Yeah, but then the unvaccinated would only be risking their own lives. The most prominent argument for compulsory vaccination right now is that they're taking away scarce ICU beds.
That there are a bunch of egoists that would rather have us all fend for ourselves doesn't change that, and usually those are exactly the people demanding we take on their burdens when the situation is reversed. It's called a social contract for a reason: taxes, vaccination against communicable diseases where possible, compulsory education and so on, it's the flipside of the coin, you get a lot of rights, but you also have some (sometimes moral) obligations.
I agree that it would be a much stronger argument. However, I also find it cruel to force people into an injection that they do not want, and would probably still oppose a universal vaccine mandate for that reason. I'd be okay with a mandate that allows people who really don't want the vaccine to opt out. I'd even be okay with that for the COVID vaccines if it wasn't for the 2G stuff and the awful rhetoric against unvaccinated people that preceded it. Enacting the mandate now makes the whole thing feel too much like "we'll get you somehow". Like I said, I find it cruel. It's not my idea of a humane society.
Keep in mind that there is plenty of precedent for mandatory vaccinations, in almost every developed country and in plenty that are not young children are vaccinated against a whole raft of diseases that would otherwise cause serious problems. The only people that are exempt are those that do not want any vaccinations for religious reasons because it apparently interferes with 'gods plan'. If you want to deal with this at the same level of ignorance then that's fine with me but I personally have absolutely no problem with a mandate and I also would not have a problem with rescinding the exemption for religious purposes.
https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...
But reducing the amount of active infections does have a beneficial effect because even though everyone will likely be exposed that doesn't necessarily mean that everybody will also get the disease (even the the worst diseases viral do not necessarily spread to 100% of the population), and there some chance that later strains may become milder. And if fewer people are ill at the same time that should increase the level of care available.
But it's a rearguard action at this point.
Illusion of control. The chance was never there. Even countries who are way more suitable for isolation like australia didn't manage to keep the virus out. Attributing that to "those that tried to spare the economy" is just another toxic blame game.
It's like a fire. If your house is the only house in a row of houses that is well prepared against fire then you're going to go down, in spite of all of your preparations.
The fatalism that many people exhibit is a self fulfilling prophesy: we won't be able to do it so we're not even going to try. But you know what? Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and China showed that it is possible.
No, they just moved themselves into a corner that they will be trapped in for the next 10 to 20 years.
I don't see that with this series of vaccines. They do not stop transmission. The ICU issue cannot be addressed fairly without addressing the other causes that put large numbers of people in ICUs.
We pay every year as a society in deaths for the assumption of some risk. We manage it, make laws, or just leave it alone and some people die (for example, we don't ban cars or eating too many calories or swimming pools).
In my estimation we are going a bit overboard demanding everyone take a novel injection, most especially when it appears the health authorities either didn't understand or didn't communicate the effectiveness over time of the injections.
There's a point were everything can't be all about what someone at the top proclaims is for the social good. Otherwise we wind up in corruption and dictatorship.
This was the same with every vaccine in the past, very few vaccines have received as much scrutiny as these, the biggest risk is the long term one and even there we have a fairly good idea of what the possibilities of materializing are.
None of these weigh up against the damage that a COVID-19 infection does.
If you think mandatory vaccination equates corruption and dictatorship then I am not sure we are on the same wavelength regarding the meaning of those terms.
There are a small group of people out there who are scared to death to take this vaccine because they genuinely think it will do harm to them. They are being asked to override their own alarms by people who do not share the fear because they don't have the same alarm bells going off. I know only a few of these people and they all have a ton of prior negative experiences with the medical system that would have left me feeling much the same way if I had shared their experiences personally. There are people that have been put in a 'do as you are told' situations and have received medical interventions that have done them great harm. Now they are being hounded and once again are being told to do as they are told, while fearing for their own health. A lot of people are willing to sweep aside their concerns as if they are asocial, ignorant, stupid, irresponsible and part to blame for the scale of the epidemic. People who feel out of control want to blame others so very badly, concentrating culpability in the hands of a group of bad actors, and it results in completely warped thinking with a tendency to dehumanise. And people can pick this up in others and it only increases their skepticism. They fear people operating in a blinkered, blame-seeking authoritarian way, and they see that as danger.
Though I encourage vaccination and have repeatedly tried to talk people who fear it off the ledge, I totally understand where the dictatorship and corruption logic is coming from. It doesn't take a hard-core cynic to raise an eye-brow when a drug company CEO proclaims that we'll all be needing many repeated doses of their product for years to come, while a leading political figure with immediate ties to the biotech industry wants to encourage countries to mandate the use of their products. If you had told me 2 years ago that society would control, monitor, demonise and divide people on the basis of having or having not received a recent government sanctioned medical treatment, I would have probably called you a hysterical conspiracy nut.
Two things drive me crazy: 1. How easy it is to dehumanize a significant percentage of the population. 2. How willingly politicians embrace that in order to find a scapegoat for their own failures.
As in, we can't just say "We have some social responsibilities so you must XX per the authorities" when XX is self serving, counterproductive, useless or harmful. We have an individual right, and responsibility, to weigh the dictates we are given at some point, perhaps not on all issues, but on some.
Other vaccines were not taken in to market in this manner. It is a novel vaccine.
This is pretty much the norm in any country that is a democracy but that does not have coalition governments. You get a kind of see-sawing effect where one group will enact a bunch of stuff and then when the tables are turned it all gets undone. It's stupendously inefficient.
Democracy is quite flawed but it still is the best mechanism for government that we have that is sustainable over a longer period of time.