Freedom.
The savvier of the anti vaxxers want to make the issue about freedom. It's the principle of the thing, they argue. Your rights are being trampled when the state requires vaccination, they insist.
Rand Paul wants the freedom to have a few weeks or months in between childhood vaccinations.
That's not freedom. It's just a requirement with a different time line. These people accept other arbitrary restraints on the same type of freedom all the time.
I'm epileptic. There are kids who are epileptic, and medication can't control their seizures. What if the child did have controllable seizures? What if the parents of an epileptic child don't believe in medication? What would happen if they sent their kid to school every day with the knowledge that he generally has a seizure at some point during the day? Is that okay? Is that freedom? What if the seizure causes a daily problem that the school personnel has to deal with for an hour each time it happens? Would it be an infringement on their freedom if they were told that they couldn't send their kid to school without some kind of control of the seizures? What if the school said that they could send their kid to school, but he would have to be in a therapeutic program where they can attend to his daily seizures? Is that a restriction on freedom?
As a parent, I know that some mornings I wake up and my kids have a fever over 102 degrees. They are ready to vomit, and they are coughing and spewing mucus all over the place. If some kid is sent to school with a 103 degree fever, is it an affront to the principles of freedom to call that child's parents to come and pick them up?
Oh, that's not a big deal? It's expected that you will not send your mucus spewing, fever ridden child to school with that level of illness.
How about lice? If some child in the school has parents who really don't care about lice, and who do nothing to remove the lice from their child at home, is it an attack on their freedom to say that they can't send their kid to school until they don't have lice? (Shit, now my head itches. I'm bald, but still.)
It's simply ridiculous to think that "freedom" is the issue.