Thread by @AdamWagner1

Compulsory vaccinations and prohibiting unvaccinated people taking part in parts of public life are policies which I imagine very few rights experts could have predicted being seriously proposed, let alone implemented, two years ago. Has the world changed? Have we?

18 months of lockdowns, death and disease have clearly had a profound effect on societies and politicians' conception of what personal liberty is. How to balance the risk of widespread death and disease with civil liberties? Are there right and wrong answers here?

(obviously, there are RIGHT and WRONG answers on Twitter because everything is either right or wrong with no middle ground but I'm talking about in actual policy making by policy makers with almost impossible choices to make)

There are contested facts but surely it is incontestable that a society riven by Covid, with overfull hospitals and hundreds dying a day, is to be avoided - "like the plague", as we say. But at what cost? And how do we know what the true cost is? Maybe we won't know until later

Take the "lockdown of the unvaccinated" - I know the reasoning, it is that the alternative is full lockdown, so at least there is some proportionality, as it is easy enough for most people to get vaccinated, and those who can't for medical reasons would be exempt.

But it is impossible to escape fact that a lockdown of the unvaccinated is not unlike a vaccine mandate. And it's not as if we avoided that in UK - currently unvaccinated have to isolate (lock themselves down) for 10 days if they come into contact with Covid. Vaccinated don't.

I'm not offering an answer - vaccine mandates in the form of employment and other civil sanctions are already here in the UK, and more severely in other parts of the world. Vaccines help protect society and individuals from Covid.

But the closer we get to a full mandate the harder it is to justify from a bodily autonomy perspective. We generally have a right to decide what medical procedures we undertake, though vaccines - which have personal *and* public health benefit - and are almost benign...

So as I have done throughout the pandemic, to the anger of many on this platform, I agonise, try and set out the balancing factors, thank the stars I'm not making policy, and generally find myself doing this

See for example newstatesman.com/politics/uk-po…

And this newstatesman.com/politics/uk-po…