Check Your Externalities
Covid Vaccines Offer a Private Benefit, Which Should Make Vaccination a Private Decision.
It's been strange over these last few months listening to voices I highly respect come to the complete opposite conclusion on Covid Vaccine Mandates. These includes voices who cherish liberty as much or even more than I do, such as Tim Sandefur of the Goldwater Institute or the hosts of the Armstrong and Getty Show. Their arguments appear to rest on the external effects the unvaccinated may cause to society. They see the choice to vaccinate as a public one, since an unvaccinated individual risks spreading the disease to others and thus creating external negative effects to society. I believe I have determined the key assumption that has led us to different conclusions.
These thinkers often analogize Covid vaccine mandates to actions by George Washington to mandate Smallpox vaccination among his troops. Tim Sandefur has also compared Covid vaccines to vaccines for Measles.
But Covid is not Smallpox, Covid is not Measles. And their vaccines are NOT comparable.
The vaccines for Smallpox and Measles offer Lifelong, Sterilizing Immunity. Your chances of catching the disease after vaccination are minute, your chances of spreading the disease to others is negligible. These vaccines can be used to significantly suppress the diseases spread and even offer the chance for disease eradication, as is the case with Smallpox and as may someday be the case with Measles.
This is not the case with the Covid vaccines! This fact must be admitted! It changes the entire discussion of externalities.
As the CDC has admitted, and as the evidence from the UK and Israel prove, the Covid vaccine efficacy against infection wanes significantly over time. You can still catch the disease, and you can still spread it. The vaccine’s chief benefit then is a personal one, it offers strong efficacy in preventing hospitalization and death. However even this effect appears to wane which is why countries like Israel are already offering a third booster dose and why the US soon will as well.
Due to the nature of coronaviruses and the way they mutate, it's likely that no future vaccine for Covid will ever offer the benefits of a true vaccine like those for Smallpox or Measles barring a dramatic technological breakthrough.
There is a better analogy than Smallpox or Measles to compare the Covid vaccine to, the Flu Shot.
You can still catch and spread the flu after you get the annual shot, but it will help keep your symptoms more mild and help to keep you out of the hospital. Have we ever required Flu Shots for teachers? No!, even though Flu is significantly more dangerous to kids than Covid. We've also never mandated Flu shots to the general public because they don't offer strong enough protection to aid in disease suppression or eradication. Their benefit is mostly a private benefit, NOT a public benefit. The externalities of forgoing the Flu shot are minimal since Flu is (was?) an endemic virus which spreads widely through society every year.
All the same is true with Covid. So while we should recommend that everyone get the vaccine, take the booster, and take the annual Covid shot each fall once it's available, we should allow this decision to be private since the benefits are as well. Mandating this treatment is an affront to liberty, baring those from society who refuse it is unethical and won't help suppress Covid, and crossing this threshold risks losing liberties we will never reclaim.
Anyway 0 and 2…