>>>>But why should someone -- an adult, specifically -- have to lie to avoid taking a shot the government thinks is a good idea? If the government wants to do an information campaign saying we think this shot is a good idea for you to get, and here's why, that's one thing. But making it a requirement to attend college? Humbug.
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>>>It's a public health issue, like requiring restaurant workers to wash their hands after using the bathroom. If the number of people immunized goes below a certain level, the system fails.
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>>>FWIW, college dorms are well-known as incubators of all kinds of diseases. (Get your mind out of the gutter-not just those. <g>) Even without it being the law, our docs pushed very strongly for my boys to have certain vaccines before they went off to school.
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>>>I'm curious, too, whether what Tracy posted is the law for all college students or for those attending a state college. IOW, is it the college's regulation and, in this case, the college happens to be the state? I know Yale definitely had some rules about what vaccinations we had to prove. (Can't remember for Amherst--it was too long ago.)
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>>I think it's quite an extension to equate this with requiring restaurant workers to wash their hands. (Which they don't always anyway, as any fan of Seinfeld knows <g>).
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>>We don't need to debate this. I am pretty sure that as good Democrats we have an honest difference of opinion about the proper roles of government.
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>I'm fine with not debating it, but there is a whole interesting question about where public health ends and private choices begin. It overlaps with the smoking ban question, which can certainly be framed as an issue of protecting workers.
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It can be framed that way, and has been. Overall I am very much on the side of private choices. I don't like citizens being forced to do things because some bureaucrat thinks it's a good idea.