Draymond Green Won’t Push His NBA Teammate to Get Vaxxed: ‘That Goes Against Everything America Stands For’

With a healthy roster, the Golden State Warriors have championship aspirations this season, but their goals are being drastically hampered by Andrew Wiggins’ decision to skip the vaccine. Despite the ramifications, team leader Draymond Green won’t push Wiggins to get jabbed.

“That would be like Andrew, who everyone knows previously just had a kid maybe five months ago or so now, that would be like me telling him, ‘Yo, your wife is going into labor. How dare you leave this team and not go tend to your wife?'” Green told reporters Thursday.

Although remaining unvaccinated can be harmful to others, Green’s overall point is that he still considers the Covid jab decision to be a personal matter.

“We’re dealing with something that to me feels like has turned into a political war when you’re talking about vaccinated and non-vaccinated. I think it’s become very political,” Green added. “And for someone who’s not extremely into politics, when you make something so political and not everyone is into politics, then you can also turn those people off.”

“You say we live in the land of the free, well you’re not giving anyone freedom because you’re making people do something essentially without necessarily making them, you’re making them do something. And that goes against everything America stands for, or supposedly stands for.”

“I remember the days when your medical history was private,” Green said. But asking someone if they’re vaccinated does not take away the fact that every person owns the right to have their medical records kept private. Doctors cannot share medical information without written consent.

“I remember the days when who you voted for was private, your choice on whether you were democratic or republican was private,” Green added.

There is a strong case for making any vaccination mandatory (or compulsory) if four conditions are met:

1. There is a grave threat to public health: While the world number of deaths is about 4,804,031 it is not as grave as the Spanish flu of 1918. It is not difficult to imagine Covid-19 evolving into a superflu, or a bioengineered bug, which kills 10% across all ages. This would certainly be a grave public health emergency where it is likely mandatory vaccination would be employed. COVID-19 does present that potential and is a grave public health emergency.

2. Mandatory vaccination has a superior cost/benefit profile compared with other alternatives: There are many alternatives to mandatory vaccination. A popular position, especially among medical professionals, is that we don’t need mandatory vaccination because people are self-interested or altruistic enough to come forward for vaccination. We can reach herd immunity without a mandatory vaccination. First, how fast we reach herd immunity is also important. In a pandemic, time is lives. If it takes a year to reach herd immunity, that could be thousands or tens of thousands of lives in one country. Immunity wanes over time—so even people previously vaccinated may become vulnerable. Should we count deaths averted (no matter how old), life years lost or lost well-being (perhaps measured by quality adjusted life years)? Should we count loss of liberty or privacy into the other side the equation?

Mandatory vaccination policies are made all over the world. Those that include a non-voluntary element to vaccine consent and impose a penalty or cost for unjustified refusal (justified refusal includes those who have a contraindicating medical condition, or those who already have natural immunity). There are a range of possible penalties or costs which can coerce people. Australia has the “No Jab, No Pay” scheme which withholds child benefits if the child is not vaccinated, and a “No Jab, No Play” scheme which withholds kindergarten childcare benefits. Italy introduced fines for unvaccinated children who attend school. In the USA, state regulations mandate that children cannot attend school if they are not vaccinated, and healthcare workers are required to vaccinate.

3. The level of coercion is proportionate: In public health ethics, there is a familiar concept of the “least restrictive alternative”. The least restrictive alternative is the option which achieves a given outcome with the least coercion (and least restriction of liberty).

This is a very weak principle: it uses liberty as tie breaker between options with the same expected utility. More commonly, however, we need to weigh utility against liberty. That is, a more restrictive policy will achieve more expected utility—but is it justified? It has been found that graduated consequences may be a more reasonable method of coercion. Anther idea is a carrot-and-stick method where getting the vaccination would give a tax deduction. This might be a reasonable deduction because avoiding infection is an advantage to government.

According to a principle of proportionality, the additional coercion or infringement in liberty is justified if it is proportionate to the gain in expected utility of the more coercive intervention compared with next best option. That is, additional coercion is justified when the restriction of liberty is both minimised and proportionate to the expected advantages offered by the more coercive policy.

4. The vaccine is safe and effective: Although the technology being used in many of these vaccines has been successfully used in other vaccines, no country has ever produced a safe and effective vaccine against a coronavirus. So in one way, we are all in uncharted waters.

No vaccine could be said to be 100% safe. There will be risks and those risks are likely to be greater than with well-established vaccines. Perhaps the biggest challenge for the vaccines for COVID-19 will be to be honesty about the extent of those risks and convey the limitations of confidence in safety and efficacy relative to the evidence accrued.

Even if the vaccines are safe and effective herd immunity will be significantly delayed by vaccine hesitancy at a cost both to lives and to the resumption of normal life, and at worst, it may never be achieved.

While the speed the vaccines were developed was welcomed by politicians and some members of the public, the pressure to produce a candidate vaccine, and the speed at which it has been done, may be also perceived (perhaps unfairly) to increase the likelihood of the kind of concerns that lead to vaccine hesitancy: concerns over side-effects that are unexpected or rare, or that take longer to appear than the testing process allows for. The question remains of how safe is safe enough to warrant mandatory vaccination. It is vanishingly unlikely that there will be absolutely no risk of harm from any biomedical intervention, and the disease itself has dramatically different risk profiles in different groups of the population. In an ideal world, the vaccine would be proven to be 100% safe. But there will likely be some risk remaining. Any mandatory vaccination program would therefore need to make a value judgement about what level of safety and what level of certainty are safe and certain enough. A COVID-19 vaccine may be effective in reducing community spread and/or preventing disease in individuals. Mandatory vaccination is most justifiable when there are benefits to both the individual and in terms of preventing transmission. If the benefits are only to individual adults, it is more difficult to support mandatory vaccination. One justification would be to prevent exhaustion of healthcare services in an emergency (eg, running out of ventilators), which has been used a basis of restriction of liberty (it was the main justification for lockdown). It could also be justified in the case of protection of children and others who cannot decide for themselves, and of other adults who either cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons.

Vaccines may be better than the alternatives like lockdowns, and alternate remedies—ivermectin and HCQ. The testing of those alternatives has been mixed and compromised by fraudulent data and poor testing designs. So far, no test has come through with definitive findings.

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