If you are at high risk, your doctor is probably going to QUITE RIGHTLY recommend that you be vaccinated. People who are in high risk populations like the elderly and the immunocompromised need all the protection they can get.

But that’s not most of the world’s population – not even most of the US’s population. If vaccines actually work – and the evidence is supporting that they are pretty effective (great, no; good, yes) – then there’s no compelling need to vaccinate hundreds of millions when we can vaccinate tens of millions and get the same results.

Stop yelling about Granny and think this through. It costs BILLIONS to poke that many people – what happens if we use that money for the research necessary to fine tune the vaccines to make them more effective for the people that really need them? With already existing vaccines, this is a much faster process than the two or three years that a vaccine program normally takes.

I grant, I’m assuming such a short time frame – if we look at the programs of the past it took a decade or better to bring polio under control and to eradicate small pox. Vaccination programs aren’t fast – but we also have much better infrastructure so in theory a couple years is plausible.

Fine tuning a vaccine should take a year or less – and I’m deliberately being overly conservative. We could be talking far less time – it just depends on what the problem is and how easily it can be overcome.

What about the outlier patients – those who aren’t in a known risk group but get horribly sick anyway? That’s simple enough – no reason we can’t offer vaccination for those who are concerned. Would we get every outlier – no. But we won’t get them even with a mandatory program – there’s always going to be an edge case that can’t take the vaccine and turns out to have needed it.

But offering it to those who need it and those who want it is so much more efficient and cost effective than trying to force an unpopular and increasingly unconscionable program down the throats of a scared public.

What’s unconscionable about it? It’s a legalized assault – yes, really. First, no one has the right to go around sticking others with needles who don’t willingly consent to it – and white lab coats don’t change that fact. Second, absolutely no one has the right to force a substance into the body of another without informed consent – NO ONE. Duress – forcing compliance under threat (do this or you lose your job, for example) only compounds the crime.

Government’s job is to protect rights – not to invent them. When government legalizes what the Constitution says it cannot do, in a real sense, it commits a crime because the Constitution is the supreme law of the land – government must obey it. There’s no public right to ‘safety’ that grants government – even through private actors – the right to force people into medical procedures they do not want. Period.

When Bob lets the nurse go ahead because he’s more scared of losing his job than the shot, that nurse has committed an assault because under sane law, you can’t give legal consent under duress. Your consent is meaningless if someone has a knife to your proverbial throat.

One more thing to consider – there are no perfectly safe drugs. There is always a risk and it’s higher with a vaccine than it is with aspirin. When Bob turns out to be one of the rare people who dies from this – how is this anything other than institutionalized murder? Bob didn’t want this. Bob didn’t give legitimate consent to this. Bob was forced into it – and he paid with his life because his rights weren’t protected.

You should have the right to do what you consider best for yourself. To accept the risk and be vaccinated because the risk of the disease is greater or you’re concerned it might be; or to decline that risk and chose not to be vaccinated because you are more concerned about the vaccine than the disease – you should have the right to chose for yourself. That’s what the Constitution and 200 years of American jurisprudence say. And that’s what’s slowly being taken from you – the right to chose for yourself what’s best for you.

We can protect Granny without tearing up the Constitution. Let’s do that instead.