The Government of Austria has just taken the very sensible decision to confine to their private homes all the uninformed, stupid, conspiranoids, hypochondriacs or simple fools, who have everything in the vineyard of the anti-vaccines, who do not want to be immunized against the virus, seclusion from which they can only leave to go to work or to study. Nothing, then, to go to shops, drinks, discos, gyms or a simple walk. Measure, that of the Austrians, brave and worthy of being imitated as soon as possible, right now, in the rest of Europe. If possible, starting with Spain.
Because, being so difficult, it has been shown that it was possible to fight a viral epidemic of biblical dimensions effectively. What is not feasible, however, and neither in Austria nor elsewhere, is to fight both a viral epidemic of animal origin, and against another epidemic of extreme irrationality, the last of pathological origin. The right to live mentally in the High Middle Ages perhaps deserves among us the mandatory legal protection of a liberal and democratic legal order that protects almost any type of individual extravagance, no matter how crazy it may be.
But when that right collides with another higher right, that of the effective guarantee and protection of public health by the State, its exercise can and should be put in parentheses. Or what sense does it make, then, that, and for well over a century, there have been compulsory vaccination laws – such as the British one against smallpox, which dates from 1853 – while the closure of those who do not comply is postulated as unassailable. immunize against covid? We have, after great efforts and huge investments of money, found a way to end the pandemic. What we have not found yet is the way to end human stupidity. And as it seems highly unlikely that we will achieve it in the short term, the only way to end this definitive planetary disaster as soon as possible is to suppress, even temporarily, our reckless tolerance for anti-vaccines. Because the freedom of an idiot is not more sacred than the right to life of the next victim of the covid. Let’s emulate Austria as soon as possible.
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