Is it justifiable to impose a vaccine mandate, if brown-eyed or type-A/B/O people are not bothering to get vaccinated because they feel safe themselves?
(I'm really more interested in the philosophy and ethics than the facts of the actual situation. I agree that on the factual level in 2022, there's plenty of room to argue about the usefulness or counterproductivity of these mandates. I want to know if vaccine manades are ever justified).
... people don't work like that. :/
> in an alternate reality where the vaccine is super effective at reducing transmission of Omicron, and where Omicron is super deadly
If either of these were true then mandates would be far less required because people would be far more willing to take them voluntarily.
Instinctively though I do want to answer yes, I would support mandates more under higher risk scenarios. In an ideal world though I would probably prefer if communities could self select by risk tolerance i.e it's possible to live/work/party somewhere nearby with like minded people.
> If either of these were true then mandates would be far less required because people would be far more willing to take them voluntarily.
I don't know whether that would necessarily be the case. We have seen how easily people are manipulated via misinformation campaigns.
I'm also not against a small amount of natural selection. People choosing their own fates helps to keep everyone happy and some Darwinism is probably a good outcome for humanity in the long term.
Self selected communities are another good answer although I imagine it's hard to totally bubble communities up along the axis of vaccine-opinionation without any overlap.
It might depend on how selective the lethality is! If a small population is vulnerable then I don't have a problem with them protecting themself to the best of their own abilities (no mandates). This is fairly common already with the immunocompromised etc.
If a large portion of the population is vulnerable then it becomes more grey. I'm pretty uncomfortable with there being a large amount of preventable suffering but intellectually my brain wants to take a long term view. The best possible society in the future seems like one where humans have stronger immune systems and take fewer vaccinations, not more. Is this something we can evolve towards? Is my poor knowledge of biology leading me astray? Who knows!
Given I know nothing I'm happy to fall back onto the distributed decision making apparatus (individual choice).
