Can Vaccines be Mandated?

If you are concerned about the issue of forced vaccination, then there has never been a more important time to educate yourself and enter into the debate.

In the past week, renowned US attorney attorney Alan Dershowitz was quoted as saying:

You have no constitutional right to endanger the public and spread the disease. Even if you disagree, you have no right not to be vaccinated. You have no right not to wear a mask. You have no right to open up your business. If they decide you have to be vaccinated, we have to be vaccinated. And if you refuse to be vaccinated, the state has the power to literally take you to a doctor's office and plunge a needle into your arm.

Fortunately, that is not the end of the story. Del Bigree, producer of the Vaxxed documentaries, invited Alan Dershowitz to join him in a public debate. To Dershowitz's credit, he accepted the invitation. The resulting conversation was both frightening and encouraging.

The frightening part is that Dershowitz quoted case law precedent from 1905 for the mandating of vaccines that he felt would hold up in the supreme court of the USA. And, that could very well play out the same here in New Zealand where we have already seen extraordinary powers being given to the government and police force.

The encouraging part of the debate was that Bigtree was able to ask hard questions that took the debate into deeper waters. What does it mean for a vaccine to be safe? Does it need to be tested against an inert placebo? Should it be forced on the portion of the population that was excluded from the vaccine testing because of health reasons? Should children, who seem to be particularly resilient to COVID-19, be forced to take a vaccine that involves an inherent risk?

The result of the conversation was that Dershowitz engaged the questions and broadened his perspective. In a later interview, Dershowitz displayed a more thoughtful perspective that better reflects the complexity of the issues surrounding COVID-19 vaccines.

You can watch the full interview on Del Bigtree's show, the Highwire.