Vaccine "Mandates"

 Let's talk about vaccine "mandates" and why you shouldn't necessarily be worried -- yet.

No one should ever be forced to accept any medical treatment against their will, including vaccines. Forced medical treatment of any kind is always, always a human rights abuse. We should never lose sight of that.

Fortunately, in the U.S., that's not happening. Media coverage has hyped the idea that the federal government is "mandating" COVID-19 vaccines. They are not, and if they did, we absolutely should rise up in opposition.

What they are doing, and what some states and employers are doing, is making COVID vaccination a job requirement for certain jobs. Specifically, employees of larger businesses will be required to either be vaccinated against COVID-19 or tested for it weekly. This is to prevent potential carriers from spreading the disease to others, surely a legitimate goal.

Is this discriminatory? Not if regular testing is accepted as an alternative. People who can't, or don't want to, be vaccinated still have another option, and will not be forced to be vaccinated. They will simply have to demonstrate that they are not contagious, which is a valid matter of workplace safety. (Some fields, like healthcare, do require vaccination because the risk of transmission is too great, but that, again, is a job requirement, not a mandate.)

Short version: Vaccine mandates would be a human rights abuse if they were happening, but they're not happening, so don't worry about it (yet).

So, Hypatia, are you writing this whole post just to say that an abusive policy isn't happening and we don't need to worry about it?

Well, no. If only it could be that easy.

Employee safety requirements involving regular testing or vaccination are not, contrary to popular reporting, forced vaccination -- but people defending them are under the impression that they are forced vaccination, and that forced vaccination is a good thing. This, rather than the policy itself, is terrifying.

The U.S. government is not forcing people to be vaccinated, but, apparently, much of the population would be completely fine with it if they were. People are openly admitting that "my body, my choice" was only ever a slogan to them, and they never really meant that humans should have a general right to bodily autonomy. Their arguments are, essentially, that people who choose not to be vaccinated are bad people, so we don't need to care about their rights, and that choosing not to be vaccinated is an "irrational" "unscientific" choice, which makes it an illegitimate one. This should sound alarm bells for all disabled people, especially Mad/neurodivergent people, who are regularly told that our choices about our own minds and bodies are "irrational" and thus invalid, that choosing to reject the treatments laid out for us is "unscientific" and thus invalid, or that we're immoral for our indifference to how our "unhealthy" deviant bodyminds "affect others."

To be clear -- being a potential carrier for an airborne, contagious disease is a health issue that literally, tangibly "affects others" in a way that being Mad/neurodivergent, disabled, Fat, or Queer does not. There are competing rights between the right of the potential carrier and the right of others not to be exposed to the disease, more analogous to the conflict between the rights of someone's choice to smoke and the rights of someone to be free of secondhand smoke, and in both cases, I support public policy prioritizing the latter, generally by requiring the former to keep a physical distance to keep their germs/smoke to themselves. Being medically noncompliant Mad/neurodivergent, disabled, Fat, or Queer (among other things) only "affects others" indirectly, through their alleged emotional distress at seeing or knowing about our bodyminds and choices, or at the alleged financial cost our existence imposes (it doesn't -- money is a social construct -- but that's another day's post). But the argument that bodily autonomy is contingent on "rationality" is the same.

Nor is "But people who choose not to be vaccinated are bad people" a relevant argument. It's true that most people in the organized anti-vaccine movement aren't people I'd want to know, and most of them certainly wouldn't want to know my queer autistic liberal socialist self. But bodily autonomy is a human right for every human, not a privilege earned by being a good person.

So, once again, the short version: U.S. labor policies including vaccinations or regular COVID-19 testing are not forced medical treatment, and you don't need to worry about them. But you do need to worry about the large segment of the population who thinks that forced medical treatment is okay, and are willing to jettison the principle of bodily autonomy at the first political inconvenience.