I’m a strong supporter of safe and effective vaccines. It’s incredible how many illnesses we’ve practically eliminated in the Western World over the short few centuries since the discovery of the method. And when it comes to safe, effective vaccines for deadly illnesses like Smallpox, it seems entirely reasonable to make them commonplace so long as we have the disease running rampant.

But there is a catch to all of this, and it’s in those two adjectives: safe and effective. The original Polio vaccine ended up leading to paralysis in hundreds of children and even leading to several deaths. It turned out that some of the vaccination regiments contained live forms of the virus instead of the far less deadly inactive form. In such a case, the rush to produce the vaccine caused unnecessary harm.

As it turns out, we may be in for a second round of this dangerous situation with the coronavirus. While children have a lower risk of dying from it than they do from the flu (by a margin of almost 10x), and while most people under 65 likewise are more susceptible to the seasonal flu than to this virus, it appears that mandatory vaccinations – regardless of opposition – are coming at least for New York:

Citing a robust collection of federal and state case law, a New York State Bar Association task-force group on Thursday said it should be mandatory for all Americans to have a COVID-19 vaccination, when one is available, including those who won’t want it for “religious, philosophical or personal reasons.”

For all the moaning I’ve seen that we ought to defer entirely to medical experts in everything, it’s amazing how little resistence people have to lawyers, who are – it should not have to be said – not medical experts.

This reveals a larger problem though, I think. Lawyers and our sue-happy culture are largely responsible for the extreme risk aversion on display since March. When companies say they are concerned with the coronavirus, they are misleading people. What really concerns them is liability. Lawyers are the medium through which liability haunts these companies. So it’s interesting to see that not only have lawyers helped create this risk averse scenario where no-one dare get back to normal, lest he be sued into bankruptcy, but they are fully willing to defend the very high risk of rushing a vaccine and then injecting that rushed vaccine into every living person in the borders of the country.