For the record, this comment is not arguing against vaccines or their veracity, there seems to have been confusion about that. I am specifically arguing against vaccine mandates.
If the pandemic had been deadlier and even more infectious like measles or smallpox were, would you still be against mandates? Surely there is a scenario like airborne Ebola or 28 days Later Rage virus that would justify mandates.
If someone refuses a vaccine and then passes on a virus to someone else, who dies, isn't that morally equivalent to "forcing" a vaccine on someone, who then dies? Your argument seems to be "people who choose to put others at risk, should be prevented from doing so." This seems like a much stronger argument in favor of requiring unvaccinated people to stay home rather than putting others at risk?
Every death is a tragedy. Harm to one person is not fungible with benefit to another. You can't subtract one from five to get four net lives saved, but you can say that five is more than one. If someone pulls the lever then they have murdered one person and saved five. If someone wants to pull it and I stop them, haven't I murdered five people and saved one?
No, it's not morally equivalent, as one of these is very obviously unintentional and a result of simply living one's normal life, and the other is neither of those things.
It's also somewhat irrelevant since the vaccines do not prevent transmission. At best they lower the chance to some degree and now you're in the weeds of trying to measure something that's too multivariate to measure.
Except COVID "vaccines" did not prevent infecting yourself or someone else, are there still people believing this nonsense? This "vaccine" at best protects you if you are old at risk and it's not good even at doing that comparable with those flu "vaccines".
Some people can't take vaccines because of allergic reactions. Other people have weakened immune systems and so the effect of vaccines is low.
For those people, it's the group that protects them. But of course you always have selfish pricks that only care about themselves. It was nice to see the amount of selfish pricks was pretty low in my region, and we got about a 80% vaccination rate.
The polio vaccine is much older and as far as I could find has never had a death attributed to it. COVID vaccines are newer, and their safety profile was not fully understood when they were rolled out.
I would also be against vaccine mandate if we also had a law where if I could prove you infected me, that would count as assault with a deadly weapon, and all the other laws that determine what I could do when someone assaults me with a deadly weapon would apply.
Every death is a tragedy. Harm to one person is not fungible with benefit to another. You can't subtract one from five to get four net lives saved, but you can say that five is more than one. If someone pulls the lever then they have murdered one person and saved five. If someone wants to pull it and I stop them, haven't I murdered five people and saved one?
It's also somewhat irrelevant since the vaccines do not prevent transmission. At best they lower the chance to some degree and now you're in the weeds of trying to measure something that's too multivariate to measure.
Why wasn't that other person vaccinated?
For those people, it's the group that protects them. But of course you always have selfish pricks that only care about themselves. It was nice to see the amount of selfish pricks was pretty low in my region, and we got about a 80% vaccination rate.
I'm willing to bet that in the next 20 years, some kid in the western world will suffer the consequences of polio, because of the anti-vax lunatics.