People can simply have different perspectives on things. Measels has mortality rate of around 0.1% while small pox has a mortality rate of around 30%. So the individual risk from measels is relatively low leaving plenty of room for individual choice.
There's less room for the same argument with small pox. In fact small pox is where the term vaccine comes from - it was observed that milk maids weren't getting smallpox, which led to the discovery that infection with cow pox (which is relatively harmless) provided immunity to small pox - hence 'vacca cine', vacca = cow in latin.
But there's a long history of people trying to self vaccinate with all sorts of things against small pox including using scrapings off somebody's small pox wounds to hopefully give oneself a light infection. Needless to say that came with well understood side effects up to and including full-on small pox infection. But when the death rate is 30%, people were willing to do some crazy things, because the risk:reward was seen as worth it.
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FWIW I did ultimately decide to vaccinate my children against measels, but it was not an easy decision, because it is in general not that risky a disease whose mortality rate had already precipitously declined (from 13 per 100k to 0.19 per 100k) [1] before a vaccine was first introduced in 1963. Obviously I think it's the right decision, but I also wouldn't really fault anybody for going the other direction either.
A friend's favorite Wiki page is on the micromort. [1] I found it kind of banal, but perhaps that's my more casual attitude towards death. I suspect the average person doesn't realize, or doesn't accept, how brief life truly is. One micromort is something with a 1 in a million chance of death. So with measels, we're talking about 1000 micromorts, if you're infected - which is also extremely unlikely. So if you give yourself a 1% chance of ever being infected with measels (which would be quite high) then not vaccinating would be down to a 1% * 1000 = 10 micromorts of risk.
All non-natural cause of death in the US, excluding suicide, is about 1.3 micromorts per day. So it's the same all non-natural cause risk you'll be exposed to over the next week. The page offers a lot of other comparables - traveling 100 miles by biking, 2500 by car, or 10k by airplane, and so on.
In a world with a low vaccination rate, infection with measles is practically 100%. It spreads more easily than COVID.
You can take your risk with herd immunity if you want. That works well now, with a near universal vaccination rate. But if the rate drops below 90%, then you will get infected.
Immunity rate, not vaccination rate. This is why everybody ended up catching COVID, often multiple times, regardless of how much they injected themselves with. Whereas, measles, with an ostensibly higher spread rate, was already on its way out before vaccines were introduced with fewer than 1 new case per 500 people - far below even basic fertility rates. It's because infection with measles is a nice mixture of relatively low risk and providing lifetime immunity. Beyond that, herd immunity is a hand-wavy measurement about statistically preventing perpetual spread within a population, it says much less about individual susceptibility.
Your child being vaccinated against measles is 1. yes, protecting them, but 2. also protecting all the other children at school they interact with, and vice-versa. It isn’t just an individual choice. You should definitely fault people for going the other direction because they are willingly increasing the chance of your child or your child’s friends getting measles.
The US sees in the ballpark of a hundred million tourists, business travelers, and migrants per year. And these people are vectors for basically everything and are numerically very large. And you're inevitably going to bump into and interact with these people. So I think the idea of domestic herd immunity is increasingly nonsensical because 'domestic' is no longer even remotely close to a closed system. And global herd immunity is nonsensical simply because it's wholly unrealistic, and at that sort of scale any small issue can explode into a huge one: see - source of most modern cases of polio.
My parents both got measels, and they had no hesitancy getting me vaccinated. I’m significantly taller than my dad, who lost 40 pounds when he got German measles when he was 17. I grew several inches that year.
People who don’t get vaccinated are bad people. I have no qualms saying it.
I don't think this is a great argument. The reason is that Rubella/German measels is in the majority of cases very mild, in many - people will not even know they had caught it. If you take a large enough sample you'll absolutely find people winning a lottery that they really don't want to win, but the exact same logic is used to by people to avoid vaccinating. For instance the MMR vaccine can cause all sorts of nasty things in extreme cases, but in the average case it's believed to be mostly harmless. Though of course we're always discovering new things about medicines. There's even new side effects in e.g. tylenol still regularly being discovered and published about.
There's less room for the same argument with small pox. In fact small pox is where the term vaccine comes from - it was observed that milk maids weren't getting smallpox, which led to the discovery that infection with cow pox (which is relatively harmless) provided immunity to small pox - hence 'vacca cine', vacca = cow in latin.
But there's a long history of people trying to self vaccinate with all sorts of things against small pox including using scrapings off somebody's small pox wounds to hopefully give oneself a light infection. Needless to say that came with well understood side effects up to and including full-on small pox infection. But when the death rate is 30%, people were willing to do some crazy things, because the risk:reward was seen as worth it.
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FWIW I did ultimately decide to vaccinate my children against measels, but it was not an easy decision, because it is in general not that risky a disease whose mortality rate had already precipitously declined (from 13 per 100k to 0.19 per 100k) [1] before a vaccine was first introduced in 1963. Obviously I think it's the right decision, but I also wouldn't really fault anybody for going the other direction either.
[1] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/measles-cases-and-death-r...