Hello Dazzle! Thanks for coming and hanging out with me today, I’m glad that you are here. And with that title, I’m going to have to start this blog post out with the fact that I am pro vaccination. I get every vaccination that is offered to me and hope that they keep making more so that I can be more protected. This blog isn’t about the vaccinations themselves, because they are an amazing medical technology that I am immensely grateful for.
So, if this isn’t an antivaxxer post, what is it then? This is a discussion of ethics and human rights.
The human right, that I personally feel is the most fundamental and important is our right to body autonomy. Body autonomy is the right for a person to govern what happens to their body without external influence or coercion. It is the human right that declares that we can never be forced to do anything to our bodies that we don’t want. It is the right that allows us to put our own personal health and well being before that of others.
Mandatory vaccinations is a violation of Body Autonomy.
When we mandate that a person must have vaccinations in order to attend school or maintain a job, we are engaging in coercion. Coercion is the act or process of persuading someone forcefully to do something that they do not want to do. When we tell them that they cannot have an education without vaccinations that is coercion. When we tell them they cannot work without vaccinations, that’s coercion. Threatening a person’s ability to earn an income or increase their earning potential is a brutal form of coercion in these economically difficult times.
While I believe that vaccinations are life saving technology, I believe that our right to Body Autonomy is far more important. Upholding the right to Body Autonomy means that we must make room for people to make choices for themselves that we would not make for ourselves. It means that we must allow the to room to make choices that put themselves before everyone else. That is at the heart of Body Autonomy.
Medical Ethics has long ago decided that people should not be forced to make choices for their bodies for the sake of others. This is why we can never be forced to donate tissue or blood, even when someone is dying. It is Body Autonomy that allows us to make these choices for ourselves. Declaring that someone must get a vaccination in order to protect the community is a violation of this principle.
There is a ton of push for health care workers to have mandatory vaccinations. All in the name of keeping patients safe. Why is my patient’s health more important than my own? Why are we asking health care workers to put the physical well being of others before that of themselves? Our right of Body Autonomy is supposed to allow us to decide what we do with our bodies without regard for the well being of others. Then you make the decision to join the healthcare work force and now you loose a very important right that you are required to protect for everyone in your care. After you have made the decision to dedicate yourself to helping others, society then demands that you acquiesce to the sacrifice of one of our most important human rights.
The thing that angers me the most about this is that these mandatory vaccinations are not even keeping our patients safe. In our current healthcare working environment, we are engaging in behavior that is far more dangerous that being unvaccinated. It is common practice for healthcare workers to work while they are sick and infectious. That’s right. I’m vaccinated for Influenza but I will be working while I have an active case of Influenza. That vaccination protects none of my patients when I am actively infectious on the unit and caring for patients. Vaccinations are great. But having a sick nurse taking care of you increases the risk that you will also become sick. Even if you and your nurse are vaccinated.
If we are really interested in providing better care and higher safety for the patients, the answer will always be to take better care of the workers that are providing that care. Mandate that all healthcare workers stay home when they are sick and mandate that employers pay them for that sick time. Don’t put healthcare workers in the position of choosing between earning the money their family needs to stay healthy and protecting their patients from illnesses. How can we expect a healthcare worker to choose to stay home without pay? How can we expect them to risk being fired for poor attendance? Like everyone else in the work force, they will do what they must to provide for their families, even if that means coming to work sick and putting their patients at risk.
This reality is one of the many factors that makes a person at higher risk for getting an infection while they are in the hospital then anywhere else. Keeping sick workers home would go much farther to reducing this risk than workers getting vaccinations. Additionally, there would be other benefits to this approach. It would mean that workers would be able to engage in the self care that they need to be equipped to properly care for others. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs tells us that people are not capable of having compassion and empathy for others when their basic physical needs are not being met.
The right to Body Autonomy must be absolute. When we make exceptions to this right we open the door for future exceptions to be made. With each exception, there is a diluting and crumbling of the right that leads us to a place where it no longer protects everyone, but rather only the few, special elites.
Well, that’s about it for my rambling today. Thanks for coming and spending some time with me. If you like my rambling then click on that like button. It really does help! Until we talk again, you take care of yourselves!
Zebra Pig 
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