> You aren’t even comparing the same situations.
We've gotten quite far from the original point; I'll reply once more but probably not again on this branch because we seem to have a fundamental disagreement over whether governments should have the right to mandate (either de-jour or de-facto) medical interventions on people in return for the ability to take part in society.
Governments can't mandate for every eventuality, they have to make policies covering broad areas. We're discussing public health policy here, i.e. the ways in which governments can reduce harmful effects on the health of the populace through rules and regulations. My point was that if governments truly cared about public health, they would have already for example banned smoking universally (or at least in situations where there is another person within X meters of the smoker), since second hand smoke is a demonstrable cause of premature death. The justification would be one of public health. And if anything, such a policy would be even less controversial than mandating vaccines because a smoker can simply stop smoking temporarily to be around other people whereas people cannot stop breathing and therefore potentially spreading viruses. Yet it seems governments have skipped over all of these easier public health issues, and gone straight to mandating that people get vaccinated to enter publicly funded places from a public health justification. To me, regardless of how effective or not these mandates have been and are, I smell bullshit when I hear governments justifying such rules with public health arguments because they have not from their previous actions demonstrated that they are merely following through with their public health manifesto. I rather fear they're mandating vaccines to enter public spaces because the public demanded something be done. Governments in representative democracies aren't doing their job if they do merely that which the public want; they are supposed to lead even if the majority of the public disagree.