Axiological Pluralism and Health Claims as a Challenge to the Democratic Principle. The Cases of Non-Validated Therapies and Vaccinations

The paper aims at investigating how much room legal orders leave for individual positions on health unsupported by scientific evidence. This analysis requires to properly balance individual rights and freedoms with the need to set general public health rules. To this aim, the paper focuses on two paradigmatic issues, fiercely discussed during recent years both in Europe (in particular in Italy) and in the U.S.: non-validated therapies and vaccines. A critical reading of these two topics allows concluding that axiological pluralism—entailing different visions of health and mainly derived from misinformation, emotional involvement or distrust— is sustainable only to a certain extent. Beyond that threshold, scientific rigorousness, the need to protect vulnerable subjects, and considerations about justice (equality and resource allocation) require selecting individual claims, transposing only some of them from the realm of human needs to the terrain of actionable legal rights.