There's No Such Thing as "Anti-Vax," only Pro- or Anti-Choice

The term "anti-vax" has become quite prevalent not only in social media rants aimed at those who choose not to vaccinate, but even in the supposedly objective reporting on the issue. The media uses the term freely, as if it were an accurate description of the position of those who, for various reasons, have chosen not to vaccinate. Yet, the term is grossly inaccurate and carries with it a hidden ideology--one that clearly favors state control over personal choice.

In point of fact, there are no "anti-vax" organizations and the number of people who could be accurately described as "anti-vax" is, statistically speaking, zero. True, there are many people who are pro-medical choice, but none of them wish to interfere with the rights of other people to vaccinate. None of them seek to shut down the vaccination industry (though many of them want to reform it to make it safer). None of them wish to take the power to prescribe and administer vaccines away from doctors and medical professionals.

To call someone who chooses not to get vaccinated, "anti-vax," is as accurate as describing a supporter of Roe v. Wade who chooses not to abort their fetus as "anti-abortion." In short, the so-called "anti-vax" are not against vaccines, they are against vaccine mandates. When it comes to vaccines, they are accurately described as pro-choice.

This choice analogy is one to which supporters of vaccine mandates will, no doubt, have an immediate allergic reaction. But the analogy is justified. Indeed, pro-vaccine-choice citizens want to have the same right to determine what happens to their body as pro-choice individuals want when it comes to abortion. Moreover, abortion pro-choice advocates see this right as one that should trump the competing right of the state to protect what is, inarguably, a developing human being. The argument is that the state's interest in protecting all human life must stop at the frontier of a person's skin. As a liberal who believes in medical choice, I heartily agree, in both instances: abortion and vaccination. It's my body. It's my life. It's my medical choice.

Of course, folks who oppose vaccine choice will argue that since my vaccine choice can have an impact on the health of others, it is reasonable to suspend that choice for the greater good. Somehow, this greater good should trump my right to medical self-determination, even though, for most vaccine-mandate supporters, it does not do so in the case of abortion. But, in the case of vaccines, this invocation of the "greater good" doesn't merely justify forcing a person to carry a pregnancy to term; it grants nearly unlimited power to the state to coerce a treatment that could potentially kill or seriously injure some individuals for the supposed good of others. And this harm is not a theoretical one.

Data from the CDC VAERS now shows 723,780 reported vaccine injuries and 16,310 deaths associated with vaccination. This number of deaths exceeds all VAERS fatality reports for all other vaccinations combined since VAERS began collecting data in 1990. That means that just under 200 million COVID vaccinations in one year have led to more deaths than billions upon billions of vaccinations over the last thirty years. The rate of reported death for the COVID vaccines is 189 times higher (that's 18,900% higher) than the rate reported for the flu vaccine in 2019 (which was 89 deaths out of roughly 150 million vaccinations).

For those who would trot out the old "correlation, not causation" canard, we need only respond that any scientist who would ignore an 18,900% rise in an historically well-established correlation index would not be practicing science at that point, but politics. "Safe and effective" is a meaningless phrase to the hundreds of thousands who are now living with serious vaccine injuries or the tens of thousands who have died. Moreover, other countries are recognizing the serious health risks caused by the vaccines: Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Iceland have all paused usage of the Moderna vaccine due to serious concerns over heart disease, especially in teenage males--a population whose risk for serious COVID (without underlying co-morbidity) is essentially nonexistent.

Even if one were to argue that these injuries are a reasonable cost to pay for the greater good of fewer dying of COVID, the case for forced vaccinations is still weak. This is because once the typical immunological supports for mandated vaccines of "herd immunity" and "containment of spread" were knocked out by the Delta variant, there was no good argument left for violating the medical freedom of individuals who choose not to vaccinate.