The Constitution was written at a time when sanitoriums for sick people were common. People with tuberculosis were locked up. Same with leprosy. If you caught a communicable disease, you could literally be quarantined in your house for weeks, with notices posted around your property warning other people not to approach your house. Typhoid Mary was imprisoned for over 30 years, because she kept infecting people and would not believe that she was contagious, because she was an asymptomatic carrier. The framers of our Constitution specifically included the duty of the government to provide for the general welfare of the people—as much against infectious disease, I believe, as against malicious human enemies.
The vaccine age has brought us an unprecedented amount of freedom of movement that our ancestors could not imagine.
Even now, if you get an infectious disease, you can be quarantined. Whole towns can be quarantined, if it comes to that. No matter how much you value your freedom, you do NOT have the right to go around infecting other people.
Forcible vaccination and quarantining aren’t the same thing. I can be prevented from carrying a firearm in a federal courtroom. Or an airport. It’s not the same thing as sending the jackboots to my house and physically taking my gun away.
I have had, in the course of my life, FIVE rubella vaccinations. For one reason or another. Imagine my surprise when I had my titer checked and it was ZERO. No antivaccine person here. I resemble a pincushion.
Unlike you, my first choice isn’t to demand my neighbor who has an objection to the vaccine to get it or else. I have no desire to send the jackboots to a dissenters house to physically sit on them and inject them with something which they have have a genuine religious or philosophical objection.
Why is there no ‘Plan B’? Ie, TREATMENT for the disease. Why, after FIFTY YEARS of a Rubella vaccine is there NO plan B? And no research in that direction! Why is the only apparent ‘Plan’ ever increasing uptake of Plan A, the vaccine? Why have we wasted FIFTY YEARS of chance with this? Chasing diseases of ever decreasing epidemiological benefit? Because we think the vaccine strains will never mutate and smack us in the behind? Because well educated (at our expense, btw) terrorists will never, ever, in a million years mutate any of those strains in the lab? Measles would make a *great* bioweapon. With only a few mutations easily accomplished in a college lab. In Saudi, or Pakistan, or...
Fear of your neighbors naieve immune system is no different than fear of their loaded gun. Both of which cause you no danger right now, possibly ever. But make you FEEL unsafe. So government needs to do something about that. RIGHT NOW. Or ELSE.
Because it looks, to me (and I worked in the industry for years, unlike Jenny McCarthy, Playboy would have paid me to keep my clothes on!), like Plan A represents an endless guaranteed income stream, times every citizen. Possibly with boosters every 15 years for the rest of their lives. And Plan B doesn’t. Maybe it’s a matter of the bottom line. Because, unlike some posters on the board, I’m aware of the fact that vaccine divisions are BIG business at pharma companies. It never hurts to be both mandated and indemnified, does it?
Oops, I guess I answered my own question :)