Không tiêm vaccine Covid-19 có bị phạt?

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Telegraph columnist Sherelle Jacobs rightly insists that “[p]unishing the unvaccinated would be both immoral and unjustified.” A slice:

But perhaps most importantly, measures targeted against the unvaccinated would cross several important moral (đạo đức) lines. Compulsory jabs are dehumanising (mất tính người, vô nhân đạo) in the sense that they undermine human agency. Taking their cue from mandatory child vaccinations, they infantilise (coi như trẻ con) the public, endorsing the idea that the state must protect people for their own good.

Some wrly suggest that the state could nudge anti-vaxxers in a way that encourages greater self-responsibility by charging them for Covid-related hospital treatment, as in Singapore. While this is a potentially clever way to square the circle, it would be ethically repugnant (đáng ghét, ghê tởm) to single out the unvaccinated, but continue to indulge the obese (béo phí) or heavy drinkers (uống rượu nhiều), who put strain on the NHS as well.

If we were to introduce discriminatory measures against the unjabbed, we would also surely be setting a worryingly low bar for the circumstances in which the social good is deemed to outweigh the freedom of the individual in the future. For all the worries about the omicron variant, Covid now has an estimated fatality rate of 0.085 per cent (not dramatically greater than flu, which is believed to be 0.04 per cent), and deaths have continued to fall.

Bài trước: Fauci bất tài