EmilyD wrote:
So you are advocating that everyone be mandated to get the shot? That personal choice (yours) should not matter? What about people who have religious and medical reasons for not getting it? Are their reasons just to be thrown out the window? And if those people are declared exempt from the mandate, will they be mandated to live apart from everyone else?
If people start having reactions to the inoculation, will the government then start paying for their (your) medical costs? (It won't do that now). Will pharmaceutical companies then become liable for severe reactions and death...will people (you) be able to sue them? (Can't do that now either.)
Once people accept a mandate over personal choice, will the government take control of other aspects of their (your) lives?
So you are advocating that everyone be mandated to... (
show quote)
I like this post because it brings up a lot of interesting questions.
There's not much to disagree with yet, because it's nearly all phrased as questions.
I'm going to give my own answers to your questions.
1. "... everyone be mandated ...": Maybe.
2. "... choice ...": If the "personal choice" were to affect _only_ that person, then I'd prefer not to mandate. But it does not affect only that person. It affects a great many people, because the virus spreads and mutates among the population (mostly among unvaccinated people) (affecting the entire population because of the whole situation).
3. "...religious and medical reasons...": There could be a great variety of religious reasons, from a great variety of religions (because we don't mandate any particular religion). A religious reason would be a problem if it were to affect people who don't subscribe to it. A religious person's right to harbor a dangerous, and mutating, virus, does affect others.
4. "...thrown...": I happen to know of at least one medical reason which should not be just "thrown out the window"; that's the one about mercury in a preservative in some doses of some vaccines (e.g., some flu vaccines, at least in the past). Mercury is potentially dangerous or toxic. This is an example of a reason which should be respected; but in this case the end result doesn't have to be that the person doesn't get vaccinated; the person could be given a dose which does not contain mercury. With enough respect going around, pharmaceutical companies would find ways to produce vaccine doses without harmful preservatives, and the public would be informed about such things (and not just deluged with advertisements and vacuous absolute statements).
5. "...apart...": I think that's the logical result, yes. For example: If there's a person with poor health habits, who tends to spread diseases such as the common cold, who touches lots of food he doesn't buy in grocery stores, who coughs a lot, and refuses to wear a mask, and refuses to get vaccinated in a pandemic, then yes we ought to have some way of reducing the harm that that person does to the rest of us.
6. "...government...paying...": I'd like that. To get that, we'd need something like universal health care coverage, which is a sensible idea. But if we were to reject such solutions as universal health care coverage, then of course we can't require the government to pay for reactions to the inoculation. And that does not change that the government might still need to mandate universal or near-universal vaccination, if the overall effect weighs heavily on the side of saving the health of the nation (or world) as a whole. (It might be only a very small percentage who have significant adverse reactions to the vaccine, and it might be unpredictable who that will be.)
7. "...pharmaceutical companies ... liable...": That should depend on negligence. If a pharmaceutical company had an honest option and a dishonest option, and chose the dishonest option, then I think suing it should be an option. To do that you might need a government regulating the pharmaceutical industry. If it's just one individual person trying to prove in court what a pharmaceutical company did and why it should result in a successful lawsuit, then the person is likely to just die before winning such a lawsuit. The individual people could band together to do something, but that's either a union or a government (and even a union is like a little government entity). I'm in favor of a government, which represents the interests of the people at large, regulating the pharmaceutical companies. And if it does that job poorly, then make it do it better.
8. "... other aspects ...": There is a "social contract" or "general agreement" that people have to cooperate in some ways. Government is related to that. The social contract and/or the government regulates some things but not all things. (I think that's generally been true throughout world history.). Where might we draw the line, theoretically, between what a people's government should regulate and what it shouldn't? I'd probably draw that line somewhat like this: the government should protect the public spaces so that all can use them safely (or with some kind of safety and some degree of safety); but the government should stay out of the personal things which only affect the individuals who do them.