Yes — they were coerced by the state including having normal freedoms removed, which is what generally defines “legal obligation”.
No one was ever forced to take a vaccine. Nor were they coerced by the state.
Making hard choices inherently implies options. Vaccines saved well over a million people’s lives at negligible heath impact for the wider population, that’s simply what states are going to do in an epidemic.
You don't have the right to demand that they cater to your requirements.
If you work for the FBI you can quit at any time and work for a different companies with different rules. You can’t work for a company that gets to ignore minimum wage laws.
- love what I do and love the team I am on a my mission.
- have a career at fbi, not a “job” I am willing to change like underwear
- be gs-15 few years away from retirement/pension/…
you can technically say this is a “free” country and all that but it is just semantics
A career extends beyond a job means that you can transition to something related outside the FBI. If there some aspect of a job you dislike then quit.
bottom line though, the then government (which is soon to be now government) went full ballistic on us during COVID times and vaccine mandates affected many lives
When you volunteer to work for someone you’re agreeing to do what they want or quit, that’s by definition a choice. When many private employers had the same requirements complaining about overreach by the government is misplaced, it’s at most overreach by employers.
So yea 98% says a lot about how toothless this all was.
I do not believe you.
I think it’s interesting how many people deny that — almost as if you know what was done is morally repugnant.
It’s entirely possible to engage in net-negative behaviors because you fixate on a singular goal — a human version of the “paperclip optimizer”: we became “COVID optimizers” and produced suboptimal results.
Ethics and morals are time-honed heuristics to avoid those failures. “Freedom” is the heuristic that distributed risk assessment and planning out perform centralized versions — and we forgot that in our panic.
It is fortunate that the COVID-19 pandemic did not rise to that level. Maybe it couldn’t have, but that’s easier to say with the benefit of hindsight.
Or some other catastrophe that threatens us. My point is that natural things do not care for artificial concepts such as “freedoms” and “rights” and “morality”.
But they were and you’re inventing a false dichotomy whereby we had to engage in totalitarianism contrary to evidence of COVID’s deadliness or some hypothetical infinite bad might have happened.
That’s nothing but bullshit, from somebody who was wrong.
We knew within two weeks of most major shutdowns that Covid wasn’t even close to as bad as predicted by the Imperial College. Society decided to completely ignore that data and instead doubled down on its hysteria for more than three years.
Good thing we aren’t viruses and have intelligence and the ability to step back and think through our actions.
There is more to life than exactly one specific myopic focus on a virus. It takes an incredible amount of privilege to believe that the only problem humans can solve for is an exactly one single virus to the exclusion of literally everything else. Massive, massive amounts of privilege to think that way, in fact.