Having a jab at the anti-vaxxers

Failing to test strong measures against the risk that they amount to being needlessly extreme is not just a tad lazy as a practice, it’s dangerously habit-forming.

Seen purely as a medical issue, Dr Lance O’sullivan’s call for New Zealand to follow Australia by penalising parents who won’t vaccinate their children is emphatically justified. As a social imperative, the case appears nothing if not strong. But none of this means the Government would be entitled, even if it were so minded, to concoct punishments without first seeking a pretty explicit social sanction. Anti-vaxxers are dangerously deluded. They spurn medical developments that have been emphatically and repeatedly tested and proven not only by the scientific world, but by human experience down the decades. They embrace views that have been debunked to what should be the point of intellectual humiliation. To some extent they retain the right to believe whatever barking idiocy they like, provided it’s their own wellbeing they hazard. In the name of parental rights, there’s even a significant measure of tolerance, albeit disapproving, for parents to act on beliefs that do their own children no good. Yet as The Guardian newspaper recently declared, parents do not have an unlimited right to be irresponsible and, in this case, they are both exploiting their society’s hard-won herd immunity and contributing to its breakdown. The hell with that, right? Trouble is, the worst excesses of ill-informed zealotry aren’t the only issue at play. To be right isn’t itself justification to be a jerk about it. The tyranny of the majority – that, too, is a thing. Preferable, you might think, to the tyranny of the agents of disease, but that doesn’t make it the only way to go. Australia’s ‘‘No Jab, No Pay’’ programme reduces family tax benefits fortnightly by $NZ30 for each unvaccinated child. That’s heavy-handed stuff, but pointless if it isn’t painful enough. When we’re comfortable with such penalties we tend to use descriptions like zero tolerance. This sounds rather nicer than intolerance. The question becomes whether we’ve reached the stage where we need to accept some people are just intolerably wrongheaded and must be compelled by whatever means works to cut it out. We haven’t, as yet, collectively asked ourselves the question. The very act of testing our views on both issues – how stupid anti-vaxxers are entitled to be, and how punitive we’re entitled to be – would itself be good thing. And the converse is true. Failing to test strong measures against the risk that they amount to being needlessly extreme is not just a tad lazy as a practice, it’s dangerously habit-forming in itself. Bottom line: consulting one another on the idea of penalties such as O’sullivan proposes is a valid next step. And, sorry, it may need to be a tediously careful one.