Mandates will keep the immunocompromised safe

The argument

The case for mandatory vaccination made here turns on the existence of people who cannot be vaccinated at all, and on the fact that their protection has to come from everyone else. The starting point is an exemption rather than a requirement. Some people are immunocompromised and cannot safely be vaccinated, and any mandate would have to absolve them from vaccination. That exemption is not a weakness in the policy but the reason for it: because these individuals cannot be protected directly, the only protection available to them is the absence of the disease in the people around them. Exempting them therefore increases rather than reduces the need for the rest of the public to be vaccinated. People with impaired immune systems must be protected, and they are especially susceptible to the contagious diseases in question. The way to protect them is to ensure that the rest of the public is vaccinated and so does not pass on the contagious diseases to which they are especially susceptible. The obligation falls on those who can safely be vaccinated precisely because they can, and because no one else is in a position to supply that protection. The same reasoning covers others who cannot be reached by vaccination themselves. Mandating vaccination protects the health of vulnerable populations generally, including children who are too young to be vaccinated and the small proportion of people who do not respond to particular vaccines. Each of these groups depends on the same thing: a population in which the disease does not circulate. So the proposal is that vaccines be made mandatory for those who can safely receive them, in order to shield those who cannot. Because mandates keep the immunocompromised safe, and because that protection cannot be achieved any other way, vaccine mandates are for the common good.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Vaccines should not be mandatory for anybody. The government should not have the authority to decide which groups of people have to be vaccinated and which groups do not. Vaccine mandates are unfair. If vulnerable and immunocompromised populations do not have to get vaccinated because vaccinations could harm them, the same should apply to those who are not vulnerable or immunocompromised. Vaccines are not 100% safe; there is always some risk. The government can not selectively choose which individuals get to retain their freedom of choice and which individuals do not.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The exemption the premise grants undercuts the principle it then applies: if a person may decline a vaccine because it carries risk for them, the argument needs to explain why a much smaller but real risk to others does not ground a similar claim — which is the counter's objection. [Rejecting P2] The protection claimed depends on the vaccine reducing transmission and not only illness, which varies by vaccine and by disease, so the premise asserts a benefit whose size it never establishes. [Rejecting P3] The common good is what is in dispute rather than a reason that settles it: the counter holds that bodily autonomy is itself part of the common good, so invoking the phrase restates the position instead of supporting it.