Florida Republican-turned-independent-turned-Democrat-turned-perennial-candidate Charlie Crist believes that your body is your own. Nobody can tell you what to do with it, he says — unless it’s something he wants to force you to do to your body.
I’m the only candidate in this race who believes that every person should have the right to make their own decisions about their health, body, and future.
— Charlie Crist (@CharlieCrist) October 18, 2022
The COVID vaccines saved thousands of lives and prevented many more hospitalizations. A huge chunk of the 400,000 COVID deaths since the summer of 2021 would have been prevented by vaccines.
Where the COVID vaccines fell short of their promise, and where they differ from the vaccines for polio or measles, is in stopping the spread. Getting vaccinated “provided limited protection against symptomatic disease caused by the omicron variant,” as one study in The New England Journal of Medicine put it. This study found the Pfizer vaccine was mostly (65%) effective in stopping the omicron variant — for about a month. Four months after getting your second shot, it only stopped about 1 in 6 cases.
So the vaccines don’t stop most of the spread. That means the COVID vaccines were mostly valuable for protecting yourself (and, by extension, those who depend on you) and only slightly valuable for protecting the general public.
The above isn’t an argument against vaccination by any stretch. It is an argument against mandating vaccines. The strongest argument for mandating vaccines is that if someone gets polio because he’s unvaccinated, he’s harming the people near him by shaking hands, touching a vending machine, or holding on to a subway strap.
This argument doesn’t work for the COVID vaccines.
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There’s a secondary argument for mandating vaccines, which is much weaker: The state has an interest in coercing people to protect themselves.
This is why we mandate motorcycle helmets. This is why some governments regulate raw milk. It’s what we call paternalism.
We have many paternalistic laws, and one could defend a COVID vaccine mandate on paternalistic grounds. What you can’t do is defend COVID vaccine mandates and also profess, as a principle, respect for bodily autonomy.
Charlie Crist has campaigned for governor on the promise of mandating COVID vaccines.
Ron DeSantis opposes vaccine requirements that will help end this pandemic. As usual, DeSantis is pro-COVID and anti-Florida. Like this if you agree.
— Charlie Crist (@CharlieCrist) October 18, 2021
Now, Crist is campaigning for governor on the principle that “every person should have the right to make their own decisions about their health, body, and future.”
We know what this really means: Crist supports abortion but doesn’t want to say he supports abortion in so many words since most people don’t really like abortion (not even if they want it to be legal in some cases). So he avoids saying the word by trotting out a high-sounding principle about bodily autonomy … which he obviously does not believe in.
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Democrats broadly supported vaccine mandates in 2021 and 2022. Democrats universally support abortion. These two positions don’t necessarily contradict one another. But once you’ve tried to force people to take a vaccine that doesn’t stop the spread, you have clearly forfeited the right to say, “My body, my choice.”
