Guest Column: Freedom

Recently I was on a podcast when one of the co-hosts, a retired New York City police officer, expressed his opinion that people should be free to get or not get the COVID-19 vaccine.

There is a pandemic-like misunderstanding of what freedom means, and it is unfortunately even more prevalent and virulent than COVID-19. Freedom comes with the responsibility not to hurt your fellow man. Freedom is not the absolute right to do or not do anything you damn well please. Think about it. You must stop at a red light. The government tells you that, and if you don’t, you suffer the consequence—a summons and possibly an accident; maybe your own demise. Government legitimately tells people they cannot put PCBs in our drinking water, employ underage children and so forth. 

There are countless ways in which the government tells us what we can and cannot do, and although sometimes the government gets overzealous, much of the time the rules and regulations are for our own benefit. We no longer live in the Wild West where anything and everything goes. Yes, we do enjoy an immense amount of freedom. We are free to travel, to see friends, to worship, etc., but we are not free to do many things which would adversely impact others.

Even some of our most fundamental rights incorporated in our Bill of Rights are limited. We have the right to assemble, but not on the 405 Freeway. We have the right to free speech, but not to slander or incite riot. The late conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia even suggested that the right to bear arms could also be reasonably regulated.

You may be free not to vaccinate your child for polio or the measles, but we live in a community, and that community, through its government, has the right to say your child cannot attend a public school. You may be free not to vaccinate yourself for COVID-19, but there might well be negative consequences, as if dying weren’t enough. The government may well encourage airlines not to allow passengers onboard who are not vaccinated, and universities it subsidizes not to enroll students who do not show proof of vaccination. 

COVID-19 is once more on the move. New cases including here in Malibu are skyrocketing and the virulent Delta variant has quickly become dominant throughout the country, and yet in several states nearly two thirds of the adult population refuse to get the vaccine. If pressure is not brought to bear on our citizens to vaccinate quickly, we run the real risk of once again having to shut down parts of our economy, close our schools and lose hundreds of thousands more of our people, this time including our young.

Virtually all those who died recently from COVID-19 in this country were unvaccinated. That is a fact, not an opinion. With the exception of people who have legitimate reasons not to, we all ought to get vaccinated. 

We have an ample supply of what most of the rest of the world is literally dying for—a safe and effective vaccine. This is no longer about our freedom, this is about our sanity as a nation!