Mandates, Etc. (cont’d)

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, January 25, 2022

 

Note: Previous posts in this conversation here, here, and here.  

 

Charlie, that would be an excellent point — if it were the case that we applied vaccine mandates only to non-citizens. But, as I already have pointed out more than once and as you yourself must know, that is not the case. We apply vaccine mandates of various kinds to U.S. citizens in various circumstances, adults and minors, and have for generations.

 

For almost 200 years, we have been to one extent or another mandating vaccines for schoolchildren. It is very difficult, damned near impossible, for families with children to lead ordinary lives without complying with these mandates. How I am to believe that what has been a largely ho-hum issue is now, suddenly, a headlong descent into tyranny? Because we have for a very long time been insisting that if you want to learn your ABCs and color in a coloring book, then you have to get your shots, and now there is an almighty fuss about making the same demand of people who work as dentists or emergency-room doctors, or in other contexts in which they are brought into intimate contact with sick, injured, and vulnerable people, and nudging (though not quite mandating) the general population in the same direction.

 

I do not think there is a principled difference between requiring vaccinations for kindergarteners and incentivizing — or even requiring — vaccines for the general population. I think it is only a political difference, that many conservatives feel obliged to make room for irresponsible and intellectually indefensible tendencies on our own side.

 

I don’t think it was a monstrosity that we drafted young men into service in the wars of the 20th century, though it surely was a complete violation of personal liberties that we would in ordinary times be expected to respect and to protect. In much the same way — though the situation is less dramatic — applying ordinary, rudimentary public-health practices that we already rely on in other contexts, notably public education, to the Covid-19 epidemic does not seem to me an especially egregious violation of liberty in a country that prohibits interstate trade in nonconformist cheeses.