Republican flag-waving and hooting about “freedom” notwithstanding, vaccine mandates “have been around since the very first days of the republic, claiming broad support and withstanding legal challenges,” a story on Huffington Post notes (read it here), adding, “This isn’t because officials or judges are ignoring freedom. It’s because they believe vaccination is a key to securing it.”
“In fact, among those who support vaccine requirements today are some well-known conservative judges and libertarian scholars ― in other words, precisely the sort of people you would expect to protest government overreach most vociferously. A basic justification for vaccine mandates is that your freedom doesn’t include the freedom to endanger the rest of your community. The principle is a bedrock of democratic philosophy and the American legal tradition, with courts applying it to a variety of contexts including public health,” the article says.
“You can’t walk around assaulting people just because you feel like it’s an important part of your self-expression,” a Michigan law professor says. “We require kids to get vaccinated for all sorts of illnesses before they go to public school. Otherwise, their bodies could be used as vectors to harm others.”
“People are not entitled to harm innocents or to impose deadly risks on others,” a Virginia professor known as a libertarian ethicist wrote back in 2013, before anyone had heard of Covid-19. She cited the example of laws against celebrating July 4 by firing guns in the air, because the bullets could strike someone.
Another libertarian professor, “whom nobody would mistake for a fan of government power,” also supports vaccine mandates. “The issue here is not just that it saves lives, … and not just those of the vaccinated people themselves. It also protects others in the community. That makes it different from primarily paternalistic restrictions on liberty,” he says.
Another libertarian talking about Covid-19 vaccinations says, “In my view, people have the right to harm themselves by making bad choices. This is about protecting others from the undue risk of harm you impose upon them by being unvaccinated.”
Last week, a federal court upheld a public university’s student vaccine mandate. The unanimous opinion was written by a Reagan-appointed conservative judge.
As the Huffington Post article pointed out, current vaccine mandates aren’t “requirements per se, but rather conditions for some kind of voluntary activity.” You don’t have to work for a given employer, attend that university, or go to a restaurant or bar. And there often are exceptions for people with legitimate objections to getting vaccinated, and alternatives for those who don’t want to (e.g., frequent testing). “In the eyes of the law, nothing under discussion is actually a mandate, in the sense of a government command backed up by coercion,” the law professor said.
But government could require mandatory vaccination. That might happen if, say, a “doomsday” variant appears “that shrugs off vaccines, spreads like wildfire and leaves more of its victims much sicker than anything we’ve yet seen.” Scientists still consider the odds of that happening to be fairly low, but aren’t ruling it out, partly because of Covid-19’s trajectory so far: Each new variant is more contagious and virulent than the last. (See story here.) What if involuntary mass vaccination was the only way to prevent catastrophe?
Some people undoubtedly will still beat the “freedom and liberty” drum. But being in a hospital bed hooked up to a ventilator isn’t freedom, and being dead isn’t liberating in any sense. We can debate whether government ought to protect private citizens from their own ignorance or stupidity. But government’s right to protect others from such people shouldn’t be debatable. That’s one of government’s most basic functions. On that point, even conservative and libertarian thinkers agree.
Related article: “Vaccine mandates are lawful, effective and based on rock-solid science,” a Scientific American article says (read it here).
Then these folks are not true libertarians whose interests are the freedom for the individual to the maximum. Vaccine mandates attack the foundations of libertarianism. It suggests that libertarians must take into account anything they do that may harm another,
A libertarian does not have a responsibility to be overly concerned about the pollutants from his car or horse, From his or her tanning factory. If you can get away with wood rather than actual cinnamon then you are merely a clever and richer merchant as the buyer should beware ….
True libertarians are bastards and most know it and because they wish a measure of being liked by their fellow man lie about their creed, rather than be the misanthropes they must be if they truly believe in their political theory rather than dress it up all pretty. They are misanthropes but necessary ones least government have too much power. Libertarians and conservatives should work a bit harder about the individual rights and those rights under our Constitution are paramount and the slight risk A may give B who is over 60 and has an underlying condition that may do them in any day or month or year does not trump that individuals right to not take the vaccine and to be able to eat, go to work, go to school ect. …
[This comment has been edited. Some typos have been corrected, and a quantity of irrelevant and/or inaccurate commentary was removed.]
You’re wrong. The risk of Covid-19 infection isn’t slight — this wouldn’t be a pandemic if it was — a world-class epidemiologist calls the Delta variant “maybe the most contagious virus” of all time (story here). Its transmission rate is so high that other medical experts have warned every unvaccinated person in America will become infected. Those now being hospitalized and dying are nearly all unvaccinated and are predominantly young, many under age 35, and now many children are getting it and pediatric hospital wards are filling up with Covid-19 patients.