Mandating Mandates
These days it is de rigueur to complain about, and demonstrate against the CoViD Vaccination Mandates. People criticize the perceived loss of freedom. They don’t want to be forced to have to do anything against their will, least of all ‘put that poison’ into their bodies. They decry they are ‘living in a police state’.
There are a couple of problems with that stance.
An article in The Conversation hi-lights the issue of Positive and Negative Liberty: "The extent to which personal freedoms are limited as part of living in a functioning society is a moral concern about the role of government. This requires a clear understanding of the nature of freedom in the first place, and what it means to be a free person in a free society."
In the first place, on closer scrutiny we may have to acknowledge that, yes, we indeed live in a police state - always have and hopefully always will. Who do you call when you get mugged at the ATM? When your car is stolen or when a drunk-driver crashes into you? When your house is burgled? When rowdy louts bash up your son at night, or your daughter gets raped?
But what about the CoViD vaccination mandate? For certain groups of professionals there are mandates to get vaccinated against CoViD, to protect the community against further spread of the virus and to ensure a high standard of public health is maintained.
To protest against these mandates is inconsistent and irrational.
Are those protesting against the vaccination mandate not aware of the other dozens of mandates in public life - many of them restricting their ‘freedom’ to a much larger degree?
Like the mandate to have a driver license if they wish to drive a car. The speed limit mandate. The Harbour Bidge toll mandate. The stop at red traffic lights mandate. The keep left mandate. The mandate to park for a limited time in restricted areas and to pay for it. Drink driving? There’s a mandate about that; heard of it?
And not least the mandate to inoculate your child against diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough as well as measles, mumps, rubella and chickenpox before they are allowed into kindy or school; and to get vaccinated against cholera, tuberculosis and typhoid etc if you wish to travel to certain countries.
You don’t want to have ‘that poison put into your body’? Tell me about it: I am a diabetic, I have injected ‘poison’ into me twice a day for twenty five years. If I hadn’t done so I would have died last century. Tell a cancer sufferer about it. When you have a car crash, all sorts of stuff is injected into you to keep you alive - do you ask the paramedic, “excuse me, what’s in that stuff you’re administering?”
Anyway, are medicines - are vaccines - poison? Of course they are; one has to be very, very careful with all medications, they are potentially very dangerous; I’d die if I injected too much insulin. But applied correctly, are they good for us? Well, yes.
Over the past hundred years our life expectancy doubled. Why? Because of a healthier life style with better nutrition, clean water and improved hygiene, as well as successful medical interventions - above all vaccinations. Vaccines have been called the most successful medical intervention in human history. More than a dozen and a half vaccines have been invented since the Second World War, which have eradicated or mitigated many diseases.
So, do medicines - including vaccines - save lives? Of course they do. In fact just this century more than a hundred million lives were saved by vaccinations. Furthermore, vaccines are recognised to be extremely safe, including the various CoViD vaccines. Of course some people will experience side effects, but they're minute in comparison to the good the vaccines do.
What about all those mandates impinging on our ‘freedom’? Were one to argue that we are not free, from a certain point of view that indeed would be correct. But are those the ‘freedoms’ worth fighting, even just demonstrating for? It’s a truism that if people followed their urge to do anything they want, chaos would ensue.
The point is that there is a profound misunderstanding of the term freedom in play here. To get an understanding of the concept, one is well advised to study people like Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Steve Biko, Martin Luther King, Sophie and Hans Scholl, Aung San Suu Kyi, to name a few.
Perspective, please.