Many serious, well-intentioned people are conflicted on how much the government can mandate vaccinations through legal restrictions and soft pressures. Even in countries with a high percentage of vaccinated individuals, there is a general sympathy, if not outright acceptance, for the opinion that vaccine-based restrictions are oppressive. In the West, the argument goes, we shouldn’t limit personal liberties or create stratifications within society just because of different personal beliefs. And while everyone wants to defeat COVID, many do not want to lose our Western values in the process.
This is the 'vaccine dilemma' many Western governments face: how can a country maximize vaccination rates without infringing on individual rights? You hear some version of this repeated by pundits and average citizens alike. What's puzzling, though, is that this dilemma isn't real. If anything, it is a straw man, because there aren't any individual rights at issue with current vaccine mandates. There are important questions of implementation and logistics, as we should debate how best to verify vaccination status and make sure there are no illicit loopholes or systemic inefficiencies. But we should not take accusations of oppression seriously.
That doesn't mean that the 'vaccine dilemma' isn't dangerous; indeed, the effects of people's beliefs are far too real. In the U.S, several states are experiencing their worst outbreaks since the pandemic began, with case and death numbers driven largely by the older, non-vaccinated population. In the E.U, sizable minorities of anti-vax ‘querdenker’ (literally ‘those who think differently’) are protesting vaccine mandates and making the pandemic harder to control. What's worse, some politicians, especially in the U.S, have continued to push back against the use of any pressure, soft or otherwise, to get people vaccinated.
Once again, this should be a non-issue. No one’s liberty is violated in the face of vaccine mandates. The right to remain unvaccinated and move freely about society is being falsely equated with individual personal liberties, like freedom of speech or freedom of religion.
The problem, I think, is that vaccines are talked about as if they were utterly singular, unlike any other communal requirement. They are not. Vaccines are part and parcel of other collective mandates we take for granted, like driving licenses and gun control (wait a second...). As Jamelle Bouie put it, "we refuse to treat the pandemic for what it is: a social problem to solve through collective action." Moreover, the word ‘liberty' continues to be misused. Liberty does not mean ‘freedom to do whatever.’ It has always included a social dimension, perhaps best captured by that old saying: your freedom to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.
This isn’t revolutionary stuff. During the last months countless left-leaning intellectuals and columnists have been citing this exact same line of argument – ‘if you want to be unvaccinated and stay at home, fine, but the second you go outdoors and mingle in public you are risking everyone’s health’ – to defend various government restrictions.
So the vaccine dilemma is a non-dilemma. And it is puzzling, frustrating, and tragic that so many lives have been thrown away for nothing.
The only responsible course, it would seem, is to press on. Governments on both sides of the Atlantic cannot imbue anti-vax doubts with legitimacy because that risks a fatal worsening of the pandemic. They must push ahead with vaccine passports, restricted access to public services, education schemes, and incentivization programs. Government serves the people as a whole, after all, and it is wrong to threaten society as a whole because of the views of a small minority.
I have come to wear this attitude like a good coat, and have found it easy to dismiss anti-vax views as fringe nonsense.
Perhaps the whole circus will go away as the pandemic recedes, and the people who resist vaccination are only doing so because they have been misled or misinformed.
I worry, however, that the vaccine non-dilemma conceals a real dilemma. That dilemma can be summed up in a series of questions. How do we reincorporate those on the political fringes? Should governments just dictate and mandate to those who don't trust government? How do you even repair a breach of trust so large that people are literally dying over the issue? This dilemma gets far less airtime than its straw man cousin.
And I can't help but recall the mobs in the Capitol. I worry that querdenkers are only one more step in a sequence of gradually increasing social discord. Maybe this is mere brooding, an exaggeration of the power and cohesion of a few political minorities. But if large numbers of citizens don't trust public health advice on vaccines, or scientific advice on climate change, or the results of elections, what will they trust?