12/18/2023 0 Comments Examples of harm principlePeople need as much solid reliable data to make an informed decision. 99.97% chance of being fatal for the average person does not constitute breaking and defying anybody’s liberties. There has to be proper reporting and documentation. How about we demand how many of the actual deaths being reported are caused by Covid. This is for a virus that kills less people than the flu. These are experimental drugs being released with no data on what the long term and multi generational affects are. Not all but the most “effective” vaccines include cell mutating RNA. The fact that all of these are being released with emergency clearance from the government for the FDA. If cigarettes are regulated because of the risk of secondhand smoke, encouraging COVID vaccination seems like a no-brainer. But let’s also accept that we must allow for the prospect that the state might have a role to play here. I would much rather peacefully and comfortably comb the aisles of Walmart and Costco without a mask but with my vaccination certificate.įreedom and responsibility are tied at the hip, and we are at the point where we must individually agree to act swiftly and responsibly to help save lives – let’s get vaccinated as soon as possible and save the lives of others. Private businesses should take the same steps. Care to enter a public building? You need to document you’ve been vaccinated. Want a driver’s license? Show me your COVID vaccination. One might even use the rather unpopular word “nudge”. But just as schools require children to be vaccinated before attending, it seems to me that requiring a COVID vaccine for certain activities is a way to “encourage” such behavior. Should those of us who defend liberty endorse the idea that the state should set up mandatory vaccination clinics and drag people out of their homes in the night to vaccinate them? Obviously not. While this runs contrary to the intuition one might expect, individuals who reject the vaccine are obviously violating the harm principle. So for those of us who defend the concept of liberty, vaccines seem to be an example where perhaps the state can and should use its coercive power to force citizens to be vaccinated, assuming the vaccine is deemed safe and effective. By not getting vaccinated individuals make hitting the herd immunity threshold a longer and more difficult goal to achieve, putting others directly at risk. The harm principle states that the only reason to restrict the actions of individuals is to prevent harm to others. However, libertarians and liberty-minded individuals also very much believe in John Stuart Mill’s “ harm principle ”. So what should a liberty-minded person think about the role that the state should play in getting the public as widely vaccinated as soon as possible? Initially, one might believe that a libertarian would make this an individual decision – a person has the right to decide to do what she sees as best. As I have noted elsewhere, at the moment public trust in our political leadership is not especially high, for good reasons. Public officials have to convince the public that the vaccine is effective in helping to solve the pandemic and safe. Īnd yet as Ron Bailey over at Reason has adroitly noted – vaccines don’t in and of themselves solve the problem unless the vaccinations are widespread enough to help achieve herd immunity. If you think vaccines cause autism you’re just dead wrong. I don’t need to make a lengthy case that such beliefs fly in the face of reality, so I won’t. Just last year before the pandemic hit there was a lot of discussion about the problems that have arisen as a result of the decisions by so-called “anti vaxxers-” those who refuse to take vaccines or have them administered to their children for either religious reasons or because they doubt the veracity of the science behind them. Three former presidents- Clinton, Bush and Obama- have all volunteered to receive the vaccine live in order to reassure the public over its safety. The bad news is that public distrust about the safety and efficacy of the vaccine is surprisingly widespread and it’s particularly high among African-Americans, according to NPR. The good news? We have several very promising vaccines that should be available fairly soon – in fact in record time. 2020 has gone from being an all bad news year, to what I guess can be described as a good news/bad news kind of year.
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