I earlier noted a couple of articles about smallpox vaccination. This strikes me as good logic:

"We live in a society that values individual choice," said Julie L. Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "If we have vaccine and we have data to accurately assess the safety, one school of thought is that informed people may want to have the choice of getting vaccine or not."

Let's hear it for free choice!

Update
Or did she mean, and say something slightly different?

Dr. Gerberding said, absent a smallpox attack, or the imminent threat of one, she still felt the vaccine's benefits do not outweigh its risks for the general public. But, she said: "We recognize that individual citizens feel that if they understand the risks and benefits of the vaccine, they may choose to have it."

Anyway, both articles point out the risk of dying is (literally) one in a million, while the NYT also points out that the non-life-threatening complications (a 15 in a million chance) include blindness.