For Your Safety: Can Vaccine Mandates Go Too Far?
Why we might have to drop the passports to keep our way of life
The cyclical torture of lockdown, release, then lockdown again has brought us to a breaking point that is more dangerous than any virus. Soon we’ll beg for any tyrannical measure that promises to free us from COVID once and for all. And there’ll be no going back.
That proposition has already been made in the form of vaccine mandates. The offer is simple, yet perplexing: if we can finally shake off the ideas preventing us from closing the immunization gap — individual choice, free will, bodily autonomy, the right to refuse a medical treatment — we can be free to live again.
But in no right-side-up universe do basic principles of freedom represent an obstacle to freedom. And in no world do we buy liberty tomorrow with tyranny today. Yet this is the trade we’re being sold, and we need to ask why.
After two years of COVID measures, our leaders say the real problem is noncompliance, and that the only reason we’re still masking, distancing, vaccinating, and locking-down is that we haven’t done enough of it.
Always, the message is that there is never enough to be done, and there is no length too great for even the slightest benefit.
But this has never been — and would never be — a serious approach to public health because of the detrimental hysteria it would encourage.
Before the era of hysterics, scientists would use decision making tools to target the most beneficial and least destructive policy for meeting new health threats, understanding that going too far to attack one problem can create other bigger problems.
Instead we face policy extremes that have harmed our health, reset global economies, gutted small business, addled our risk perception, torn apart families and communities, and ushered in an era of unprecedented surveillance and tracking. Worst of all these safety policies have softened us towards authoritarianism and turned freedom into a dirty word.
The further these measures go, the more we have to wonder how much good is truly left to be gained by them, and whether perhaps the measures themselves are their own motive.
The law of diminishing marginal returns
There’s a concept in Economics called the law of diminishing marginal returns, which offers an indictment of our current no-holds-barred approach to COVID prevention. It says that in any pursuit that provides a benefit, there’s a point beyond which each additional step starts to do more harm than good. No well-meaning agent exceeds that point.
For example, consider juicing an orange: the point of diminishing returns happens when the force required to squeeze the last few drops begins to outweigh the return. Squeezing until pulp and peel break apart does not provide enough additional benefit to justify the force. Going so far only puts suspicion onto the one doing the squeezing.
The same applies for COVID measures: we can look at countries like Australia, Austria, France, and Germany, who have defied the notion of ever being safe enough and have so far squeezed their people until the pursuit of safety has started to look like an excuse for the raw exercise of power.
With over 80% vaccinated, and the unvaccinated already barred from most of public life in Canada, will we recognize that there is a destructive line we should not cross?
Or will we be convinced that the added safety benefit of squeezing the last of the resistors into compliance is worth the cost of setting up the authoritarian framework necessary to do it?
The stigmatization of the unvaccinated has gone a long way towards lobbying support for radical measures beyond what even the science can justify. For example, waning vaccine immunity puts the unvaccinated nearly on par with many of the fully vaccinated, yet we are meant to see them as a unique and intense danger. The constructed image of the unvaccinated, which recalls a Second-World-War-style domestic propaganda effort, dramatically inflates the threat that they pose. In actuality, there is only a small fraction more safety left to be gained by further pounding them into submission.
But when the next lockdown gets blamed on the few unvaccinated left among us, we’ll support the darkest things left to be done against them. Will we fine them into compliance? Freeze their finances? Take their assets? Put them under constant surveillance? Seal them in their homes? Collect them in a safe location?
In the stupor of our fear and fury, we’re liable to support almost anything.
Indeed we seem fated to squeeze that metaphorical orange well beyond any meaningful benefit. Unfortunately, the cost will be our own subjugation beneath the same authoritarian system we set up against them.
Spotting a trap
We would be naïve to think that an all-encompassing infrastructure for control and coercion will be left to dry up and blow away when this crisis passes. If it’s allowed to go too far, the leveraging power of a passport system — its sheer potential to bring an entire population to heel — will attract new reasons for its use and in time completely erode the principles of a democratic society. Is that worth a bit more COVID safety today?
It would only be a matter of time before we all find ourselves on the wrong side of a changing and expanding system that is totally indifferent to our consent, even if for the moment we support its edicts. In short order, we will wake up in a world we regret building.
And so the less sense it makes to further squeeze the unvaccinated for safety reasons, the more sense it makes to squeeze them in order to reshape all of society.
A people scorned
When we blow past the point of diminishing marginal returns, when all of a sudden you need to scan your health pass to bank and you question how much safer you really are for it, then logically you must start entertaining questions you wouldn’t have considered before.
Our compliance so far has been conditional on the good faith that it serves our interest. But we are not totally blind to the possibility of ulterior motive, even if it would necessitate extraordinary perpetration. We can follow the math and decide when the words of our leaders stop adding up. Likewise we can recognize that power and control have been an age-old pursuit of the ruling class. And we can fathom global coordination to achieve it.
The worst is not impossible; and if we start to feel like we are being led into handcuffs with safety only as the pretext, we can rescind the power we have given to the passport by simply refusing to produce it or to request it.
At such a point, we will do the same extraordinary thing we did at the start of pandemic. We’ll accept the call to do again what is right even if it means dropping everything we recently stood for and reverse directions.
The difference is that this time the call won’t come from our leaders and our experts. If it comes, it’ll come from within ourselves. It’s time to start listening.
