>And so you are calling for a War on Tobacco, much like the War on Drugs - at least that's what it sounds like. How many billions of dollars (euros, yen, pick yer type o'cash) shall the world spend on such a war only to end up creating Tobacco Cartels (just like the Drug Cartels, only more so!) and get no where quickly - oh, except MORE people smoking because it's outlawed and reversing the trend of the last 20 years or so (at least in the States, iirc)
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>Personally, I'm all for vaccines that block/stop/eradicate major diseases and (possibly) some cancers. If you don't want your children vaccinated, fine - but your insurance should then have the right to not cover your childen if/when they contract polio, whooping cough, measles, mumps, etc. And no, that's not advocating forced immunizations - it's expecting the ADULTS to accept the consequences of their decisions - and I'll even state now that no, the children don't deserve these diseases, but hey! talk to your parents. They're the ones who made that (un)informed decision.

It's the "(un)informed" part that I'm not sure of in this case, actually in both cases - vaccines and smoking. The research on smoking seems to be mostly politics, smoke and mirrors; first the manufacturers paid the research to prove it was good for you, then the tide turned and there was this huge orchestrated campaign against smoking. By the looks of both campaigns, I died twice already - once because I didn't smoke until age of 20, next time about ten years ago, when the other campaign calculated I should have died from smoking. I guess I have an illusion that I don't even cough. From what I have read, the whole connection between smoking and lung cancer is tenuous, the research was not repeated nor rechecked, and there were serious cases of fraud, where they'd show a dead miner's lungs as example of smoker's etc. OTOH, since so many people stopped smoking in the last 20 years (I know dozens - and I don't know any smoker who got lung cancer; I knew a lot of people who died of other kinds of cancer), where are the boastful statistics on how the lung cancer is vanishing?

Ditto for gardasil and several other vaccines. It seems that it goes without saying that they do what they are supposed to do, and are completely harmless. Why have then the manufacturers bought a law that you can't sue them if you get sick or die from it? Why did they first deny that there's a mercury compound used as preservative, then said "it's not used anymore", then "it's actually harmless"? If the vaccines were made by a non-profit, or a state controlled institute with strict quality control, then yes, maybe I'd trust them. But these are made for profit, by big pharma, and their whistleblowers or ex-staff have already gone public with their horror stories. One even says "no vaccine is clean".

And they also don't really work as advertised. Our kids got vaccinated against pertussis before enrolling into public schools in the US (1999, i.e. before all those stories came out, when there was no public doubt about vaccines yet), and voila, within a year or two they got pertussis.

As for gardasil itself, my wife did some research (i.e. found stuff on the web) - the number of cases where it hurt (serious disease, disability, possibly death) is far larger than the number of cases it should have prevented. Statistics...