Vaccine Requirements Aren’t Oppressive
A rebuttal to many of the arguments that anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers make.
There was a bunch of hubbub in the historical costuming community the past few days. One of the mid-level CosTubers posted an Instagram story comparing vaccine passports and whatnot to the Holocaust. The blowback was swift, as it probably should be.
Honestly? I’m getting really sick of all of the people complaining about mask mandates and vaccine passports and whatnot. None of this is oppressive, or even particularly difficult to do for most people. Vaccines are safe and effective, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to need one to go somewhere or do something around a bunch of people.
That said, I’m going to go through many of the common arguments and rebut them because I’m frankly tired of hearing about this stuff. Just a disclaimer: I’m not an expert on this (I actually address that later), but these people are definitely not experts, so I feel fairly confident in my arguments.
Wearing a mask infringes on my rights!
No, it doesn’t. The government can mandate the wearing of masks to protect public health, and the First Amendment doesn’t affect that ability, as wearing a mask doesn’t infringe upon your ability to demonstrate free speech.
But it’s a free country!
I hate to tell you, but there are 14 other countries freer than America. The top spot went to New Zealand, which instituted a bunch of lockdown and safety policies that were so effective that they’ve been living more or less normally for quite a long time. Granted, they’re an island nation with a lot of circumstances that allow for that, but their ability to be free was not, in any way, infringed upon by the lockdown.
This also ignores the above point that the First Amendment doesn’t protect you here. I’m pretty sure that the scholars at Columbia Law School know what they’re talking about.
Also, I like to think I have the freedom to not be infected with the plague by some rando who decided that their “free-dumbs” were more important than the health and wellbeing of everyone around them.
I can’t breathe in this mask!
Tell that to the surgeons who wear them for 12+ hours at a time. There are plenty of options that allow you to breathe freely, including face shields, which aren’t as protective as masks but get the job done for quick trips. Also, there are some really snazzy ones that minimize the gaps that regular face shields have.
I have a respiratory disease that prevents me from wearing a mask!
First off, get a face shield like the one above, or any number like it. There are options for under $20.
Second off, there are only a handful of respiratory illnesses that cause major breathing issues when wearing a mask under low-strain conditions. I’m willing to bet that you probably don’t have one.
Third off, if you do have one of those illnesses, why the heck are you walking around without a mask during a pandemic? Particularly a pandemic featuring a respiratory illness? If you have to, you have to, just get a face shield.
Vaccine cards/passports are a violation of HIPAA!
No, they’re not. HIPAA only applies to healthcare providers, health plans, and healthcare clearinghouses (and the like). It is in no way illegal to ask whether you have a vaccine or not or to ask for proof of that status.
Now, it could be illegal for an employer to ask why you didn’t get vaccinated, as that could be a protected bit of information under certain disability laws. However, it is required by OSHA laws that employers provide a safe working environment, and requiring vaccines or otherwise requiring an unvaccinated person to wear a mask is perfectly legal.
Also, businesses are legally allowed to ask for proof of vaccine and can require you to wear a face mask or other PPE if you aren’t vaccinated. They are also allowed to ask you to leave if you refuse on both counts.
Vaccines cause autism!
What do you have against people on the autism spectrum? There’s a lot of people on the spectrum — do you think they’re all subhuman or something? Somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.85% of children will be diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder. Do you want to tell their parents that their children are subhuman monsters?
Also, you’re wrong, but that’s not an argument that ever gets through.
Vaccines are against my religion!
I suspect that there is nothing in any particular holy scripture, most of which were written thousands of years ago, that specifically prohibits you from getting a vaccine. I suspect you’re just being combative and using religion as a bludgeon, as so many right-wing folks in this country are wont to do when it comes to damn near anything.
As someone who isn’t religious, I think your argument is dumb. Pretty much every religion I’ve ever come across is pretty big on loving your fellow man and whatnot. I don’t see how spreading the plague is akin to spreading the love of Jesus.
Vaccines aren’t effective against the Delta variant/vaccines are what caused the Delta variant.
Nope and nope. Vaccines are effective against Delta, but no vaccine is perfect, so there will be breakthrough infections. However, by and large, those breakthrough infections are less severe and result in far fewer hospitalizations than among unvaccinated people.
Also, viruses don’t mutate because of or in reaction to vaccines. It is literally the opposite of that: viruses mutate regularly as a matter of course, so having a higher vaccinated population means fewer hosts where the virus can mutate.
Just let COVID take its course and develop herd immunity that way/only young and weak people die, let it take its course and fizzle out naturally/it’s not that bad.
Do you want to tell your parents and grandparents that they’re expendable? How about we take a trip to the cancer ward and tell all of them that their lives will be sacrificed for the greater good? Can you look every one of them in the eye and say “I think your death is totally acceptable, even though it could be prevented”?
Also, young healthy people die from COVID too.
Also also, letting COVID “run its course” would be devastating.
Vaccines have microchips that track everything we do!
That’s some standard-issue conspiracy stuff right there, but let me address this simply:
First, your phone does a fantastic job of tracking everything you do already.
Second, I’m pretty sure that you’re not interesting enough for the government to track.
Third, and this is important, I want you to think of the many millions of people who are involved in manufacturing, distributing, and administering the vaccine around the world. Again, this is literally millions of people. Do you really think that they’re all being paid off to hide this huge secret? Don’t you think that someone would’ve come forward by now?
Oh, you think the media is in on this? Don’t you think that, with all the various political leanings of the various media networks out there, one of them would’ve run that story? There are plenty of major media networks that broadcast how awful the vaccine apparently is. Don’t you think that Fox News would’ve picked up this story and run with it? Surely, some scientist somewhere who would’ve had the ethics to understand that microchipping the entire population was wrong would’ve thought to send evidence to every major network in the world and one of them would’ve run the story by now.
Assuming that the media is being paid off as well, we are talking about tens of millions of people who are being paid some amount or another to hide a world-breaking secret. How much are they being paid? Who is paying them? There’s not enough money in the world to pay them all off to the satisfaction of every last one of them, and for many, many people, no amount of money in the world would make them keep this secret, nor would threats of violence or any other attempted leverage.
The sheer amount of moving parts in keeping a standard-issue secret from getting out to the public these days is staggering, and with the advent of email, it’s damn near impossible to stop someone determined to get that secret to the public.
It’s a satanic conspiracy!
Oh, you’re that kind of moron. Okay, I guess I can’t get through to you then.
Vaccine passports are like Nazi Germany!
That is all sorts of wrong for so many reasons. For one, showing a vaccine card is like a driver’s license or passport: it expands your rights as opposed to limiting them. Also, nobody is suggesting that we kill anyone who doesn’t get vaccinated. The point of the vaccine is to prevent death and help keep the population healthy.
There is some concern about creating a sort of two-tier social system, with those who have been vaccinated on top and those without on the bottom tier. Yes, that is bad, but the idea that vaccines are questioned at all is horrific to me and many others.
The fact that people on the right are offended by the thought of getting vaccinated should not have happened except that the former president was someone who thrived on divisiveness and misinformation. His derision towards the vaccine has had such a huge effect that he was booed by his own supporters for daring to suggest that people get vaccinated.
There are some concerns for people who cannot get vaccinated due to being immunocompromised or for other medical reasons. However, the point of the vaccine is to create enough immunity that these people can function in society without the vaccine with as little risk as possible.
Ideally, we wouldn’t have this issue and we would’ve reached a rate of vaccination that would’ve gotten us to herd immunity by now. If that were the case and we didn’t have such an active anti-vaccination movement, this might not have been an issue at all and people wouldn’t resort to comparing a campaign to improve global health to one of the worst atrocities in history.
Do you really trust the CDC? Do your own research!
The reason I trust the CDC is that they have a budget of billions of dollars and hundreds if not thousands of scientists whose job it is to do this kind of research. I’m not a scientist, I’m a writer, and while I do research on scientific journals, I have to rely on the scientists who understand the ins and outs of microbiology to do the actual science that leads to the results that lead to the scientific papers that tell me what’s going on with this whole COVID thing.
But the scientists have changed their opinions several times! Doesn’t that make them wrong or unsure?
Do you not remember the lessons you learned in middle school about the Scientific Method?
Science is about testing hypotheses and challenging established norms. Scientific principles and laws are constantly changing and being modified based on our understanding of the world. It’s taken us thousands of years to figure out how and why gravity works, even though it’s a fundamental force of the universe, and we still don’t have a complete understanding of it.
So, expecting that scientists would figure out 100% of everything to know about COVID within a few months is wildly unreasonable at best. It takes time to collect, aggregate, and analyze data, so over the course of a year, our understanding of this virus has changed as we learn more about it.
However, the fact is, decades of vaccine science have led us to the point where we developed a functional vaccine for COVID in about a year, something that many publications call a miracle. The miracle, however, is that we have decades and centuries and millennia of research and observation and study that have led us to the point where we as a society were able to create a functional vaccine in about a year.
None of this is meant to question the vaccine’s safety or potential lack thereof. Rather, it is a testament to how far we have come in our understanding of microbiology that we were able to take this body of research and apply it to make something good in a short amount of time.
Conclusion: Don’t be stupid, stupid
Look, I’m not an expert in microbiology, virology, or any of those other sciences that relate to COVID. However, I trust the people that are, and they all strongly suggest that we wear masks and get the vaccine. I understand just how little I understand about this virus, which is why I extensively reference the CDC — again, they’re the experts. Anyone who thinks they know more than the CDC needs to look into the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
The fact is, vaccines have caused a fantastic increase in the health and life expectancy of the population at large. Polio is incredibly rare in the world thanks to vaccines. Smallpox pretty much only exists in a couple of labs, again, thanks to vaccines.
Look, I can’t tell you to get vaccinated, and I can’t make you listen. All I can do is write an article in the hopes that someone, somewhere will read this, change their mind, and get the vaccine. The sooner we all get the stick, the sooner we can all go out safely again.
Please, everyone. I don’t know how else to explain to you that you should care about other people.
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