There are acknowledged side effects of the vaccine, notably myocarditis that is a risk for men in their teens and twenties (the risk is several fold higher for men in this age group than it is for women). The Israeli and CDC data variously put the risk at 1 in 3000-6000, but that doesn’t mean that many times more milder cases of damage aren’t more prevalent.

Various countries in Europe have balked at or delayed vaccinating under 18s for this reason. Interestingly for people who got the mRNA vaccines there was almost no myocarditis after the first dose, so this was mostly a second dose effect. We may not have enough data right now to say whether a booster dose is even more likely to produce heart damage but it’s possible.

Since myocarditis is also a risk of COVID itself, it’s probably still a better deal for many people in this age group to get vaccinated. In fact public health officials seem to think that it’s a good deal for the average person in this group. However, if you are a healthy man in his early twenties whose absolute risk from COVID is already very low, there’s a decent argument that you should be given a chance for informed consent and not have this mandated.

This is even more true if you’ve already had COVID and acquired natural immunity. In many countries proof of infection functions the same as proof of vaccination in terms of accessing services, it arguably should In this case as well.

The sorts of mandates we have had in place for things like MRR are different because we have decades of data on the safety and efficacy of these vaccines, and we know that we can lose herd immunity if we don’t have high compliance. The current COVID vaccines are clearly not providing herd immunity, given that omicron is tearing through highly vaxxed countries like the UK. Many experts are basically acknowledging that nearly everyone will get omicron eventually.

Also, unlike measles which can be kept at bay by mass vaccination, COVID is rampant in massive animal reservoirs like whitetail deer, which means that we aren’t going to make it extinct like we did with polio or smallpox. If the best that can be said about the vaccines is that they reduce hospitalization and death risk for those who take them, then is there justification for a mandate? You can argue that reduced severity is important for protecting the hospitals from being overwhelmed. But does that justify a mandate for boosters amongst college kids whose absolute risk of hospitalization from COVID is already very very small?

Anyway, I’m as fully vaxxed as I can be in my jurisdiction, but I don’t begrudge people making different choices for themselves in a case like this where it’s more about personal risk management than public benefit. Rational decisions are being made and the vaccination rates amongst elderly are much much higher than people in their twenties.

I also think that part of our resiliency as a society is having a range of perspectives. Even if the paranoid personality is annoying or maladaptive, sometimes they help bring things to light.

In the case of mRNA vaccine skeptics like Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, they is just consistently very far out on precautionary principle spectrum. Like they don’t think you should learn the sex of your child before birth because it would increase the psychological trauma of a miscarriage. A lot of their concern boils down to overweighing the unknown unknowns (from my perspective). I’m on the other end of the precautionary spectrum, but I have come to value the perspective and role that people like this play in our society, and I think they should be part of the conversation.