Many jobs require vaccinations. In my state (and many others) college students are required to have an MMR vaccine to attend school. Students living in residence halls also need a hepatitis vaccine.
Vaccines have long been required in a variety of environments.
I'm not talking about the past, I'm talking about now. Schools require vaccines, and required them pre-covid, and that has been upheld as constitutional. (In the US) From the perspective of law, it is not wrong. YMMV in other countries.
What are your goalposts here on "basic commerce"? School and many jobs seem like they should be included in that, which refutes your original comment on the topic of vaccine mandates for basic commerce not having precedent.
That narrows down the scope of your claim a little. It is somewhat incorrect though: During smallpox in the early 1900's, Baltimore would jail people if they refused a vaccine. That's certainly a barrier to entering stores and conducting basic commerce.
England did the same thing.
Going back another 100+ years, Virginia passed a law that could see someone not inoculated via variolation jailed & fined if their failure to inoculate spread the disease. I also consider this jailing a barrier to basic commerce.
My take is that slavery is bad and that you your statement about basic commerce was wrong.
You clearly don't like the restrictions and mandates. If you want to have a productive conversation on the topic with other reasonable people then focus less on precedent and more on why these things are bad regardless of precedent. You'll have to do that with someone else though: your method of discussion up to this point has verged more towards reflexive provocation than productive conversation.
I'll let the reader determine who is furiously trying to list every vaccine mandate precedent. As is often the case, the bad faith argument is one of projection.
furiously trying to list every vaccine mandate precedent
Strange phrasing given that you claimed that there were no precedents and I merely brought up precedents in response. I'm not sure how listing historical legal occurrences would cause you to infer such emotional weight to them as to describe them as "furiously" obtained. It's a discussion, that's all. It's been a bit one-sided discussion, because when you are met with counter evidence you level vague accusations of subtle psychological motivations instead of giving a reasoned response.
I'll give you an example of a more productive & reasonable way to respond to the precedents I listed: The precedents are too old and the current situation too varied from them to have any bearing on current legal decisions on these matters. The United States has had more than 100 years of growth & maturity surrounding decisions on constitutional matters and advancements in constitutional scholarship, and during that time has had occasion to revisit decisions that now seem problematic in light of those advances in legal thinking. Additionally, smallpox was significantly more lethal than COVID. Up to 30% might die of it, raising the stakes far above COVID. As such, even granting that the US constitution would, today, allow for those historic measures, we are not now in a situation comparable enough for them to be required.
There you are. That response would have been a more productive conversation to have, specifically addressing my counterclaims without resorting to ad hominem attacks or avoiding the issue all together. We could then have gone on to discuss that in more depth, even if I partly disagree with what I just wrote, a devil's advocate rebuttal to my own rebuttal of your claim. It's a shame you didn't go down that route. It's pretty pointless to be here unless you're simply looking for rhetorical point scoring instead of discussion. Which bring me to:
>let the reader determine
That would be a major difference between you & I: I don't think about other readers when I post. It simply doesn't occur to me to filter what I write through that lens. Until you mentioned it, what other people reading this might think hasn't crossed my mind. It's simply not what I focus on.
That's a non sequitur. Your claim was that there has never been a mandate that interfered with "basic commerce". Your interlocutor was disputing that claim. Whether such a mandate is morally equivalent to chattel slavery is an entirely different claim.
If you're referring to Jacobson v. Massachusetts, that case was about whether the state has a right to impose a fine on someone who refused to be vaccinated. A fine is very different than being barred from conducting commerce.
In several states it was a criminal charge that could see you fined and/or imprisoned. Having a criminal record bars you from employment and commerce opportunities no?
I know wearing a mask and taking the bare minimum to try to control a pandemic that has killed millions infringes on YOUR PRECIOUS FREEDOM but it seems a reasonable trade off for the state.
Also what restrictions to basic commerce are you facing? That you can't go get wasted in a bar? Give us a break.
Stop Sars-CoV-2. You can vaccinate to 100% and double, triple, quadruple boost everyone. In this Omicron wave, almost everyone I know here in Florida has come down with symptomatic COVID. That includes my wife and kids, the entire families of all my best friends, my coworkers, my boss, my kids' teachers, everyone, and they are ALL VACCINATED to the man. The prior two waves never got within 3 degrees of freedom to me, vaccine or not.
This isn't surprising. COVID doesn't care about our stupid vaccine. It doesn't even know it's there. As far as I know we've never beat a bug like this with a vaccine. Consider that while we sit around and put on the mask and point the finger at the guy next door, the outbreak started in Wuhan, Omicron developed in South Africa, and the next variant is probably starting to incubate in yet another remote location. In fact the entire trajectory of this disaster is basically orthogonal to all of our activities.
The politics of COVID, however, the self-inflicted economic and social damage, are entirely our own doing. I believe this is actually comparable to, if not worse than, the direct effects of the virus itself. And since nothing we have done or can do will prevent the direct damage, I say we should stop inflicting all the secondary damage on ourselves.
Sure COVID-19 will be endemic, can't put the genie back in the bottle now, but that doesn't mean we can't and shouldn't be trying to end the pandemic: r0 < 1. The vaccines and masks do a great deal to reduce those basic reproduction numbers.
Maybe millions dead, countless others not entirely recovered, isn't helping economies or folks mental health? I agree, that's all our own doing, but not because we "locked down" it's because we never actually did. There was never a lockdown (at least here in the US), middle class folk just stayed home while the lower class brought us our groceries and died.
You're lucky the virus hasn't effected you till now... guess you don't have any friends in the service, hospitality, or health care industries.
Also if you're in Florida, what do you care. Y'all basically YOLOing this and I don't think there's much in the way of government mandates.
Maybe step away from the keyboard, put on your mask, and chill the fuck out friend. People are dying. Stop being selfish.
> hat includes my wife and kids, the entire families of all my best friends, my coworkers, my boss, my kids' teachers, everyone, and they are ALL VACCINATED to the man. The prior two waves never got within 3 degrees of freedom to me, vaccine or not.
And did they die? Because the vaccines are tremendously effective at reducing symptom severity, hospitalization and deaths.
More likely than not the outcome would have been the same even if they were unvaccinated, because covid-19 just isn't that bad of a virus. If you're under 30 years old, even with Wuhan/Alpha/Delta variants, you were at lower risk than with the yearly flu.
> If you're under 30 years old, even with Wuhan/Alpha/Delta variants, you were at lower risk than with the yearly flu.
This is objectively false; the IFR of all Covid variants is one order of magnitude greater than the flu, with the possible exception of a few years in the century with particularly virulent seasonal flus.
I suspect that prior to this pandemic most venues hosting a birthday party for a kindergartener would frown upon any guest attending who is currently infected with a contagious disease or who is not vaccinated against any highly infectious diseases experiencing a local outbreak at that time. This is not "private medical history" in any sense other than that any guest is free to not attend if they don't wish to share this information.
