How Do I Immunize Me From You?

Since vaccination is both an individual protection and a societal protection methodology, the question of individual rights and individual responsibilities come into conflict not only with each other but with their societal counterparts: group rights and group responsibilities. In the context of the H1N1 flu health care issue, we can examine this conflict with respect to who is doing what to whom.

A vaccination for yourself is clearly an individual choice, and in consideration of you strictly as a true individual the decision to get the H1N1 flu vaccine does not infringe upon anyone else’s rights. If you want it, and the medicine is not prohibited by some legal restriction (like being a controlled substance requiring a prescription) then you can and should be able to get it. Nothing to protest here.

What about choosing to not get vaccinated? Do you have the right? I believe that this is conditional. If there is no overriding social imperative that vaccinations are required because you are either in a select group that poses a risk to other if you are not vaccinated or if vaccinations are mandated for everyone because it has been decided that vaccinations are required to prevent the disease from placing the general population at risk from anyone who is not vaccinated. In such situations, your individual right is subservient to the group’s superior right as conferred in the social contract. If you are a citizen, you have a priori agreed to the obligation to comply with the vaccination requirement. Refusing is a violation of the agreement and of the legally binding jurisdiction of the Government.

Now let’s add to the context, a shortage of available supply. You still want it, but who gets to decide if your right to obtain the medication is affected by others who also want the vaccine? In the case of the H1N1 vaccine, the CDC in conjunction with other governmental and medical groups get to establish the policies and procedures for distributing and regulating the availability of the vaccines. The rationale includes the collective medical information and judgment about what types and groups in the society are at greatest or greater risk from the H1N1 flu. So the individual’s right to get the vaccine is now constrained by the group’s right and their responsibility to protect those who have a greater need for the vaccine’s protection. What about your responsibility? If you find that you have access to the vaccine even when it is clear that there is an insufficient supply to cover the higher at-risk groups. Well you can get it, but you are displaying a disregard for your social duty and of having an expected level of compassion for your fellow citizens. But you are not in violation of the social contract of our democratic government. To the best of my knowledge, there is no explicit law that you would violate in taking the medication. Of course, if you lied in order to qualify to get the vaccine then your giving of a false statement to the Government’s representative would be a violation of the law; and you could be prosecuted accordingly.

Let’s extend the context a little more. Now you are not just yourself, but you are the head of a family. You are now making the decision about vaccinations for yourself and for the minor children in your family. Your individual right to decide to get or not get vaccinated is extended to your children. Just as choosing to get vaccinated for yourself is not at question, extending the choice to also vaccinate your family is not at issue. Nothing is new here. Having yourself vaccinated but not your family, or the inverse, would require some mitigating reason to explain the decision; but it does fall within your right to make that decision.

Extending the argument to not getting vaccinated under this circumstance, the individual is required under that same logic and the family members are required under the extension of that logic. Your responsibility includes the minor members of your family.

The central tenet here is that where your individual rights would, if unconstrained , allow you to create a risk to the other individuals (the group) and therefore to their rights. If that risk is deemed unacceptable by the representatives of the group – the Government, then your individual rights are trumped by society’s rights to protect and preserve the society.

So, when you think a free, democratic and Constitutional society, like ours, has no authority to compel you to accept compulsory activities then you are not paying attention to your responsibility and obligation to that very society. The concern that you should have is how to insure yourself and the other members of the society from an inappropriate and un-Constitutional abuse of those powers when not justified by the same Constitutional authority.