If, then, otherwise

In reading more and more about the anti-vaccine movement (and observing it on media and social media), I kept coming across description of parent after parent who said "I don't want to give my kids a vaccine that might harm them".

Suppose we allow that some vaccines are, in fact, harmful (this is generally found to be untrue, though some reactions can occur, sometimes with bad results like encephalitis, which can lead to permanent injuries). We are then faced with the following:

If I give my child a vaccine, they might be irreversibly harmed.

We've allowed the causation in this case, so let's go ahead and allow this statement. Now, what happens after you don't give them the vaccine? What's that you say, you didn't think about that one? Let's fill it in for you:

If I give my child a vaccine, they might be irreversibly harmed. Otherwise, they may contract a deadly disease.

Doesn't sound so great, does it. We can now argue that by living in the bubble of the USA they won't be exposed to a lot of the things we now vaccinate for, but given the amount of international travel people do it's a safe bet that measles, mumps, rubeola, diphtheria, tetanus, polio, etc are alive and well and have made it past our comprehensive TSA and immigrations screenings. If your child is the only one not getting vaccinated, maybe they're ok. But as a parent, do you want to 100%, for sure, feel (and actually be) responsible when they come down with one of the above? And when your neighbor also skips vaccines, when both your kids are now sick? Or when you convince lots of people to not get vaccines and an epidemic explodes?

Given the rare of births in the country and the frequency of settled suits in vaccine court (where the plaintiff doesn't even have to prove fault, it's really just a catch-all streamlined compensation system), we can conclude that there's 1 in somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 chance your kid has an unfortunate, seriously bad reaction. That's slightly better odds than your kid being involved in a fatal car crash (and certainly way better than the odds of being injured or killed in a crash). In other words, you should stop allowing your kid in a car. Ever.

For the record: before broad vaccination programs, somewhere between 1 and 2 million people a year died in America from diseases that we now vaccinate against (that number is now under 10,000 per year if I remember right - that's right, vaccines as a whole are only something like 99% effective). That's something like 1 in 100. Put that in the otherwise clause above and see how you like it!

People in general are bad at looking at the other option; they tend to just look at choices in a vacuum. Every choice not only means you go down one road, but you simultaneously don't go down the other road. If, then, otherwise. There's always an otherwise.