Vaccination: It Does Affect Other People

Child with measles http://phil.cdc.gov/phil/home.asp

Browsing across my Facebook feed I came across this comment on the subject of childhood vaccination:

...I don't believe that a person's right to choose what is put into their child's body should be taken away though. Why should I be worried about unvaccinated children when my child is vaccinated? He should be protected if the doctors & scientists are so smart... -Unnamed Facebook friend's friend.

 A couple things:

• We already have laws about what people can do to their children.  For example, you can't abuse them.  Abuse may be well intentioned and done out of ignorance, but regardless, we have laws forbidding it.  You may have a personal belief that gravity doesn't exist; that doesn't mean you can drop your child out of a helicopter.  Not vaccinating your child without a medical reason is reckless endangerment out of ignorance.
• You should be worried, because as effective as vaccines are there is still a failure rate which is small for most common vaccines, but like any other treatment still exists.  For example:  The secondary failure rate for the measles vaccine of less than .02% (http://journals.lww.com/pidj/Abstract/1996/01000/Secondary_failure_rates_of_measles_vaccines__a.14.aspx), out of a population of 300 million, that is potentially 60,000 people for whom the vaccine will fail.
• There are children that because of medical issues are unable to receive vaccines.  For example:  For a child with an allergy to egg protein they would be unable to receive a vaccine for influenza (http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/recs/vac-admin/contraindications-vacc.htm).
• "Herd immunity" is when a population vulnerable to infection is protected because a high rate of immunization disrupts transmission of disease.  Dependent on the disease in question, this rate immunization needs to be up to 94% which should be easily achievable if those who can be vaccinated, are vaccinated (http://www.bt.cdc.gov/agent/smallpox/training/overview/pdf/eradicationhistory.pdf slide 17).

Vaccination is perhaps the greatest triumph of modern medicine, but it only works if everyone does their part.  You need not even have a great understanding of the science of vaccination, just look at a history book and how many people used to die of what are now easily treatable diseases.

I find the whole "living naturally" thing to be arbitrary and bizarre.  "Naturally" most of us wouldn't live to age 40.  Are humans not a product of nature?  If we are, isn't everything we do "natural"?