A Pro-Vaxxer's Case Against Vaccine Mandates
When institutional trust is low, vaccine nudges are the more pragmatic option.
8/30/21: Edited the article for overall clarity; added some points about institutional trust.
For some time now, there have been questions and hesitancy around the vaccines that were developed to combat the coronavirus pandemic. A lot of liberal commentators say that this hesitancy is mainly driven by conservative anti-vaccine sentiment; and in fairness to those commentators, a significant amount of it is. But at least some of this hesitancy is also driven by concerns over their rights; there are fears that the Biden administration will impose a national vaccine mandate, as they’ve already done for federal workers and contractors. But is a vaccine mandate a good idea? Does it violate an individual’s rights? How does a government respect the bodily autonomy of the individual while also promoting the health of the body politic?
“Your right to swing your fist ends just where my nose begins.” Attributed to various luminaries like Abraham Lincoln and John Stuart Mill, this quote is a great summation of the pragmatic limitations that can, and should, be placed on a person’s individual liberty. Any sensible person would agree, I think, that no one has the right to punch people in the nose, since it’s an act of aggression and attempted harm towards another human being. If an individual were to walk around in public while wildly and indiscriminately swinging their arms and fists around, they have every right to do so—until they hit someone with a stray fist.
Now, imagine that someone is swinging their fists around, while also not knowing whether they have an invisible nine-tailed whip in one – or perhaps both – of their fists, increasing their melee range to six feet. The only way they’ll know for sure is if they whip themselves. And when you whip someone else, you somehow cause a chain reaction that causes the victim to gain whips of their own. I think some discerning readers will understand the allegory I’m making.
Bodily autonomy is, in my opinion, one of the strongest arguments against vaccine mandates. If individuals have a right to do with their bodies what they will, then they can choose what they can put in their bodies, and vaccines, on the surface at least, are no different. But what makes vaccines particularly thorny in that regard is that, despite being something that’s injected into your individual body, they’re intimately connected to the health of the public. The diseases for which vaccines exist are all contagious, so anyone infected with such a disease are that much more likely to affect someone else’s life and health in a negative way, even if their own life is otherwise unaffected. And thus comes the argument in favor of vaccine mandates, at least during a pandemic – by walking around in public unvaccinated, you’re not only gambling with your own health, but you’re also gambling with the health of the people around you without their consent. (Not to mention, I would rather have a vaccine mandate than a mask mandate, since all you have to do is get the required number of jabs and move on with your life.)
I think this is acceptable outside the context of a pandemic; the risks to yourself and others that come with walking around in public can never and will never be reduced to 0%. Even if you dedicate yourself to living in a padded cell for the rest of your life, that comes with the risk of mental and developmental harm. Part of why the message of the vaccine/mask skeptics is so alluring is because, in any other context, it would be a very positive one – Life is fleeting, so don’t let others tell you what you can and cannot do with your own body. You don’t have to wear a mask, you don’t have to get vaccinated, you don’t have to be a patron at businesses that have such requirements, and you don’t have to fear the virus. Don’t let those government and media scaremongers get to you. Live your life the way you see fit. And ideally, that’s something I want for everyone, too.
And I’m not saying anyone should fear the virus, either. The coronavirus has about a 98% survival rate; if you get infected with it, you’re more likely to live through it than not, depending on various risk factors. But in a country with over 330 million people, one or two out of 100 is still a lot of dead from a preventable illness.
Despite all of this, the emergence of the Delta variant has all but convinced me that even after the pandemic is over, Covid-19 will be here to stay, and like the flu before it, it will become routine for most people to take regular vaccinations as the virus continues to mutate in different ways. Which begs a related question: Is the flu vaccine mandated for adults by law? I ask this because there were very frequent comparisons made between the influenza and Covid-19 viruses. Readers are free to correct me if I’m wrong, but the answer, as far as I can tell, is no.
The implication of this is that most people, including some who are skeptical of the Covid-19 vaccines, trust that the flu vaccine will do what it’s supposed to do. And that’s fundamentally the root cause of a lot of the vaccine hesitancy – a lack of trust in the institutions that are supposed to protect our public health. And it’s not entirely unfounded, either.
Regardless, though, if taking flu vaccines are not mandatory for adults, this shines a beacon of hope and reconciliation regarding Covid-19 vaccines, too. With vaccines having wide availability and the potential to be improved or revised if necessary, the free market may be able to do what it couldn’t do before, as businesses start implementing vaccine requirements for their employees. Individuals can—and should—continue to take precautions in the face of the Delta variant, like wearing masks and social distancing. Coronavirus tests should be made widely available and encouraged for everyone to take, regardless of their vaccine status, so that more comprehensive data can be gathered on how effective the vaccines are, especially over time.
Lastly – and these two points are critical – the Covid-19 vaccines themselves need to be formally approved by the FDA, in the same manner as other vaccines before them. Also, the immunity from lawsuits that their manufacturers currently enjoy needs to be lifted. This last proposal may be seen as a bone for vaccine skeptics—and it is. But that’s the point. Part of building trust lies in ensuring there is recourse for when that trust is broken. And if you’re a powerful institution, pushing people to do something they don’t want to do will likely just make them push back harder. In an environment where institutional trust is at an all-time low—like right now—the best policy is to nudge people in the right direction instead, through measures like these.
A truly free society needs mutual trust between citizens—most of them, at the very least—and public institutions. That trust has been dropping. And it’s not just up to the citizens to trust that the institutions are doing their job and doing the right thing—the institutions must also show trust towards their citizens through a consistent show of blunt honesty. Presenting information in a way that’s meant to promote an agenda, rather than tell the unbridled truth as reflected by the latest evidence, is a problem that besieges many of these institutions today, and it’s a major factor in why many people would rather ingest horse medicine than get vaccinated.
Vaccine mandates would be more immediately effective at ending the pandemic; given how long it has lasted and the emergence of the Delta variant, it’s understandable why people are pushing for these mandates at the federal level; normally, I would be in favor of them. But I think that vaccine nudges, while they’re not as effective in the short term, may be of far greater utility in the long term, at least in an environment where institutional trust is as low as it is. I’m fairly optimistic about the future—I think the Covid-19 vaccines will likely come to be accepted over time as the pandemic finally blows over, the manufacturers lose their lawsuit immunity, and the vaccines get approved by the FDA.
But, only time will tell.