Vaxing question redux

I addressed the question of mandatory vaccination for COVID and the potential for vaccine passports the other day. You can read about here if you like:

https://thesublimetotheridiculous.blogspot.com/2021/09/vaxing-question.html

It should not surprise anyone who knows me to discover I am against such ideas. But I want to take a moment to look at things a bit further. It was brought on when I read that uber-libertarian Howard Stern asserted that anti-vaxxers should not get health care if they fall ill with COVID. I think such cavalier, indeed reprehensible, attitudes express precisely why we as a society should be very careful about telling people what they can and cannot do.

If someone is denied health care because they didn't get the COVID vaccine on the mere grounds that they made an individual choice as a reflection of their personal freedom (no matter how insidious you might think that choice to be) then I must ask, what else may society deny a person who is acting in ways arguably harmful to the greater society?

Should someone who overeats not receive care? Someone who smokes like a chimney? Someone who drinks too much? Someone who races their car at 100 miles per hour on the highway and crashes horrifically? Surely such folks could or will cost society quite a bit in the long run. Arguably they care no more for their fellow man than the person who will not be vaccinated, if you believe that the anti-vaxxer has no concern for his peers. Indeed if we ever reach the point in the States where there are national health plans on a broader scale than we have it currently, there is a simple and easy to emplace rationale for denying health care: society is paying for it, so society has a right to dictate who gets it. Why? Because your actions can, quite obviously, adversely affect society.

Think that can't happen? Two years ago I never imagined so many freedoms being trampled on for an illness which is, I will say it again because I believe it needs to be shouted from the rooftops, relatively harmless. If it's justified for and accepted for COVID, it's more easily and readily justified for most other human actions. We would then, as Ben Franklin so rightly warned us, have given up freedom for security and will end up with neither. It is a trade we should not make.