In Defense of Rational COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates In Unimmune Eligible Americans
When a threshold number of people in a civil society behave irrationally or recklessly, restrictive laws and mandates become necessary to protect those in harm’s way. As Winter approaches in America, with 30% of us still un-immune, a COVID-19 vaccine mandate is an inevitable (and unfortunate) necessity.
In general, I am not a fan of mandates. I viscerally dislike exclusionary passports too.
But, I also know that civil order in a plural democratic market society at times requires restrictive laws and mandates, when minority subsets of people are put at risk of severe harm by environmental factors or irrational social behaviors.
In a perfect world, where everyone is perfectly well-informed and well-intentioned, where real logic and science are respected by the people, where fear and mistrust do not govern the democracy, and where no nefarious forces are at work to cause damage to a nation, there would be no need for mandates.
In a perfect world everyone would act rationally — based in empathy for self and others, based on science and on a profound sense of responsibility and patriotic duty to community and to nation.
But we do not live in a perfect world.
America is more divided today than, perhaps, since the civil war. Our democracy is tearing itself apart — ruled by fear and mistrust of one another and of our government. Influenced and led by political figureheads who are either too narcissistic or too paternalistic.
One wonders, how much longer America will actually hold herself together in this state of ridiculous imbalance — for a nation so accomplished and grand.
Here we are in the midst of a pandemic with 30% of our vaccine eligible countrymen UNIMMUNE, still — and a low virulency designer virus that severely harms 10% of the population and kills up to 0.5%.
As an immunologist, I have evaluated the RCT data on the COVID-19 vaccines — they work well. I also have evaluated enough people’s serologies to know that the vaccines work very efficiently to induce protective antibody and T-cell responses.
Every patriotic American should be proud of how our nation has managed to build the most technologically sophisticated and effective vaccine ever built in human history, in under a year, in defense of our nation and the world.
Alas, America has come to hate and mistrust itself in the year 2021 — both those who beat their chests to “Make America Great Again”, and those who beat their chests about American justice and equity! Shame on us all!
As a patient safety advocate, I understand medical harm and how it is born and sustained profoundly and viscerally, I assure you….
I am very comfortable attesting here on the public record that the American COVID-19 vaccines, created by the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed, are reasonably safe in UNIMMUNE Americans and are HIGHLY effective.
In fact, at this moment in the pandemic, I would go as far as to state that for any UNIMMUNE adult American to choose not to get the COVID-19 vaccine is the equivalent of choosing to get behind the wheel of car drunk.
Like a drunk person choosing to drive, an UNIMMUNE person who chooses not to get vaccinated in a pandemic, poses a risk of harm to him/her-self and to others.
To clarify my point, the moment an unimmune person who chooses to refuse vaccination, gets infected…is the same moment a persons who chooses to drink, gets behind the wheel of a car…
Immunology is NOT a made up science — and the SARS-CoV-2 pademic virus is NOT a hoax.
I firmly believe that just like the state has the right and responsibility to restrain the hazardous behavior of a drunk driver on a policy level, it also has the legal right and duty to restrain UNIMMUNE, unvaccinated persons in public engagement, during a pandemic.
What’s interesting about my analogy here is that most drunk drivers, like most unvaccinated who get infected, do not get into car accidents. Like COVID infected persons, over 90% of drunk drivers do not get severely harmed themselves. But the rate at which a COVID-infected person can harm others is likely to be much higher than the rate a drunk driver harms others. Airborne infections do get passed on from the infected to others….And the poor soul on the receiving end may do MUCH worse than the donor of the infectious disease.
Please understand that my stated position here ought not be used to assume that I am a proponent of Mr. Biden’s irrational and unsafe “one-size-fit-all” vaccine mandate. As I have extensively argued, in writing and in Federal court cases recently (ie., Zywicki v. GMU and Norris v. MSU), it is irrational and unsafe for the state to compel COVID-recovered Americans, who are already well immune, to get vaccinated against their will.
But, given the reality of this pandemic, and the fact that we are entering this Winter with nearly 30% of the country still UNIMMUNE and at risk of serious harm, it is now more than reasonable for the state to mandate vaccination in eligible UNIMMUNE Americans who are still refusing. Because such persons are placing themselves and others at risk of harm this Fall and Winter.
In a perfect world, we would all act rationally and in the best interest of ourselves and the nation. But, as is the reality in all plural democracies when a hazard only affects a minority subset of people, who could be any one of us, not everyone will act rationally and empathically in the democracy — — and especially if mitigating the hazard requires large scale public cooperation and consent as it does with COVID-19 vaccination today. This is why restrictive mandates and laws become necessary at times and are, in fact, rational, legal and necessary for the maintenance of social order.
Of course, the danger of mandates is that when the state imposes them in too draconian a fashion, and when appropriate and scientifically measured accommodations are not made, adequate compliance fails — and the mandates themselves become a source of instability. Exactly this failure is plaguing president Biden’s draconian and paternalistic vaccine mandate in millions of already immune Americans.
It is true that mitigation against social and public health hazards is a complex problem to balance out well, using restrictive mandates. consensus and compliance require the public to be empathic to those harmed, and scientifically well-educated about the nature of the hazard. And it requires that governing representatives and experts create rational, ethical, scientific and adequately flexible mandates.
If both the public and regulators fail, the hazards grow, mandates fail and civil society destabilizes.
America is in peril going into the Fall/Winter 2021/22. Because about 30% of the eligible population remains UNIMMUNE, unempathic, mistrustful or irrationally defiant. All this compounded by an executive administration plagued by a foolishly paternalistic president surrounded by a group of weak or nefarious public health advisors.
America is in peril — and there are few patriots left to defend her, as Americans themselves tear each other apart: In the aftermath of a surprise pandemic assault from a far land, with a virus perfectly matched to our democracy’s every weakness.
Who are you, reader — part of the assault force on America or an American patriot capable of seeing how we, ourselves, are destroying a grand nation and our own future?
Hooman Noorchashm MD, PhD
Fall 2021.
