No, a vaccine passport is not like a dompas, and you’re not a victim

Ahhh, I’ve been waiting through the entire pandemic for this time to come.

We have the vaccines, people are getting the vaccines, and some people, for whatever reason don’t want them. The common refrain, other than that delightful Cape Town march chanting to “shove your lethal injection up your arse” is that they’re free to choose.

And they are, but…

What if your work requires you to get vaxxed? Questioning whether your employer can have expectations of vaccination is going to be all the rage in the next couple of months, as anti-vaxxers cry foul when they’re being let go from their jobs, dismissed from social clubs, and make ridiculous associations with apartheid’s so-called dompas.

ALSO READ: Ouch! Anti-vaxxers might be forced to get Covid-19 vaccine

As is common in South Africa, human rights and freedoms are lekker when you employ them in isolation, and they’d work a treat if the population of the country was 50, not 50 million. They’d also work a treat if you could pick and choose which ones you’d want to employ and where, but balancing some 30 basic human rights and the associated underlying expectations among a diverse group of millions of people is going to take some balancing.

And for the most part, those refusing the vaccine are correct. No government in the free world can force a vaccine on its citizens. It’s been an issue for years. In the US, the 2016 Donald Trump campaign stirred sentiment when the Don thought about the best ways to vaccinate babies.

Fortunately, that’s never really been a political issue in South Africa. Maybe it will be one day.

What is sure is that, similar to Covid-19 vaccinations, the state cannot force you to have your child inoculated. Yet it’s pretty much common practice to give your baby shots once it is born. The comparison obviously isn’t fair since inoculations have been readily tested and proven.

Of course, there is the debate that what we’ve learned from immunising babies has been carried into how the Covid-19 vaccine was developed but I’m not about to have that debate.

I want to debate why it’s fair for private organisations to have an expectation of you to have your Covid-19 vaccine or face consequences. We’ve been doing it for years. Parents enrolling their children to schools often have to provide proof of inoculations. The children can legitimately be denied access to the school without such proof.

The reasoning and rights analysis is simple: if not being inoculated poses a risk to the other children in the school, then the prevention of the risk would outweigh the infringement on your rights. Only when you look deeper at what rights we’re talking about, you’d notice that there’s hardly any infringement on your rights.

One may have a right to education but certainly not a right to dictate policy of an educational institution. One may have the right to information, but certainly not the right to force your book club to accept one. One may have the right to work, but certainly not the right to dictate to the employer under which circumstances the company must be run.

Yeah, there will be additional considerations. It wouldn’t be fair, and probably not legitimate, to have an expectation that remote workers must be vaccinated if they’re never going to be among colleagues. That’s understandable.

What is not understandable is anti-vaxxers’ infatuation with this idea of their freedom being curtailed unfairly because private (and some public) institutions are warping the incentives to get vaxxed.

The government should not be in the business of forcing things onto its citizens. That is a definitional requirement of freedom. With that freedom though, comes the freedom of others and others should be free to develop and determine their own policy.

Yours is not the only freedom that matters in South Africa.

Get vaxxed, don’t get vaxxed… That’s up to you. What happens after that is up to the people and organisations you choose to affiliate with.