I am fully vaccinated against COVID-19. I support others getting vaccinated. Yes, these inoculations are fairly recent and we don’t yet know everything about them, but, for myself, I think the available evidence makes a vaccine favorable cost-benefit case. I hope others, after informing themselves, will arrive at this conclusion.
But I also believe in individual rights and people being able to choose what kind of health care they receive. I believe in the Constitution; in freedom of religion; in the rights of individual states to make decisions about how they regulate pubic health, as enshrined in that Constitution and decades of precedent.
And I believe that recent attempts by President Biden to force tens of millions of people to get vaccinated — now including not only public employees, but also much of the private sector — flies in the face of all of the above. It constitutes a massive overreach of the federal government’s Constitutional limitations. Inasmuch as this amounts to the president and executive branch issuing fiats without any Congressional mandate, that unlawful overreach is even greater; truly beyond words. Constitution aside, I feel it is immoral, unethical, and contrary to our commitments to human rights. And, it is also deeply ineffective, even arbitrary, since we now know people who are vaccinated can still transmit the virus.
It is also profoundly hypocritical that the same liberal-leaning politicians who advanced the causes of gay marriage and abortion, proclaiming the belief that people have a right to choose what to do with their own bodies, are now trying to force people into getting shots, many of which still only have preliminary FDA approval.
We have implemented plenty of other vaccination programs very effectively without such measures and, where mandates have been used, they have been at the state level and much more flexible than what Mr. Biden seems to desire.
Herd immunity does not require 100% vaccination. We need to win this fight through education and outreach; not by tyrannizing those who disagree with someone else’s cost benefit analysis. We elected our president to preside over a democracy, not a dictatorship.
Hussain A. Hamdan lives in Hawley, where he is a member of the Selectboard.