The Recorder – My turn: On individual rights in the choice of health care

I am fully vaccinated against COVID-19. I support others to get vaccinated. Yes, these inoculations are fairly recent and we don’t know everything about them yet, but for my part, I think the available evidence points to a favorable cost-benefit case for the vaccine. I hope others, after inquiring, will come to this conclusion.

But I also believe in the rights of individuals and people to be able to choose the type of health care they receive. I believe in the Constitution; in freedom of religion; in the rights of individual states to make decisions about how they regulate public health, as enshrined in this Constitution and decades of precedent.

And I think President Biden’s recent attempts to force tens of millions of people to get vaccinated – now including not only public employees, but much of the private sector as well – go against all that is wrong. precedes. This is a massive overstepping of the constitutional limits of the federal government. To the extent that it is up to the president and the executive branch to issue executive orders without any mandate from Congress, this illegal scope is even greater; really beyond words. Aside from the Constitution, I think it is immoral, unethical and contrary to our commitments to human rights. And, it is also deeply ineffective, if not arbitrary, since we now know that vaccinated people can still transmit the virus.

It is also deeply hypocritical that the same liberal-minded politicians who advanced the causes of same-sex marriage and abortion, proclaiming the belief that people have the right to choose what to do with their own bodies, are now trying to force people to to get shot, many of which still only have preliminary FDA approval.

We have implemented many other immunization programs very effectively without such measures and where warrants have been used they have been at the state level and much more flexible than Mr. Biden seems. to wish.

Collective immunity does not require 100% vaccination. We must win this fight through education and awareness; not by bullying those who disagree with someone else’s cost-benefit analysis. We elected our president to chair a democracy, not a dictatorship.

Hussain A. Hamdan lives in Hawley, where he is a member of the Selectboard.