I was usually ambivalent about government directed Covid vaccine mandates. I didn’t support them but the topic made me uncomfortable. I am pro-vaccine and pro freedom. I think our elites (including political and public health elites) did a better than average job during Covid. <\/p>\n
Now I love the topic of government directed Covid vaccine mandates (of course private entities should be free to require Covid vaccines). How much personal freedom should one lose if there is a massive public health payoff? <\/p>\n
What changed my mind was reading this Linda Greenhouse essay<\/a> in the New York Review of Books: “For the new majority on the Supreme Court, religious liberty takes precedence over the government\u2019s power to protect public health.”<\/p>\n In the general dispute between individual freedom and the public good, I’m slightly more towards the public good than I was in earlier days. <\/p>\n From the New York Review of Books<\/a>:<\/p>\n She places on display an American exceptionalism of a particularly disquieting form: a legal mindset that has come to value individual freedom over communal welfare and so has \u201clost sight of contagion\u2019s most compelling lesson: Our own health depends on the health of others.\u201d<\/p>\n …American legal culture\u2014constitutional law in particular\u2014played an unacknowledged part \u201cin generating the vulnerabilities that the pandemic exploited.\u201d A uniquely American body of law \u201cprivileged a particularly thin and one-sided conception of liberty\u201d that helped to \u201camplify the forces that tear at our social fabric.\u201d<\/p>\n …In Parmet\u2019s view, the Jacobson opinion exemplifies a \u201crich conception of liberty,\u201d which was lost during the Covid-19 pandemic to the \u201cnarrow and individualistic conception of liberty\u201d that came to dominate the public and judicial discussion. She does not exempt the Biden administration from criticism for the \u201cindividualistic framing\u201d it adopted. In May 2021, referring to the vaccines that by then were widely available, Rochelle Walensky, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, declared that \u201cwe really want to empower people to take this responsibility into their own hands.\u201d Parmet observes, \u201cOnce health risks are viewed in this manner, pandemic mitigation measures appear as intrusions on individual liberty.\u201d<\/p>\n Courts embraced the individualistic framing as if on cue. In January 2022 a federal district judge barred the navy from penalizing a group of SEALs who claimed religious reasons for refusing the Covid vaccine. Parmet notes this astonishing case, but without giving the details that demonstrate how far away from the \u201crich liberty\u201d of the Jacobson case the legal system was moving not even two years into the pandemic. The district court decision\u2019s list of the SEALs\u2019 rationales for refusing to be vaccinated included the \u201cbelief that modifying one\u2019s body is an affront to the Creator\u201d and \u201cdirect, divine instruction not to receive the vaccine.\u201d The navy argued that the requested waivers would render the SEALs nondeployable, to the detriment of military readiness and the national defense. Judge Reed O\u2019Connor was unmoved. \u201cThe Plaintiffs\u2019 loss of religious liberties outweighs any forthcoming harm to the Navy,\u201d he concluded. (The Supreme Court granted the government\u2019s emergency request for a stay of O\u2019Connor\u2019s decision, over the objections of Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch, while the case proceeded. Congress later that year ordered the Pentagon to lift the deployment bar on unvaccinated service members, and the navy\u2019s compliance rendered the case moot.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I was usually ambivalent about government directed Covid vaccine mandates. I didn’t support them but the topic made me uncomfortable. I am pro-vaccine and pro freedom. I think our elites (including political and public health elites) did a better than … Continue reading