Canada Freedom Truck rally

Originally posted by macklington ↑

Do you wear a seatbelt? Do you drive on the correct side of the road? Are you still allowed to smoke indoors in commercial establishments? If you have kids, did they have to get other vaccinations before they were allowed to attend school? This is such a silly and often-refuted line of argument where the person claims that everyone else is part of a blindly obedient herd, and it pops up over and over. Ultimately it boils down, again, to the fact that some people don't want to be told what to do, or to have to experience some small degree of discomfort, even if it will largely result in a safer environment for that person and everyone around them. It's selfish.

Vaccination, Risks, and Freedom: The Seat Belt Analogy
Abstract

We argue that, from the point of view public health ethics, vaccination is significantly analogous to seat belt use in motor vehicles and that coercive vaccination policies are ethically justified for the same reasons why coercive seat belt laws are ethically justified. We start by taking seriously the small risk of vaccines’ side effects and the fact that such risks might need to be coercively imposed on individuals. If millions of individuals are vaccinated, even a very small risk of serious side effects implies that, statistically, at some point side effects will occur. Imposing such risks raises issues about individual freedom to decide what risks to take on oneself or on one’s children and about attribution of responsibility in case of adverse side effects. Seat belt requirements raise many of the same ethical issues as vaccination requirements, and seat belt laws initially encountered some opposition from the public that is very similar to some of the current opposition to vaccine mandates. The analogy suggests that the risks of vaccines do not constitute strong enough reasons against coercive vaccination policies and that the same reasons that justify compulsory seat belt use—a measure now widely accepted and endorsed—also justify coercive vaccination policies.

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Where to start? I wear a seatbelt, so therefore I must take an experimental jab and take part in a global trial for something that is very unlikely to kill me. Is that what you're running with?

Anyway, the logic is further extended to suggest that if I don't take this experimental jab for something that is very unlikely to kill me, it will somehow affect other people who HAVE taken the vaccine, and this decision on my part is very upsetting to this group.

I'm not getting it at all. In fact you could line up all the things I've agreed to in my life for myself and my children. You could even present me with the number of times I've worn a seatbelt and agreeably driven on the correct side of the road, and I will still look at the wisdom of taking an experiment that I don't need to take, comes with no guarantees of compensation if it damages me, has FDA documents listing 1223 uninvestigated deaths in 3 months (amongst other tens of thousands of nasty injuries) and I'm going to say no thanks.