On Personal Choice

Vaccination is not a personal choice.

(Allow me to repeat for those (not listening) in the back…)

Vaccination is not a personal choice.

(One more time…)

VACCINATION. IS NOT. A PERSONAL. CHOICE.

I could end this piece right there, but because I’m tired and angry and have to wear a mask at work again and in a mood to monologue, I’m gonna keep going.

By definition, a personal choice is a decision the results of which only impact you. The clothes you wear, the food you eat, the car you drive, the political party you support; all personal choices that do not have a MANDATORY impact on anyone else. The way people react to your personal choices is THEIR personal choice: they can support your choices, be offended by them, or ignore them. The impact of your choice on other people, including no impact, can be decided by that person, and are not dictated by you.

Individual liberty is an idea central to the entire mythos of American Democracy. In essence, the idea of individual liberty is that no one gets to dictate the personal choices that you get to make. When it comes to decisions that only impact you, the sky is the limit.

But, like I happened to mention above, vaccination is not a personal choice.

One modern example: folks used to be able to smoke cigarettes wherever they wanted, whenever they wanted. Restaurants, airplanes, hospitals, you name it. Even after it was learned how damaging smoking was to the human body, the prevailing idea was “if they want to kill themselves, that is their choice.” The reason we as a society put limits on where people can smoke is not the act of smoking itself, but rather secondhand smoke. As soon as it was proven how damaging cigarette smoke was to people who did NOT make the decision to smoke, particularly children, it was decided that smoking was no longer a personal choice and therefore did not fall under the protective umbrella of individual liberty, and restrictions were put in place. Of course, this process took place over many years until eventually it became an accepted norm. In some ways, the process was ABLE to take that long because the threat posed by secondhand smoke, while clear, was not exactly widespread or universal.

Because disease does not only effect you, the decision to fight disease or not is not one you get to make. Vaccination is not a personal choice, it is a communal one, because the impact can affect the entire community. Agreeing to be a member of a community, indeed the very idea OF community, means that individual desires must take a back seat to communal needs.

Now, again, PURELY hypothetically, lets say that a miracle vaccine is developed in record time that prevents this virus from infecting people. When a virus can’t infect people, it dies, and people no longer need to fear it. Good news, right? All we need to do is make enough people infection-proof, and EVERYONE is safe.

Except, uh oh, roughly 50% of people who could easily become infection-proof refuse to do so. They decide, for a multitude of reasons, that they do not fear infection, and therefore do not want to inject this miracle vaccine into their bodies. Except it’s not about them, it’s about everyone. Their choice does not only affect them, but everyone they might potentially encounter, so on and so forth. Therefore the decision to not protect yourself actually means you are not protecting others as well, sometimes a lot of others. If a personal choice can directly impact a lot of other people, it’s not a personal choice. If exercising individual liberty takes away the liberty of others then it is not liberty, it is subjugation.

Obviously, none of this is hypothetical (*gasp!*) and is actually happening in this country right now. The more or less 50% of the country who refused, for whatever reason, to not receive the COVID-19 vaccine, are the reason the Delta Variant is ravaging the country right now, causing the return of mask mandates, renewed questions about the reopening of schools, and a fresh round of concern for the immunocompromised and, for the moment, anyone under the age of 12.

I’ve heard so many reasons, extremely few of which are valid and nearly all of which involve a warped sense of personal choice and a bastardization of individual liberty. None of them deserve to be showcased here or given the dignity of the energy needed to type them. (Although I will tackle the “BUT THIS IS AMERICA!” excuse in a later post because it pisses me off the most.) What it boils down to is anyone who can get vaccinated and chooses not to does so because they don’t want to. Let’s be honest, if it was just the folks with medical exemptions not getting vaccinated, we wouldn’t be in this mess.

But, to return to the Holmes-is metaphor, if swinging your fist breaks someone else’s nose, you aren’t allowed to swing your fist anymore. These individuals have demonstrated an unrepentant selfishness, the result of which we won’t even be able to know for a good while yet. And it’s time for them to pay for it.

I’ve read a lot of pieces lately that suggest combating “vaccine hesitancy” with empathy and an open ear. I can honestly say I have no interest in that.

Bring on the vaccine passports.

Don’t invite unvaccinated family to your wedding.

No vaccine? Don’t bother coming to work. (And definitely don’t expect a paycheck.)

If there are no consequences for selfish behavior, it will keep happening. If the willfully unvaccinated are incapable of considering the feelings or the experience of anyone but themselves, why should their feelings be taken into account? Doing so is our choice, and its one we need to stop making if we want any hope of returning to anything resembling normal.

Because what they WANT is lot less important than what we all NEED.

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