09-12-2021, 12:11 PM
(09-12-2021, 06:06 AM)jeffster Wrote: Maybe a better idea is just to vaccinate children (if ever approved) that have serious health issues, and are more likely to benefit from a disease that, for the most part, ignores children.
My understanding is that children can act as links in a transmission chain. The goal of vaccination is to make our country an inhospitable environment for the virus. This is done by vaccinating everybody, or at least everybody who spends significant time with others.
Again, vaccination is not really an individual decision, but a societal one. This is why vaccination requirements are appropriate: if the society as a whole decides, through our democratic institutions, that we are to end the pandemic through vaccination, and if the safety and effectiveness of that decision is supported by solid scientific research, then those who disagree have the right to protest the decision but not to stop it.
The same is true of any of our laws. We all have to stop at traffic lights, whether or not we think traffic lights are an appropriate way of controlling traffic. We all have to wear clothes, even though not doing so doesn’t really harm anybody else. And so on.