Written by: Aashrab Khanal - 22001, Grade XII
Posted on: 24 January, 2022
On 11 March, 2020, WHO declared COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic. Since then nations around the world have been working to combat the spread of the virus. Various measures have been put in place to combat the spread showing their own degrees of success. But the implementation of vaccine mandates can be observed to be an increasingly favoured measure for governments of different countries. The vaccine mandates are ultimately promoting tyranny on the side of the government.
Many of us would agree that making vaccination mandatory is going to be the best way to end COVID-19 pandemic. But many people also believe that mandating vaccination infringes on their personal freedom. If governments can make it compulsory to wear a seatbelt while driving then why not mandate vaccination. Both acts will and have shown to save millions of lives. Is your personal freedom more important than the welfare of your fellow citizens and humans? My answer would be absolutely not. But I would also like to point out the decreasing trust in individual conscience and increasing trust in a government’s conscience.
Even though seatbelts and vaccinations are both mandated by the government, the promiximites with individual liberty are very different. Having to wear seatbelts wouldn’t cause people to think about individual freedom because it is not related to something important to an individual. But vaccinations are completely different in a sense that it is one’s body that is being injected. The bigger problem here is that all the mandating is being done by the government. The government today might not be tyrannical but it is not true that it never can be one. This can be thought of as keeping a lion as a pet. Even though it is trained to be harmless towards humans, you cannot be naive about its natural instincts. Governments turn tyrannical when given more power over their citizens. The people in governments, people’s representatives or politicians deal with power which has many times shown to bring out the worst in humans. The rules of their game don't allow for the success of an unselfish and sincere person. Almost every decision can be analyzed to be motivated by personal gains, rather than the interests of the people who elected them. We are seeing the deterioration of trust on an individual's conscience. Society is moving towards more trust and power in the government. But history doesn’t seem to be generous to people who have helped build a monolithic government and a similar type of society.
The earlier responses to the COVID-19 pandemic show us how brazen governments around the world follow authoritarian methods. China being authoritarian was able to put its citizens under a strict lockdown in order to curb the spread of COVID-19. And the same method was followed by governments all around the world. We must remember that all totalitarian governments throughout the history of our civilization have used crises like the current one to gain more power and destroy individual liberty.
