3507 wrote:
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.
I like this post because it brings up a lot of int... (
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1. "Maybe" wouldn't work.
2. Of course
personal choice only affects that one person! (??) And taking away that person's freedom to choose is unconstitutional.
3. Religious people have a serious commitment to their faith and their belief. To force them to forego those sacred beliefs would be considered sacrilegious. They would not do it. Then what? They get arrested?? Besides, it is against the First Amendment that says:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Mandating a vaccine that goes against their faith would be prohibiting their free exercise of their religions.
4. Medical problems should not be taken lightly or ignored by people who are giving the injections. In most cases, those people (think of an employee at a CVS) don't have access to the person's medical history, and don't pass out the information sheets from the pharmaceutical companies that list the warnings to consider when taking the injection. People who have had serious medical problems would be much more susceptible to even more problems if they were forced to be inoculated. For instance, people with pulmonary weakness (have had pneumonia, lung disease, serious smoker), heart disease (such as people who have had bypass surgery...
all of them have compromised oxygen supply to their bodies since their repaired hearts no longer function at 100% capacity), cancer, diabetes, obesity, blood disease, etc.
Mercury is one very good reason to reject this unapproved, untested, gene-manipulation inoculation. M-RNA is another very big concern. No one (no one!!!) knows how it will affect humans down the road!
5. I don't believe, and I doubt many Americans do either, that these people who have a great risk of dying or having their quality of life greatly reduced if they are forced to put a toxic drug cocktail into their bodies should be punished by forcing them to live apart. It would be too much like Hitler's concentration camps. If this were the Bubonic Plague, I might think differently, but it's not. Far from it.
6. If it is ok for the government to mandate everyone be inoculated, yet not be held financially responsible if something goes wrong, seems Draconian to me. I suppose that goes along with culling the herd that Bill Gates and others condone. Who needs sick people and old people who are just a drain on society anyway. (/sarc.)
It might be a small percentage of people who have adverse reactions and/or die, or it might be a large percentage....we don't know that now, and won't know it for several years. Experts say it is standard procedure to test a vaccine for 5-7 years to prove its safety and effectiveness. M-RNA has been tested with 100% unsuccessful results since 1987. (Every single lab animal that has been used in testing it have died so far!) Those currently being vaccinated are guinea pigs in a huge clinical trial. I believe that to be a fact, not my opinion.
7. It's nice to
think the pharmaceutical companies should take responsibility, but the bottom line is they don't. In fact, they will bend over backwards to avoid it...and they have all kinds of disclaimers to prove it. I believe that if people are allowed to sue them, they will go out of business, hearing how many people have already had serious reactions and/or died. (BTW, if a person is likely to die before a lawsuit is finished, their families take over...that's standard practice when a sick person who might die sues someone.)
8. A "social contract"?? Where is that found? Where can I find this "general agreement"? If the government starts to regulate mandates, then our country's fundamental legal structure....the Constitution....will become invalid. Government by the people for the people will be gone, and all of us will be controlled by the whims of whoever the "Dictator Du Jour" is. If the government is granted control over our personal choices, it will become a slippery slope where that control will expand and expand until approval for all our personal choices will be mandated. Once they discover they can control us (which they've already started doing by mandating lockdowns and mask wearing), they won't stop just there. Mandating this by decree will lead to so many more problems for Americans than they are already facing. Also, can they mandate a drug that has not been approved by the FDA? I suppose they will pull whatever strings are necessary to get that done before it should be (or override it somehow), in order to proceed with the mandated decree.
Added: Covid has a 98% recovery rate. It's variants will most likely have that stat as well. Mandating people to be vaccinated for something they have a 98% chance of getting over by just staying at home, relaxing and letting it ride it's course, is excessive...even extreme. My opinion is that something else is at work here, and it's not rocket science to figure it out. In one word: Control. The government is becoming larger and larger, and moving away from the "by the people for the people" concept that our country was founded upon. Mandating this injection would be the beginning of the end of America as we know it.