Vaxing question

I almost hate to step into what has become a quagmire. Yet, truth be told, so very much of what we face in this world is a marshland. Unless we wish to never express an opinion at all we cannot help but step in a swamp.

To vax or not to vax, that is the question. At least, it's the question dragging down a lot of civil conversation these days. I don't pretend to know the One Best Answer. But I am honest enough to admit it. Too many of my friends apparently walk on a plane of knowledge which I am not certain, by any measure, exists on this issue.

Talk of vaccine mandates are, quite honestly, obscene. The defense that the government makes us do all sorts of things so why not that fails to address the point. Quite bluntly, there are a great many things which government already compels us to do which it should not. That a government might try to compel us to act has no bearing on the morality of the act. 

Still, I will concede that a legitimate government has the moral authority under the right circumstances to force us to do given things. We couldn't have a single law without recognizing as much. So I will allow that even with vaccines those in authority over us might be within their rights to make us vaccinate. Again, without allowing for that we could not morally tolerate the vaccinations forced upon our children. The question then becomes, does the government have the moral authority to do that with COVID vaccines, or, worse, issue so-called vaccine passports?

I must come down on the side of the anti-vaxxers on that. With all due respect to those who will disagree with me, it is rather plain by any reasonable analysis that those who contract the disease by any means will almost certainly survive it. Then we have the fact that the governments don't actually seem to have a handle on it (masks work unless they don't; social distancing may or may not matter; you can live normally with two shots until you need a third; where does it end?) which leads to the legitimate question of whether we can trust government on COVID. And there is a difference, a huge difference, between vaccines being rushed through and the extensive, years long development of those against evils such as polio.

Part of the reason I'm okay with mandated vaccines against polio and measles and so on is that they are well established. It's pretty clear that we don't know all the effects of the COVID vaccines precisely because they're so new. There simply hasn't been enough time to have any real and final idea about their long term use and impact. Men and women are within their rights to be skeptical of them on that basis alone.

As a rule of thumb, acting without adequate knowledge is foolish. You get things such as health care advocates bobbing back and forth on issues exactly because the situation is still in flux. This leads to the rash, knee jerk actions which governments are so good at doing. If you don't mind a bit of a pun, governments (and their media hounds) need to take a pill and calm down. So do we.