“Who am I as a government or anyone else, or as a man standing here now, to tell you what you should put in your body?"
Well, you're supposed to be the state's top public health official.
Which is a rather disturbing thing to say, both by overlooking the legal basis behind vaccine mandates and implying any state official has near dictatorial control over his state's citizens.
Here's the legal basis for vaccine mandates for any state: A state has the right to set the requirements to attend state funded schools. A private school has that same right. It's not a matter of the state saying children must be vaccinated by such and such an age; it's that
students must be vaccinated to attend. State's schools; state's rules. It's just that simple. If someone wanted to homeschool, the state couldn't dictate that the children be vaccinated. It would be a bad idea not to vaccinate the children, but the state couldn't demand it.
That's the legal basis. It's reasonable (a requirement to attend schools paid for by the state) without dictatorial powers.
I'm a strong proponent of vaccinations for a very simple reason: I grew up beside an old cemetery and remember the little graves. A funeral home director in the 1980s commented that the biggest change he'd seen was he didn't sell as many small caskets. I was just after that era, but knew someone who had a withered arm from Polio and heard about what was once called childhood illnesses. All this was known to my parents and theirs, and there was no opposition that I can recall to vaccines: people remembered life without it. We had heard stories about ailments like lockjaw to the point where we were glad to be vaccinated. The generation after mine likely heard less. And people forgot, forgot what it was like, forgot when the old folks had the superstition "Bright Christmas; fat graveyard" because deaths due to illness were much more common then than now.
They've also failed to notice what happens in every school from the moment it starts: waves of illness from colds to intestinal ailments to influenza to strep. Easily passed along in the close confines of classrooms and playgrounds. It's why college students in state schools are often required to have meningitis vaccinations. That was a big reason state schools required vaccinations in the first place.
This is an example of how it used to be: One afternoon, when my mother was a little girl, she fell ill, and when the doctor saw her, he said "I already know what it is. [Name forgotten] is in her class and he's come down with measles." Sure enough, it was measles, and every student in that class contracted it. Vaccinations ended such. Without vaccinations, that's going to return.
