Not vaccinating an attack on society

It takes a long time for social movements to show up in conventional politics. The personal becomes political only with a time lag of decades. The increased respect for the individual that appeared in the ’60s and ’70s did not make a political breakthrough until this century. This wasn’t an unmixed good. We tend to think of this rejection of outmoded convention as a wholly progressive development, but the loss of respect for authority has a shadow side as well. The belief that people should be free to believe what they like has led to the rise of fake news and of infantile fantasies of the triumph of the will. These burst into electoral politics in 2016, nourishing the Trump campaign and the Brexit referendum. But such thoughts had been incubating quietly for years inside the antivaccine movement.

To refuse to have your children vaccinated is an attack on society in much the same way as tax evasion is. If a refusal to vaccinate endangered only the children whose parents deliberately put them in harm’s way, it would still be wrong because parents do not have an unlimited right to be irresponsible. It can be argued that so long as very few people do it, there is very little irresponsibility in refusing to vaccinate a child against a risk that remains distant if everyone else acts for the good of society. Similar arguments are used to justify all sorts of fraud.

But when children who might be vaccinated are not, their parents are both exploiting herd immunity and contributing to its breakdown. This is plainly wrong and should not be tolerated. The French government has just announced that children there must be vaccinated against 18 common childhood diseases. This follows the Italian decision to make vaccinations against 16 diseases a condition of entry to school at six. These measures may feel disturbing to society’s liberal instincts, but they are entirely justified as measures of collective solidarity against disease. London, July 7.