First-responders deserve a choice

A few nights ago, my apartment building was evacuated because someone on the fourth floor set fire to their unit. I doubt it was deliberate, although I can’t say I know everyone in the building and there are some shady characters I’ve seen on the elevators, so you never really know what goes on in the hearts of men (only the Shadow knows, and if you got that you’re older than I thought).

Waiting outside with my melting ice cream, I watched as the first responders kept running in and out of the building. They were all in the 25-50 age group, different races, but they all had the same look on their collective, handsome faces: Get the job done, make the building safe for me and my neighbors, and go home to their own families.

As they filed out of the building and headed back to their trucks, tarred with soot and lugging their equipment, a smattering of applause broke out. It got louder, and reminded me of the banging pans that serenaded the health care workers during the early days of the pandemic. In moments of crisis, we know who the angels are.

It made me reflect on what’s happening in cities and towns across the nation, as police, firemen and other first responders are being told that if they don’t get vaccinated, they will lose their jobs. This is not a “suggestion” that they should be immunized. This is not Aaron Rogers throwing a football for lots of money (God bless him and Go Packers,

since the Eagles have become annoying). This is about men and women who put their lives on the line for the rest of us, who sat comfortably at our computers and whined about having to wear masks at the Acme (hand raised here). Because the president has taken the ever-shifting, ever-confusing advice of Dr. Anthony Fauci and other health experts, these heroes now face the prospect of either submitting to forced medical treatment, or losing their jobs.

Regardless of how you feel about the vaccine, and I feel fine since I’ve been vaccinated twice and will likely get the booster when I can schedule a visit, you have to acknowledge the moral and legal tunnel we are entering when we start demanding that people be medically treated against their will.

The law has had to engage in a very delicate balancing test, weighing the privacy rights of individuals and their interest in self-determination against the interest society has in protecting the vulnerable. A seminal case in the area is Jacobson v. Commonwealth of Massachusetts, over 100 years old, which allowed a state university in Massachusetts to forcibly vaccinate students against smallpox, the epidemic of the moment.

This column is not a legal treatise on the constitutionality of President Biden’s attempt to use OSHA as cover for his federal mandate, nor is it an attempt to explain why cities like New York and Chicago think they can force their first responders to do something to their bodies that they’d otherwise oppose. I’m neither expert enough in constitutional law, nor do I have the space to, excuse the pun, do it justice.

But I do have space, and the expertise, and the desire, to rail against any government presuming to force an individual citizen to make a choice between his or her sense of bodily integrity and autonomy, and being able to put food on the table. This is especially so when you consider that the jobs these people are performing are saving our lives.

I can hear the readers out there saying, “But Christine, you’re all about forcing women to do something with their bodies that they don’t want to do,” a sly reference to my anti-abortion advocacy. The differences are so obvious that I shouldn’t even have to mention them, but letter writers will, so here goes.

Science has established that the fetus is a human being, one that can live outside the womb at an increasingly earlier stage in its development. People like Ben Carson operate on those fetuses, in utero, and treat them as living patients. It’s no longer an issue of religion or morality. Aborting a fetus is about science. And we’re told to follow the science.

Unless the pregnancy poses a threat to the mother’s health, the whole issue of “I get to do what I want with my body” is not the same as forcing a person who is worried that a vaccine that has only been around for a year and a half will have a negative impact on his or her health to just shut up and stick out her arm. The analogy won’t work.