I wonder should we also start mandating yearly influenza shots from everyone? And bar those who are not tested or vaccinated from work places? It would certainly save some lives wouldn't it?
650,000 people have died and that's with taking some pretty extreme precautions (for what we consider extreme anyway). It's not just the old or the infirm. Healthy people in their 20s and 30s. Toddlers. We have gone to war over much less.
We have a ton of safety regulations that govern how we build homes and infrastructure, how we plan for fires and natural disasters, how you live your daily life, and pretty much anything else because they are effective and do save lives. This one seems reasonable (mandatory COVID vaccination - influenza vaccines are significantly less effective and in general the people that die from it society seems to be ok with).
The building I work in was designed and built by others. Regulations mean they can't cut corners in their impact of me.
A vaccine that protects me from getting the virus or getting a serious case.
It's a difference between others work impacting my safety and my own choices impacting my safety.
This is an area worth pondering.
As another comment said, if the unvaccinated were willing to stick to their "ideals" and die at home instead of an ICU bed, I would be a lot more amenable to arguments against mandates.
But as-is, normal people who took precautions to get vaccinated are being hurt by anti-vaxxers when they get an unrelated illness or injury (car wreck, infection, etc) and then suffer worse outcomes (including death) just because the ICU beds are full of people who could have literally just decided not to be in them (given how effective the vaccine is at preventing hospitalization).
Our society is far too interconnected for almost anything to not at least indirectly affect someone else, even if the first-order effects are well-limited to "just you".
Never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.
This depends on where you're at. Where I live we currently are not near capacity in hospitals or ICUs. There isn't an issue and we are not near one.
Should so many be mandated or highly pushed to get vaccinated because of a few hot spots that affect a small part of the population? This is a question I've heard.
Note, there is a difference between believing (or knowing) the positive effects of vaccines, being a proponent, and getting one yourself.
This is about forcing others against their will do to something. I fear this will come back to bite our nation in the future. Both in terms of the willingness to force people and the repercussions that will come from it.
Can you extend this logic to other groups beyond "unvaccinated"? For example, imagine the ICU beds that would be unoccupied if people who smoke tobacco and drink alcohol chose to "die at home". As a society, we know both of these behaviors are detrimental to health, and yet there are people occupying ICU beds because of their decision to use those 2 substances. Slippery slope and whatnot.... health insurance premiums would also be a lot cheaper if my group health insurance plan wasn't subsidizing treatment for all my coworkers with lung cancer, emphysema, and liver failure.
This argument falls flat when we do not require mandatory weight loss from other citizens. The point of the vaccine is not to protect oneself from taking up an icu bed, but to protect other people.
In the same way, driving while drunk is tremendously dangerous to yourself but is also a danger to others.
Communicable disease and taking reasonable precaution isn't that different. This one is interesting because its virality and fatality rates are apparently on the cusp of what society as a whole agrees are worth doing something about.
Helmet laws for motorcycles? I'm generally against them for the reason that it doesn't affect others (except in really weird edge cases) and I don't think we should mandate people risking their own lives (Except in situations where people don't realize the danger they are in)
When you skip the flu vaccine you put others at risk. In a normal year 40k people die of the flu in the US.
At what point do we draw what lines?
I'm not suggesting what that point is. Just that we slow down, think about it, and understand the tradeoff. There is no perfect answer.
There is also the element of the co-founding factors. Things like heart disease. Many of the co-founding factors, though not all, are repercussions of lifestyle (e.g., most heart disease is the result of many years of unhealthy eating).
We don't force people to eat healthy which would avoid a significant amount of disease and related factors in COVID deaths.
I realize this is not all cases... and I'm attempting to push thoughts forward rather than state my own ideas. Thinking this stuff through in depth is important. Seeing folks on the other side is important.
Somewhere. One one side, we don't allow you to shoot anyone you see to protect yourself against COVID. On the other we don't allow people with COVID to intentionally infect people (even sneezing on them in an obviously purposeful way implying you have COVID is getting punished.) So we draw it somewhere.
> Just that we slow down, think about it, and understand the tradeoff.
No. I have no desire to slow down. It's killing people now. It's delaying cancer treatments now. It's causing people to die of burst appendixes because they cannot get treatment now. If we need to revisit, fine. But it has to be after taking action.
So we draw the line somewhere between 40k and the number of deaths from covid? Note, it's not 650K in the US, those are deaths after all the social distancing, mask wearing, etc and more recently vaccinations. The true number would have been in the millions just in the US if these precautions weren't taken. Actually the IFR/CFR would be at a higher rate than now because hospitals would have been completely pummeled so people who now survive due to hospital care would die at home or in an ambulance waiting for a bed. Not to mention long covid, organ damage etc. The economy would suffer even with everything open.
Are you saying that you would draw the line at more than millions dead in a year in the US for covid because we draw the line higher than 40k per year for the flu?
If anything can be learnt from this, I think the argument can be that we can do more to combat flu every year, make it socially necessary for sick people to stay at home or mask up in subways etc.(like in Japan), increase testing, increase uptake of vaccines, new better MRNA vaccines etc.
Why do we need to draw the line there? Why not at 10k or 1m? It seems like you are advocating we arbitrarily pick the number to not include the flu but to include covid without providing a good reason.
Also, society has not really drawn the line. Politicians and unelected bureaucrats have chosen for us.
Which itself is an epidemic. There are multiple levels of cellular automata at work here, riding on each other like layers of foam.
The Meme of COVID being all of the AJ talking points. The antivaxxers are a surrogate host, they act in symbiosis. The mind virus and the cellular virus reinforce each other.
Sometimes?
Where we draw that line is very important, for sure.
The vaccine does not in fact guarantee person X will not be infected or hospitalized. Widespread vaccination does result in systemic reduction in community spread.
Ponder that.
We aren't going to wipe out COVID. It's here to stay. From people to animals. At some point most of us will likely get it. There has been a fair amount written on this.
If we look at past times we had pandemics (e.g., pandemic of 1889-90) we can see patterns. There the virus hit people and was bad the first year and gradually was less and less until they stopped tracking it. When we get hit the first time we get some immunity. For the virus from that pandemic it happens today as kids. Antibodies fade over time (while T cells remain). That means our nose and throat can easily get reinfected but after the first time we usually just get a simple cold (and first time is usually a simple cold, too).
That situation moved from pandemic to endemic. The same will happen here.
Yet, every year ~40k people in the US die from cold/flu.
We can't stop it. How we treat people along the way will say a lot about us and impact our relationships once we hit the endemic stage.
We'll get to endemic without or without the vaccine. The vaccine will help. Forcing people is going to create enemies and the side effect will live beyond the pandemic.
Just a thought to ponder.
Associating public health mandates with (EDIT correcting typo) "forcing people is going to create enemies" is the opposite of being respectful of people.
Best wishes to you.
The idea that enemies are made by enforcement of a public health mandate, and that that enemy creation is evidence of poor example of how to treat people and will redound....elides the rather obvious point that those who refuse to volunteer for vaccination in this context are exhibiting...poor treatment of others. In any kind of social context it is grotesque sociopathy. To accede to this notion of "enemy creation" is irrational and cowardly.
Cheers.
What we are witnessing in a distrust of non-demogogic power that has been instilled into the Republican base over the last 40 years. The multigrade attack on intellectualism, science, logic. That is like your opinion man. The same qualities of Fascism, the hero worship, the sacrifice of the individual, emotionally charged thinking, all of that is at the opposite end of the spectrum from the tools of the enlightenment.
If folks had better understanding of how vaccines work from a mathematical/statistical level their internal framing of "should I get it or not" would be altered. It isn't whether this is a benefit to me directly, but is it good for the heard. For society as a whole.
Thinking of the heard is socialist. Self-centered, me vs the world is another Republican strategy. All of them actually weaken the individual vs the state and the corporation.
Choice, responsibility, individualism are great concepts, but they have been perverted into a form of control that divides and distracts.
Ironically, because COVID vaccinated individuals still transmit the virus, the individualistic argument now favors the vaccine. Since anyone vaccinated is going to reduce social distancing and try to “return to normal,” they will spread the virus. So now the individualistic argument is that you should get the vaccine because the virus will become endemic and on a long enough timeline you will become infected.
Obesity is not highly contagious. Obesity can't mutate easily.
But if the vaccine protects you, and you have it, why do you care if I get it or not? By definition, the only people I could hurt are myself or other unvaccinated people.
Because every infection is a chance to evolve a new variant that my (and my family's) vaccination does not protect against.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...
Given that 10% of the population has been exposed at this point that makes likelihood of dying in the young age ranges extremely low. So many commonplace things people do in these age ranges have a vastly higher chance of causing death.
I wonder how many lives we could save if we required every car to have a breathalyzer that has to be used to start the car, and maybe a second test once 2 miles have been driven.
Also, if you want to get technical, most of those car laws only apply to public roads. On a private road you can get away with far far more.
From June 1 2020 to the present Florida has had 203 deaths per 100k. New York has had 130 deaths per 100k. New Jersey has had 170 deaths per 100k.
From June 1 2021 to the present, Florida has 42 deaths per 100k, New York 7 deaths per 100k, New Jersey 9 deaths per 100k.
For the first ~10% of the pandemic in the US you were statistically safer in Florida than in New York or New Jersey. For the rest of the time you were statistically safer in New York or New Jersey than in Florida.
I'm never sure how to take objections like yours, because there are certainly a few different things to discuss. Is your objection to the government's role in this (such that you'd be fine with private employers enforcing whatever mandates they wish)? Or are you objecting to the mandatory vaccination (in which case, what do you have against spitting into a vial once a week)?
Or are you more of a technocrat, concerned that the ROI (in terms of, say, QUALYs, as economists like to put it) gained through these policies isn't worth the cost?
All strike me as viable arguments, but it's always hard to tell which one is being put forward.
One nice benefit of going more remote is that we can hopefully "personalize" the cold/flu experience vs. making it a de facto office-wide experience, and without the bizarre politics around vaccines/masks/sick-days/etc.
There has got to be some genetic component where others have it way worse than I do, and yet still others skate by even better than I do. We know far less about biology than we think we do.
[1] https://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/your-cold-wont-go-away
And to be clear, I'm fully Covid vaccinated and get flu shots religiously. But when an impersonal institution is coercing and coaxing people into injecting something into their body that they don't want, I'm out. I won't vote for those politicians, I won't work with those companies, I won't cooperate with those federal agencies.
It's weird, it's creepy, it gives my lizard brain a bad vibe that screams "Get Away From Them FAST!" You can go on all you want about QALYs and ROIs and R0s. But that's about as convincing as a man with a pencil mustache and a windowless van explaining to me why he's qualified to babysit my kids. I'm sorry, I won't do it. I won't eat the bugs.
https://www.ncsl.org/research/health/school-immunization-exe...
[0] https://calmatters.org/health/2020/09/california-doctor-scho...
When I was in school (both K-12 and college), my schools just accepted a paper document (trivially forgeable) that stated what vaccines I had received and when.
I think your point--which is spot-on--is that a lot of the outraged reactions appear to be from people who are unaware (or unwilling to acknowledge) the very long history of compulsory vaccination (and who probably had such vaccines themselves as children).
That's not to say that any mandatory medical intervention shouldn't be treated with serious consideration, but the unwillingness to acknowledge precedent is bizarre and, I suspect, to some degree dishonest.
For example, should flu vaccines be mandatory to attend school? Historically they have not been in any large degree (to my knowledge). If you look at the IFR for those age groups for flu (varies somewhat by strain) and covid, then you'll see that they are generally very close. So we have to ask what changed, because it doesn't appear to be the value proposition.
There's probably a reasonable debate to be had about requiring people to disclose vaccination status (but, again, significant precedent)--but I do think the hysterical reactions sound a bit funny when viewed as a reaction to being forced to spit into a cup once a week.
I think we agree that the debate is, as is, not very good. I might be making it worse by highlighting the least productive comments instead of engaging more selectively with the actually constructive ones, but, well...this is the Internet, right? :)
Second, two of the three available are still under EUA, and the one that is approved is of a new type of vaccine that became approved through a very unconventional route, which has some folks cautious. Those other vaccines you mention are well-established and have been proven over time and through clinical testing to be safe and effective. COVID vaccines have proven to be only effective at reducing reactions, but not very effective at reducing spread.
Note that a typical clinical trial lasts years[0] - phase II usually takes 2-3 years and phase III takes an additional 2-4 years. We've had these vaccines for less than one year; if this was a typical vaccine, it'd be only part-way through phase II trials.
And now it's mandated by the government; get this shot, some of which are using new technology, that has had shortened clinical trials or lose your livelihood (because, at $14k per infraction, I don't see many large companies bothering to offer testing as an alternative unless it's for the CEO or other executives; it's just too much liability for an easily-replaceable lower-wage employee).
> but the unwillingness to acknowledge precedent is bizarre
That's because your precedent isn't an exact match, and has had easy alternatives and ways to opt-out.
To your other point, the vaccines do reduce transmission, as far as I can tell (e.g. https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/mounting-evidence-suggests...).
Now, to be perfectly serious, I do think that any efforts at compulsory--or, as in this case, incentivized, since testing remains an alternative--medical measures exist in a tension between the utilitarian and the libertarian point of view. We should certainly be cautious about mandating any medical procedure, and do our best to preserve alternatives (like testing, or mask wearing, or by limiting mandates to as narrow a scenario as necessary).
But I don't think the debate is helped by getting the facts wrong.
I think this is a strawman argument as virtually everybody is aware of past childhood vaccine requirements and acknowledges that they existed for a long time.
What might make this Covid vaccination and decision process different from those in many peoples' eyes is that:
* Past vaccines took years of development and testing before being applied to the public and were not rushed through any approval process. Covid vaccines in contrast use a new technology, were rushed through the approval process in a political process, and in fact are still technically in clinical trials. To many people, not enough time has passed to see about any possible long-term health impacts, fertility problems, or other issues. And obviously, discussions of short-term health problems in social media are suppressed or minimized too. Personally, I would argue that trying to vaccinate all people (especially the young) for such a low individual risk is one of the most irresponsible risk-management decisions in human history.
* Dr. Fauci and other health experts have spent much of the last 18 months either lying (remember experts insisting that masks are pointless before doing a 180) or being wrong about many things. Is it a wonder that people don't trust them?
* The media is the boy who cried wolf. They spent the last 5 years hyperventilating about Orange Man to the point that anything they say now is viewed through a partisan lens. Sorry, but if public trust is frittered away on political motives, don't cry now that you're telling the truth this time.
* The medical establishment seemed desperately against even trying alternative medical treatments (HCQ, Ivermectin) due to the vaccines emergency use authorization being tied to no treatments being available. How would a normal person react to the idea that there's a possible alternative treatment from a cheap already tested drug? You'd express some hope and be willing to try it, but express doubts about the treatments due to the limited studies available that don't show good enough results. Instead, we get a pile of propaganda labeling a legitimate medical drug as only a "horse dewormer".
* The focus is not on health and safety (which should be the goal), but only vaccination. Millions of people have had Covid and have natural antibodies: why isn't Covid antibody testing a suitable substitute for vaccination? Has even one health leader recommended steps to lose weight and get some sunshine for instance despite the clear worse Covid health outcomes for fat people with Vitamin D deficiencies? Or take NYC's draconian vaccine requirements to visit a ball game as an example. You're not allowed to attend a game if you're not fully vaccinated, but you can walk from the ballpark to a vaccination clinic, get "the jab (TM)", and immediately go attend the same ballgame even though the science says you're not immune. Everything about public policy is oddly specific about urging vaccines and incredibly creepy right now.
As I noted elsewhere, in many jurisdictions it is, as is testing.
In fact, as the very article upon which you are commenting notes, under the new OSHA rules those who do not want to get vaccinated can simply take a test once a week instead!
I admit, some mornings I have a bit of dry mouth, but after my morning coffee I always have enough spit to hock a loogie into a cup. For science and the greater good.
No, they have always been against use of drugs that have not been shown useful. That is the job of the FDA. It seems you aren’t aware that they did approve some treatments? Didn’t really affect the vaccine development, since the two aren’t really that dependent: their goal is to promote the best option.
> Has even one health leader recommended steps to lose weight and get some sunshine for instance despite the clear worse Covid health outcomes for fat people with Vitamin D deficiencies?
Yes, they are surprising reluctant to engaging in victim-blaming. You aren’t the only person who heard these may be helpful; I think it was pretty widely popularized since the beginning that poor health is a risk factor.
People keep acting surprised that other people would say no and also object to not having a choice.
Then there's the immunocompromised people who react poorly to vaccines and programs such as this are trying to corral them into a one-size-fits-all mandatory vaccination program.
They were also more numerically effective at keeping people from turning into a carrier, but they had the benefits of decades of tuning.
I can't help but think like your comment is more intended provoke heated responses than encourage constructive discussion.
But the ICU beds never got overwhelmed. In hospital treatment never failed.
The response then was "if you have a flu, call your GP who will just prescribe you the medicine over the phone". The exact same situation that most non-COVID patients have been in for months.
Excessive consumption of soda and beer have negative health consequences, and taxing them could lower consumption.
It also doesn't have the contagious element that viruses do, but if you only care about the individual impact it's still a defensible position.
Heart disease kills 650,000 per year, but there is still a McDonalds and Taco Bell on every corner.
And yes, there are a large number of people who sue Cigarette manufacturers for their role in the deaths of these people with the attempt of completely destroying the industry.
A) Typically ban smoking indoors because the state has banned smoking indoors
B) Also typically provide areas for smokers outside the building in compliance with local regulations. Are those places generally outside? No. Is the onus of responsibility on the business should an employee smoke inside? No, the employee is the one that would face the consequences, including possible termination and/or criminal charges. A business doesn't have much in the way to worry about.
There is no such provision for the vaccine. You either need to get the vaccine to continue working there, get tested every week, or find a different job. This is also without taking into account two things:
1) While the testing is offered according to OSHA, with potential fines up to 14k per instance what are the odds that employers are actually going to offer that to their employees? You actually, as a business, face less fines for leaving a piece of paper in plain sight that has someone's SSN, Name, and Address than you do for not potentially following this regulation.
2) That we are also looking at good odds of the testing option going away. It's not an option for federal employees, I don't think it is unreasonable to assume that it will be going away for those under this mandate in the near future.
Literal Nazi propaganda.
Strawmen don't need the vaccine either you know.
And federal law, state law, and often employer policies restrict exposing other people to your smoking in the workplace
The IRS can be in charge of making sure every American purchased at least one ADA approved toothbrush, submit your proof with your tax return.
We can give ration books for processed meat products - if you can’t choose wisely then the state will choose for you.
You never know what goes through someone's head or whether a previous injury will lead to an accident.
I'm only half joking, this could actually help me :D
I don't look forward to our health-police state we apparently decided was a great idea. Well we didn't decide, because that would have required congress to pass a law. This was just some old man skipping congress, likely knowing this will be overturned by the Supreme Court, but desperately needing to change the national debate away from Afghanistan.
If you eat sugar, you don't endanger others' health. If you don't get vaccinated, you put others at risk. See the difference?
This is the issue with technocratic government: zero understanding of anything deeper than “if it works, do it!”
Time to roll up sleeves for your civic duty.
Australia is the future of the Western world.
If that exists, it existed before COVID, and vaccinations against COVID certainly haven't changed that.
> Social credit system
Are you referring to mandates? These have been a thing, in the U.S., for many decades
> exclude people from doing simple human things
Vaccine mandates have excluded people from things far more important than restaurants, such as education, for many decades. This is not new to COVID.
You seem to be arguing against a system that has existed for many, many years.
Even if they did, it’s pretty obvious that they have been dramatically increased in the last 18 months.
You seem extremely uninformed.
The only difference is there's a new vaccine that needs to be rolled out to everyone, as quickly as possible.
Most people get their mandatory vaccines as children, in a staggered way.
Because of the current situation, it's happening all at once, and the restrictions that enforce the vaccine are also being changed, based on the age of the people required to get the vaccine. What am I missing here?
If anything the restrictions people are putting in place to enforce the vaccine mandate have been less extreme. As workplace mandates get rolled out, this will become more even, as the right to work is comparable to the right to an education.
As I tried to communicate before, curtailing basic rights in order to enforce vaccinations for everyone is not new. The only difference is that these usually happen based on age, instead of happening to everyone, all at once.
"That was a relatively easy no for the court. In a 7-2 ruling in Jacobson vs. Massachusetts, it decided that jurisdictions do have the right to require people to get vaccinated. Back then, the government was much more forceful about it, knocking down people’s doors to get them vaccinated, the New York Times says."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/09/10/republica...
Denying access to restaurants seems....timid? At least, in comparison.
I’m sure the argument falls apart in many other ways. You can probably find the counter arguments in the same Twitter thread where you found your talking points – just make sure to unhide the tweets containing them.
1. Is OSHA legal?
2. Is the mandate within OSHA's scope?
In terms of state level mandates, the Jacobson vs. Massachusetts ruling clearly applies.
Australia is taking it to the next level and using covid as an excuse. Do you believe that they will end their programs in 5 years when all of this is over?
>Are you referring to mandates? These have been a thing, in the U.S., for many decades
Vaccine passports are starting to be required to go to concerts, grocery stores, ball games, etc. If you do not do what the state wants you to do you will become a second class citizen with restrictions. This is similar to the social credit system in China.
>Vaccine mandates have excluded people from things far more important than restaurants, such as education, for many decades. This is not new to COVID.
No one is restricted from education. You can go to a private school or get an exemption.
since everybody has their own opinion on where that balance is, there will always be individuals unhappy with what decision makers decide
it is, of course, totally okay to have an opinion on that, but an opinion does not necessarily grant decision power, or even veto power, so ultimately you aren't the one who gets to decide what constitutes a right, and you aren't the one who gets to decide what constitutes a violation or an infringement of a right
I'm not trying to slam you here, because I am also not the one who gets to decide that -- I'm just one of hundreds of millions of Americans, the majority of which do not have a problem with this move
now, of course, if someone/you believes this move is an unconstitutional violation of rights, they/you can bring it to SCOTUS, who will let them/you know if they/you are right
and if SCOTUS does ultimately say that this specific mandate is unconstitutional, then of course I agree with you that such a decision should be respected unless and until We The People change the constitution, which would be okay, too
that framing does not reflect reality
if and when a SCOTUS ruling says that this specific mandate is a violation of constitutional rights, you will be correct
until then, you are not correct, by default
otherwise any random dude on the internet could just declare _anything_ a "right" and declare _anything_ an "infringement"
I still respect you as a person, though -- have a great day
I can’t keep repeating the same thing over and over again.
I can't keep repeating the same thing over and over again
Just to be clear, it absolutely does establish such rights in law and thereby grant them as legal rights. It may be that some of authors and ratifiers (and some current constituents) of the Constitution have a (quasi- or literally) religious belief about the metaphysical preexistence of and/or independent ethical universal necessity of exactly such rights (or a super- or subset of them) against any legitimate government, but that's...largely immaterial except in terms of arguments between people sharing such views as to what rights should be established in law, or social science analysis of why the particular rights chosen were established in the Constitution.
I think you'll find that most people who are okay with the laws you are referencing likewise disagree that those laws infringe free speech rights, rather, they view them as operating in a space outside of the proper conception of the right to free speech; the complexity isn't as much in the operation of rights as in the parameters of rights.
an alternate interpretation with the exact same implications might be "that right isn't absolute", which, yeah, I am okay with
ultimately it's just semantics that fails to meaningfully address GP's comment
If, as real property analogy, I have fee simple title to a parcel part of which is subject to utility easement, the utility company’s access within the scope of the easement is not an infringement of my right of exclusive control, it is outside of the scope of that right.
Similarly, most people who support laws that you see as “infringing” on the right of free speech who agree that a right with that name exists view the definition of the scope of that right more narrowly than the people who see the law as an infringement.
yet here I am, one of those people, telling you that yes, I do indeed view it as one
No, I haven't.
In fact, I’ve said nothing in this thread about that analogy (and nothing at all about it, IIRC, on HN except [in summary form] that it has fuck-all to do with the actual law, either now or when it originally appeared as dicta in an abomination of a decision.)
Nor have I said anything about what “most people” view as a “limitation” on a right. What I’ve said is about that most people who support a given law that others characterize as an “infringement” of the right do bot view it as an infringement, but as an act outside the scope of the meaning of the right.
> yet here I am, one of those people
Even if literally everything you said preceding this wasn't false, “one” ≠ “most”, except in a particular degenerate case where it is also “all”.
if I am understanding you correctly, you are saying there is a difference between society viewing something as outside the boundaries of a right, versus society viewing something as an allowed, permitted-by-society infringement on a right
if we assume that is true, then what are the implications to OP's post?
e.g. the vaccination mandate can be presented as either "outside the boundaries of the right" for whatever right those protesting the mandate cite, or an allowed, permitted-by-society infringement on that right
so what's the difference?
The whole idea of rights is that they cannot be violated, period. There's no reason to even have for example a UN Declaration on Human Rights if they can just be violated for Good Reasons™. Rights are absolute or they don't exist.
Rights are things reserved for individuals to hold unilaterally, sovereign over them, no democratic process or other consideration can take them away. That's the whole idea. That's at the core of the definition of the concept. Without that, the concept of rights doesn't exist.
After I lose my job I plan to be a company of 1 working on my SaaS or doing contract work... but I'm not confident that restrictions won't get harsher the more that people get vaxxed. The vaccines will work less and less, and the unvaxxed will be blamed more and more, leading to them being treated as criminals.
At what point does the US government freeze my bank account? At 95%? 98% vaccinated? I'm planning to leave the country before then.