consider myself to be a pretty good person who doesnt
discriminate against anyone. I certainly never thought it would apply to my daughter. Then I read an article talking

the vaccine-causes-autism issue. This issue is in the forefront of news

again, due to the recent outbreak of measles across the country. The article pointed out
that most, if not all, of these articles were ableist because they talk about
whether vaccines cause autism or not, as if autism is a disease. This concept
about

never even occurred to me until I read this article. I can think of several times where I have left comments or
written articles that used much the same language. For this I am sorry and can only hope that I have not offended

the use of language and social

media can be so powerful. I dont think most people really consider how
the words they use can be interpreted in different ways , but in todays web
connected world, words are even more important. You dont know who will read what you have
anyone. More importantly the article got me thinking about how

written and more than likely you wont ever have a chance to explain a word that someone else may find offensive.
It is also important to remember that once you post something, it is out there forever. So
all those families, friends and parents who post about the trials and triumphs of their children, it is important to stop
and wonder how those same children will feel when they read it themselves. It doesnt matter how old they are now
eventually they will see what is written. Will it make them happy it was posted or embarrassed and angry? It
doesnt matter if the post is well intentioned or not. Posting on Facebook asking the public to send birthday
greetings may seem like a nice thing to do, but I often wonder if those parents have asked that child permission
before they post. Does the child really want the world to know they dont have any friends? Do they really want
greetings from people who send them only because they feel sorry for them and will never hear from again? Do
they even care about getting birthday greetings? or is the parent assuming a feeling the child doesnt actually
have? It seems that as parents we tend to make a lot of assumptions, myself included, about how our children feel
or think without asking them. Our priorities are not always theirs and it is time to step back and take an honest
look at how we behave online. As a freelance writer I tend to share a lot of stories about our experience with autism
and raising an autistic daughter. I never really asked her if it was okay to share these stories and just assumed she
wouldnt care because I keep her anonymous. However I am making a commitment that from now on I will check
with her first, before sharing anything online that refers to her or her experience. I am going to work hard to

remember that everyone deserves respect.

If I post something that I would find

ableism doesnt
just apply to other people, but to everyone is an important step in autism
awareness. I only hope that other parents will take note and start to think more about what
they post.
embarrassing if it were about me then I just shouldnt post it. I think understanding that

Aff Answers

Privacy Link

No Spillover
No spillover pro-privacy legislative action is dependent
without crisis.
Kerr 4 Orin S. Kerr, Associate Professor of Law, George Washington University
Law School, B.S.E. 1993, Princeton University; M.S. 1994, Stanford University; J.D.
1997, Harvard Law School, 2004 (Technology, Privacy, And The Courts: A Reply To
Colb And Swire, Michigan Law Review (102 Mich. L. Rev. 933), Available Online to
Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-Nexis)
Contrary to Swire's suggestion, I think that statutory protections also tend to
reach a middle ground. If there is a general trend toward lesser statutory
protection over time, it is not clear to me. Swire focuses on the fact that Congress
did not act on an Internet privacy bill that the House Judiciary Committee approved
in 2000, but then passed the USA Patriot Act in 2001. To Swire, this suggests that
the legislative process is broken: Congress passed (bad) pro-government
legislation but not (good) pro-privacy legislation, leading to less privacy.
n19 I find it difficult to draw a lesson from this example. It is worth noting, however,
that in Swire's own example the legislative process rejected FBI and DOJ
proposals and instead attempted to push the law in a strongly pro-privacy
direction. Then, when Congress passed some of the proposals a few years
later, it did so only under remarkable circumstances and even then only
subject to a sunset provision. n20 If Swire's example is supposed to show a
trend toward [*938] lessening privacy protection over time, then it is at best a
mixed signal. More broadly, the privacy/security pendulum swings both ways ;
while there may be times of crisis when the pendulum swings in favor of
law enforcement, there are other periods when the pendulum swings in
favor of privacy. I would pose this question to Swire: if there is a systematic
tendency toward greater surveillance, in what year was privacy most protected by
the legislative process? In 1960, when federal law did not forbid wiretapping? In
1970, before FISA was enacted? In 1980, before Congress passed ECPA?

Turn: Surveillance Backlash

Turn: Surveillance causes public backlash which increases
privacy.
Moncrieff, Venkatesh, and West 9 Simon Moncrieff, research fellow in
the Department of Computing at Curtin University of Technology, Svetha Venkatesh,
professor in the Department of Computing at Curtin University of Technology, and
Geoff West, professor in the Department of Spatial Sciences at Curtin University of
Technology and at the Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information, 2009
(Dynamic privacy in public surveillance Computer, 42(9)
http://dro.deakin.edu.au/eserv/DU:30044204/venkatesh-dynamicprivacy-2009.pdf)
As surveillance becomes increasingly intrusive, public opposition to these
technologies will grow. Lawmakers will be pressured to force
organizations that develop and deploy surveillance systems to incorporate
additional privacy protections. However, because legislation tends to lag behind
technology, such measures will inevitably inhibit preexisting systems functionality.
Designing surveillance systems with privacy in mind, rather than as an
afterthought, will accelerate the adoption of privacy policies in
surveillance and reduce the impact of enforced privacy measures.6 For
example, Google did not foresee privacy issues with Street View and thus did
not incorporate privacy protections into the initial release of this feature in 2007. In
response to public outcry, the company instituted several measures
including the blurring of facial images and vehicle number plates and reducing
image resolution to limit discernible information about pedestrians and vehicles.
However, there is still considerable debate as to whether these measures go far
enough; other identifying data such as location, clothes, and stature/gait are
evident in Street View and may violate local privacy laws.

Link Non-Unique
Link non-unique people are concerned about their privacy
now
Trujillo 15 Mario Trujillo, Professor in the Engineering department at University
of Wisconsin Madison, PhD from the University of Illinois, 2015 (Poll: Large
concern over data collection through smart devices, TheHill, January 15th, Available
online at http://thehill.com/policy/technology/228472-poll-large-concern-over-datacollection-through-smart-devices, Accessed 7-20-15)
Nearly eight in 10 people are concerned about their personal information
being collected through smartphones and other devices, according to a
poll released Monday.
The survey commissioned by TRUSTe, a consumer privacy company, also found
that 69 percent of people believe they should own the data that is
collected through their smart devices.
Twenty percent, on the other hand, believe the benefits of the products
outweigh privacy concerns.
Eighty-seven percent expressed concern about their personal information
being used in ways they are not aware of. Eighty-six percent said they are
concerned about identity theft or their device being infected by malware.
Seventy-eight percent expressed concern about their geographical
location being unknowingly revealed.

Link non-unique NFA, Snowden, activists, journalists, and

increased internet use
Bartlett 15 Jamie Bartlett, Director of the Centre for Analysis of Social Media,
2015 ("How we all became obsessed with online privacy," Content Loop, June 16th,
Available Online at http://www.content-loop.com/how-we-all-became-obsessed-withonline-privacy/, Accessed 7-20-2015)
It began with radical 'cypherpunks' who wanted to destroy the state. Now it's a
hot-button issue for every Facebook user. How did the notion of internet
privacy gain so much traction, and where will it take us next?
Cast your mind back to just 5 or ten years ago. Did you ever think about
data, your digital footprint, the NSA, or what happened to your social media posts?
Doubtful, even though you might have been doing much the same online. The
question of internet privacy wasnt something many of us gave much
thought to.
In the last couple of weeks, a handful of events have demonstrated how
much that has all changed. Earlier this month the US Congress passed the
Freedom Act (which, in American tradition, stands awkwardly for Uniting and
Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ending Eavesdropping, Dragnetcollection and Online Monitoring). It placed limits of mass data collected on US
citizens by the National Security Agency, something many privacy
advocates thought impossible. Last week, David Anderson published an
independent review of the UK governments investigatory powers its very good by
the way and made over 100 recommendations about how to make surveillance
simpler, clearer, and with more oversight. Perhaps even more surprising, although

barely reported, Facebook decided to allow users to send encrypted

messages on their messenger service.
This is all driven by growing pubic concern of course. According to the 2014
Deloitte Data Nation survey, 24 per cent of people in the UK do not trust any type of
organisation with their personal information. Recent research by my think-tank
Demos found half of young people said they were either extremely or very
concerned by online privacy more than environmental issues, immigration, tax
avoidance, or the EU. There are more people are using tools and techniques to
cover their digital tracks, especially since Edward Snowden blew his whistle.
Internet privacy has become a major political and social preoccupation. But
very few people know much about the origins of the idea. The hope that modern,
digital cryptographic software could change society goes back to the 1990s
Californian Cypherpunks (a mash up of the word cypher with cyber-punk). All were
radical libertarians and early adopters of computer technology, sharing an interest
in the effects it would have on politics and society. But while many West Coast
liberals at the time were toasting the dawn of a new and liberating electronic age,
these Cypherpunks spotted that networked computing might just as likely herald a
golden age of state spying and control. They all believed that the great political
issue of the day was whether governments of the world would use the internet to
strangle individual freedom and privacy through digital surveillance, or whether
autonomous individuals would undermine and even destroy the state through the
subversive tools digital computing also promised.
At their first meeting, Tim May, as close to a leader as the group ever had, set out
his vision to the excited group of rebellious, ponytailed twenty-and thirtysomethings. If the government cant monitor you, he argued, it cant control you.
Fortunately, said May, thanks to modern computing, individual liberty can be
assured by something more reliable than man-made laws: the unflinching rules of
math and physics, existing on software that couldnt be deleted. Politics has never
given anyone lasting freedom, and it never will, he wrote in 1993. But computer
systems could. What was needed, May argued, was new software that could help
ordinary people evade government surveillance.
The group quickly grew to include hundreds of subscribers who were soon posting
on a dedicated email list every day: exchanging ideas, discussing developments,
proposing and testing cyphers. This remarkable email list predicted, developed or
invented almost every technique now employed by computer users to avoid
government surveillance. Tim May proposed, among other things, secure cryptocurrencies, a tool enabling people to browse the web anonymously, an unregulated
marketplacewhich he called BlackNetwhere anything could be bought or sold
without being tracked. Twenty years before the notorious Silk Road.
Ultimately they also hoped their endeavors would eventually bring about an
economic, political and social revolution. In 1994 May published Cyphernomicon, his
manifesto of the cypher-punk world view, on the mailing list. In it, he explained that
many of us are explicitly anti-democratic and hope to use encryption to undermine
the so-called democratic governments of the world. On the whole, the cypherpunks
were rugged libertarians who believed that far too many decisions that affected the
liberty of the individual were determined by a popular vote of democratic

governments. They saw internet privacy as the way out. (Julian Assange was joined
the mailing list in late 1993 or early 1994).
Of course, not everyone who cared about internet privacy shared the cypherpunks
view that internet privacy was a route to pulling down governments. Each time
governments especially the US government - overreached by trying to spy on
citizens too much, new movements and organisations would join the fray. And
through the course of the 1990s and 2000s, internet privacy slowly started to inch
into people's peripheral vision as something worth worrying about.
But it's really only the last 5 years or so that it's moved from periphery to
centre. Partly it's Snowden. Partly it's the relentless work of activists and
journalists who share concerns. But mostly it's the amount of time we now
spend online, and a dawning realisation that all that data we produce
must be going somewhere. These days we share inordinate amounts of digital
information about ourselves: our bank details, our love life, our holiday snaps; our
whole lives are online. And its no longer just governments snaffling it all up
it is private companies, too. Think for a moment: do you ever wonder why it is
that we get all these amazing internet services Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Gmail
for free? I rarely think about it, either, because Im used to it all just being there,
and always working. But it costs an awful lot of money to run these platforms: the
server space, the highly skilled engineers, the legal teams. We are paying all right,
just not in cash. We pay with our data and our privacy.

Public opinion is moving in favor of privacy Congressional

security rhetoric is the only opposition
Margolis 13 Jason Margolis, reporter on economics and politics, M.A. in
Journalism from the University of California at Berkeley, citing Joseph Nye, former
Dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, PhD in
political science from Harvard University, 2013 (After Snowden, Global Debate Over
Privacy vs. National Security Gaining Momentum, PRI, July 17th, Available Online at
http://www.pri.org/stories/2013-07-17/after-snowden-global-debate-over-privacy-vsnational-security-gaining-momentum, Accessed 7-22-15)
Those figures mirror the mood in the US: There's a clear conflict between the
need to protect our national security and our civil liberties.
There's a pendulum that constantly moves between security and privacy
needs, said Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye, author of the new book,
"Presidential Leadership and the Creation of the American Era."
"I mean we saw it in the Civil War when Lincoln suspended Habeas Corpus,
or in World War II when Franklin Roosevelt basically interned American
citizens of Japanese origin," he said. "And then later the country swung
back to saying this was excessive."
Nye said nearly 12 years after the September 11th attacks the pendulum
is beginning to swing back toward more calls for civil liberties. He adds
Congress and the Administration need to find an acceptable middle
ground.
That's difficult, because many members of Congress say the surveillance
programs are working successfully and have thwarted terrorist attacks.

The link is non-unique people are concerned with their

privacy prefer our studies
Doherty 13 Carroll Doherty, director of political research at Pew, develops the
research agenda, masters in international studies and bachelor in political science,
regularly provides public opinion for BBC and NPR, 2013, (Balancing Act: National
Securityand Civil Liberties in Post-9/11 Era Pew Research Center, June 7th,
Available Online at http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/06/07/balancing-actnational-security-and-civil-liberties-in-post-911-era/, Accessed 07-14-15
The revelations that Obama administration secretly collected phone
records and accessed the internet activity of millions of Americans have
raised new questions about the publics willingness to sacrifice civil
liberties in the interests of national security. Since 9/11, Americans generally
have valued protection from terrorism over civil liberties, yet they also have
expressed concerns over government overreach and intrusions on their personal
privacy. Security First. Since shortly after 9/11, Pew Research has asked
whether peoples greater concern is that anti-terror policies will go too far
in restricting civil liberties, or that they wont go far enough in adequately
protecting the country. The balance of opinion has consistently favored
protection. Most recently, in 2010, 47% said they were more concerned that
government policies have not gone far enough to adequately protect the country,
while 32% said they were more concerned that they have gone too far in
restricting the average persons civil liberties. But Fewer See Need to Sacrifice
Civil Liberties. Yet fewer Americans think it will be necessary to sacrifice
civil liberties to combat terrorism than did so shortly after the 9/11 attacks. In
a poll conducted in 2011, shortly before the 10th anniversary of 9/11, 40% said
that in order to curb terrorism in this country it will be necessary for the
average person to give up some civil liberties, while 54% said it would
not. A decade earlier, in the aftermath of 9/11 and before the passage of the
Patriot Act, opinion was nearly the reverse (55% necessary, 35% not necessary).

The link is non-unique Snowden leaks made people

concerned about their privacy
Pierce June 5th Charles Pierce, working journalist since 1976, author of four
books, 2015, (There Would Be No USA Freedom Act Without Edward Snowden,
Esquire, June 5th, Available Online at http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/27775/30564-there-would-be-no-usa-freedom-act-without-edward-snowden, Accessed
07-14-15
The passage of the USA Freedom Act paves the way for telecom companies
to assume responsibility of the controversial phone records collection
program, while also bringing to a close a short lapse in the broad NSA and
FBI domestic spying authorities. Those powers expired with key provisions of
the Patriot Act at 12.01 am on Monday amid a showdown between defense
hawks and civil liberties advocates. The American Civil Liberties Union
praised the passage of the USA Freedom Act as "a milestone" but pointed
out that there were many more "intrusive and overbroad" surveillance powers

yet untouched. The ambivalence about Edward Snowden, International Man Of

Luggage, all clears away at one simple point -- without him, none of this
happens. Without what he did, nobody looks closely enough at the NSA
and its surveillance programs even to think of reforming them even in the
mildest way, which is pretty much what this is. Without what he did, the
conversation not only doesn't change, it doesn't even occur. Oregon senator
Ron Wyden, a Democrat on the intelligence committee who has railed against
NSA surveillance for years, praised the breakthrough but said the work is far
from complete. "This is the only beginning. There is a lot more to do," Wyden
told reporters after the vote. "We're going to have very vigorous debate about
the flawed idea of the FBI director to require companies to build weaknesses into
their products. We're going to try to close the backdoor search loophole this is
part of the Fisa Act and is going to be increasingly important, because
Americans are going to have their emails swept up increasingly as global
communications systems begin to merge." Without what Edward Snowden
did, even these first tremors of a rollback from the politics of fear that
have encrusted the country in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001
would not have been felt in Washington this week.

Vaccine DA Culture of Rights

Uniqueness

Non-unique Culture of privacy/rights now

Increasing numbers of young people think parental choice
outweighs mandatory vaccination age is the most influential
factor it comparatively outweighs other variables like class,
race, gender, and political affiliations.
Anderson 15 Monica Anderson, Research Analyst at Pew Research Center,
holds a Masters degree in Communication, Culture, and Technology from
Georgetown University and a BA in Political Science and Feminist Studies from
Southwestern University, 2015 (Young adults more likely to say vaccinating kids
should be a parental choice, Pew Research Center, February 2, Available Online at
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/02/02/young-adults-more-likely-to-sayvaccinating-kids-should-be-a-parental-choice/, accessed 7/14/15, KM)
As the number of measles cases linked to the California outbreak climbs to over 100, health officials are urging
parents to properly immunize their children, citing unvaccinated individuals as a main contributor to the diseases
spread. Some have linked the outbreak to the anti-vaccination movement a group whose members claim
vaccinations are unsafe and ineffective. A Pew Research Center report released last week shows that a majority of

survey data reveals

significant age differences in views about vaccines. In 2009, by contrast, opinions about
Americans say children should be required to get vaccinated. Further analysis of the

vaccines were roughly the same across age groups. Also, some modest partisan divisions have emerged since
2009, when Pew Research last polled on the issue. Overall, 68% of U.S. adults say childhood vaccinations should be

Among all age groups, young adults

are more likely to say vaccinating children should be a parental choice.
Some 41% of 18- to 29-year-olds say parents should be able to decide
whether or not their child gets vaccinated; only 20% of adults 65 or older echo this opinion.
required, while 30% say parents should be able to decide.

Measles Cases fall with vaccine Older Americans are strong supporters of requiring childhood vaccinations 79%

One possible reason that older

groups might be more supportive of mandatory vaccinations is that many
among them remember when diseases like measles were common. Prior to the
say they hold that view, compared with 59% of those under 30.

first licensed measles vaccine in 1963, hundreds of thousands of measles cases were reported annually in the U.S.
In 1958 alone, there were more than 750,000 cases. A decade later, in 1968, that number fell to about 22,000,

Today, measles
cases are extremely rare, but the CDC reported a spike in 2014, with more than 600 measles cases,
according to an analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

the first such jump in more than a decade. The CDC attributed the increase to an outbreak among unvaccinated
Ohio Amish communities and cases related to an outbreak in the Philippines. Although some have linked the anti-

Pew Research data show little

difference in peoples views based on income or education. Vaccines Public Opinion
vaccination movement to more-affluent, highly educated parents,

About 30% of adults living in households earning $75,000 or more a year say parents should decide whether or not
their child gets vaccinated. This holds true even among the highest of earners (those in households making

Men
and women share similar views on whether vaccines should be required or not and opinions
on this issue vary little by race. At the same time, slightly more parents of minor children than
those without children believe vaccinating children is a parental choice. There are slight differences
in views about vaccines along political lines. A majority of Democrats (76%), Republicans
$100,000 or more). These opinions are on par with people living in lower- and middle-income households.

(65%) and independents (65%) say that vaccines should be required. But Republicans and independents are
somewhat more inclined than are Democrats to say that parents should be able to decide. In 2009, there was no
difference in views on vaccinations along party lines.

Non-unique No pro-vax influence

Influencing anti-vaccination proponents is impossible a
consensus of studies agree.
Marcotte 14 Amanda Marcotte, American blogger who writes on feminism and
politics, 2014 (According to a New Study, Nothing Can Change an Anti-Vaxxers
Mind, Slate, March 3, Available Online at
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/03/03/effective_messages_in_vaccine_pr
omotion_when_it_comes_to_anti_vaxxers_there.html, accessed 7/22/15, KM)
While some false beliefs, such as astrology, are fairly harmless, parents who believe falsely that vaccination is

researchers, publishing
in Pediatrics, decided to test four different pro-vaccination messages on a group of
parents with children under 18 and with a variety of attitudes about vaccination to
see which one was most persuasive in persuading them to vaccinate. As Chris
Mooney reports for Mother Jones, the results are utterly demoralizing: Nothing made
anti-vaccination parents more amendable to vaccinating their kids. At
best, the messages didn't move the needle one way or another, but it
seems the harder you try to persuade a vaccination denialist to see the
light, the more stubborn they get about not vaccinating their kids. Brendan
dangerous or unnecessary for children present a real public health hazard. That's why

Nyhan of Dartmouth College and his colleagues tested four different messages on parents. Mooney describes them:
The first message, dubbed "Autism correction," was a factual, science-heavy correction of false claims that the MMR
vaccine causes autism, assuring parents that the vaccine is "safe and effective" and citing multiple studies that
disprove claims of an autism link. The second message, dubbed "Disease risks," simply listed the many risks of
contracting the measles, the mumps, or rubella, describing the nasty complications that can come with these
diseases. The third message, dubbed "Disease narrative," told a "true story" about a 10-month-old whose
temperature shot up to a terrifying 106 degrees after he contracted measles from another child in a pediatrician's
waiting room. The fourth message was to show parents pictures of children afflicted with the diseases they could
get without vaccination. Both the pictures and the horrible story about measles increased parental fears about
vaccinations. Researchers don't know why but theorize that the problem might be that invoking fears of sick
children just makes parents more fearful in general of all risks, whether real or imagined. The cooler, more distant
"disease risks" message didn't change parents' minds either way, but what was most startling was what happened
with the message correcting misinformation on autism: As for "Autism correction," it actually worked, among survey
respondents as a whole, to somewhat reduce belief in the falsehood that vaccines cause autism. But at the same
time, the message had an unexpected negative effect, decreasing the percentage of parents saying that they would

learning that they were wrong to believe

that vaccines were dangerous to their kids made vaccine-hostile parents
more, not less likely to reject vaccination. Mooney calls this the "backfire effect," but feel
free to regard it as stubborn, childish defensiveness, if you'd rather. If you produce evidence that
vaccination fears about autism are misplaced, anti-vaccination parents
don't apologize and slink off to get their kids vaccinated. No, according to this study,
they tend to double down. This reaction, where people become more assured of their stupid opinions when
confronted with factual or scientific evidence proving them wrong, has been demonstrated in
similar studies time and time again. (This is why arguing with your Facebook friends who watch
be likely to vaccinate their children. In other words,

Fox News will only bring you migraines.) Mooney suggests that state governments should respond by making it
harder to opt out of vaccinations. That would be helpful, but there's also some preliminary research from the James
Randi Educational Foundation and Women Thinking Inc. that shows that reframing the argument in positive terms
can help. When parents were prompted to think of vaccination as one of the steps you take to protect a child, like
buckling a seat belt, they were more invested in doing it than if they were reminded that vaccine denialists are
spouting misinformation. Hopefully, future research into pro-vaccination messaging, as opposed to just anti-antivaccination messaging, will provide further insight.

The influence of the pro-vaccination movement is irrelevant

studies say theres only a risk that pro-vax messages make it
worse anti-vaccination parents are too suspicious of the
science.
Alter 14 Charlotte Alter, covers women, culture, politics and breaking news for
TIME, 2014 (Nothing, Not Even Hard Facts, Can Make Anti-Vaxxers Change Their
Minds, Times, March 4, Available Online at
http://healthland.time.com/2014/03/04/nothing-not-even-hard-facts-can-make-antivaxxers-change-their-minds/, accessed 7/22/15, KM)
Maybe there should be a vaccine for stubbornness, because it sure seems
tough to cure. A new study shows that when presented with four different
scientifically proven arguments that vaccinations are safe, some antivaccination parents seemed even less inclined to innoculate their kids against
measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) once they saw the evidence. We shouldnt overestimate how effective facts
and evidence are in convincing people to accept a claim and change their behavior, said Brendan Nyhan, who

throwing facts and evidence at them isnt likely

to be the most effective approach. Nyhan and his colleagues surveyed almost 1,800 parents of
authored the study published in Pediatrics, but

young children after seeing one of four vaccination messages similar to those provided by the CDC. The first
messages were focused on conveying the dangers of measles, mumps, and rubella: the Disease Risk message
detailed the medical risk of contracting MMR, the Danger Narrative told the story of a woman whose son
contracted the measles from another child and got a 106-degree fever, and the Disease Images showed
disturbing pictures of infected children. A fourth message, Autism Correction, provided heavy scientific evidence
that disproved the link between vaccinations and autism. All that sounds convincing, but none of it really works. The

researchers found that none of the four messages significantly increased

rates of intended vaccination (they only measured whether parents intended to vaccinate, not
whether they actually did) and some even provoked an anti-vaccination backlash. The
least successful messages were Disease Narrative and Disease Images, which actually increased the
misconception that vaccinations will have negative side effects by 6%, and looking at the photos of the sick kids
increased the subjects perception that vaccines cause autism. Nyhan said that he thought this was because when
people saw children in distress, they became preoccupied with other dangers their child could encounter. Disease

while
Autism Correction proved to some parents that theres no link between
vaccines and autism, it produced a strong backlash in others that just
reinforced their sense that vaccinations are a conspiracy theory. Only 45% of
Risks and Autism Correction had slightly better results, but neither seemed to convince parents. And

the already anti-vaccine parents said they would vaccinate after they saw the Autism Correction message,

parents are suspicious of the

scientists and that the pro-vaccine movement is trying to pull a fast one on them. People think, what are
they trying to convince me?' he explained. The dont worry, dont worry, everything is
safe approach is not often effective, because they think why are they
trying so hard to reassure me that everything is safe?' The fact that none of
these messages were particularly effective is a little disconcerting
considering that vaccinations only work if a majority of the population is
vaccinated. And Nyhan also pointed out that these diseases are more dangerous than ever, because MMR is
so rare that we almost never encounter them. Regardless, it seems that the CDC has a serious PR
problem, since none of their pro-vaccination messages seem to actually
convince people. We need to test the messages we use in public health the way we test other kinds of
compared to 70% of the control group. Nyhan thinks that these

inventions, Nyhan said. There isnt a crisis now, but this is about making sure we dont have one.

Pro-vaccination has zero influence theres too much

skepticism in its benefits and acceptance of the vaccine-autism
link. Our evidence assumes events like the Disneyland
outbreak, or as anti-vaxxers like to say, hype.
Haberman 15 Clyde Haberman, American journalist who was a longtime
columnist and correspondent for The New York Times, 2015 (A Discredited Vaccine
Studys Continuing Impact on Public Health, New York Times, February 1, Available
Online at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/02/us/a-discredited-vaccine-studyscontinuing-impact-on-public-health.html?_r=0, accessed 7/22/15, KM)
In the churning over the refusal of some parents to immunize their children against certain diseases, a venerable Latin phrase may
prove useful: Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. It means, After this, therefore because of this. In plainer language: Event B follows Event
A, so B must be the direct result of A. It is a classic fallacy in logic. An outbreak of measles several weeks ago at Disneyland in
Southern California focused minds and deepened concerns. It was as if the amusement park had become the tragic kingdom.
Dozens of measles cases have spread across California. Arizona and other nearby states reported their own eruptions of this nasty
illness, which officialdom had pronounced essentially eradicated in this country as recently as 2000. But it is back. In 2014, there
were 644 cases in 27 states, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Should the pace set in January continue,
the numbers could go still higher in 2015. While no one is known to have died in the new outbreaks, the lethal possibilities cannot be
shrugged off. If the past is a guide, one or two of every 1,000 infected people will not survive. To explore how matters reached this
pass, Retro Report, a series of video documentaries studying major news stories of the past and their consequences, offers this

a seminal moment in anti-vaccination resistance. This was an

announcement in 1998 by a British doctor who said he had found a
relationship between the M.M.R. vaccine measles, mumps, rubella and the onset of
autism. Typically, the M.M.R. shot is given to infants at about 12 months and again at age 5 or 6. This doctor, Andrew
special episode. It turns on

Wakefield, wrote that his study of 12 children showed that the three vaccines taken together could alter immune systems, causing

his findings were widely

rejected as not to put too fine a point on it bunk. Dozens of epidemiological studies found
no merit to his work, which was based on a tiny sample. The British Medical Journal went so far as to call his research
fraudulent. The British journal Lancet, which originally published Dr.
Wakefields paper, retracted it. The British medical authorities stripped
him of his license. Nonetheless, despite his being held in disgrace, the
vaccine-autism link has continued to be accepted on faith by some. Among the more
intestinal woes that then reach, and damage, the brain. In fairly short order,

prominently outspoken is Jenny McCarthy, a former television host and Playboy Playmate, who has linked her sons autism to his
vaccination: He got the shot, and then he was not O.K. Post hoc, etc. Steadily, as time passed, clusters of resistance to inoculation
bubbled up. While the nationwide rate of vaccination against childhood diseases has stayed at 90 percent or higher, the percentage
in some parts of the country has fallen well below that mark. Often enough, these are places whose residents tend to be well off and
well educated, with parents seeking exemptions from vaccinations for religious or other personal reasons. At the heart of the matter
is a concept known as herd immunity. It means that the overall national rate of vaccination is not the only significant gauge. The
rate in each community must also be kept high to ensure that pretty much everyone will be protected against sudden disease,
including those who have not been immunized. A solid display of herd immunity reduces the likelihood in a given city or town that
an infected person will even brush up against, let alone endanger, someone who could be vulnerable, like a 9-year-old whose
parents rejected inoculations, or a baby too young for the M.M.R. shot. Health professionals say that a vaccination rate of about 95
percent is needed to effectively protect a community. Fall much below that level and trouble can begin. Mass vaccinations have been
described by the C.D.C. as among the 10 great public health achievements of the 20th century, one that had prevented tens of
thousands of deaths in the United States. Yet diseases once presumed to have been kept reasonably in check are bouncing back.
Whooping cough is one example. Measles draws especially close attention because it is highly infectious. Someone who has it can
sneeze in a room, and the virus will linger in the air for two hours. Any unvaccinated person who enters that room risks becoming
infected and, of course, can then spread it further. Disneyland proved a case in point. The measles outbreak there showed that it is
indeed a small world, after all. What motivates vaccine-averse parents? One factor may be the very success of the vaccines. Several
generations of Americans lack their parents and grandparents visceral fear of polio, for example. For those people, you might as
well be protecting against aliens these are things theyve never seen, said Seth Mnookin, who teaches science writing at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is the author of The Panic Virus, a 2011 book on vaccinations and their opponents. Mr.

skepticism about inoculations is one of those

issues that seem to grab people across the political spectrum. It goes
arm in arm with a pervasive mistrust of many national institutions: the
government that says vaccinations are essential, news organizations that
echo the point, pharmaceutical companies that make money on vaccines,
Mnookin, interviewed by Retro Report, said

scientists who have hardly been shown to be error-free. Then, too, Mr. Mnookin said,
scientists dont always do themselves favors in their choice of language. They tend to shun absolutes, and lean more toward
constructions on the order of: There is no vaccine-autism link to the best of our knowledge or as far as we know. Those sorts of

the Disneyland
measles outbreak has failed to deter the more fervent anti-vaccine
skeptics. Hype. That is how the flurry of concern in California and elsewhere was described by Barbara Loe Fisher,
qualifiers leave room for doubters to question how much the lab guys do, in fact, know. Thus far,

president of the National Vaccine Information Center, an organization that takes a dim view of vaccinations. The hype, Ms. Fisher
said in a Jan. 28 post on her groups website, has more to do with covering up vaccine failures and propping up the dissolving myth
of vaccine acquired herd immunity than it does about protecting the public health. Clearly, she remained untroubled that most
health professionals regard her views as belonging somewhere in Fantasyland.

Anti-vaxxers are winning the propaganda fight they are

dominating sites like Twitter and using social media to
collectively harass pro-vaccination individuals.
DiResta and Lotan 15 Renee DiResta, Principal of O'Reilly AlphaTech
Ventures and Gilad Lotan, Chief data scientist at betaworks, 2015 (Anti-Vaxxers Are
Using Twitter to Manipulate a Vaccine Bill, Wired, June 8, Available Online at
http://www.wired.com/2015/06/antivaxxers-influencing-legislation/, accessed
7/22/15, KM)
To take a closer look at how anti-vax Twitter organizes its attacks, specifically against the California legislation, we
analyzed the hashtags used by people in the network. In network graphs like the one above, circular nodes are
Twitter handles; larger nodes indicate accounts with more followers within the network, making their tweets more
likely to be seen and acted upon. Thats called high centrality. The lines between the nodes represent follower
relationships. Different colors represent communities of people who are sharing a similar message, and the distance
between regions is based on common tiesthe closer a colored group is to another, the more shared connections
its members have, and the more likely information is to spread amongst the groups. Much like any other group with

anti-vaxxers have leveraged Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube for

quite some time. In the early days, the majority of their activism focused on propagating the myth of the
a message,

autism-vaccination connection. In August of 2014, anti-vax activity began to coalesce into one primary hashtag:
#cdcwhistleblower, a reference to an anti-vaxxer conspiracy theory that claims the CDC is concealing information

Within two days,

autism-vaccine proponents had looped in celebrity sympathizers such as
Donald Trump and Rob Schneider to amplify their message. Andrew Wakefield,
that proves a link between the MMR vaccine and autism in African American children.

author of the original fraudulent study linking MMR and autism, got involved. CDC scientists responded, but the idea
of the conspiracyand the hashtagcontinued to grow in popularity. There were 250,000 #cdcwhistleblower
tweets between August 18 and December 1 of 2014. A whopping 63,555 of these came from 10 prominent anti-vax
accounts. In terms of massive events and national conversations, 250,000 tweets is rather small (there were 19.1

anti-vax leaders that this

Twitter hashtag had attracted a loyal following among true believers. And so,
million tweets sent in a 12 hour period about the Oscars). But it became apparent to

in December 2014, hashtag organizers began to publish nightly Trends and Tips (TaTips) instruction videos on
YouTube, containing instructions on what to tweet to advance the cause, and to improve the SEO of vaccine
questioning websites. There are over 150 of these videos nowa testament to how much the anti-vax movement
prioritizes Twitter. Like any good brand, that messaging has evolved to tie to current eventsincluding legislation to
increase vaccination rates. As the California personal exemption bill progressed, tweets with the #cdcwhistleblower
hashtag started to shift to include #sb277, the number of the bill. When we dig into the activity in the #sb277
hashtag over time, trends and ties emerge. If you look at the first network graph, several distinct clusters emerge
based on the hashtags and topics tweeted by each account. In other words, we didnt search for the group labels
deliberately; they revealed themselves. Pink is tweeters focused on anti-vax content; orange is the autism
community. These groups tweet about many of the same topics, but dont share the exact same material or use the
same hashtags. Blue are social conservatives, many of whom use popular Tea Party hashtags. The long strands
between the blue groups and the anti-vaxxer group indicates minimal overlap among accounts following each
other; the networks are not tightly connected. But as you look at this second network graph, you can see how
antivax political strategy has shifted. A new group emerges in the space between Antivax Twitter and
Conservative Twitterwe call it vaccine choice Twitter. The tweeters are the same individuals who
have long been active in the autism-vaccine #cdcwhistleblower network. And originally, much of the content shared
in #sb277 focused on the same anti-vax pseudoscience underlying #cdcwhistleblower. However, as bad science

anti-vaxxers updated their marketing:

They are now pro-SAFE vaccine parental rights advocates. Instructions
to the group now focus on hammering home traditionally conservative
parental choice and health freedom messaging rather than tweeting about autism
and conspiracies repeatedly lost in legislative votes,

and toxins. Twitter activity around #sb277 is part of a multipronged strategy that takes place alongside phone,

The net
effect is that legislators and staffers feel besieged on all fronts. In one
unfortunate video, a movement leader encouraged supporters to use
Twitter to harass and stalk a lobbyist, who has since filed police reports. In a very recent
email, and fax campaigns, coordinated by well-funded groups including the Canary Party and the NVIC.

creation, that same leader excoriates her Twitter army for diluting the power of the #cdcwhistleblower movement
by creating their own hashtags rather than using the ones theyve been assigned. She also requests that the entire
network tweet at Assembly representatives to inform them that their political careers will be over if they vote in
favor of SB277. Much like Food Babe leverages her #foodbabearmy to flood corporations with demands for change,

the goal of anti-vax twitter is to dominate the conversation and make it

look as if all parents are vehemently opposed to the legislation. The other
finding from observing anti-vax network graphs is that despite the vast majority vaccinatingnational vaccination
rates remain above 90 percentthere is no offsetting pro-vaccine Twitter machine; most parents simply vaccinate
and move on with their lives. People dont organize in groups around everyday life-saving measures; there is no pro-

The recent emergence, lack of central

coordination, and weak connections seen among pro-vaccine Twitter users ,
who often use the hashtag #vaccineswork, means that the pro-vax message (in green) is not
amplified to the same degree. Tweetiatrician doctors, lawyers, and pro-vaccine parents often do
seatbelt activist community on Twitter.

attempt to join the conversation around the antivax hashtags. Unfortunately, many of the most active accounts
experience the same attention received by the legislators: They become the target of harassment that includes
phone calls to their places of employment, tweets posting identifying information or photos of their children, or

Pro-vaccine activists and legislators alike often

encounter paranoia when they attempt to engage the anti-vax community.
warnings that they are being watched.

They face accusations of being shills paid by Big Pharma to sway the narrative and keep vaccine choice activists
from spreading The Truth. Like many fringe communities, while the group is extremely well-organized and
passionate they are largely tweeting into an echo chamber. Twitter users who dont look for these hashtags would
likely not know that they exist. Besides occasional celebrity amplification, very little percolates out to a mainstream
audience or trends at a meaningful level. And even theoretically-sympathetic affinity groups that they occasionally

the
broader public health implications of propagating these memes and
articles make anti-vax activities more than a bizarre online curiosity. Most of
the material that the #cdcwhistleblower accounts tweet are designed to erode confidence in
vaccination. The goal is to make new parents question everything, says anti-vax leader Dana Gorman in one
of her instructional videos. Public health officials are concerned. It is important to remember
reach out to, such as anti-GMO, conservative, and autism groups, are not amplifying their hashtags. However,

that today, the vast majority of people follow the recommended vaccine schedulethey take the advice of their
doctors, supported by professional medical bodies and the WHO, says Gary Finnegan, editor of Vaccines Today.

it is essential that when people go online for information they are

left with the clear impression that vaccines are safe and effective. If thats
However,

going to change, the people fighting misinformation need to understand how it gets spread in the first place.

Vaccine DA Link Answers

Link turn big data

Big data link turns their unfounded vaccination claims by
using datasets, big data allows for powerful visual
representations of the impact of immunization.
Munro 14 Dan Munro, write about the intersection of healthcare innovation and
policy, Quora Top Writer from 2013 to 2015, 2014 (Big Data Crushes AntiVaccination Movement, Forbes, January 23, Available Online at
http://www.forbes.com/sites/danmunro/2014/01/23/big-data-crushes-antivaccination-movement/, accessed 7/21/15, KM)
For years its been relatively easy to ignite medical controversy with emotional (but often anecdotal) evidence. TV is
a popular format for doing just that. Its quick, colorful and dramatic (and increasingly in high-def and big-screen).
Add a well known celebrity (or two) and the effects can be powerful, long term and hard to refute. Much of that
power, however, is changing and will continue to change with large datasets that are freely available online or

the science of Big Data as a new discipline, its often the datasets
that were referencing and the visualization of those datasets can be equally
powerful and dramatic. As a single example, I wrote about the release of one such dataset on hospital
soon will be. When we talk about

pricing released last year by the Government (here). On Monday, Aaron Carroll (over at the Incidental Economist

chart that was based on a dataset recently published by

the Council On Foreign Relations. The chart shows vaccine preventable
outbreaks around the world from 2006 to present day. The original chart is online here
and is interactive by year, outbreak type, location and number of people. The
data covers outbreaks for Measles, Mumps, Rubella, Polio, other and is
here) highlighted another

also available as a downloadable CSV file (for use with most spreadsheet applications here). The CSV data also

The
graphic and the data it represents is a compelling argument against those
who think that the vaccinations themselves are dangerous and should be
avoided. The Mayo Clinic has a great Q&A section which flatly states: Vaccines do not cause autism. Despite
includes source citation, country, longitude/latitude, number of cases and fatalities by outbreak type.

much controversy on the topic, researchers havent found a connection between autism and childhood vaccines. In
fact, the original study that ignited the debate years ago has been retracted. Mayo Clinic Childhood Vaccines:
Tough questions, straight answers (here)

Alt causes
Too many alt causes to solve immunization, especially
internationally anti-American sentiment, religious
differences, logistical issues, cost.
Welsh 15 Teresa Welsh, foreign affairs reporter at U.S. News & World Report,
2015 (Anti-Vaccine Movements Not Unique to the U.S., US News, February 18,
Available Online at http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/02/18/anti-vaccinemovements-not-just-a-us-problem, accessed 7/22/15, KM)

With widespread access to medical care and immunizations, the U.S. typically doesn't see massive outbreaks of

American anti-vaxxers parents who refuse to have their

children vaccinated and seek exemptions from immunization requirements aren't alone in their misgivings:
Skepticism abounds in many other countries about the safety and
effectiveness of disease-fighting injections. There is opposition to vaccine
I think in every country around the world, and the nature of the opposition
varies from place to place, says Dr. Alan Hinman, a senior public health scientist with The Task Force
for Global Health. Vaccine hesitancy, according to a World Health Organization working group created to
preventable diseases like the measles. But

study the phenomenon, is a delay in acceptance or refusal of vaccines despite availability of vaccine services." The
group studied the issue for more than two years and found that it is complex and context-specific, varying across

can be due to religious beliefs, it can be through personal

beliefs or it can just be through misinformation on the need and importance of vaccination, says
time, place and vaccines. It

Hayatee Hasan, a technical officer in the WHO's Department of Immunization, Vaccines and Biologicals. In the U.S.,
where a recent measles outbreak has renewed calls for parents to vaccinate their children, some parents are still
hesitant to do so because of a 1998 study linking the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella to autism, even
though that study has long since been debunked. Similarly, misconceptions about the potentially adverse effects of
vaccinations also impact the rates at which certain communities abroad vaccinate their children. Researchers often

in northern Nigeria about a decade ago, when political and religious

leaders instructed parents not to immunize their children against polio . The
cite an episode

leaders said they believed the vaccines could be contaminated with an antifertility agent meant to sterilize the
population, as well as with HIV, and immunizations stopped. Polio cases spread, and the vaccines were shown not to
have been tainted. The

leaders actually admitted that they didnt really believe

the vaccine was contaminated, but they were opposed to the polio
eradication effort because they viewed it as a Western-led activity , Hinman
says. In India, suspicion of the West also has sparked aversion to
vaccinations. Lois Privor-Dumm, director of policy, advocacy and communications at the Johns Hopkins
Bloomberg School of Public Health's International Vaccine Access Center, says her team works with Indian

some
vaccines have been widely accepted in India for years while other, newer vaccines have been
resisted because they aren't manufactured by Indian suppliers and Indians
think they are too expensive. Distrust of efforts to battle disease also isn't unique to immunization
physicians to provide them with data so they can make informed decisions about immunizations. She says

programs. In West Africa the heart of the recent Ebola epidemic some have considered Ebola a government
conspiracy or not a real malady, and vulnerable residents have resisted amending burial practices to avoid
spreading the disease. Health workers trying to increase awareness about the dangers of Ebola have even been
attacked and killed. The WHO working group found that efforts tailored to specific countries are most effective in

In Bulgaria, an analysis of the Roma population a nomadic

ethnic group also known as Gypsies found the main reason the community resisted
vaccination wasnt a lack of knowledge about vaccines or a lack of confidence in their effectiveness; rather, it
was due to a lack of immunization programs that were welcoming to Roma.
addressing vaccine hesitancy around the world.

For that community, the quality of the patients encounter with a health
worker was the most important factor. "These diagnostic findings were used to tailor and
target programs designed to address the main cause of Roma vaccine hesitancy," the working group explained.

Religious beliefs also have been a barrier to vaccination efforts around the
world, with some Muslim communities in the U.K. objecting to porcine
elements in a nasal flu vaccine. The porcine gelatin is used to stabilize the
vaccine, but Islam does not permit the consumption of pork. Officials have also sought to
allay concerns among Jews in the U.K. about the vaccine. Last year in Kenya, a
group of Catholic bishops vocally opposed a WHO-led tetanus vaccination campaign because they said the
immunization was laced with a birth-control hormone that could eventually lead to sterilization. The bishops were
suspicious of the campaign, which targeted women of reproductive age, and said they were convinced it was "a
disguised population control program. They also said the Catholic Church had not been given adequate
stakeholder engagement. "Theres

the belief that vaccines may be some type of

plot against their religion" to control the population, Privor-Dumm says. All 50 U.S.
states have immunization requirements for public school students, but vaccine mandates vary around the world. In
Canada, only a small number of provinces require vaccinations for students, while a study of Iceland, Norway and
27 European Union countries published in 2012 found that 15 countries had no vaccination requirements. Vaccine

Many lowincome countries also lack an advisory body to make vaccine

recommendations, so governments often take the WHO's advice for what vaccines to recommend to their
opposition in England dates back to the 1800s, when people objected to smallpox vaccinations.

populations. Dr. Kathy Neuzil, program leader for vaccine access and delivery at PATH, an international nonprofit

many developing countries also lack a program the

U.S. has to provide compensation for those who suffer a vaccine-related
injury. Neuzil notes that adverse effects such as sudden illness from vaccinations do occur, so the medical
that focuses on global health, says

community must be careful to document such cases to show that they are very rare. But proximity doesn't
necessarily prove cause: A child could have a seizure for the first time two hours after being vaccinated leading
parents to believe the vaccination caused the problem but that may not be the case, Neuzil says. Some of these
adverse events or safety concerns are going to occur by chance, but its very difficult as a mother to not believe
that a vaccine may have caused something thats temporally related, Neuzil says. In developed countries like the
U.S., Hasan says the WHO leaves it to national health authorities to address vaccine hesitancy, because they are
better able to identify the cause behind it. Is it because people dont understand the need for immunization? Is it
because people are questioning does vaccine cause autism, even though billions of children around the world have
been vaccinated with the measles vaccine since the 1960s? Hasan asks. Measles was declared eliminated from the
U.S. in 2000. In comparison, Hinman says there are more than 100,000 deaths from the disease around the world
each year, mostly in India and sub-Saharan Africa, where children rarely receive vaccinations for it. That means
that todays parents of young children [in the U.S.] have never seen measles. It also means that many younger
physicians have also not seen measles, and so its difficult for them to maintain what we consider to be the proper
respect for a highly contagious and potentially fatal disease, Hinman says. Heidi Larson, an anthropologist who
leads The Vaccine Confidence Project at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, says the back-tonature movement fueling oppositions to vaccines in the U.S. is also present in Japan and elsewhere. Some also
refuse vaccinations because they object to government intervention, she says. But in some developed countries,
Hasan says, children are not vaccinated simply because their parents dont have time to take them to the doctor.
Some children receive a first round of vaccinations, but dont get booster shots and therefore dont develop full
immunity. And in poorer countries where parents must travel long distances to clinics or take time off work, time
constraints and transportation can also be barriers. Many parents and caregivers in developing countries also

Logistically, it can be difficult for health

workers to reach populations to educate them about the necessity of
immunization, while properly storing vaccinations that require
refrigeration also presents a challenge for ensuring populations are
vaccinated according to schedule. The Gavi Alliance, an organization that seeks to improve
simply haven't learned why vaccines are important.

access to vaccines in poor countries, says the key to the success of an immunization program is having buy-in from
the community. And when children aren't vaccinated, it can impact more than just their immunity to particular
diseases, Privor-Dumm says. Healthy children don't have to miss school and can stay on track to climb out of
poverty. While some Americans have grown complacent about vaccinations, Neuzil says, parents in poorer
countries can't afford that luxury. Thats a major difference as compared to these places where its an everyday
part of their life that children are dying from vaccine-preventable diseases, Neuzil says.

Budget cuts are an alt cause the CDC is targeting

vaccinations
NACCHO 15 NACCHO, The National Association of County and City Health
Officials (NACCHO) represents the nation's 2,800 local governmental health
departments. These city, county, metropolitan, district, and tribal departments work
every day to protect and promote health and well-being for all people in their
communities. For more information about NACCHO, please visit www.naccho.org, 22-2015 ("NACCHO Expresses Concern Over the President's Budget Cuts To
Immunization Funding During Measles Outbreak," 2-2-2015, Available Online at
http://naccho.org/press/releases/budget-proposal-2016.cfm, Accessed 7-21-2015)
Washington, D.C. (February 2, 2015) - The National Association of County and
City Health Officials (NACCHO) today expressed concern that the Obama
Administration is proposing to cut discretionary funding for immunization
and other programs that are key to preventing disease outbreaks and
other disasters, especially while the country is in the midst of a measles
outbreak. It is the role of local health departments to monitor, prevent, and control
disease to reduce health risks through vaccine awareness and immunization
programs. The President's FY2016 budget proposal cuts funding to the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) immunization program by $50
million. The program supports the purchase of vaccines, as well as
immunization operations at the local, state, and national levels.
According to CDC, the United States experienced a record number of measles cases
during 2014, with 644 cases from 27 states. In January 2015 alone, 102 people from
14 states were reported to have measles.
NACCHO commends other aspects of the budget, including the $141 million
increase to the CDC and removing the harmful across-the-board budget cuts that
have kept discretionary spending at historically low levels. The budget also provides
new funding for important public health activities, such as viral hepatitis prevention,
antibiotic resistance, drug overdose prevention, and the strategic national stockpile.
"Despite this new funding, the President's budget misses an important
opportunity to bolster the capacity of the nation's public health
departments to prevent infectious disease outbreaks, including those that
are vaccine preventable," said NACCHO's executive director Robert M. Pestronk.

No link Court rulings solve

No link Courts have already ruled multiple times that
mandatory vaccination is constitutional no risk the plans
surveillance reform overturns vaccination rulings.
Farias 15 Cristian Farias, Legal Affairs Writer with a special focus on civil rights,
criminal justice, and the U.S. Supreme Court, holds a JD from City University of New
York School of Law, 2015 (Yes, the Government Can Make You Vaccinate Your
Child, New Republic, February 3, Available Online at
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120950/courts-have-upheld-governmentsconstitutional-right-vaccine-laws, accessed 7/20/15, KM)
New Jersey Governor Chris Christies comments on Mondaylater clarifiedthat the government has to find a
balance between public health policy and giving parents "some measure of choice" has renewed the debate over

the Supreme Court settled the question

of compulsory vaccinations more than 100 years ago. And just last month, the
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which sits in Manhattan, cited that
century-old precedent in rejecting a constitutional challenge to a New York
law requiring that all kids attending public schools be vaccinated. The case
vaccine laws. But its instructive to remember that

involved a group of parents who had religious objections to the law. Two of the parents, both of them Catholic, had
obtained religious exemptions for their children, which the law permits so long as the parents hold genuine and
sincere religious beliefs against vaccines; the law also contains a separate exemption for medical reasons. The
parents balked, however, when their kids were excluded from school after a schoolmate contracted chicken pox. It
turns out a separate New York regulation provides that children with immunization exemptions be excluded from
attendance in the event of an outbreak. Unhappy with both the law and the regulation, the parents sued in federal
court. A third parent also sued, but on the grounds that she couldnt obtain a religious exemption. At a hearing, the
woman had testified that decisions about her childs health were guided strictly by the word of God. But the
judge, after hearing the woman testify that vaccination could hurt my daughter. It could kill her.... It could cause
any number of things, found the womans religious beliefs to be neither genuine nor sincere, but merely health-

three parents joined forces and

mounted a constitutional challenge to New Yorks vaccination requirement .
They threw the book at the state, arguing, among other things, violations of their rights under
the First and Fourteenth Amendments, as well as under state and municipal law. The rub
of their arguments: that the state was infringing on their liberty and religious
interests. A federal judge in Brooklyn dismissed all their claims. Thats when
the Second Circuit court, as its wont to do on appeal, took up all of these
grievances anew and rejected them one by one. Citing Jacobson v.
Massachusetts, the 1905 case, a three-judge panel ruled in a short opinion
that New York was well within its police power to mandate vaccinations
for schoolchildren. Since immunizations are in the interest of the population as a whole, the court said
related. The court denied her request. Thats when the

they trump the parents individual wishes. The court brushed aside their claim that a growing body of scientific
evidence demonstrates that vaccines cause more harm to society than good, noting that only the legislatureand
not the parents or the courtcould make the call on the alleged body of evidence. Turning to the parents religious
claims, the court relied on a 1944 case, Prince v. Massachusetts, where the Supreme Court stated that a parent

The
court went on to note that the First Amendment right to religious freedom
does not include liberty to expose the community or the child to
communicable disease or the latter to ill health or death. And because
the law compelling vaccinations is neutralthat is, it applies to everyone
and doesnt specifically target a particular religionno constitutional
violation occurred. Plus, two of the parents had received exemptions, so the court viewed New Yorks
cannot claim freedom from compulsory vaccination for the child more than for himself on religious grounds.

limited exclusion during an outbreak as permissible. Of course, the ruling is only binding within the context of public
education; nothing prevents the parents from homeschooling their children and keeping them vaccination-free. And
it remains to be seen whether these parents will be appealing to a higher court to review the case. But

given

that the Supreme Court has already spoken loudly on the matter, heres hoping
faith in the judgment of the courts and the rule of law will prevail.

Vaccine DA Impact Defense

Anti-science
There is science behind anti-vaxxers claims.
Walia 13 Arjun Walia, 8-2-2013 ("Polish Study Confirms Vaccines Can Cause
Large Number of Adverse Effects," Collective-Evolution, 8-2-2013, Available Online
at http://www.collective-evolution.com/2013/08/02/polish-medical-school-studydetermines-vaccines-can-cause-irreparable-harm/, Accessed 7-22-2015)
Despite the conviction of the necessity and safety of vaccinations, there
are a number of studies coming forward that illustrate the potential
dangers they may pose. A scientific review published by the Department of
Paediatric Rehabilitation from the Medical School at the University of
Bialystok has determined that there are a number of neurological adverse
events that follow vaccination. This research is specific to Polish vaccinations,
but is still useful given the fact that many ingredients used and examined in the
study are still used in vaccinations all over the world.
The University of Bialystok is a well known medical university that has
published a tremendous amount of research on various topics. The
evidence thats out there supporting the hazards of vaccines is irrefutable.
There is a lot of research that medical professionals are not privy to, this is
credible research coming out of Universities done by doctors and
professors. Medical professionals are usually guided to research done by
pharmaceutical companies and the vaccine manufactures themselves. Its
important to look at both sides of the coin, and examine all information available
before coming to a conclusion.
It is not reasonable to assume that manipulation of the immune system through an
increasing number of vaccinations during critical periods of brain development will
not result in adverse neurodevelopment outcomes(1)
The study addresses the use of vaccines in terms of adverse effects,
immune system effects, neurological symptoms following vaccinations and
a history of vaccines demonstrating little benefit. We often hear of studies
only from the western world, expanding our sphere of research to a global
one provides us with a broad range of information coming from a variety
of different sources. A report like this coming from a medical school
should not be taken lightly. It coincides with a lot of other research thats
emerging to suggest that vaccines can be hazardous to human health.
Post-Vaccine Neurological Complications
The authors focused on thimerosal, otherwise known as ethylmercury. Its
known to be a key ingredient in vaccines for preservation. A number of
conditions are associated with thimerosal including toxicity of the heart,
liver, kidneys and the nervous system. Over the last two decades,
neurological conditions such as epilepsy, autism, ADHD and mental
retardation have increased dramatically all over the world.
From the 1990s new vaccines for infants containing thimerosal began to
be used in America. In the DTP, Hib and Hep B vaccines, children received a dose
62.5 ug of mercury, which is 125-fold more than the dose considered safe, which is
0.1 ug a day. These reports were the reason that Scandinavian countries already
prohibited the use of mercury in 1990(1)

Research has shown that there is a direct relationship between thimerosal and the
rate of autism. The paper determined that there was also a correlation
between the number of measles-containing vaccines and autism
prevalence during the 1980s. A couple of years ago, an Italian court ruled that
the MMR vaccine was the cause of Autism in the case presented. A recent study
by the University of British Colombia came out exposing the HPV vaccine
as being dangerous to health as well. UBC doctors also exposed a
Vaccination cover-up, demonstrating through official documents that
vaccine manufactures have been aware of their adverse effects for a
number of years.
Adverse Effects
Reports in many Polish and foreign medical journals lead us to conclude that
postvaccinal complications among children can be observed in sporadic cases and
that they are disproportionate to the benefits of vaccination in the elimination of
dangerous diseases in childhood(1)
This study and many others leave little doubt that vaccines can be extremely
hazardous to human health.
They first illustrate the adverse effects that occur shortly after vaccination as they
are acknowledged by Polish law. These include:
Local reactions, including:
local reactions after the BCG (tuberculosis) vaccine
swelling
lymphadenopathy
abscess at the injection site
Postvaccinal adverse events of the central nervous system:
encephalopathy
febrile convulsions
non-febrile convulsions
paralytic poliomyelitis caused by vaccine virus
encephalitis
meningitis
Guillain-Barr syndrome
Other adverse events following immunization:
joint pain
hypotonic-hyporesponsive episode
fever above 39C
thrombocytopenia
continuous inconsolable crying
Next they explore the fact that the vaccine schedule has increased dramatically
since the time of these studies and antigens are being injected again and again.
Doctors and researchers point to the worsening state of the health of the child
population since the 1960s, which coincided with increasingly introduced
vaccinations. Allergic diseases, including asthma autoimmune diseases, diabetes
and many neurological dysfunctions-difficulty in learning, ADD, ADHD, seizures, and
autism are chronic conditions, to which attention has been brought(1)
As far as immune system effects, they go on to state that the common practice of
administering more than one adjuvant at a time or repeatedly injecting the same

antigen can produce autoimmune disorders. They also point out that the toxicity of
adjuvants can produce a range of adverse reactions. The hepatitis B vaccine has
been known to cause Fatal Auto-Immune Disorder.
Experimental evidence clearly shows, that simultaneous administration of
as little as two to three immune adjuvants, or repeated stimulation of the
immune system by the same antigen can overcome genetic resistance to
autoimmunity(1)
We continue to vaccinate en mass despite the growing body of evidence
that clearly reveals how vaccines can be harmful to the body. The manner in
which the body responds to vaccines is not well understood. With the amount of
studies published, alarm bells should be ringing for the medical industry
to start making adjustments and at least warning parents. This isnt meant
to create an anti-vaccines position, but instead to look at all the facts vs. just some.
Often times, Doctors are not fully aware of the dangers associated with
vaccines nor the ingredients and studies available to show they can be
hazardous. Doctors should be encouraged to independently seek out a variety of
sources and look at a variety of journals on the subject. It is quite possible that they
would realize the vaccine world is not black and white and serious consideration
needs to be taken when looking at the current vaccine schedule.
A burgeoning body of evidence shows that immune molecules play integral
roles in CNS development, affecting processes such as neurogenesis, neuronal
migration, axon guidance, synaptic connectivity and synaptic plasticity. Despite
the dogma that peripheral immune responses do not affect CNS function,
substantial evidence points exactly to the contrary. Thus, it is not
reasonable to assume that manipulation of the immune system through an
increasing number of vaccinations during critical periods of brain
development will not result in adverse neurodevelopment outcomes(1)

Ableism No solvency
The negs narrow focus on autism in the vaccination debate is
insufficient a complete critical examination of ableist
structures and mindsets should be the priority.
Choicewords 14 Choicewords is a blog that highlights the young peoples
views on issues related reproductive justice and gender equity, 2014 (Challenging
Ableism: Autism and the Conversation About Vaccines, Unite for Reproductive and
Gender Equality, March 24, Available Online at http://urge.org/challenging-ableismautism-and-the-conversation-about-vaccines/, accessed 7/21/15, KM)

Recently there has been a debacle in the public health field about the connection between vaccines and autism.
The Center for Disease Control will tell you there is no connection, while plenty of Americans and Jenny McCarthy
believe that there is a definite link between the two. First off, there is such a range of autism. I will be using the
term autism spectrum disorders (ASD) to cover the range of them, including Asperger syndrome, since there is
rarely the distinction around this conversation. If you are not familiar with ASD, check out what information the

I am not here to debate with you about whether

vaccines cause ASD. But heres the thing: Why are we so afraid of
autism and children with disabilities? One of the problems I have with this
debate is how we talk about oppression and autism. Why is it that we talk
about being afraid of having children with autism, rather than ways to
change ableist mindsets? I acknowledge that the quality of life with autism is not high for a number of
reasons beyond social circumstances; but why arent we focusing on eliminating
oppression, rather than the disorder itself? Why is our biggest debate
about whether or not autism is caused by vaccines, rather than why kids
with ASD are more likely to grow up to be unemployed, or why children of
color with ASD are less likely to have access to services? Ableism and
ableist language is a huge problem in public health communities, with
language about eliminating particular disabilities being very prominent.
Center for Disease Control has. But

While the intentions of folks in the public health field are to improve the well-being of the community, it ignores how
this language impacts how people with ASD are perceived. When we put down ASD, we are putting down people
with ASD. When we talk about preventing ASD, we are creating a hierarchy of, able bodies >disabled bodies. It

In social justice, we also must ask the

question to ourselves: why are we so obsessed with curing disabilities,
instead of focusing on making life easier for folks with disabilities? Why
are we so content with putting expensive prosthetic limbs on people with
an amputated leg, instead of making the 2nd floor of a building
accessible? This is especially true in reproductive justice movements, when we consider the ethics of
terminating pregnancies with fetuses with disabilities and predicting them in utero. In the end, our
obsession with curing and preventing disabilities comes down to
internalized ableism, and people being terrified of themselves or their
children being diagnosed with a disability. Ultimately, creating accessible and
accepting spaces, uplifting voices of folks with ASD and other disabilities,
and dismantling an ableist mindset should be our priority, rather than
dueling out how to prevent autism in the battle of the vaccines.
perpetuates oppression of people with ASD.

Counterplan

CP Card
Enforcement of DO NOT TRACK solves
Strauss, Spring 2014 (Benjamin, JD Candidate 2014, ONLINE TRACKING: CAN
THE FREE MARKET CREATE CHOICE WHERE NONE EXISTS? Chicago-Kent Journal of
Intellectual Property Lexis)
Any legislation aimed at protecting Internet privacy should aim at
shedding light on what information is being collected, and provide some
enforceable mechanism for consumers to opt out of Internet tracking. A
Do-Not-Track regime should grant consumers the opportunity to voice
their opposition to being tracked, and require that the preference be
honored. Thus far, any attempt for the market to establish voluntary
compliance with Do-Not-Track headers has failed. Critics argue that
advertisers have no incentive to provide robust privacy protections for
consumers because they derive much of their revenue from Internet
tracking and profiling. n243 I disagree. The incentives have simply not
been sufficient so far. People are still using Google even though they (should)
know that their online activity is being tracked. Presumably it does not bother a
significant number of consumers enough to stop or switch services. If companies
are not losing visitors due to their tracking policies, why change? One solution is
to implement a legally-binding Do-Not-Track regime. As outlined above, the
technology is simple. Users may simply activate the Do-Not-Track preference
in their browser or mobile device. This preference, however, must be
universally applicable to cookies, mobile apps, in-store mobile analytics software,
and traditional web browsing. It should also be simple, with clear instructions
provided by the software or device provider. A legally-binding Do-Not-Track
regime would only require a law mandating that webhosts (or $=P568
controllers) honor the users' preference. There does not need to be, nor
should there be, a centralized Do-Not-Track list. A government-controlled
centralized list carries privacy risks of its own. n244 The legislation should
permit the FTC or FCC to impose fines or other administrative sanctions
similar to those in China's draft amendments discussed above. n245 In addition, the
legislation should also provide individuals with a legal claim against
companies who do not honor their preference to not be tracked. However,
administrative enforcement is likely to be more successful as many
individuals will lack the time and resources to litigate against informationcollecting giants such as Google. Some argue the system should be Do-NotTrack by default, thus requiring individuals to opt in if they do not mind being
tracked. n246 This, however, is not necessary and poses greater consequences than
an opt-out system. Any opt-out regime runs the risk of fundamentally
altering the economic paradigm of the Internet. If enough people opt out,
service providers will be stripped of the economic incentive to offer free
services. Without advertising revenue, it is unlikely that Google will
continue to offer free services such as Gmail, Google Drive, and Google
Docs. If everyone is automatically opted out, it is likely far fewer people
would opt in, thus exacerbating this problem. n247 A Do-Not-Track by default
system might even cause behavioral advertising to "wither to insignificance," even

though it offers value for many customers, "most of whom don't mind the practice."
n248 Additionally, the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA) argues against Do-Not-Track
as the default setting because it purportedly does not represent user choice. n249
The DAA even declared it would ignore Internet Explorer's Do-Not-Track
header because Microsoft (by way of Internet Explorer 10) was essentially
making the Do-Not-Track decision on behalf of its users. n250 An opt-out
regime would likely suffice so long as it permits privacy-concerned individuals to
browse anonymously at their election, and the DAA would have no argument
against the choice manually activated by the user. $=P569 Enforcement
legislation might not be the best solution to the problem. Critics, including Michigan
Congressman Fred Upton, are highly skeptical of Congress' or the government's
ability to "keep up with the innovative and vibrant pace of the Internet without
breaking it." n251 Upton believes that "[c]onsumers and the economy as a whole
will not be well served by government attempts to wrap the Web in red tape." n252
As detailed above, the E.U. Directive has already been criticized for failing to keep
up with innovation as the rules on data exportation and transfer to third countries
were deemed "outmoded" by the RAND Corporation. n253 This is perhaps a
compelling argument considering the government's inability to build a functioning
health care website after throwing $ 600 million at it. n254 Enforcement
legislation also fails to address the global nature of the Internet. As seen
with the E.U. Directive, enforcement outside the sovereign's jurisdiction is
impossible without international cooperation, thus inhibiting the effectiveness of the
privacy program. The world, along with the Internet, will only become increasingly
more globalized. Considering the United States has yet to institute an optout protocol on a national scale, it is very unlikely a global consensus will
be reached to establish an international standardized opt-out protocol.
The free market, however, can traverse international borders. Enforcement
legislation may not be required if the market can incentivize companies to
honor Do-Not-Track requests by users or alter their profiling practices to
dissuade consumer discomfort. Transparency or "right of access" laws (as seen
in the E.U. Directive and PRC Decision) could provide this incentive. If users are
permitted access to what information is collected about them, and how
that information is used, perhaps we can indeed shed light on the largely
hidden, highly lucrative world of the personal data market. If users object to
the type of information collected or the way in which the information is used,
consumers can opt out. If the opt-out preference is not honored, consumers
can voice their opinions in other ways. Users can essentially "vote with
their feet" by switching to services that have less intrusive tracking
policies or to companies that honor tracking requests. When companies
begin to experience a loss in revenue by way of fewer active users, they will be
forced to alter their practices. Twitter has recently announced it will honor Do-NotTrack settings in $=P570 users' browsers when it launches its ad exchange. n255
Perhaps this is evidence that the market is gradually adapting to consumer
preference in this area. Google and other "free" service providers could
incentivize individuals to forego opting out in exchange for access to
these free services. Additionally, Google could offer these same services
for a fee to consumers who choose to opt out of tracking. This would place

a value on an individual's privacy on the Internet. If users place a value on

their Internet privacy that is higher than the fee charged for these
services, they will continue to opt out. However, if users wish to continue
to use the free services, they can do so in exchange for their consent to
tracking by the service provider. Essentially, this places a monetary value
on a user's browsing profile and can at least provide some return to the
users whose data is being collected and exploited. It is perhaps a utopian
idea of market economics, and it is unclear whether such a system would
be sustainable, but it is an alternative solution to a stagnant legislature
who has failed to seriously address online privacy.