It’s not often that one would be minded to advise a President of the United States to copy an Irish Government, but honestly, compared to Joe Biden, the Irish Government has it’s vaccine mandate nailed down: They simply don’t call it a vaccine mandate, but make sure that people cannot live normal lives to the same degree as the vaccinated, if they have not taken a jab. The Vaccine Passport is a mandate, in all but name.
Grandpa Joe’s problem is that he just decided to be honest about what his policy was:
A federal appeals court on Saturday temporarily halted the Biden administration’s vaccine requirement for businesses with 100 or more workers.
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted an emergency stay of the requirement by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration that those workers be vaccinated by Jan. 4 or face mask requirements and weekly tests.
Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry said the action stops President Biden “from moving forward with his unlawful overreach.”
The basic question here, when it comes to vaccine mandates, and vaccine mandates in name only, like we have in Ireland, is this: Does the Government have the right to compel a private citizen to take a medical product which is not strictly necessary for their health?
The answer to that, throughout the history of western philosophy and thought, has always been “no”. We have always, in the west, valued the “right of bodily integrity”. That’s why, for example, we banned torture: It is not legal for the Government to inflict pain on a citizen, even if doing so might, in theory, extract information about the location of a ticking bomb that might save thousands of lives. In that example, we say that the right of one person to bodily integrity is actually worth more to us than the rights of potential victims to live.
Vaccines, of course, are not torture, and there is no attempt here to say that they are. But the basic underlying principle is the same: Is it okay to force one person to take an injection of a vaccine, on the basis of a theory that doing so might prevent them from spreading covid to others, and therefore, save lives?
Advocates of that position would say “yes, it is”, on the basis that the vaccine is a relatively unobtrusive imposition: The cost to the person being vaccinated is much less than the cost to them of torturing them, for example. The benefits, they would say, are much more clearly established (after all, a person being tortured might tell you anything just to make it stop). On that basis, advocates would say, the vaccine mandate produces a clear and observable benefit to society, in return for only a very mild impact on a person’s personal liberty.
The problem, of course, is that such a theoretical argument falls apart in the face of the data from vaccine manufacturers, which shows that protection against the transmission of covid is not especially high, and not especially enduring. So, in actual fact, you end up mandating an injection which does not really guarantee protection for society at large, except at the most extreme margins.
It should not be surprising, then, that the US courts want to consider the constitutionality of the matter.
In Ireland, of course, we have no such worries about big philosophical questions impacting the Government’s policy. Here, we just say that everyone retains a choice about whether to take a vaccine, but that saying “no” will reduce their ability to live a normal life. “Nice dinner plans you have there, be a pity if something happened to them”.
In truth, obviously, the vaccine passport should be as controversial, and as widely opposed, as Biden’s vaccine mandate is. But it won’t be, because people simply don’t care about restrictions on people’s liberties, once those restrictions apply to other people. And there are many more vaccinated people than unvaccinated in Ireland.
If you’re one of the unjabbed, and awaiting a similar ruling from an Irish court, my advice is to settle in for the very long haul, unfortunately.