Adolescent Libertarianism and the Confusion of License with Liberty

Here we go again. Ron Paul's Campaign For Liberty is hysterically claiming that the legal basis for Covid vaccine mandates is a lie, a fraud, and an outrage. 

"The so-called 'legal' basis for vaccine mandates," they claim, "always rested on one thing: stopping the transmission of the virus to others." But, horror of horrors, "the Covid vaccine was never designed to stop transmission of the virus, and it was never even tested to see whether it did."

This claim is followed with a by now familiar volley of indignation rooted in fantasy:

"Words cannot describe the evil that was done to America and the whole world by this fraud. Pfizer profited tens of billions of dollars selling its ill-tested and ineffective vaccine to the world, and it lied to use governments to force their vaccines upon people who rightly distrusted them."

This is all quite wrong, and even absurd. Initially, the vaccine makers were focused on whether or not the vaccines could prevent people from getting so sick they couldn't breathe, a natural and quite reasonable priority. Only after this hurdle was cleared did transmission to others become a concern. And when investigated it turned out that the vaccines did indeed reduce such transmission, though they did not eliminate it, which was not a surprise. This performance has persisted through the omicron era.

So there is no scandal.

Furthermore, the Covid vaccines are overwhelmingly effective at preventing severe disease and death, which is more than sufficient justification to mandate the public takes them. But such trifles are unworthy of note to fake libertarians.

The Campaign For Liberty finds Covid vaccine mandates illegitimate because they don't stop transmission in its tracks. They fail to note, though, that this isn't true only of Covid vaccines. Polio vaccine doesn't guarantee you won't get polio, only that you won't be paralyzed by it. Ho hum. Medical science has prevented mass paralysis with vaccines, but the important thing is our "liberty" to be imbeciles and prevent such miracles from being widely shared.

Sure.

One might as well repeal drunk driving laws because they fail to prevent all car accidents. 

And of course no matter that the Covid vaccines have saved millions of lives. Such trifles are unworthy of note.

Unsurprisingly, the Campaign For Liberty admired the Great Barrington Declaration, which urged an end to so-called lockdowns, with "focused protection" for the elderly. Its goal was to achieve "natural immunity" for the non-elderly population by converting the U.S. into one huge Covid party. Now that waning immunity is a well-established fact, it's easy to see how this plan would have worked out in real life. There would have been a tsunami of simultaneous infection and re-infection, a collapse of the public health system, and general chaos.  

Everybody catching Covid over a two year period is one thing; everybody getting it in a two month period quite another.

Bottom line: if governments can't mandate that we prevent millions of unnecessary deaths by preventable disease, then no government of any kind will ever be legitimate.