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this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
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If vaccinations only protected the person being vaccinated and didn't protect anyone else, I'd say "let people decide whether or not to be vaccinated."! It would still be the better idea to vaccinate, but I'd be fine (in that theoretical world) with them choosing not to vaccinate.
However, I also believe that your right to swing your fist ends at my face. People don't have the right to do things that actively hurt others. Not getting vaccinated means that you can transmit highly infectious and deadly diseases. Deciding not to vaccinate could mean that a person is deciding that other people will die.
Apart from valid medical reasons (e.g. autoimmune disorders or allergic reactions to vaccine components), people shouldn't be able to opt out. In a society, we often curb the individual liberties to protect people. I'm not free to decide to drive drunk and it's not because I could hurt myself by doing so. If I drove drunk, I could hurt other people and so it's illegal.
Civil suits could be the answer, except it's nearly impossible to prove that Timmy got measles when he passed by Jane in aisle B31 of Target. The level of contact tracing that would be required to absolutely prove this would be orders of magnitude more invasive than vaccines.
We shouldn't allow "personal freedom" to skip vaccinations with the trade-off being other people's lives.
We do let people make decisions that put others at risk, if that risk is small enough. You use drunk driving as an example of something which is illegal because it can hurt other people, but driving at all can hurt other people. Someone who drives a lot every day is more likely to accidentally harm another person than someone who doesn't drive. Despite this, driving is legal and simply choosing to drive (as opposed to breaking traffic laws or driving recklessly) doesn't make the driver liable if he hurts someone.
Is being unvaccinated more like drunk driving or like driving at all, in terms of the risk to others? I haven't done the math but I expect that it's more like driving at all, and IMO it would have to be a lot more dangerous than ordinary driving in order to justify the inherently onerous requirement of undergoing a mandatory medical procedure.
Driving does require licensing, though. You need to register with the state to say that you can drive. This license can be revoked if you don't drive safely. If you drive without a valid license, you can get in a lot of legal hot water.
Vaccination might be compared to driving without a license. Let's say you let one person drive without a license because they promised to drive safely. They might be fine and not cause any accidents. This is analogous to a small number of anti-vaxxers not getting sick/spreading illness because they are still covered by herd immunity.
However, as more people are allowed to drive without a license, more accidents would happen. This would be especially true if we allowed people exceptions to things like speed limits and driving on the sidewalk because their "sincerely held religious beliefs" state that they are allowed to do this. At that point, we'd have a lot of accidents and a lot of people being hurt.
There are a lot of regulations around driving (licensing, road rules, yearly car inspections) that are onerous in an effort to keep driving as safe as possible. Getting rid of those regulations "for personal freedom" would cause many, many deaths. Allowing people to just refuse vaccinations for any reason would also cause many, many deaths.