Vaccines. It works to address that in more detail too.

> Vaccines are not 100% safe, and should not be legally required.

Living is not 100% safe, and should not be legally required. Respecting the law is not 100% safe, and should not be legally required.

Jokes aside, no, it’s not safe, and that has no bearing. Only its __relative__ safety has bearing. Even if the risk of death by vaccine was 10%, and the risk of death by disease ( infection x mortality ) was 11%, the the law is that the vaccine is administered. Why? Because this saves more lives. How many more ? 1% more. Is it worth it? Yes. Why? Because without the vaccine 11% of people die. With the vaccine 10% of people die. Now what if everyone you love is in that 1%? What if that 1% difference is your life?

The other side is what if everyone you love is in that 10%? Is it a tragedy? Yes. Is the law still correct? Yes. Why? Because more people live, even if they are not the people you love. Sorry, that’s society. The many > the one && the one !== you ( not necessarily, anyway ). If you disagree, you are free to terminate your social contract at any time. It may be hard to find somewhere away from all of us, tho, we’re sure you can if you try.

Now, this situation is not ideal with respect to technology, and a better future is coming through better technology. What is it? Personalized medicine. What if we can get tighter error bars on your risk of death by vaccine and your risk of death by disease by studying the genetic markers associated with disease and treatment effectiveness? We can, and when that is more developed, we can make decisions that not only maximize life over the group, and also maximize it in individual cases, based on individuals’ genetic make up.

“But they can’t force us to surrender our genetic information to the state for analysis!” And yet, there’s a chance if you do, then you receive treatment that gives you a better chance of life if you do. And if everyone does that, then everyone’s odds are improved. I haven’t yet thought at all about whether it is mandatory for the state to sequence your genome, tho this would likely be a reason contributing to a probable decision to say it is.

So do you accept the state’s ability to protect the majority of life, even if you won’t, or do you hold to a ridiculous idea that the state can not adjudicate what works for the mass of people, so that you, and anyone else who so wishes, can choose to die, unhindered, by “natural” causes beyond the control of the state?

Why is this idea ridiculous? Firstly because your choice to live in the state binds you to the state’s ToS. So for it to even be a question for you of disagreeing with what the state “permits” you to do is illogical. If you don’t want the state’s intercession, depart from it, to elsewhere. If you stay, you already accept the state's providence and prohibition. And if you choose both to stay, and to disagree, then you are an optimist who believes they can alter their circumstances to more suit them, and I commend you, and I am as well. If we want the state to become different, we can of course make it so.

If you want the state to surrender regulating vaccines, then you can contribute to the creation of personalized medicine, and champion its adoption to provide a more granularized interpretation of “common good”. If you disagree with the concept of common good, then remove yourself from the commons, because you value your individuality more highly than the collective. There's nothing wrong with that being so, it just makes it illogical for you to stay.

If you refuse all these and still contest the state’s regulation to preserve the majority of life is “unnatural” then that is ridiculous, because the hidden hand of “natural” causes ( natural selection, that despotic tyrant ) has been protecting the mass of people by its very mechanism since for ever.

So if the state can step in and do it on individually relevant timescales of 1 lifetime, instead of on the order of meaningful propagation of a fit adaptation ( more like 10 generations ), then that works to an even finer granularity than evolution.