Does anything else better show how nebulous the concepts of liberty and freedom are than the discourse on vaccination? It really all falls apart into incoherence and inconsistency on matters with negative externalities.
You have Ron DeSantis and others solely talking about the individual right of the vaccine refuser, and completely ignoring the competing individual rights of the vulnerable people that person comes into contact with. You have a focus on the individual vaccine refuser and no conception of the businesses and communal spaces burdened by Covid risks and Covid mitigation.
Somehow the limited, narrow access imposition on the vaccine refuser matters more than the imposition on the vulnerable person regarding social contact in all spaces.
Why is that not seen as a much larger public access imposition?
Because the folks making the argument aren't those with immunocompromised systems.
It's like folks arguing that anti-discrimination law means you can sue a business if they don't let you in without a vaccination: they don't have a disability, they're not part of a protected class, and thus they don't know what anti-discrimination law actually does and does not do.
They only know their own experience. It's a failure of imagination, really.
Even more it hits at something that bothers me especially about this discourse in terms of a liberal society. That so often the voluntary choices of others are prioritized above the liberty of persons made vulnerable by involuntary immutable characteristics like being immunocompromised.
How would you handle the first order preference not working out?
And also I just want to clarify I'm not speaking about forced vaccinations. I think the threshold for that has to be quite high to be acceptable under any framework. But I am speaking about businesses and organizations having vaccine requirements. And DeSantis and others prohibiting such actions. I think people should have the right to ask for vaccination status and for some employers to require it for employment. A concert hall has the right to want to avoid Covid burdens if vaccination screening is the least burdensome way to get to 100% capacity. And a nursing home has the right to protect its most vulnerable residents. An immunocompromised person has the same right to the public space as others.
I view it like other negligence based externalities. Obviously 100% risk free societies are impossible. But that doesn't mean that say society doesn't have a right to impose upon someone who is firing randomly in public recklessly. You don't get to ask those at the mercy of your threat to fully internalize the costs of your harmful actions.