Before the vaccine, society found a way to operate with mitigations, face masks, social distancing, testing, outdoor eating, ventilation in classrooms, plexiglass, frequent cleaning, washing hands, essential travel only, essential workers only, etc etc. I’m not commenting on their effectiveness, just that we used them to continue life as normal as possible before the vaccine? We worked through all of that before the vaccine. Now that we have a vaccine, we can’t have people work or travel without being vaccinated? So now that everyone that wants to be vaccinated has gotten the jab and protected by it, we can’t operate with those who choose not to, even though we went 9 months operating with no one having a vaccine? Does that make sense to anyone?

There isn’t a doctor or anyone else in this world that can tell anyone they won’t have any adverse reaction if they get vaccinated. There is a certain amount of risk there just as there is of not getting vaccinated. One’s age, health, and pre-existing conditions, or previous COVID infection are going to dictate the amount of risk of not getting the vaccine. Taking into account people of all ages, health, and disease, 99.2% of them recover from COVID. All previous vaccines have had years of data to validate the adverse reactions. We are still collecting data on the COVID vaccine. There have been other vaccines that have been pulled due to adverse reactions. It’s going to take years to get the equivalent amount of data for this vaccine. This is all to say that because of those facts, people should be free to chose what risk they are willing to take.

There is a risk and risk analysis in almost everything we do every day. For example, the cdc has numbers for deaths caused by car accidents every year and even break it down by age. Needless to say, there are thousands of people who die or maimed from these accidents. Yet we don’t have a zero tolerance policy on driving even though we know what causes accidents. We don’t dictate that one can only travel in vehicles driven by professionals. We simply have rules, things like tests, age limits, seatbelts, speed limits, eye glasses, cell phones restrictions, drinking, etc. (kind of like the having mitigation rules we had before the vaccine). If everyone followed all the rules, deaths and dismemberments would go down close to nothing. Yet we know, because we are humans, that not everyone will follow all the rules all the time. Yet we still make the decision to get behind the wheel almost everyday. Despite thousands of people needlessly dying every single year after year, we still drive. We’ve learned to live with it.

Making people choose between a vaccine and their livelihood is not a true choice, true consent, it’s not freedom and liberty. That is called coercion. Consent is when you have two of the same act and one becomes a crime without consent. And that’s what we have here. You may support the vaccine mandate for your own personal reasons. But remember that when power is given, it’s seldom given back. Don’t give your freedom away just because it doesn’t confirm to your current ideology, values, or judgements. The next mandate may be the one you are against.