A lack of moderated opinions is hurting a lot these days. Read my answer to dalke, because I would like ask you the same question: Would you be for mandating vaccines against rota-viruses in high-income countries?
Looking at the facts lead me to a moderate position.
I let you feel confortable following the cdc, i prefer to keep a critical mind, though i agree it is hard for non experts like us to get good and objective information.
That's a random fact, but not evidence in support of your thesis, which is that the currently accepted set of vaccines should be evaluated for their costs and benefits by individuals.
The evidence that individuals are better equipped and are less biased than the current scientific establishment to evaluate the costs and benefits of a particular vaccine is the evidence I'm looking for. The evidence that vaccine X was crappy is not. Evidence of people trying to get a new vaccine into the market or required for children is definitely not.
You ask for facts, I give an example of what I mean but then you reject it as random and needing evidence of a thesis I never formulated....
As for your second paragraph, the scientific establishment can be very wrong. Example: 20 years ago the scientific establishment rejected the idea of exoplanets. Today, there are hundreds catalogued. Although I had no facts to support my view, the consensus felt just wrong to me. I just think there might other be cases where the scientific consensus just feels wrong, a good reason to keep a critical mind!
"20 years ago the scientific establishment rejected the idea of exoplanets"
What?! No, they didn't. The Drake equation even had a term, f_p, for the fraction of those stars that have planets.
Drake's 1961 shot-in-the-dark estimate for f_p was 0.2-0.5 (one fifth to one half of all stars formed will have planets).
Sagan and Drake were believers in the principle of mediocrity, which says that "the Earth is a typical rocky planet in a typical planetary system, located in a non-exceptional region of a common barred-spiral galaxy." (Quote from Wikipedia.)
Others were believers in the Rare Earth hypothesis, yes, but there definitely wasn't the consensus rejection of the idea of exoplanets. The consensus was more that we don't have the information to stay one way or the other.
There are plenty of examples of when the scientific establishment was very wrong. Geologists didn't accept Wegener's theory of continental drift for many decades, and it wasn't until the 1980s that Warren and Marshall showed that most stomach ulcers and gastritis were caused by H. pylori infection, instead of the then-consensus view that they were caused by stress or spicy food.
The factors are not the same in the two comparisons.
It's people who develop these vaccines. These people have friends and family, with children. These children will be vaccinated. Why would they want to place these children at too high of a risk?
If your thesis is true, then you would expect that the children or grandchildren of pharmaceutical researchers are less likely to be inoculated. Do you think that's the case? Do you have any evidence for that?
(Personal anecdote: I once met a woman who worked at Glaxo-Wellcome, back before they became GSK. Once the chicken pox vaccine was available, she immediately got her daughter inoculated.)
There are many public health organizations besides the CDC. There's the WHO, and the public health organizations of different countries. The EU, for example, also has a very extensive set of requirements and oversight. So you can also look towards the UK, or Australia, to see what they think. (I picked English speaking countries to make it easier on you.)
There are significant differences between the CDC and NSA: 1) the NSA is institutionally secretive, while public health research is not, 2) the NSA staff are less likely to have an adverse effect by the NSA accessing their private data than the public at large, and 3) other espionage organizations, who are in the position of finding out what the NSA does, are also secretive and not likely to publish that information to the public.
I assume you considered these differences as part of your critical analysis. Why did you think they aren't significant?
