Rabik: Individual freedom is no defense in the fight against vaccinations
America’s most pressing pandemic problem comprises the following trio of troubling facts:
1. Only 60% of all eligible Americans have been fully vaccinated despite abundant supply of free vaccines;
2. Three in 10 Americans say they have no immediate plans to get vaccinated;
3. The delta variant is driving a fourth surge of deadly infections, especially in states with low vaccination rates.
Fox news serves up anti-vaccine messages almost every day. Republican governors have tried to ban vaccine mandates not just by local governments and school districts, but by private businesses. Multiple Republican attorneys general have filed suit to stop federal vaccine mandates.
How ought we solve this problem? One approach is to get tough on the unvaccinated.
Examples include: vaccine passports (i.e., authentication for entry to establishment), banning unvaccinated students from attending colleges and universities; vaccine mandates for private-and public employees; and, perhaps, even a federal mandate for vaccination.
These tactics are necessary for protecting our communities and restoring our ways of life. This plague has gone on for more than 18 months and will continue without these steps. However, not everyone agrees.
Still, the case against vaccine mandates, however disingenuous, needs to be answered on the merits. Yet, I at least have rarely seen the case against a right to refuse vaccination fully explained, even though you could come up with a better example than Covid-19 vaccination if you wanted to design a hypothetical situation in which arguments for freedom of choice don’t apply.
And I think it’s worth spelling out exactly why.
The political opponents oppose mandates and passports because they believe they restrict individual liberty. According to them, even if “getting tough” would assuredly rid us of the virus forever, the costs to freedom would be too great to bear.
Even on this modern view of freedom, some limits are necessary. Our society restricts the actions of would-be murderers, thieves and harassers. And these restrictions protect individual freedoms, including the freedoms of those whose actions they restrict.
Personal choice is good, as long as your personal choices don’t hurt other people. I may deplore the quality of your housekeeping, but it’s your own business. On the other hand, freedom doesn’t include the right to dump garbage in the street.
Going unvaccinated during a pandemic does hurt other people, which is why schools, in particular, have required vaccination against many diseases for generations.
The unvaccinated are much more likely to contract the coronavirus, and thus potentially infect others, than those who’ve had their shots. There’s also some evidence that even when vaccinated individuals become infected, they’re less likely to infect others than the unvaccinated.
Vaccination, then, should be considered a public duty, not a personal choice. Here, freedom is communal rather than individualistic.
And rather than being unbound, individuals in the free community are bound by and to each other.
More to the point, communal freedom achieves much more than the unbound individual ever could. It creates new possibilities and expands our horizons.
Life is enhanced when our community is free because we can participate in communal freedom, and the goods it creates.
Bernard J. Rabik, a Hopewell Township attorney, is an opinion columnist for The Times.