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Why should a state even have the ability to mandate medical treatment when that's a very clear bright line violation of natural rights?
I care much more about the ethics of mandates than I do the specifics of efficacy. The individual must make the informed decision on this, not the state, and any mandates are tyranny that must be defended against to the death.
There is certainly a debate to be had about mRNA, a very necessary one, which was poisoned by the will to impose without discussion as we now know for a fact, but the idea that we should assume from the beginning that the State has to retain tyrannical powers in the name of public health is insane.
This seems like overly dramatic macho posturing. Obviously you are still alive and didn’t do anything of the sort.
Can you seriously not imagine a situation where mandates would be warranted? I don’t support the mandates for COVID, but being unwilling to even consider that there might be a point where the tradeoff scales tip is just an unreasonably ideological suicide pact. If there were a hypothetical disease much more deadly than COVID, surely you must be able to imagine such a thing
If someone is charged by a needle-wielding thug with the intent to stab them with it, I believe they are entitled to defend themselves, up to and including using lethal force against the assailant. Even if said thug is an agent of the state. Of course, this would be analogous to compulsory vaccination, which is not the form most vaccine mandates took in 2021. Rather, they are more akin to a mugging, and that's a slightly greyer area when it comes to whether lethal force is appropriate for self defence.
Regardless, medical coercion is a gross violation of ethics. Even in the absence of vaccine mandates themselves, lockdownist regimes violated medical ethics in how they offered the vaccines. They advertised that restrictions would go away without vaccines, hence created the implicit threat of more restrictions in the case of refusal.
My judgement on this comes from the UKDH reference guide to consent for examination or treatment, which says:
On this basis, the existence of vaccine mandates clearly poses a risk for violating informed consent, as it introduces duress in several ways. Firstly, it means pressure or undue influence being exerted on the person to accept treatment from government, employers, retail services etc. Secondly, it also means threats of the withdrawal of privileges in an environment with involuntary detention. See how specific the language here is, how closely and specifically it applies to the circumstances of vaccine mandates in countries that carried out lockdowns, despite the age of the document long predating covid. That should hint that these recommendations are not simply some backporting or recency bias for the sake of winning an argument, but instead represent best practice as it was already understood.
Even political leaders broadcasting claims that vaccines are a route out of lockdowns, or that unless X% of the population are vaccinated that restrictions will continue, introduces duress. However, this is more of a footnote, as regimes that carried out the false imprisonment of the entire population are already instantly rendered illegitimate by doing so.
Personally, I found the whole process so fucking disgusting that I refused to take the vaccines purely on the basis of that. I don't care if they're the best or the worst vaccines in the world. The rubicon is crossed, and the relevant institution is no longer trustworthy. For the state to insist that people are born subhuman, and only acquire rights after jumping through regime-approved hoops and injecting regime-approved substances on a regime-approved schedule... The very thought sickens me. The fact that a large proportion of my fellow countrymen, as if somehow I can regard them in such friendly terms any more, agreed with these mandates sickens me even more.
Even mandatory vaccinations would not consist of "needle-wielding thugs" charging you trying to stab you.
Is not a remotely rational description. Nowhere in the Western world did vaccine requirements come anywhere near the level of the unhinged rhetoric you keep repeating. (China wielding people inside their houses? That's legitimately terrifying, but also not an aberration in China.) You are not describing reality. You are not describing actual events, behaviors, or policies. You have never, in all the time you have ridden this hobby horse, described the world we live in. Nothing you have described actually happened, ever.
Austria came close to criminalizing being unvaccinated, aborting plans to do so at the last minute.
Some countries implemented lockdowns on the basis of vaccine status. Again Austria comes to mind as an example. Austria's regime did decide that people who did not jump through regime-approved hoops and take regime-approved medication on a regime-approved schedule are so unworthy that they do not deserve the right to leave their homes. I don't know what to call that beyond treating them as subhuman. Many more places decided that they couldn't be allowed to attend events, restaurants and bars, shops etc. Even the US, to this day, continues to regard unvaccinated people as lesser by making it illegal for them to enter the country.
And I've seen enough rhetoric from governments and supporters of mandatory vaccinations to know that, without pushback, they'd have gone further. Because of this, I'm not particularly interested in merited impossibility, nor lockdown denial.
Even if I believe you (I don't), you're describing something that was floated as a proposal, not something that actually happened.
I could reword almost any law to sound ridiculous and dystopian. "Some people are treated as so subhuman they aren't even allowed to get behind the wheel of a car!"
There are many situations in which the government can restrict your freedom to travel. While you may not agree with all (or any) of them, they are not "treating you as subhuman." Unless you're an anarchist and you believe all laws are treating you as subhuman, in which case, okay, that would at least be consistent if still irrational.
All countries have restrictions on who can enter, and the US is not the only one that includes vaccinations as a requirement, and not all vaccination requirements are COVID-related. So every country in the world regards some people as "lesser" in this fashion.
Your rhetoric is unhinged and counterfactual.
It was not floated as a proposal. It was passed as a law. The law came into effect. The law was suspended moments before anyone actually fell afoul of the requirements.
And I can reword almost any objection to a law the same. Who cares if the Khmer Rouge is carrying out omnicide, they're entitled to do whatever they want with their subjects bodies because of a precedent set by driving licenses. This doesn't make lockdowns sound acceptable. It just makes driving licenses sound worse. Driving licenses are driving licenses. They are not driving and everything the government does is now automatically okay licenses.
Do you believe that being allowed to leave your place of residence is something humans are not owed by default? If so, we have no values on which we agree, so this whole conversation is pointless.
Turns out there's a wide gap in political opinion between opposing all laws and supporting all laws. Or do you think all laws passed by governments are inherently okay?
Seriously, what's your argument here? That because I don't object to all laws I'm not allowed to object to any specific one?
Then we are in agreement. Maybe you think unvaccinated people are lesser. Maybe you don't. I certainly don't, and I object to anyone who does think they're lesser. Hence why I object to the US regime's vaccine mandates for international travel.
Yes. I also believe most freedoms are something humans are owed by default. That doesn't mean the government cannot restrict those freedoms under certain circumstances.
In some countries, the process of deciding what those circumstances are is called democracy. In other countries, it's called authoritarianism. But there are no countries that don't impose restrictions. And screaming that one particular restriction in one particular situation with a practical rationale (even if you disagree with it), constantly (and inaccurately) catastrophizing about the level of that restriction with hyperbolic language detached from reality, using rhetoric you'd use to describe being herded off to a concentration camp, is unhinged.
You're allowed to object to anything you want. I'm saying your specific objections, and how you frame them, are irrational and not ingenuous.
Note that I have not stated that I am actually in favor of mandatory vaccinations or lockdowns myself. Because I can talk about laws I don't necessarily agree with without trying to hype them as Literally Gulags.
What principles do you hold that would lead you to reject concentration camps?
My principle is that arbitrary imprisonment, the imprisonment of someone who has not committed a crime or is not suspected of having committed a crime, is a violation of human rights. This is not some rare stance. It's contained within the UDHR. It's implied by Habeas Corpus. As a legal concept, it goes back centuries if not millennia. It is the very bedrock upon which rule of law lay. And it interlocks with all other human rights. For example, a right to religion cannot be protected if the state can arbitrarily imprison people of the wrong religion anyway.
I do not believe lockdowns are in any way compatible with this idea. Certainly not as they were carried out in the UK. It was made illegal to leave your house without one of a specific list of reasons to do so. This meets the conditions of home imprisonment, as defined in Jalloh v. Home Secretary. The reason the bounds of imprisonment need to be broad is to protect people from being placed into imprisonment-like conditions and not have any legal recourse against them. I do not believe there's any "negotiation" or "democracy" than validates arbitrary imprisonment, and believe that any polity that endeavours to imprison the entire population immediately illegitimizes itself.
Because of this, it is unclear to me on what grounds supporters of lockdowns can claim to meaningfully oppose concentration camps beyond specifically rejecting concentration camps for aesthetic reasons. How can you okay the repeated arbitrary imprisonment of billions of people on the flimsiest of pretexts yet draw a sharp line only at that specific form of arbitrary imprisonment? To me, that they were imprisoned at all is the crime, not the specific details of where you then place your prisoners. Imprisoning people for no reason does not become good because you give them nice, cushy prisons. It does not help that Australia actually did set up camps, either.
Similar applies to vaccine mandates. Medical treatment without informed consent is somewhere between assault, battery and grievous bodily harm. Injections specifically are likely to be the latter because they pierce the skin. Even leaving the vaccine mandates aside, informed consent under duress due to lockdowns is a serious problem that was entirely ignored. How many people got the vaccines because they were suffering under the indignity and abuses of lockdowns, and falsely believed that submitting to vaccination would end those abuses? They would not believe it for no reason, because governments claimed that people being vaccinated would end lockdowns. Did those carrying out vaccinations early on, even before any of the mandates, ever take pause to consider whether the people they were injecting had actually given informed consent, or were instead doing so under duress?
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