Reply To: Show us zee papers.. Passports of your not coming in ever….

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But none of that invalidates my point.  Much of what I do to live my own life puts others at risk.  Again, driving is an obvious one.  The law holds me responsible for my actions and puts certain restrictions around things, and there has been debate over the years about where the boundaries of “driving with due care and attention” lie.  And they have settled at a point which keeps most people safe, but still allows society to function and freedom for reasonable use of vehicles.

Breathing the same air may be the mechanism by which this particular risk is spread about but that is merely detail that describes the risk, and doesn’t significantly impact the principle of risk mitigation that I am talking about which is purely about numbers and maths.

Clearly we do have a responsibility not to put others in harms way.  But the risk to the general populace of death, I repeat, is now tiny.  Microscopic even.  Much lower than very many other things we don’t even think twice about.  To the extent that for younger people the risk of serious side effects from certain vaccines, minuscule as that is, is actually greater than the disease itself.  So then the debate becomes about what level of restriction is it justifiable to impose on those who have minuscule risk in order to protect those that are actually at a high level of risk (the elderly, those with pre-existing health problems, etc., etc.).

Worked example.  My youngest son is 18 and loves clubbing.  The rest of the family it is fair to say don’t, and indeed tend not to very often go to “packed” locations where there is a heightened risk of breathing infected air out of choice as we are fairly antisocial by inclination.  I could lay the law down as “head of the house” and forbid him to go, because as a 53 year-old overweight asthma sufferer he is putting my life at risk.  But as his dad, I see the harm that forcing him to stay home and not be with his friends is doing to him (he usually doesn’t drink because he drives, isn’t particularly into chasing girls, but just loves hanging out with his mates and clubs offer a way of doing that into the early hours of a weekend).  My judgement is that forbidding him to go clubbing to protect me, is simply me being selfish, so I don’t do it.  Had we had an aged relative living with us, we may have done something different, but all we have done is ask him to consider getting vaccinated, which in the end he chose to do. And so we live with the small chance of harm that remains.

I personally have a great distaste for the idea of forcing young people who are really not at much risk at all from this disease to have a vaccination simply to primarily protect the older population. What right do we have to impose greater risk on others in order to reduce our own?  I would contend “none”.

Through my interaction with my son, I don’t think “enforcement” would have made the situation better in any way, and it is my contention that the same is true in society at large.  There are limits that we have to accept on our right to impose restrictions on others that may prove a risk to us.  If we are at heightened risk we can take measures to protect ourselves, and should only impose restrictions on others in very extreme cases, at least in a society that likes to think of it as free.  We should be careful that those decisions are only taken on very, very good evidence and considering all the effects across the piste good and bad for all participants, and not weighting the argument with irrationality, emotion and undeveloped science.  Precautionary measures that can be wound back once evidence deems them unnecessary are fair enough, but they should be open to challenge, and those that challenge them should not be denigrated.  Unless we want to march into some sort of Stalinist dystopia.  Authoritarianism, I would contend, is ultimately a greater risk to life, limb and happiness than any disease, and it is a very slippery slope that is easy to descend but hard to climb.