The ability of the government to establish vaccination requirements is long established. It's only becoming a hot topic now because anti-science folks have been programmed to fear a safe and effective vaccine.
The difference is you flipped the switch and decided to turn up to work without clothes. You decided to radically change your behavior and actions in the workplace. This will obviously have consequences due to your unsightly naked body offending co-workers.
When someone doesn't flip any switch, but continues to work exactly as they did before, they have not done anything you can label a "choice with harsh consequences".
Unvaccinated people are not suddenly shedding and dangerous, in the way a naked person is shedding pubic hairs everywhere.
>Unvaccinated people are not suddenly shedding and dangerous, in the way a naked person is shedding pubic hairs everywhere.
Unvaccinated people are inherently dangerous. The change is that we now have the ability for them to become vaccinated people who aren't nearly as dangerous to their clients.
In June 2020, we had no choice but to have unvaccinated health care workers. Today, we do.
They are not dangerous. A person who has access to sharp knives but is currently not holding a knife, is no more dangerous than someone who does not have access to knives.
But even that analogy doesn't fit, since vaccinated people can certainly still get sick and transmit the virus.
Besides, I am not restricting my position in this debate to health care workers. I am talking about anyone with a job, who is now required to get vaccinated. That's what happened where I live (Australia). Everyone in my state from barristers, to builders, office workers, truck drivers... literally every professional who isn't working from home, is required to get the vaccine or lose their job.
Many are pissed off with the expanding scope of mandates.
I can understand the requirement for health workers to be vaccinated. But even then, they should have the option to be tested regularly instead.
This is what happens... incremental laws expand and eliminate choice. Suddenly you live in a world where you must get jabbed every 6 months, and repeatedly prove your vaccine status to everyone every day. Tagged, tracked and validated for walking around doing normal things is not a world we should be encouraging, even in pandemic times. If we must disagree on that point, then fine, we disagree.
Vaccinated people can get sick and transmit the virus, true, but it's much less likely that they will. People with STIs can also transmit the virus, so we wear condoms to make the risk of transmission substantially less. If your sexual partner is unwilling to wear a condom or unwilling to have sex with you if you wear one, you can just choose to not have sex with them and the risk of transmission goes to nothing. That choice doesn't exist with work. If my co-worker chooses to remain a massive public health risk, my chances of catching COVID-19 go up quite a bit. I can't choose to just not be around you and the rest of anti-vaxxers. Not to mention there are people who have legitimate medical reasons who are unable to get vaccinated who are put at substantially higher risk by being forced to be around conspiracy theory anti-vaxxers.
I'm talking about 'well-established' in that it's been happening for 200+ years. The conservative right-wing theocratic extremists that trump appointed will destroy our judicial norms for the next 50 years but that doesn't make them right.