Interesting choice of words for a poor analogy. I agree that many of the "reasons" for not wanting the vaccine are silly and dumb, in my opinion. But I'm not so emotionally attached to that opinion that I conflate it with an individual's personal autonomy to make that choice for themselves. Those are two very different things that shouldn't be confused in this discussion.You still need an aviation medical to be a pilot. Why aren’t you people choosing that as the bridge to die on in this silly “mah freedumb” movement?
The purpose of aviation medicals is to detect a condition that could lead to a flight crew medical emergency and in turn, pose a risk to the safety of flight by impeding that individual's ability to do their job safely and effectively. That is in no way similar to a vaccine.
I believe you are correct. I don't believe true equality of opportunity exists, yet. However, it is one of the cornerstones that our society is supposedly built on and it's something that as a society we have been striving for for some time, even more so in recent years. It's a goal we should be trying to move ever closer to, as opposed to father away from.Freedom of equitable opportunity doesn’t exist. It’s never existed. Where’s the equal opportunity for someone who doesn’t have a driver’s license? Someone who doesn’t have a passport? A social insurance number? There are people who don’t have any of those.. those things that didn’t exist until someone in the government decided they should and society evolved around them, pushing those without further away. Where were the cries of fascism, then?
Driver's licenses, passports, social insurance numbers? Just because not everyone has one, doesn't mean that there are mandates in place to prevent whole arbitrary segments of the population from getting them. Quite the opposite in fact. The opportunity exists for anyone to get those things.
By saying we are "in the middle of a pandemic" implies that there is an end to this. I don't believe this to be the case, and I've read multiple articles citing numerous government officials and scientists who also believe that, while not impossible, it is highly unlikely that we will ever fully eradicate covid. I think we would all do well to stop thinking that we are in a pandemic, and start realizing that we are instead in a reality where there is one additional, rather minor risk of disease.We are in the middle of a pandemic and the government is reacting in the best interests of the people. Hospital ERs and ICUs are not filling up—they are full—of COVID-19 patients the huge majority of them unvaccinated. Less than 20% of the population accounts for nearly all of the beds that are taken.. and are going to outlying hospitals or in the case of Alberta, several provinces away.
That’s where your rights to work a job where you come into contact with multiple people or to go into crowded venues as an unvaccinated person end.
Furthermore, the argument that unvaccinated people pose a risk to others is absolutely true. However, everyone does, regardless of vaccination status, as fully vaccinated people can also transmit the virus. There is no moral high ground here, and thus, no basis for mandating someone else's choices. Make no mistake, even though I am fully vaccinated, when I walk in to the grocery store I could potentially be putting anyone else I come near at risk, if I myself have encountered the virus within a certain window of time.
And yes, covid has placed additional strain on our health care system. How much exactly seems to be the subject of some debate and it's difficult to filter out the signal from the noise, when articles on both sides have been published and later found out to be outright lies. Anecdotally, I have multiple family members that are health care workers and they seem to all be experiencing increased stress on the job as a result. However, there have always been many, many large scale health issues in the population that are easily preventable and yet remain unchecked and are allowed to continue to place tremendous strain on our system. For instance, every year 158,700 Canadian adults are diagnosed with heart disease, placing an obviously large pressure on the health care system. Yet, it's estimated that the risk of heart disease could be reduced by up to 60% just by making healthy lifestyle choices. Should the government mandate that we all get a minimum of 30 minutes of cardiovascular exercise per day or that we all must eat one salad per day or that no one should be allowed to drink sugary drinks or eat fatty foods? Doing so would clearly lessen the burden on the health care system. Why is it ok for people who don't exercise, don't eat healthy food, smoke, drink, do drugs, etc to burden the system? Should we continue to let them make these poor choices even though the decades of established science that they are willfully ignoring shows that they are killing themselves and burdening the system?
It may not be about control, but it most certainly is about compliance. And that's because most people are not thinking critically and instead operating on fear. Rather than look for the readily available, government produced statistics about the actual risks of covid, they are choosing a lazy and irrational thought pattern based purely on emotion. For some reason, people are placing their faith in the government to protect them from what they perceive to be a major risk, when the reality is that they are abdicating their personal responsibility for a risk that is in fact quite small and placing their faith in a government that has failed us repeatedly since the onset of covid. To illustrate, consider that very early on it became apparent that covid was overwhelmingly only a serious risk to the elderly and those with underlying medical conditions. According to information on the health Canada website, only 2133 people under the age of 60 have died from covid. That's 0.007% of the population. Furthermore, according to the CDC, only roughly 6% of fatalities have no co-morbidities. That's 128 healthy people under the age of 60. That's 0.0004% of the population. That is extremely low risk for anyone who makes an effort to live a healthy lifestyle. But rather than protecting the vulnerable and educating and informing everyone else of the risks and allowing them to make whatever decisions they are comfortable with based on data and their own personal appetite for risk, the government has only imposed blanket solutions based on fear and emotion that have repeatedly failed us. And now, after all the data we have about the risks, and the known fact that the vaccines do not prevent transmission, they are continuing to fail us with another weak blanket solution and doubling down by mandating compliance. People believe in compliance with a religious fervor, but it's a belief based on faulty data. There is no end to covid and the vaccines, while a useful tool, are not 100% effective and do not prevent transmission. That's not to say you shouldn't get vaccinated. But you can't base your beliefs about compliance on faulty premises and willful ignorance.Nobody is interested in control. Lol. Control what? You people are uninteresting and most government workers and officials would rather you just did your own thing and not bother anyone. A good method of control is to sedate and paralyze someone, strap them to a bed, and put sensors all over their body and tubes up every orifice. So why are they trying to keep that from happening?
First, people who do not choose to get vaccinated or people like myself who are vaccinated but do not believe in mandates, are most certainly not the direct cause of this situation. Keep in mind that there was no vaccine during the entirety of the worst of the last 2 years. The horse was long out of the barn before vaccines were even an option. And vaccines or not, there is likely no point at which covid will become extinct.When unvaccinated individuals are the direct cause of this healthcare emergency with their willful ignorance and behaviour, it’s no different than scolding a child or apprehending a criminal. For the greater good of society or even the individual themselves, action has to be taken.
Finally, if one is truly interested in the greater good of society, they wouldn't be so flippant as to compare their fellow, presumably law-abiding citizens to criminals. That kind of rhetoric is extremely dangerous and a hallmark of authoritarianism. To be clear, I'm not suggesting that we're going to wake up next week to find ourselves in a Fascist regime. But if you've ever read any biographies or accounts of people who have survived such things, you'll find that people don't arrive at that place overnight. It happens by degrees and always under the guise of "for the greater good." With 92 million fatalities over the last century, these ideologies are far, far more deadly than covid. We may all have to make some sacrifices to give everyone a fair shot at a normal, healthy life with covid floating around. But some things must remain sacred and some lines must never be crossed. One of those is the right to personal, bodily autonomy. If someone can take that from you, or worse yet, have you willfully give it to them, everything else you have is pointless.