Forcing People to get Vaccinated

I am in the middle of producing an episode about vaccinations for my online web series.  I wrote the script over a year ago, before COVID or a potential vaccine for it were even on the horizon.  Fortunately the principles I convey in the script are universal enough that they are just as applicable to a pandemic as they are to longstanding childhood diseases.  But there is no getting around the fact that the current situation have upped the stakes of the ongoing conflict over vaccinations.

I personally feel that this is a cut and dry issue, that has little do with science or the quantifiable effectiveness of vaccines.  It is either ethical to forcibly inject people with chemicals against their will, for the potential benefit of others, or its not.  If we want more people to get vaccinated, we need to have a strong case for why they should do so, which is not always true.  By my measure, you are more likely to die from the measles vaccine than you are to die of measles.  MMR vaccine that was given to my son listed a 1/450K chance of death as a side effect, (among other risks) so with 3.6Million births in the US, that would lead to about 8 deaths annually from the vaccine, before we even factor in that 2 doses are recommended.  The last person to die of measles in the US was in 2015, and I believe the total measles deaths since 2000 is in the single digits.  So it appears that statistically my son is more likely to die from the MMR vaccine than from measles, but neither is a likely outcome.  Now if there was a significant decrease in the number of people being vaccinated for measles, it is likely that eventually more people would start dying from measles, increasing the risk of not being vaccinated.  And this would motivate more people to get vaccinated, until an equilibrium was found.

COVID is a little different, due to the extreme variations in peoples reactions to the illness, and the unknown long term effects of both the disease and the potential vaccines.  Both sides can make all sorts of claims that can't yet be verified, and the stakes are much higher based on what has been sacrificed to combat the disease so far.  And because it has been so long since a disease of this severity has come around, that most people have nothing to compare it to, and have no reasonable sense of risk tolerance.

And since people also have trouble comprehending large numbers, the fact that hundreds of thousands of people have died from it can't be properly put into the context of hundreds of millions of people in your sample set.  All of this leads to a highly emotionally charge environment where we will soon have a debate between two already polarized factions, about whether or not to force people to get vaccinated.  While forcing people to get vaccinated is completely antithetical to the idea of being a free country, if the battle over masks is any indication, the media will be pushing it "for the greater good" because "it is not just about you."

Is it the end of the world to be forced to get a vaccine?  Hopefully not, although currently the side effects appear worse than the virus symptoms in younger people.  But it is a terrible precedent to set, against the principles of personal liberty, and according to those who fought the Revolutionary War, the principles of personal liberty are worth dying for.  So we shouldn't abandon them for a slight possibility that it might decrease our changes of getting a disease that has only the remotest chance of killing us.