Well I envy my cat in the same way: he's happily living his life hunting mice in the garden, eating his food, sleeping and getting petted by yours truly, blissfully unaware of how the food gets in his bowl, how the mice come to exist in the garden, how he gets to sleep warm and cozy even in the dead of winter, what his purpose is and how his life will end.

Comfy, care-free and appealing though a domestic cat's life may be, it doesn't mean I want to be a cat though. I much prefer having a brain big enough to look at the world in a more profound way, even if it can be unsettling.

The great thing about religion is, if you look at it with a critical mind and a little bit of reason, it's fairly quick and easy to dismiss as pure fantasy.

Religion is the opium of the people.

I'm not a homeschooler (all my kids are in public), but I've known a few. One of my best friends is a family practice doc. His family homeschools because they believe they can give a better education than the local schools in his small town, but he's adamantly in favor of vaccination.

Homeschooling absolutely doesn't imply anti-vax (although the Venn diagram does overlap a fair bit).

I did, but the math (and severity of outcomes) were off so I ignored it.

That's a pretty legit-sounding reason not to trust that particular doctor. I wouldn't hesitate to look for another doctor and get a second opinion.

God provided me with a cheeseburger yesterday, and it was aluminumally delicious.

Yes, I'm making fun of you. All opinions aren't equal, and yours is incredibly naive and dangerous. You're endangering your kids for no legitimate reason, you're a bad parent, and I have no desire to be tactful about this idiocy anymore.

Have you ever seen the mumps? What kind of sadistic bastard would rather see his kid suffer through that than a 5-second injection?

You misspelled "willful accomplices". Everyone's heard that vaccines are good and safe. Rallying against that is exactly like arguing that cigarette smoke is harmless when it's well documented and universally understood to be the opposite.

That's not our collective job. Convince me that you should have the right to spread diseases that could otherwise easily be eradicated.

Full stop here. "Toxin" is something that a bacteria squirts out, like botulinum toxin. That's the only thing it means. The only people who use "toxin" in any other context are the ones who want to sell you treatments to remove them from your body. No doctor or scientist refers to toxins as meaning anything else.

Why aluminum, specifically? I just drank a can of highly flammable hydrogen in compound with ridiculously dangerous oxygen, containing among other things a hell's blend of reactive sodium and deadly chlorine. And it tasted good. You've probably had many a pickle brined in vinegar (acetic acid! corrosive!) and alum (aluminum, potassium, sulfur, and oxygen again!), so why is aluminum as one chemical in a compound of many a particular concern in this context?

You probably wouldn't want to sit down and eat half a pound of aluminum powder by itself, but you and your kids have almost certainly ingested some as food ingredient recently.

Because that's a more convenient incubator for poliovirus than a human kidney.

Not remotely. Public health has long been accepted as a legitimate concern of the government.

Of these, lack of access is the only legitimate excuse and it's self limiting and easy to address. Many places offer mobile free vaccination clinics.

I can just about guarantee I'd win a "more Libertarian than thou" contest, but your idea of individual liberty is severely flawed. That old saying about your right to swing your fists ends where my nose begins? Well, your right to carry around dangerous pathogens for the hell of it ends where my immune system begins. You don't have the right to willfully take steps to make people around you ill.

Neither of those are at all true. Plenty of pediatricians (like ours) refuse to treat willfully unvaccinated kids because of the high risk they present to other patients. If you're taking a two week old baby into the doctor's office for a well baby checkup, the last thing you want to see is some moron's measles vector sitting in the same waiting room. "First, do no harm" nicely dovetails with "by condoning and tolerating anti-science Luddites spreading disease through your office."

This isn't uncommon and most doctors who feel this way make no attempt to hide it. If nothing else, if a patient doesn't trust their doctor when recommending safe, prudent vaccinations, will they trust that same doctor to recommend emergency surgery or other invasive treatments? If there's not a trust relationship, why even bother with it?

Anti-vaxxers should come to expect that their rejection of science leaves them to see only homeopaths and other witch doctors because science-based ones won't touch them with a 10 foot pole. If they want to practice voodoo, why should they want or expect to receive all the other benefits of legitimate medicine?

Google *is* evil - and greedy. I use their search engine for one thing only: looking for commercial vendor sites to purchase something. They're good for that. For anything else - fun, interesting non-commercial things, there are better search engines out there. DDG, Blekko... heck even Bing come to mind.

this implies a hijacking.