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Ohio lawmakers want to abolish vaccine requirements:
[...] Lawmakers are working on legislation to call off the lottery immediately. They're also trying to head off any plans for "vaccine passports." And last month, they introduced a sweeping antivaccination bill that would essentially demolish public health and vaccination requirements in the state—and not just requirements for COVID-19 vaccines, requirements for any vaccine.
[...] State Rep. Beth Liston (D-Dublin) blasted the bill, telling The Columbus Dispatch, "Not only would it prevent schools, businesses and communities from putting safety measures in pace related to COVID, it will impact the health of our children... This bill applies to all vaccines—polio, measles, meningitis, etc. If it becomes law we will see worsening measles outbreaks, meningitis in the dorms, and children once again suffering from polio."
[...] "At its core, this proposal would destroy our current public health framework that prevents outbreaks of potentially lethal diseases, threatens the stability of our economy as it recovers from a devastating pandemic and jeopardizes the way we live, learn, work and celebrate life," the letter said.
[...] "HB 248 would put all Ohioans at risk while increasing the cost of health care for families, individuals and businesses," spokesperson Dan Williamson said. "This proposal applies to all immunizations, including childhood vaccines. If passed, this legislation could reverse decades of immunity from life-threatening, but vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles, mumps, hepatitis, meningitis and tuberculosis."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 29 2021, @03:28PM
Why shouldn't we prevent fat people from buying sugary foods resulting in a dramatic social cost in their healthcare and other negative outcomes? Not only would we be helping society, but we'd even be helping them as well - making them far more likely to live a long and healthy life. In America, heart disease, largely driven by obese lifestyles, killed more people last year than COVID did.
Why shouldn't we ban alcohol? It's involved in huge chunks of all fatal crashes, countless criminal acts, to say nothing of also similarly causing tremendous long-term health consequences on the individual user that society often suffers for.
Why shouldn't we ban music that says mean things? It has a strong association with numerous forms of criminal and gang activity, can result in severe and negative influences on young and impressionable individuals, and really does nothing but propagate misogynistic, violent, "values."
Why shouldn't we sterilize individuals with severe and genetic mental enfeeblement that renders them unable to meaningfully operate in society, and will undoubtedly do the same to their offspring? This can not only lead to criminal behavior affecting outsiders, but these individuals would hardly even register the implication or meaning of sterilization.
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I could offer specific reasons I believe the vaccines are a poor risk:reward offering for certain groups of individuals (and vice versa for others), but they're irrelevant. The fundamental point is liberty. COVID, like the countless flu-like illnesses to precede it, will be obsolete within a few years. The dystopia we create trying to change three years to two, however, will likely stay with us indefinitely. Let us not go down that path. Passports, as a requirement to travel, were generally not a thing until WW1. They were a "temporary war measure" that became permanent and created a far more authoritarian and insular world. The emergence of "vaccine passports" is not something people 80 years from now are going to look back as the beginning as some new era of freedom and liberty...