The vaccination question is simple:

Is the government allowed to dictate medical intervention?

@skells
I think your question is beyond the scope of vaccinations alone but in actuality (not theory), yes, governments can and do mandate medical intervention.

Whether or not they should is also beyond the scope of vaccinations. It requires us to make assumptions/value judgments about whether people should be allowed to harm themselves (suicide) or others (Mary Mallon, aka "Typhoid Mary").

@skells
Personally I put myself somewhere in the middle. Medical intervention is sometimes necessary and private companies are even worse at providing for the common good than governments. We've seen what happens when intervention works out well, like preventing typhoid outbreaks, but also when it goes really, really wrong like eugenics and forced sterilization. We could all stand to be a little more practical and learn from history rather than reject differing opinions out of hand.

Anyway, after much rambling... My answer is no. The COVID-19 vaccine should not be legally required for anyone.

@b6hydra my central issue is failure to apply the precautionary principle - quarantines (people coming into the country have to spend 2 weeks or so without contact) have been used for millennia and rare is the case where 2 weeks in a room causes long term health issues.

However, the vaccines are new technology ( I know mRNA have been used before but only on very sick people, never rolled out into the general populace.) I've often brought up the case of Thalidomide in these conversations - the word for word response seems to be "times have moved on from then"

Indeed, our medical tech has become considerably more complicated - our means of communication more manipulable.

That several repurposed drugs have been suppressed is sufficient for me to disregard all health authorities. Lord knows they've fucked up plenty of times in the past.

@skells Well I'm certainly not saying we should throw caution to the wind. Nor do I believe that social, economic, and political conditions have changed so drastically since the 50s that this question is no longer relevant. "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce."

My point was more that I don't want to take a hard line either way. Rights-based ethical frameworks have a tendency toward being used in such a way. Either you have a right or you don't, no middle. This is useful when we want freedom _from_ something like self incrimination. Less so when we want to promote something, such as public health. I'm way out of scope now haha but I don't think your right to control your body is mutually exclusive with the utilitarian goal of providing for 'the good.'

@b6hydra i see where you're coming from but as someone who hasn't got the vax, and is seeing various forms of arm-twisting becoming the new governmental fashion, it's no longer a theoretical question.

@skells Well my non-theoretical answer is still "no," you shouldn't be forced to get it.

As for government arm-twisting, that's the only tool a nation state has at it's core, and from where all other powers are derived. The monopoly on the use of force is what keeps governments in power, and policing is merely the government's use of that force against it's own citizens.

That sounds really theoretical again but it does have real world implications. Should we allow governments the power to police what we do with our own bodies? No, I think that's a terrible idea.