Principled Perspectives: Vaccines

Showing posts with label Vaccines. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 19, 2021

Vaccine Mandates: What they Are, What They and Are Not, and Why Vaccines Should Not Be Mandated

The data is in: Vaccine mandates work, opines the New Jersey Star-Ledger Editorial Board (SLEB):

The numbers are in, and we hold this truth to be self-evident: COVID vaccine mandates work.

Or, if you prefer its prickly corollary: Where judgment and logic fail, employer mandates succeed, because the specter of job loss and financial hardship is apparently more persuasive than the threat of death.

This is the case in and around New Jersey, where data from health care and education sectors in our region is irrefutable: This tool works, and Gov. Murphy should use it to strengthen existing mandates and impose a passport system for public gatherings like the one used in New York City – because where persuasion fails, pressure works.

What “works” and what restrictions on our freedom are morally justified are two entirely different things. The statist stops at what works, measured by how many people comply. The statist isn’t concerned with the consequences to all other areas of citizens’ lives and rights. The Enlightened American starts with individual rights and considers all facts and weighs the long term consequences of diminished liberties the precedent sets before granting the state the power to mandate anything.

But next, we need to untangle the confusion about vaccine mandates embedded in this editorial.

Mirriam-Webster defines mandate as an act “to officially require (something) : make (something) mandatory.” As Star-Ledger columnist Paul Mulshine explains, there is a difference between a government order to get something and the “employer mandates” that the SLEB speaks of. An “employer mandate” is not a mandate at all. It’s a job requirement. As Mulshine points out,

If the government ordered all citizens to get vaccinated, that would indeed be a mandate. That happened in 1905 when the city of Cambridge, Mass, ordered all residents to get vaccinated or face a $5 fine. A few went to court to block the law, but the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the city.

Whatever you think of that law, it clearly qualifies as a mandate.

It’s different with workers. If an airline tells its employees that they have to get vaccinated against COVID, as United Airlines recently did, that’s not a mandate. It’s just one of many job requirements.

And as Mulshine also points out, “if for some reason . . . workers want to remain unvaccinated, that’s their right. But keeping their jobs isn’t.”

So, employers, whether private or government, have a valid right to require vaccines. But the Star-Ledger goes further. It urges the Governor to order all employers, public and private, to require vaccines via “a passport system” which would extend to all public gatherings. As SLEB editorial page editor Tom Moran reports elsewhere, the passport would apply to customers also and include all “restaurants and theaters and museums” regardless of the establishment's wishes.

That would indeed be a mandate. (As of this writing, NJ Governor Phil Murphy is resisting the pressure to mandate vaccines, perhaps because of the pending gubernatorial election.)

Which leads us to the question of whether such a mandate justifies the freedom restrictions that results from such a violation of individual rights.

My belief is no, it does not.

A vaccine protects the individual from contracting the disease, or if a breakthrough occurs, from a serious case of the illness. If the vaccinated is protected from the illness, he is by definition protected from the unvaccinated. So why mandate the vaccine? The unvaccinated are willingly taking the risk, but are not an inordinate threat to the vaccinated.

The SLEB is wrong in its terminology. It is correct to support employers’ right to voluntarily require vaccines as a condition of employment. It is wrong to call on the state to force such a requirement on unwilling employers. That is an unjustified restriction of our liberty, and liberty considerations -- the protection of individual rights -- comes first in any country that considers itself a free society.

NJ’s School/Vaccine Battle Need Not Pit Public Health Against Individual Rights

Moral Rights and Political Freedom—Tara Smith

On Mandatory Vaccinations, Protect Everyone’s Right to Object, Not Just Religionists’ Rights

Vaccine Exemption Bill Violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments, Fairness

Related Viewing:

Vaccine False Alternatives: Bribes vs. Mandates, by Elan Journo and Onkar Ghate, New Ideal Live

As an FYI, here is the text of Ayn Rand's statement about mandatory vaccination and quarantines:

"Now, requiring inoculation against disease: should this be a job for the government? Most definitely not and there is a very simple answer for it. If it is medically proved that a certain inoculation is in fact practical and desirable, those who want it will take that inoculation. Now if some people do not see it that way—do not agree or don’t want to take it, only they will be in danger since all the other people will be inoculated. Those who do not go along, if they are wrong in this case, will merely catch the disease. They will not be a danger to anyone else and nobody has the right to force them to do anything for their own good against their own judgement. They will merely be ill then, but they could not infect others.

“The next question in regard to quarantine is somewhat different, because in the state of, sense of a quarantine, if someone has a contagious disease, against which there is no inoculation, then the government will have the right to require quarantine. What is the principle here? It’s to protect those people who are not ill, to protect the people who, to prevent the people who are ill from passing on their illness to others. Here you are dealing with a demonstrable physical damage. Remember that in all issues of protecting someone from physical damage, before a government can properly act, there has to be a scientific, objective demonstration of an actual physical danger. If it is demonstrated, then the government can act to protect those who are not yet ill from contacting the disease, in other words to quarantine the people who are ill is not an interference with their rights, it is merely preventing them from doing physical damage to others.”

This is from a Q&A session during her lecture “America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business” in 1963. (An edited transcript of this is found on pp. 12-13 of Ayn Rand Answers, edited by Robert Mayhew.)

Wednesday, January 15, 2020

NJ’s School/Vaccine Battle Need Not Pit Public Health Against Individual Rights

New Jersey has been trying to pass a law that eliminates the religious exemption from its school vaccine mandate. Potent anti-vaccine activism has thus far stifled the bill. In The vaccine bill is an adequate compromise. For now, the New Jersey Star-Ledger editorializes:

It’s been 115 years since the Supreme Court ruled that states can mandate vaccines to protect the public health, and 98 years since the court ruled that learning institutions could exclude unvaccinated students from attending schools in their districts.

Every challenge to both rulings has been swept aside, apparently due to a cosmic awakening to the wonders of indisputable medical science. Or perhaps it was just common sense: In 1900, 30 percent of all deaths in the US were children less than 5 years of age. Today, it’s barely 1 percent, because children who would have previously died from childhood infections live full lives now, thanks to vaccines and antibiotics.

So it is with some ambivalence that we hope both chambers pass the vaccine bill Monday [1/13/2020].

It isn’t the mandatory compliance bill that lawmakers had promised for nearly a decade, because the anti-vax forces brought their percussion instruments and windy cascade of First Amendment rhetoric to Trenton to blow open a loophole that may not benefit anyone at all.

The compromise bill “allows private schools or day care centers to accept unvaccinated children.”

I posted the following comments:

I’m always suspicious when science is used to push a political agenda. Science is not an infallible omniscient authority. Science should be consulted when making law, but only in conjunction with the broader picture. For example, individual rights, the foundation of free societies, should always overlay the law. Rights are not mere “rhetoric.” Properly understood, individual rights are inviolable. They are crucial protectors against all forms of tyranny. With that perspective, some points:

Individual rights means equality of rights. For both 1st and 14th Amendment reasons, there should never be a strictly religious exemption from any law. If there be exemptions, it should extend to all conscientious objectors, religious or non-religious.

2. Schools public or private have the right to establish entry requirements, including vaccine requirements. Parents’ right not to vaccinate their kids does not mean the “right” to force a school to risk infecting other kids.

3. But if kids are excluded from a school, the parents should not be forced to pay for that school. This is clear with respect to private schools. But the same should go for public schools. If a kid is excluded from a public school, the education tax dollars should follow the unvaccinated kid to whatever alternative the parents choose.

I side with the vaccine requirement. I believe science should always be consulted, and its clear to me that vaccine benefits far outweigh the risks, both regarding personal health and the health and rights of others. But individual rights should always be respected and protected as well. On this basis, there is a compromise that can protect both “public health” and individual rights; a vaccine mandate coupled with parental school choice.

Rights “properly understood” means every individual has the right to live by his/her own judgement so long as his actions don’t violate the same rights of others. Clearly, walking around with an airborne infectious disease crosses the line into other peoples’ rights.

On Monday, January 13, 2020, the bill failed to pass. It is now dead, as the current legislative session is over. The bill will have to be reintroduced in the next session and begin the approval process anew. State Senate President Stephen Sweeney vowed to get the bill passed eventually.