Quote Originally Posted by KerrAvon View Post
I’m not a fan of mandates, in part because they feed into conspiracy theories, but in the main because governments should be slow to interfere with individual freedoms.

The thing is though that some infringement of personal freedoms happens as a part of living in a society. As an example, the wearing of seatbelts is mandatory in the UK. Some people railed against that when it was proposed but it is generally accepted without protest now. I would imagine that is because there is a widespread acceptance that they benefit individuals and wider society even though seatbelts can and do cause injuries and even death in certain circumstances.

The benefits of the vaccines are less tangible than those from the wearing of seatbelts, because it’s impossible on an individual basis to know for certain if you have avoided death or long-term harm from a covid infection or have avoid passing it to a clinically vulnerable person, whereas you may be acutely aware if you have avoided going through your windscreen in a prang.

And then there’s the internet. If the imposition of a seatbelt mandate were only just being proposed, I suspect that Twitter would be packed full of stories about how seatbelts can damage livers and kidneys or cause myocardial contusion and even heart rupture (as they can in rare instances) and that RoSPA is a shady operation intent on world domination. Shouty right wing American TV presenters would get in on the grift, sorry, I meant act, decrying the plot against the driving public, in between adverts for guns and bibles.

In the UK, the taking of Covid vaccines was briefly mandated as a condition of being employed for front-line health and care workers (although I think it might have been dropped before it was rolled out – but I’m happy to be corrected on that). I would assume that the aim of that was to seek to protect the elderly and clinically vulnerable people that they came into contact with and to seek to reduce sick absence in those critical areas. How would that be achieved without vaccination?
Wearing seatbelts are written into law and when you exit your vehicle you leave the seatbelt there.

Is a mandate a law? To mandate the injection of a drug and inject it into someone else’s body means it stays there permanently !