RIGHTS: Well, how about mine?

No mask mandates, no vaccination mandates, for they interfere with individual rights. This makes no sense, as our civilization is based on mandates, natural as well as those devised for the good of living with fellow humans.

Religious mandates, such as the commandments, the deadly sins, natural mandates such as poisonous plants, the law of gravity, safety mandates such as speed and fire-related laws.

Those medical workers who defy the effort of their “profession” to do what the oaths they’ve taken demand are a disgrace to that profession. Health care is historically based upon “do no harm,” and from early medical history one discovery has been a foundational principle of medicine: that of innoculation/vaccination to prevent disease.

Such scientists as Edward Jenner, Louis Pasteur and Jonas Salk enhanced the practice of medicine immeasurably. To ignore this basic principle in the prevention of disease is nothing but foolish.

Are the unvaccinated folks now in agony from the virus happy they got to keep their “individual rights”? Have they, before they took sick, infected any of their relatives or friends?

So, how about my individual right to be able to talk with, shake hands with, exchange smiles with another acquaintance or relative, without the danger of being infected? Or my right to be treated without risk of a communicable disease? A mandate makes sense when it mandates an individual right, whether one’s own or someone else’s.

The nurses in The Press’s Friday edition are protesting the mandate to be vaccinated. The mandate to be vaccinated is to protect their patients’ right to be free from risk of a potentially fatal disease.

RON BOOTHE

Kingston