maybe I'm wrong

So I've been thinking.

The vaccine thing isn't as obvious as I made it out to be yesterday.
Things you have to consider:

• how serious are the disease's symptoms? in yesterday's post, I just talked about cancer. That was a mistake, because HPV has other symptoms, and maybe some of them aren't supposed to be discussed in polite society, but they're still worth preventing. It's especially important to think about in this case, because while I don't feel like looking up the article, I've read that HPV can increase the incidence of AIDS transmission. The more damaging a disease is, the greater impetus there is to fight it. On the other hand, if a virus leaves almost everyone totally asymptomatic, but once every 4 million cases gives someone a rash or something, maybe it's not worth developing a vaccine.
  
• how (easily) is the disease spread? Certain diseases are super communicable. so the marginal societal benefit of 1 more vaccination is measurably higher than someone's personal benefit from being disease resistant. Other diseases are not spread person to person. (maybe they're spread through the water.) So the benefits of getting vaccinated are confined to the people who get the shots. For a non communicable disease, your own personal cost benefit analysis is the only relevant one, so we should probably let you make it in peace. HPV is spread person to person. But maybe it's more cost effective to stop the disease from spreading than to develop a vaccine. If condom use cuts transmission significantly, make people wear condoms, not get $200 shots. Assuming you could make people wear condoms. yay for privacy invasion!
  
• how much does the vaccine cost? a super effective vaccine for a highly communicable disease might still not be worth administering if each dose costs an obscene amount to produce. Or if it costs a lot to administer--let's say you *had* to have trained doctors make the trip on nonexistant jungle roads with refrigeration units containing glass vials of the vaccine. This cuts the other way too: if production costs per unit go down with a high enough volume, maybe the government *does* want to mandate vaccination that it wouldn't otherwise.
  

I suspect mandatory HPV vaccination still makes sense. I still think the whole "The DC schoolboard is being racist" argument is idiotic. I find a lot of the "let people choose" rhetoric unconvincing. But I might be wrong.


In other news, I've got to figure out how to post parts of entries "behind the fold" because I'm wordy.