Your freedom ends where mine begins pro#

And, who knows? Maybe it would have worked. But it seems reasonable that we should have to deal with the real world consequences of doing so.Ĭould we have gone this route before progressing to COVID vaccine mandates? Sure. This doesn’t take away our freedom of choice.

Or perhaps those who choose not to vaccinate should have to pay higher insurance premiums or a greater percentage of hospital bills if they end up needing vaccine-preventable disease related care. For those who don’t have a legitimate medical reason not to vaccinate, I am absolutely in favor of vaccine “passports” for travel or to eat out or to go to a concert. Likewise, if we are eligible for vaccination and we choose to remain unvaccinated, becoming a walking vector for infectious disease, we should lose the privilege to participate in societal activities that would put others at risk. Our choices have consequencesĮvery choice has a consequence. We do this with our children all the time, right? If your teenager doesn’t clean up his dishes after making food, despite being asked repeatedly to do so, he gets the honor of cleaning up ALL the dishes after EVERY dinner for the rest of the summer (Real life event in the LaSalle household? Possibly.). But this is where we are, and it didn’t have to be this way. In hindsight, before instituting vaccine mandates, perhaps a more appropriate way to deal with vaccine refusal would have been to institute other real world consequences to vaccine refusers.

I so wish that we didn’t have to get to the point of vaccine mandates. Because vaccines are not 100% effective, and because we seek to protect those around us who are unable to vaccinate or who may not develop a good immune response from vaccination, we need as many eligible people as possible to immunize if we are going to keep deadly vaccine-preventable diseases at bay. Each person’s vaccine choice has a ripple effect. These things are happening right here, right now. The choice not to vaccinate affects others more than we know. Your paperwork, referrals, and refills take longer to complete. The clinicians remaining in clinic not only have to cover their own work but the work of those other providers. Those outpatient clinician’s appointments have to be cancelled or rescheduled and care is adversely affected. Some primary care providers get pulled to staff the hospitals, ERs, and urgent cares. Your knee replacement or biopsy to evaluate a possible cancer gets delayed. If multiple unvaccinated people get sick and end up in the hospital, overwhelming the medical system, elective procedures get cancelled. If our child gets sick and exposes others at school, those exposed children will have to quarantine and their social and academic development suffers. If we remain unvaccinated and get sick, we can bring dangerous illness to others. The reality is that our vaccine choices absolutely affect others. Well, nothing could be farther from the truth.

Your freedom ends where mine begins pro#

Where I think we get into a pickle with the topic of vaccines and personal freedoms is that people who are pro “vaccine-choice” (that’s “anti-vaccine” by a sneakier, gussied up name) presume that their decision whether or not to vaccinate affects them alone. Yes, we have the freedom to over-indulge in alcohol but that freedom ends when we get behind the wheel. But, no, we don’t have the freedom to poison others by smoking in indoor public spaces. Yes, we have the freedom to kill ourselves slowly with cigarettes. In simpler terms, our freedom ends where harm to others begins. But our allegiance must still be to the greater good. Americans have individual freedoms and privileges not enjoyed by all peoples. This social contract acknowledges that no individual exists outside of communion with and responsibility to other humans. But inherent in this privilege is a contract, with one’s neighbors and society. This is a country founded on the principle of freedom of thought, of religion, freedom to be who and what you want to be.