How moral is it to refuse a vaccine?

Well thank goodness for that, eh? Just as we reached our darkest hour and resigned ourselves to an endless series of lockdowns and the ruination of everything we once took for granted, we heard that help might be at hand. With the announcement of a Covid vaccine, what the Prime Minister called the ‘distant bugle of the scientific cavalry’ was at last audible. Think Pheidippides staggering into Athens, or the great horn of Helm ringing out.

My instinct, and I expect yours, was to think something like: ‘Phew! It’ll take a month or two, maybe a year, but we’re in sight of things going back to normal. There is light at the end of the tunnel.’ Yet the more I have turned this over in my mind, the more I’ve found my inner gloomadon-popper (another felicitous phrase of the PM’s). It strikes me that the ferocious culture wars over lockdown and mask-wearing may be as nothing compared to those over vaccination.

One of the fundamental arguments in politics, perhaps the most fundamental of all, is between the liberties of the individual, and the needs of the community. Draw the slider all the way in one direction, you get Ayn Rand libertarianism; in the other, totalitarian communism and all the jollity that goes with that. This argument — sometimes a largely philosophical one — has been crystallised as a real-world, practical problem by this viral pandemic.

You can even put numbers on it. Those numbers may be disputed, but nobody sensible would deny that there is an empirical statistical relationship between private freedoms and public welfare. The more people mingle indoors, the faster the virus spreads and the more people die of it. The more people are vaccinated, the slower the virus will spread and the fewer people will die of it.