I will agree with this. Refusing to treat communicable diseases, and willfully allowing them to spread, should be treated the same as deliberately infecting people with them.
However, would you agree that when immunization is mandatory, the government is morally and legally responsible for the consequences of side-effects of those immunizations? Salk's vaccine left a lot of children crippled and more modern vaccines still leave a small percentage of children autistic.
In fact, a very tiny percentage of children
die from immunizations, and nearly all kids get sick from them, to one degree or another, at least for a few days; feverish, fussy and cranky.
It's scary to have your kids immunized, but it's necessary. It's one of those things where you have to take a miniscule chance with your childrens' lives in order both to protect society from communicable disease
and to protect your kids from a bigger risk- the risk of contracting these diseases later in life.
Although there have been rumors of autism resulting from the MMR vaccine (measles, mumps, rubella), there is not a definitive causal link.
The MMR vaccine is usually given at about 12-15 months of age; that is also about the time when symptoms of autism first become apparent (because the child is not reaching the expected developmental milestones).
Corellation does not, however, equal causation.
True, more cases of autism have been diagnosed in recent years, but that does not mean there
are more cases of autism; it might just as easily indicate that many cases went undiagnosed or misdiagnosed in previous eras.
I've met an amazing number of people lately who supposedly have Asperger's Syndrome (a high-functioning autism), and they seem normal to me. A little quirky, perhaps, but not what
I'd think of as "autistic".
It's perfectly possible that until the 90s, people on the higher-functioning end of the autism spectrum were simply not recognized as suffering from any diagnosable or treatable pathology, and if anything were simply thought of as being a little bit eccentric or idiosyncratic.