Why Covid Vaccine Mandates Are Terrible Policy
Never Give Up a little Liberty for a little Security
As Covid Media Panic continues to ramp up this summer, New York City has become the first municipality to mandate covid vaccines. For now this is limited to entry into restaurants and gyms, but we can expect this policy to expand across the nation in both breadth and scope, regardless of the outcomes in New York. Many see this as a smart policy, which will reduce vaccine hesitancy thus increasing vaccine uptake and finally bring the Covid Crisis to an end. If nothing else they see it as better than the alternative of having to reissue universal mask mandates. This is a false choice.
The imposition of mandatory covid vaccination as a prerequisite to participate in routine day to day activities will not bring an end to Covid anymore than masking has, and it's adoption, if not forcefully rejected by the public, represents a sharp precipice on the slippery slope towards ubiquitous government intrusion into our lives and Chi-Com style "social credit" tyranny.
Simply put, Covid Vaccination Mandates are unnecessarily intrusive, impractical, and will be ineffective.
Intrusive
It must be admitted upfront that the requirement to provide personal medical information during routine day to day activities would be an all together foreign process for Americans. This is not the same as showing your ID, or even providing a Passport when you travel. Those activities simply ask you to prove you are you you say you are. It's also not the same as having your credit score run, or a background check performed before you apply for a loan or are hired for a job. While more intrusive, these probes relate directly to the interests of the counter-party in a private transaction. This isn't the case with a vaccine mandate.
While there may be a general public interest in greater vaccine uptake, the specific interests of any given restraunteer or gym owner are little impacted by whether or not any given patron is vaccinated. Even if some business owners may seek to do business only with the vaccinated, leave it to the public and they will find an owner who is interested in upholding civil liberties to do business with instead. Nothing like this has been asked of the public before, especially by government diktat. The mandate to produce private medical information showing vaccination status is a wholly unique imposition on our private lives.
Now you may say that in a pandemic, “it's of all our interests to know your medical status because you could be contagious and there is a deadly virus on the loose, and therefore we must know your vaccination status!” The flaws in this argument are multifaceted.
First and foremost, the vaccine offers fantastic personal protection against poor outcomes from Covid, so why must we impose them on others? The vaccinated are protective, why are you worrying about the status of anyone else? Just as important is that vaccination status is only a crude proxy for the more crucial information as to whether a person is currently carrying a virus and thus infectious. In the last week this fact has been made all the more clear, based on the CDC's own admission.
Vaccinated individuals can still spread the virus, to a lesser degree for sure, but this is no longer a strict binary, it's a sliding scale of risk. And it's a flawed scale at that! Indeed, many of the unvaccinated will actually be the least at risk, those being the previously infected. By the day, the science becomes clearer as to the superiority of natural immunity compared to what the vaccines offer. A strict vaccine mandate also excludes the growing number of individuals who took only a single shot of the two dose vaccines (for a host of legitimate reasons) which offers nearly the same protection as a double vax. The mandate also excludes children, who are at no risk themselves from Covid, and who spread the disease far less than adults. And regardless of vaccination status, the presence or lack of covid symptoms is still a much better determinate of current contagiousness. The fact is, even during an outbreak in an area of high community spread the vast majority of asymptomatic individuals, regardless of vaccinated status, will not be infected.
Still, if your argument is that a pandemic demands strict measures be taken to "slow the spread", why stop at the arbitrary line of vaccination? Testing should still be required to determine whether you have the virus. Symptom checks are essential. And it's not like Covid is the only infectious disease out there. Let's put herpes and HIV tests on the lists! Hell, while we're at it, we better put our masks on, just to be safe...
We all know this is impractical because "slowing the spread" has always been a fantasy. We allow the "Illusion of Control" to blind us from seeing how little we can do to stop this virus from spreading. Watch over the next months as cases in the south start to ebb for seemingly no reason, and then watch as cases in Northern states, trying as they might to stop it, see their case rates rise just the same this fall. We just aren't in charge like we pretend to be.
So why the arbitrary line at vaccination then?, the answer to this is simple. Mandating vaccines isn't really about creating safer facilities. How could it be?, everyone there is already safe, they're all vaccinated for crying out loud! Adding unvaccinated persons to the mix doesn't change anything for the vaccinated group. The real goal of vaccine mandates is to create enough friction and impediments in everyday life for those that remain unvaccinated that they are coerced into getting the vaccine, which brings us to...
Practicality
Are you really going to start carrying around your vaccine card everywhere you go? The dang thing doesn't even fit in your wallet! Some states like New York are already demoing apps so you can avoid that trouble. But now you need to install a government run cell phone app on your phone, and I'm sure that won't come with any other intrusions on your privacy... Plus this might get you set up in your local area, but what about the next time you travel? Are we expecting a federal based countrywide vaccine mandate surveillance system, gee that sounds swell!
More likely we will end up with metrowide, statewide, and regional apps. So if you travel frequently you'll end up with a plethora of apps on your phone. All with different requirements, different passwords, different End User License Agreements, which all need to be updated, at different times. It'll be like our strange quilt of automated road toll systems except more intrusive, with less privacy and with even less point to it.
Heck, this isn't a hypothetical. I'm traveling to NYC next weekend, and I had no plans to bring my vaccination card? Why would I? It's a private medical record. And when I get to NYC will that even be good enough? I hear they are using the Excelsior Pass phone app, should I download that app? Will it even be able to look up Vaccination Records from California? And if so, how in the hell does a New York based cell phone app already have access to my medical records which I was assured were private? And what's the purpose of this again? So I can feel safe in a restaurant with only vaccinated people? I don't need this! I work everyday with unvaccinated people, and I couldn't care less. The vaccines offer fantastic individual protection, so if someone else is choosing not to receive that protection it's a problem for them, not for me, and vice versa. Why would we ever buy into a liberty restricting system like this, expecting it to produce a favorable outcome? Which leads to the final issue...
Inefficacy
Trust in our public health systems is at an all time low, does anyone doubt that the imposition of vaccine mandates will worsen this situation? Yes, there is no doubt that vaccine mandates will coax some healthy young adults who haven't gotten around to getting a vaccine into scheduling their shots. They've seen no need as of yet, but if they need it to get back into the club they might make it a priority. But let's face it, those folks don't really need the shot anyway. It's the middle aged and elderly holdouts who we are really trying to reach. These are the folks who haven't gotten the vaccine not because they aren't at risk, and not because they think Covid is a hoax, but because they don't trust our public health officials.
And why would they? These folks have been lied to for going on 18 months now, and what are the odds that the one thing our Public Health Betters aren't lying about is the vaccine. Reaching these folks requires building back trust, it will take time, and government mandates won't help this process. Coercive government policies will make it harder to reach these folks as it will work to separate them from society. I'd much rather meet up and converse openly with an at risk unvaccinated individual hoping to convince him that he should get vaccinated, then to shun him from society hoping that these restrictions will strong-arm him into taking the shot. Coercion will not work on these folks.
Will a vaccine mandate lead to a drop in cases? Possibly, to some degree, but if one looks at highly vaccinated regions of the country, such as San Francisco or Austin, TX, or highly vaccinated countries like the UK and Israel it's clear that vaccines are not a panacea.
Cases have risen in these regions even as they hit vaccination numbers which the US as a whole will likely never hit. There is no magical cure to Covid. And it's not like the unvaccianted members of our society will cease to exist. Forcing those that choose to remain unvaccinated out of public life will only create a two class society. A society where those more at risk of infection have only themselves to congregate with. Are we really better off having all the vaccinated and unvaccinated segregated instead of having us evening dispersed throughout society?
It would seem that in the end all Mandating Vaccines will do is lower the risk of Covid transmission at certain establishments, while at the same time raising the risk of transmission in other places, all in the hopes that it will inconvenience enough people to raise vaccine uptake. It won't work.
We seem stuck in the belief that if only enough people would get vaccinated this damn disease would finally disappear. But we need to let that dream go, the virus is here to stay, the end game is endemism. But it also won't be a problem going forward. Even now, in places such as Florida being hit worst by the current Southern summer wave, death rates are near pandemic lows and not dissimilar from a bad flu outbreak. And this will only get milder as population immunity improves naturally.
We will get to see this experiment being run. Just as heavily masked regions of the country didn't outperform more maskless regions last year, again we are going to see how states which impose vaccine mandates fare against states that refuse them.
Florida will be a great test case. They are nearing the peak of their summer Covid wave, all while their Governor stands as a bulwark against any restrictions on the liberties of his state's citizens made in the name of public health. In a month, when cases in Florida are plummeting, and the media moves on to the next "crisis", don't forget to compare and contrast the experience of Florida with the experience of states like New York who restrict their citizen's civil liberties with mandates.
At every stage of this pandemic, from "15 days to low the spread", through mask mandates, and school shutdowns, our Public Health Better have always held out the next intrusive measure as the last. "It's just a temporary business closure to slow the spread","Just wear a mask and the virus will go away in 8 weeks'', "Just get vaccinated and life will return to normal". Each time the intervention has failed only to be replaced with something more intrusive. Imagine what will come next, once the government has their hands on a tool that can influence and coerce the public through direct restriction on your day to day activities? If you think this ends with the Covid shot you haven't been paying enough attention the last 18 months. We're already a long way down the road to serfdom.
Outside of China (if you believe the Chi-Com narrative) authoritarianism is still batting .000 against Covid. Maybe instead of taking another swing with vaccine mandates, we can just call it a day and pick a new game to play.
Covid Vaccine Mandates represent a choice as to whether we hold our trust in the liberty of our fellow citizens or in our government to restrict them. As Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis said today,
"We can have a free Society, or We can have a Biomedical Security State."
Or even more simply, remember your Benjamin Franklin:
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
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