Bài nursing opinion essay xuất sắc nhất 2022

Should We Be Forced to Get
Covid

Vaccines?

It's

Complicated
The dilemma is almost as old as vaccines: Can the state
coerce citizens to get jabbed in the interests of public
health? What about other institutions, such as schools,
universities or employers? And if they can mandate shots,
should they?
Even with the more familiar vaccines against smallpox,
measles, whooping cough and the like, these questions
have never been answered definitively in most countries.
That haunts us now that we’re fighting a coronavirus
pandemic and need to make urgent decisions.
Most governments, for now, are treading lightly, because
they fear alienating the very people who need to roll up
their sleeves and cooperate. Italy, for example, has
mandated Covid vaccines only for health workers, and the
U.K. is considering doing the same. But some politicians,
exasperated

about

the

many

vaccine

slouches,

are

contemplating more drastic measures. Rodrigo Duterte,
president of the Philippines, has rather hyperbolically


threatened that he’ll throw in jail anybody who refuses to
get jabbed.
Schools,

clubs

and

employers

are

facing

the

same

conundrum — and also want to avoid getting sued. In the
U.S. many universities are requiring jabs for all those who

want to return this fall to physical dorms and classrooms,
but will presumably let other students “attend” virtually. On
Wall Street, Morgan Stanley is mandating vaccination for
employees who want to come back into the office while
making all others dial in. Institutions everywhere will
sooner or later face the same choices.
As a classical liberal — that is, somebody who treasures
individual freedom — I see three intertwined routes into
this debate: the moral, the legal and the practical.
The moral case must start with the premise that, barring
special circumstances, nobody has a right to tell me what
to do, even if it’s “for my own good,” since that’s for me to
judge. By this logic, even seat-belt laws are a baby step
toward tyranny. I happen to wear one voluntarily because I
feel it makes sense. But if I didn’t, what right does anybody
have to make me put it on? It’s my life, after all. The same
could be said for the risk of catching Covid-19.
This line of thought immediately crashes into the difference
between a seat-belt law and a vaccine mandate, however.
Saving the life and health of the one getting jabbed is only
the secondary purpose of inoculation. The primary goal is


to approximate herd immunity, so that the virus stops
spreading in the community at large, infecting and
potentially killing others who, owing to allergies or other
complications, cannot
get vaccinated.
So a vaccine mandate is less like a seat-belt law and more
like rules against, say, fiddling with a smart phone while

driving — a cognitive distraction that vastly increases our
risk of causing accidents that maim or kill others. By the
same token, my refusal to get jabbed makes me a potential
vector for SARS-CoV-2. As it keeps spreading, it’ll also keep
mutating, thus causing inestimable harm to people near
and far alike.
This “harm principle” was already defined in 1859 by John
Stuart Mill in his treatise “On Liberty”: “The only purpose
for which power can be rightfully exercised over any
member of a civilized community, against his will, is to
prevent harm to others.”
Viewed thus, public health is another instance of what
economists call a commons, a shared resource in which the
interests of individuals typically clash with those of society,
thus

requiring

regulation.

Classic

examples

include

overgrazing public lands or overfishing the oceans; modern
instances include littering space with satellite junk or

polluting the atmosphere — and now also free-riding in the
global struggle against SARS-CoV-2.
This need to prevent harm to other people as well as the
“tragedy of the commons” has shaped the evolution of
legal thinking about the dilemma. In the U.S. the first
vaccine mandate was introduced in
Massachusetts

in

the

1850s,

to

prevent

smallpox

transmission in schools. That precedent quickly spread to
other states and diseases, making opponents drag the
mandates into court.
In

1905

the

Supreme

Court

ruled

in

Jacobsen

v.

Massachusetts that states may compel vaccination as long
as the coercion is proportionate and necessary to maintain
public health. In such cases, the judges decided, vaccine
mandates fall conceptually into the category of the
government’s “police power,” which legitimately restrains
personal liberty for the common good.
In many iterations, that logic has prevailed in most open
societies to date. In April, for example, the European Court
of Human Rights in Strasbourg ruled, in a case that
preceded the pandemic and was brought by parents in the
Czech Republic, that mandatory vaccination is “necessary
in a democratic society.”


Both these moral and legal lines of reasoning must of
course confront practical realities, and this is where things
get tricky in the current pandemic. That’s mainly because
the

Covid

vaccines

are

still

scarce,

new

and

less

understood than those against mumps or polio, say.
The first question is whether a serum is even available
easily and amply enough. So far, it isn’t in most countries. I
don’t see how you can fairly mandate — on penalty of
sanctions — something that not every member of society
even has access to.
he next question is how safe the vaccines are. Nothing in
this world is ever completely free of risk, but the mandate
decision must rest on weighing one risk — the jab’s to the
individual — against two others: the risk to the same
individual of catching Covid and the collective risk to public
health.
For our familiar vaccines, such as the measles, mumps and
rubella jab children get in many countries, that case is

easily made. A few of the new Covid vaccines, such as the
mRNA shots of BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna, should also
clear the hurdle, although their youth still means that
regulators like the U.S. Food and Drug Administration
ave so far only given “emergency use authorization.”
Others, such as the AstraZeneca shot, have left people and


regulators confused. Others yet, including the jabs hawked
by Russia and China, are in my opinion simply too opaque
about risk to justify coercion.
Beyond the risk of a given vaccine, we also need to know
whether it prevents the recipient only from getting sick or
also from transmitting the virus. If the answer is the first,
remember, we can’t invoke the harm principle or the public
good.
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