 Is there a libertarian case for vaccine mandates? George Mason University law professor Ilya Somen supports vaccine mandates in certain cases because he believes there are relatively small infringement on freedom and are preferable to harm reduction strategies like mass mandates and lockdowns, which he sees as posing a greater threat to our liberties. Angela McCartle, the chair of the Libertarian Party of Los Angeles County, says she'll actively work to destroy any institution that tries to enforce a vaccine passport and is currently launching legal challenges to overturn vaccine mandates in California and New York. On Wednesday, September 8th, Somen and McCartle went head-to-head at the Soho Forum in New York City. Somen took the affirmative and McCartle the negative on the resolution. While vaccine mandates are an infringement on freedom, some are justified due to their big payoff in lives saved. The debate was moderated by Soho Forum director Gene Epstein. While vaccine mandates are an infringement on freedom, some are justified due to their big payoff in lives saved. And here to defend the resolution to take the affirmative, Ilya Somen, Ilya please come to the stage. Taking the negative on the resolution, Angela McCartle, Angela please come to the stage. Okay, I'm going to yield the podium to you, Ilya. You have 15 minutes to defend the resolution. Take it away, Ilya. You'll be timed in the audience and we'll be warning you. Take the podium. I'd like to start by thanking Gene and the Soho Forum for organizing this event and all of you for coming. And I'll also say my name is Ilya Somen and I'm the guy that was stupid enough to come and defend vaccine mandates in front of a most libertarian audience. Fools rush in where wise men fear to tread and this may be an example of that phenomenon. However, my task is easier than it looks at first sight and that's so for a couple of reasons. One is the resolution doesn't say that I have to defend all vaccine mandates of any kind just that some of them are justified because they save lots of lives. And second, the key point about vaccine mandates is that they're actually a very small burden, only a very small imposition on liberty. And in some context, I emphasize the word some, they can save a lot of lives. And in fact, they are much smaller burdens and have a bigger payoff than even some infringements on liberty that most libertarians accept in other contexts. So I'm going to start off with what I think is actually a relatively easy case. And that is the defense of vaccination mandates when they're imposed in the private sector or on people like myself, government employees. So we have seen both with COVID but even before then that some private employers required their employees to get vaccinated for various diseases, particularly in the healthcare sector, but sometimes elsewhere as well. Similarly, there are universities and other types of venues that require students or customers to get vaccinations. Once again, this long predates COVID, but obviously it's happened under COVID as well. And I think this is very easily defended on even the purest of libertarian grounds. This is private organizations deciding for themselves who they want to associate with and moreover, the restriction when it deals with vaccinations for deadly contagious diseases. It's one that helps ensure the safety of their employees and customers and so forth. I know you can make a similar point with respect to government requirements for government employees, including, yes, state university professors like myself. I have to be vaccinated not just for the COVID, but for some other things for my job. And it's standard for employers to be able to impose burdens as a condition of employment that you might not impose if you're just attaching it to the general population. And indeed, compared to other burdens of employment, this one is actually a small one. I get the jab when a few minutes I'm done and I go on with my life. On the other hand, another part of my job is that I have to sit through faculty meetings much, much worse, much more painful, much worse for my health too. But yet, if I don't sit through them, I could be penalized or fired. Similarly, coming to work on time every day is a bigger burden than having to get vaccinated. It's even a bigger risk to your physical health. On average, for most people, you're more likely to die or be seriously injured in a car accident on the way to work than you are by getting vaccinated either for COVID-19 or for the other diseases for which there are sometimes employer vaccination mandates. And on a slightly more serious note, for at least some types of government employees, there's actually a very strong moral case that they should be vaccinated. For example, for the police and firefighters, ordinary citizens often have no choice about dealing with those individuals. And therefore, they owe it to us if they're going to do their duty to get vaccinated against deadly contagious diseases. I think there's a similar story from members of the armed forces. They too often have to deal with people who have no choice about being in proximity to them. And also, if the soldiers or police or firefighters, if they themselves come down with a deadly disease, that means while they have it, they can't do their duty and they're not doing the thing that they contractually signed up to do. So that's another reason to justifies the imposition in those cases. So just on sort of the low hanging fruit of my side of this resolution, private mandates for they're voluntarily accepted through contract as a condition of employment or government mandates on people like myself, government employees who come in contact with members of the public and therefore risk spreading contagious diseases. I think there's a strong case at the very least for vaccination mandates in those situations. And that alone, I think, is enough to justify the very limited resolution that we're talking about here today. However, I'm going to be a bit more controversial and risqué and point out that there are going to be some cases where it is justifiable to impose mandates, yes, through the government, even on members of the public who, unlike me, do not actually work for the government or get government paychecks. The reason for this again is that this is actually a very small imposition on liberty. You get the jab, you can almost immediately go on with your normal life. There is a small number of people for whom that's not true. People who suffer unusually great health risk for whatever reason from getting vaccinated. For those people, I totally agree they should be exempted from vaccination mandates and an almost all currently existing mandates or proposed ones. They do have exemptions. You can argue about and we can discuss in questions whether there should also be exemptions for religious objections. In practice, there's only a very small portion of the US population at least that has religious objections to vaccination. Now, why is the vaccination justified? Why is even a small burden defensible? The reason is that it can save, at least in some contexts, many hundreds of lives. If you look at the history of those contagious diseases that we have gotten under control, measles, polio, smallpox and some others, every one of them vaccination played a large role. And sadly, in every one of these cases, vaccination mandates also played a significant role. We probably could not have gotten to the point where those diseases are only very minor threats or in the case of smallpox completely eradicated without vaccination mandates. And there's a long history behind this. Notice the resolution does not say that this is only about COVID mandates. Even if you think that the COVID vaccines are too unreliable or otherwise problematic, there are still vaccination mandates and other contexts for other diseases that have existed for a long time that could be defensible. And that's all I really need to prove to show my limited side of this resolution. However, it is also the case that COVID vaccines, and yes, COVID vaccine mandates, do have a valuable role to play. Both in the U.S. and around the world, the introduction of vaccines has massively reduced both mortality from COVID and serious hospitalization and disease from COVID and the like, probably 90% or more of the people who are dying recently or going to hospital recently because of COVID in the U.S. and Europe. They're sadly the unvaccinated. Moreover, the issue is not just protecting the individuals themselves to get vaccinated. If it was only that, I would be opposed to mandates. I don't think there should be mandates to protect you from your own bad judgment. However, the data also shows pretty consistently that the vaccinated also risks spreading the disease much less in both the U.S. and data from Israel and elsewhere. A person who gets the COVID vaccine, they're about six to 10 times less likely to be infected by COVID than a person who doesn't if you control for other variables. And in addition, even if they are infected, they're somewhat less likely to spread the disease. This is data from the Delta variant. I fully admit we don't yet know for sure whether the Omicron variant that just came around is going to be like this or not. I think early data suggests the vaccine still limit the spread. But if it turns out that they don't, I'm perfectly willing to admit that that would weaken the case for vaccine mandates and lessen until we have a vaccine that actually does constrain Omicron like it previously constrained Delta and Alpha and others. Even with vaccination mandates that could be justified, it is not my claim that they can be justified in every conceivable mechanism or circumstances. I'm not in favor of saying, as the government of Austria has done, that the unvaccinated should be completely locked up in their houses or except for a few essential purposes for going out. I think we can have more limited vaccination mandates that are still quite effective. For example, we can impose them in some instances where you already have to show ID and other proof to get in like on a plane flight and the like. Alternatively, vaccination can be a requirement of getting certain kinds of government benefits like welfare or social security to like or of parts of them. From a libertarian point of view, that would be a win-win if the person gets the vaccine, they're don't risk spreading contagious disease. If they refuse, at least there's a reduction in welfare spending. And you know, what's not to like about that particular approach, at least for a libertarian point of view. And I don't even propose, you know, that the person lose all benefits or whatnot. You can have a large enough fine that reduces the benefits and provide the strong incentive to get vaccinated. There's also a lot of evidence that when vaccination mandates of various kinds are imposed, they do indeed increase vaccination rates. As we've recently seen with federal employees, where the evidence shows that some 92 percent of all federal employees have gotten vaccinated as of the last few months when there's been a vaccination mandate and of the remainder, there's another three or four percent who have health exceptions where, you know, it's defensible that they not be required to do so. As always with any kind of government intervention, or sometimes even with private sector restrictions, we should think about slippery slope risk. So I totally understand the concern that, you know, if we have vaccination mandates, maybe that's not in itself terrible, but what will come next? You can't totally discount risks like that ever, at least particularly not when you're dealing with government. In this area, however, it seems very likely that vaccination mandates don't pose very much of a slippery slope risk. We know that because we've already had them for over 200 years, dating all the way back to the Revolutionary War, when George Washington imposed a vaccination mandate against smallpox on his soldiers in the Continental Army, and the slippery slope effects that we so far in the last 200 years of vaccination mandates have been very modest. On the other hand, many of the other measures taken to combat COVID, lockdowns, school closures, mask mandates, and so forth, they're much more unprecedented. They're much more severe intrusions on liberty. They're also much less effective in stopping the spread of disease, but in addition to being bad in themselves, they pose much more in the way of novel slippery slope risks. Now, you might say to yourself, if we had an ideal libertarian government, it wouldn't impose these other more severe measures, but it wouldn't impose vaccination mandates either. Even if that's true, however, I would remind you that ideal libertarian governments are in very short supply. We don't have them right now. It's very unlikely that we're going to have them in the near future. Not even a speaker as capable as Angela is likely to persuade the world to turn fully libertarian anytime soon, even though she is indeed a great public speaker. She's very good at what she does, but not even she, I think, is going to be up to that particular task. So when you have real world governments of the kind that we actually have, and you have a deadly pandemic spreading, it is very likely that governments will act in some way to try to constrain that. If they're not able to constrain it through vaccination, they're likely to adopt other far worse, more restrictive measures. So vaccination is a way to forestall that, and we've already had some benefits from vaccination in that respect. If you look at the spread of the Delta variant over the last few months, even though it's more transmissible and virulent than the previous version, we have not had anything like the same degree of lockdowns, school closures, or even mass mandates in many places that we had with the initial variable, the initial variant. And that's obviously because of the difference that vaccination has made, that there's less of a sense of crisis than there was before, because vaccination is constraining the spread in a way that it didn't before. If we had a higher vaccination rate instead of the current 60%, if it was 80 or 90% or whatnot, then we would be more secure, not only against the virus, but also against awful things that governments might do in response to it. So I'll end with this point. Whether you agree with me about vaccination or not, if you're worried about the fate of liberty in the COVID world, you should be mostly focused on these other much more restrictive measures, lockdowns, school closures, travel bans, mask mandates, and so forth. All of these things restrict liberty far more than vaccination mandates do, and all of them have much more in the way of slippery slope risks as well. So I hope at least we can agree on that, and we can also recognize that vaccination is one of the tools that can help prevent these much more severe infringements on liberty, as well as saving many lives. Thank you. Thank you, Ilya. Angela McCartle for the negative. Angela, please take the podium. 15 minutes for the negative. Take it away, Angela. Within a few minutes, I go on with my life. Let me share you something, share something with you. Sherry was 13 years old when her father took her to get the vaccine in August, and she had a reaction to the shot. She was taken to the hospital for cognitive dysfunction and heart pain. They had to place her a 13-year-old girl on life support. A few days later, her condition improved a little bit, and her mother was able to move her to home for home care. She was verbally unresponsive, but able to hold her mother's hand and communicate with head nods. Sensing something was off, her pet dog and cat laid beside her nearly every day and every night. She could be seen gently, barely petting both of them. A few days after Sherry returned home, she had to get rushed back to the hospital where her neurologist discovered severe damage which she had never seen before. Sherry's condition stabilized again, so she was released to her mother for home care with a nurse where she laid nearly unresponsive. Her mother said, at times when I spoke to Sherry, her facial expressions confirmed she could hear me, but wasn't able to talk. Other times, when I sat in the bed with her, I would hold her hand and she would grasp mine. The last 10 minutes, Sherry had alive with her mother. She spoke, and her mother Tatiana recalls, I had spent the entire day in her room either laying in bed with her or reading to her. I was talking to her and getting no verbal reply. When the nurse arrived, I decided to go to the kitchen to get a snack. Rufus, our dog, ran into the kitchen and whimpered to get my attention. I knew something was wrong. When I got to the room, Sherry was struggling with the IV in her arm and the nurse was trying to restrain her. I told the nurse to let go and remove the IV temporarily. Soon after, my daughter became lucid and was able to speak for the first time since she received the vaccination. And she said, mom, my heart hurts and I have a headache. It's going to be okay. Don't be angry and don't blame dad. I've heard you talking to me every day. I tried and couldn't wake up to tell you. Mom, thank you for being my mom. And thank you. And thank you for all of my animals. Please take care of them. Mom, you were right. There is a heaven, but I wanted to make sure you knew how much I love you and don't be afraid. Soon after this, her mother Tatiana says, my daughter stopped talking and she laid quietly in my arms with her eyes open and a smile while holding my hand. Then her eyes closed, her dog Rufus began to whine. And soon after, she slipped off asleep in my arms forever. Sherry's pulmonologist and neurologist affirmed that the vaccination was the direct reason for her hospitalization and death. And she is one of the many reasons that I'm here today to condemn these mandates. We're going to keep the clock going while we have a brief moment of silence for Sherry and to every other child that died due to these vaccines and this mandate. Thank you. And I got her mother's permission to share that. That's from her eulogy. This debate is profoundly personal for a lot of people watching here and at home. If it saves just one life, the mandates are worth it, right? The good outweighs the bad. Let's see if it does. Let's see. Let's look at some side effects statistics. In less than one year, the VAERS system has reported 875,653 adverse reactions to COVID vaccines in the U.S., including 135,400 reports of serious injury and 18,461 deaths. Sherry is a statistic now. At what point do we mandate that a certain percentage of our population be put to death for the greater good? The average cost of a child's coffin is about $1,000, I looked it up. Will that also be covered by government subsidies at some point? Who gets to decide who lives and dies? This is not a trolley problem thought experiment. There are real lives at stake. Most of Pfizer's COVID vaccine contracts include the following clause, and you can look them up. Purchaser acknowledges that there may be adverse effects of the vaccine that are not currently known. The CDC reports higher than expected levels of heart inflammation in young men ages 12 to 24, mostly Moderna and Pfizer, especially after booster shots. 20% of the vaccine-induced myocarditis cases in teenagers require ICU hospitalization. That is more than the percentage of young COVID patients who require hospitalization. A June study on pregnant women in the New England Journal of Medicine revealed that eight out of 10 women who received a COVID shot in their first or second trimester miscarried. That's an 81.9% miscarriage rate. The normal U.S. miscarriage rate is between 10 and 26% depending on the source. The CDC doesn't grant exemptions to pregnant women, and neither does New York City. Your reproductive rights don't matter. Neither does the life of your unborn baby. We are mandating miscarriages. There are no studies confirming the safety of COVID boosters. They don't exist. How can we, in good conscience, experiment on coerced pregnant women and unwilling children? Would you look these people in the eye? Would you look Sherry's mother in the eye and tell her that COVID vaccines have to be mandated and that you're comfortable sacrificing her child for the greater good, because she was just one of a few thousand people who died? Let's examine the trade-offs. Risk getting COVID or mandate getting a shot that kills a small percentage of us puts healthy young men in the hospital with a heart condition and creates an 80% miscarriage rate. If it saves just one life, let's repeal these mandates. How about efficacy? Do the shots even work? Pfizer's COVID vaccine contract states, purchaser acknowledges the long-term effects and efficacy of the vaccine are not currently known. That's a quote. As of August, 30% of the COVID cases in LA where I'm from were in vaccinated people. As of August, no, October 18th, at least 10,857 Americans have died of COVID-19 despite being fully vaccinated. That's CDC data. All of this is. Add 10,857 to the 18,461 reported deaths from the shot that adds up to 29,318 people who've died after receiving a COVID shot that we know of. It's not safe or effective and there's no other vaccine that requires a six-month booster shot. So the trade-off is now, risk getting COVID or mandate getting a shot every six months that isn't guaranteed to keep you from getting sick or dying, kills a small percentage of us, puts healthy young men in the hospital with a heart condition and creates an 80% miscarriage rate. What about alternative treatments? The government COVID contracts are designed to suppress other treatments. Why are Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine suppressed and ridiculed when there are excellent options for treating COVID? Ivermectin, which acts as an antiviral, anti-parasitic and anti-inflammatory, it's one of the safest drugs available to human beings. This right here is Ivermectin. Prescribed to an adult, it's not horse-paced. A standard dose is nine to 12 milligrams per day. A one-month supply cost me about $40 because the Merck patent on it expired in 1997. Why do we need mandated vaccines that don't work when we could just take Ivermectin and afford it? Why has the media made such an aggressive disinformation campaign against cures that work safely without deadly side effects? Well, my friends, Steven Cansella would say, intellectual property laws allow corporations to monopolize pharmaceuticals and have a quid pro quo relationship with the government. Pfizer's government contracts don't allow countries to return vaccines if the country deems they're too unsafe for distribution. These contracts cost countries around the world billions and billions of dollars. Our government has a financial motive to mandate vaccination and make sure we all comply. Our government in the U.S. spent over $9 billion on subsidies to pharma companies to develop vaccines and purchase them. And thanks to the revolving door cronyism of Big Pharma and the FDA, the biggest pharma firms have control over the drug approval process and they're able to prevent smaller companies from gaining quick approval for safer alternative treatments. Remember, Fauci did this to AIDS patients too. You can look that up. There is no need for a vaccine mandate when there are better affordable treatment options available. So the trade-off is now risk getting COVID or mandate getting a shot every six months that isn't guaranteed to keep you from getting sick or dying, kills a small percentage of us, puts healthy young men in the hospital with a heart condition, creates an 80% miscarriage rate when you could have taken ivermectin and recovered faster. Well, maybe we can just sue the companies, right? No, you can't. Vaccine manufacturers were granted immunity from lawsuits in 1986 in the Supreme Court case, Bruce White's v. White's. They have no liability. Why should they worry about mandates hurting you when they're never held accountable? In 2009, Pfizer paid out a $2.3 billion fraud settlement for criminal and civil liability for Bextra, a pain reliever that killed a lot of people. Merck paid out $4.85 billion to sell wrongful death lawsuits over Vioxx. 88,000 people suffered heart attacks from Vioxx and 38,000 of them died. Vioxx was recalled. The stats on COVID vaccines are much worse. We have to trust pharmaceutical companies blindly knowing these statistics. So now the trade-off is risk getting COVID or mandate getting a shot every six months that isn't guaranteed to keep you from getting sick or dying, kills a small percentage of us, puts healthy young men in the hospital with a heart condition, creates an 80% miscarriage rate and you can't sue if they hurt you, even though their drugs have killed people in the past when you could have taken ivermectin instead. What about jobs lost? Yesterday's heroes are today's trash. Nurses work through the entire pandemic without vaccines. Now they're being fired if they refuse the shot. 34,000 New York healthcare workers lost their jobs due to the mandate. Firefighters fired. 26 fire stations in New York City have been closed because employees have been fired for refusing the shot. Same stats in LA. Same stats. Is the mandate keeping you safe? No, it's terminating nurses, firefighters and paramedics and putting your safety at risk. Small businesses were destroyed over lockdowns. They're being hit again by vaccine mandates. The lockdowns wiped out one third of all of the small businesses in New York City and in New Jersey. Vaccine mandates are continuing that trend. They're not reversing it. Mandating the vaccine doesn't get us closer to normal and it doesn't make us freer. We've gone from two weeks to flatten the curve to lock down, to just wear a mask, to take the vaccine, to take the booster, to keep wearing your mask, to permanent mask mandates in Oregon, to show us your vaccine card. Next, it is gonna be forcible vaccination. It is all grossly unconstitutional, as you know, as Ilya also knows. Do we need coercive medical procedures to have a safer, freer society? The head of the EU recently stated she's in favor of mandatory vaccinations, not just mandates to exclude you from businesses. Forcible injection. These mandates are not making us freer and they're not getting us back to normal by any stretch. Australia has set up COVID internment camps. That happened after the mandates. Normal has never meant mandating vaccines for a respiratory virus under coercion with a vaccine that has no long-term safety profile. There are no studies confirming the safety of COVID boosters. This is in defiance of everything we know about epidemiology, it's not normal. The intention behind the mandates. British Columbia Parks and Rec Department stated, remember, the purpose of the vaccine card is to incentivize residents to get vaccinated, not to control the spread of the virus. Virus spread is controlled through vaccination, physical distancing, masking, hand hygiene. By limiting a variety of discretionary activities to those who are vaccinated, we expect to increase the inoculation coverage to a safe range for resuming full societal activities. It really is to create an incentive to improve our vaccination coverage. The vaccine passport is for non-essential opportunities and it's really to create an incentive to get higher vaccination rates. Do I need to review the trade-offs again? These mandates were decreed out of contempt for human life. Mandating this vaccine makes absolutely no sense. These mandates are an attack on personal freedom, medical innovation, property rights, free market capitalism and the right of peaceful people to move about freely. The mandates reduce your existence and worth as a human being to just one question, are you vaccinated? Your hard work and experience, your education, your intellect, all of its cast aside. It's replaced with a single question about your private medical history. Your health status doesn't matter. Perfect health, natural immunity already had it. Vaccinated, whatever it is, immunocompromised, fertility concerns, blood clots, risk of stroke, doesn't matter. It's just if you're vaccinated, all that matters is the shot. This mandate and everything that came before it has created a culture of coercion and this kind of callous utilitarianism never results in the greater good it claims. Ben Franklin was correct when he said if you give up your liberty for security, you will get neither. There is no scenario where giving up your right to make your own medical decisions will result in a safer world. Australia and Canada have made that very clear. This is a lot like the failed war on terror. We're mandating a drug that kills a small percentage of us that dehumanizes the rest of us and we're excusing it because we think it keeps us safe when in fact it does not and even if it did, we have no right to sentence a small percentage of the population, all innocent people, to social ostracization or death. As Scott Horton would say, come on man, that's bullshit. Your obedience is prolonging this nightmare. There is no justification for these deadly dehumanizing mandates and for these reasons I oppose them, all of them. Thank you. Thank you Angela. Five minutes to rebuttal Ilya. It's interesting that Angela chose to quote Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin was a person who's I think four or five year old son died of smallpox because Franklin made the mistake of not getting him vaccinated, which Franklin then regretted for the rest of his life. And during the Revolutionary War, when George Washington mandated vaccination against smallpox for the Continental Army, Benjamin Franklin was very much in favor of that. But I'm not gonna say I should win this debate because Franklin was on my side, rather the reason why I think this side of resolution is better is more fundamental. Even if every single thing she said is accurate about the COVID vaccine, that doesn't change the fact that at least some vaccination mandates are justified, I mentioned lots of examples throughout history of contagious deadly diseases that were eradicated or gotten under control, inconsiderable part through vaccination mandates, smallpox, measles, polio, many others. But it is also the case that most of what she said about the COVID vaccine just simply isn't true. If you look around the world, in places where you get higher vaccination rates, that has massively reduced the death rate from COVID and the hospitalization rate. And this is why we agreed in the scientific community, it was only government officials saying this, and they might say, fine, maybe they're lying or they have ulterior motives, but this is why we agreed both by governmental scientists and private sector scientists as well. And it's backfired data on the effects of the vaccines both in the US and around the world. So either there's a great conspiracy of scientists all over the world, they're hiding the truth from us, or we should accept the evidence that they put forward to it. And also the evidence of our eyes, which is that people who are vaccinated have vastly lower rates of both infection and death and also hospitalization, the like than people who are not. Yes, it's true. A few thousand people in the US have died of the COVID despite already being vaccinated. Most of them elderly and with very serious comorbidities. That's a vastly lower death rate by about 10 or 20 fold than the death rate among the unvaccinated. And the same thing is true elsewhere around the world. Now the issue of side effects. Angela cited the VAERS data, that is a junk database. Anybody can go online and report anything they want into that database and there's no quality control there. When you actually look at controlled studies and evidence conducted by actual scientific researchers, they consistently find that the side effect rates from the COVID are extremely low. And that indeed it's much safer than all sorts of other activities we take every day. Statistically speaking, for the overwhelming majority of people, they take a much greater risk of death or serious injury. If they have to drive a couple of miles to get vaccinated, then from getting the vaccine itself. She mentioned the issue of myocarditis and the heart problems for young men. Yes, there's a slightly higher incidence of heart problems in that group than in others. Even so, it's actually less than the incidence of myocarditis from getting the COVID among that same age group. And it's also less than the risk of a given young man being killed or injured in a car accident or other normal life activities. And the same story could be told about pretty much all of the other specific technical scientific points she makes. Ultimately, neither Angela nor I are scientists. Neither of us are conducting our own original research on the effects of vaccines. I think on technical questions of that kind, those of us who are not experts, we have to look to the scientific community who are. And in this case, there's a pretty broad consensus there, which is not just limited to government scientists or others who have a specific narrow self-interest involved. Ultimately, I think the key point is this. There are some situations where vaccine mandates are justified because they can save large numbers of lives at little cost. Where that is not the case, then I oppose the mandates too. It is not my purpose under this resolution to defend every conceivable mandate in every conceivable circumstance. Moreover, while taking the vaccine is not without risk, it's actually a lower risk than even libertarians except to preserve innocent lives in other contexts. Having a police force or an army to protect us against criminals or foreign attack, that creates risks. Sometimes the police will abuse people. Paying taxes to support those entities, that's much more of a burden on liberty than taking the vaccine. We can and should have various constraints on the police and the armed forces to reduce the threat that they pose. But even at its best, it's gonna be a higher threat than that posed by at least some vaccine mandates. So ultimately, I think this is a very limited resolution. All I have to show is that some vaccine mandates in some contexts are justified. And I think I've been able to do that. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for those alternative facts. You can look up all the information you want on side effects. It's finally hitting mainstream news. It is undeniable. In addition to working in litigation before I did this, I worked as an assistant medical researcher for Dr. Pearl Grimes, who is Michael Jackson's dermatologist. I do know how to look at medical research. I am experienced with that and I was paid to do it professionally. Smallpox was on the decline starting in 1800 before the vaccine became mainstream and was widely spread. That is verifiable information. The same goes for polio. Polio was on the decline before the vaccine actually hit it and became widely available. And that is in alignment with something called Farr's Law, which is basically the bell curve of disease and recovery. This is all widely available information. I will not shill for private sector mandates. Private sector mandates are just like government mandates. They're based upon government propaganda and fear mongering and government subsidies. Of course, people are going to listen when it's all over the news and they're gonna follow the government's orders when the government is terrifying them. My heart goes out to government employees. I have been helping the LA Department of Sanitation trying to overturn the mandate since their union isn't helping them. Let's not forget that members of the armed forces were experimented on and made very sick by the anthrax vaccine several years ago. The same thing is happening right now and I will discuss that in my close. Epidemiology has basically been turned upside down and common sense has been tossed out the window because at-risk people are still being forced to take the shot, so it doesn't matter if you're at risk or not. All of a sudden doctors are afraid to speak out against it. You're in a lot of risk right now. And it's all because government has a financial incentive to force people to take these shots and so do the hospitals and doctors who have purchased all of these drugs. As a libertarian, I don't believe in welfare, but I do oppose punishing poor people for exercising medical autonomy. Again, so many alternative treatments are available. In the past 150 years, billions of people have been pulled up out of poverty through the spread of free market enterprise and personal liberty. We've seen communist empires fall, some suddenly and others slowly, as people around the world have embraced free market capitalism and fought for a freer, more prosperous world for their children. Now we're seeing all of those beautiful advances for the human condition snuffed out into darkness. Shuttered businesses, bankruptcies, suicides. Vaccine mandates are not the way to get rid of lockdowns. Vaccine mandates are the next manifestation of extreme government control. And bowing to these mandates will bring about the next escalation in mandates which will be removing children from their unvaccinated parents and forcible vaccination of a dangerous drug that has no midterm or long term safety studies. All this misery, all this side effects, these horror stories, all the small businesses closed, bankruptcies, broken dreams. It's only going to increase if we allow these mandates to go into effect. 67% of LA's black population is unvaccinated. Are we gonna seriously refuse a majority of black people to enter public businesses? Are we back to that? Did you know medical malpractice is the third leading cause of death in the United States? They're supposed to be the highest level professionals but they injure and kill us all the time. If government mandates vaccines for our health, shouldn't they also issue an emergency order to curb or halt all of the malpractice deaths? What happened to if it saves just one life? I don't need to go through the trade off again. We could sue doctors but not vaccine manufacturers. The American Heart Association just released a study that shows the mRNA vaccine dramatically increases endothelial inflammation markers. That's the cells in your arteries. How many more damning studies will it take before we refuse to mandate these shots? The drive for total vaccination has been placed before all other values in society apparently including individual rights, public safety and employment for working class Americans. If you can't say no to a mandate that rips apart the fabric of our society and creates a medical caste system, you're definitely not a libertarian. And I don't believe that you care about the special intrinsic value of each human life. Vaccine mandates are a dangerous and gross violation of freedom and there is no justification for them historically. It doesn't matter if some other person that we've heard of said that they were a good idea. They're a bad idea now and they always have been and we are seeing how they are ruining people's lives. If you're watching remotely and you're working to oppose these mandates, make sure you drop a link to your website or your social media in the live stream comments because we all need to work together to fight this stuff. And happy birthday Barbara Olfstad. I'm done. Thank you Angela. We now go to the Q and A part of the evening. We're gonna accept questions from the live streamers and we have a microphone corner there. It's pretty dark, I can't quite see it but it is over in the corner. And so if you wanna line up to ask your questions please do so. First I wanna make a statement as moderator in terms of the wording of the resolution. Certainly Ilya was quite correct to say that it talks about vaccine mandates generally and it says say that some are justified and therefore it's open to interpreting it to mean 200 years ago they were justified and that is true as far as it goes. I will leave it open to you possibly to say that when a vaccine mandate resolution is debated especially in New York City at a time when vaccine mandates with respect to COVID are being imposed that the part of Ilya's defense which had to do with defending COVID mandates may be relevant to the resolution according to your interpretation. I will make that judgment since we are living very much in an age and in a city of vaccine mandates. But that aside having made that judgment I wanna use moderator's prerogative to ask a question first of you Ilya. We do have it's been estimated possibly as many as 100 million people who've already had COVID and who have according to the judgment of many professionals developed natural immunity. And so there are those who say to me I have natural immunity and the question is to whether a vaccine on top of having natural immunity necessarily helps the hurts is up in the air. To those people who have natural immunity let's put a finer point on it might they at least be asked well if you show up at a venue like this or at a job to do job with other people might they at least just be asked pass the COVID test do you think that then to put a finer point on it that vaccine mandate should necessarily be imposed on people who could show that they had COVID and therefore have natural immunity. So the question of natural immunity is one that as I understand it divide scientific experts among themselves if it is the case that natural immunity limits the spread of the virus and roughly the same way as vaccination does then I fully grant that for a person who has that kind of natural immunity a vaccination mandate would be unnecessary or unjustified. I would say that when it comes to private organizations like this one that would still be a judgment that they can make for themselves. They can say in our venue we want everybody to be vaccinated even if they also have natural immunity because there is also data from Israel and elsewhere which says that natural immunity plus vaccination prevents the spread more than one alone. So at the very least private organizations should have judged out for themselves but when it comes to government bodies imposing on the general population that I think if natural immunity is equivalent to vaccine-induced immunity then if vaccine-induced immunity is sufficient then likewise natural immunity should be sufficient but I'm reluctant to judge the facts on that issue too much because this is another question sort of a technical question of epidemiology. I'm not an epidemiologist or a doctor or a scientific researcher in this area on those kinds of technical questions. It makes sense to listen to the experts in the field even though the experts we should not defer them on funding. Oh, excuse me, got a minute. You should be using the microphone. I'm sorry. Sorry. I didn't realize I was supposed to be holding the microphone in my hand. I guess I'm not an expert on microphones. Yeah, I should have been. It's my- Do you need me to say everything again? Would you review your answer? You know how to summarize it now that you've gone over it. Okay, okay. I apologize to people in person who have already heard everything. It's my bad, it's my bad. But what I was saying is that the issue of natural immunity and the extent of protection it provides, this is something that experts disagree on. There are some who believe that the degree of protection is the same as that for vaccination. If so, then obviously there's no need for vaccination mandates for those who have that level of natural immunity. There are others who argue particularly with the Omicron variant that natural immunity is much weaker than vaccine protection. And there's also some evidence that the combination of both natural immunity and vaccine protection gives you more than either one alone does. The final point I would make on this is that when it comes to private organizations and private individuals, they should be able to decide for themselves whether entry into our business or our organization or whatnot should require vaccination. And it was interesting to me to hear Angela say, well, even with the private sector, she seems to think that even they should not be allowed to decide for themselves whether they want vaccination requirements in their venues or not. I would have thought the sort of basic principles of freedom of association would let different organizations decide for themselves on that. And that we cannot just simply assume that people who might differ with us on that question that they've just been scared by the government, especially not on an issue where private sector scientists, they don't differ with government employed ones very much on this question of the effectiveness of vaccines and the deadliness of the disease. Comment, Angela, on that response. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I didn't say that you shouldn't be allowed to decide who comes into your building. I think it's a bad, stupid idea. And I won't shill for it or say I won't carry water for it. Just like I won't say, I won't go out in public and say, oh, it's okay to discriminate against black people or Latino people, you know, that's your right as a business. Okay, you can technically do that, but I think it's a bad idea. And I think that vaccine mandates at private businesses are also a bad idea. Question for you, Angela. Similar to the one I put to Ilya, but sort of coning in on your argument, would you accept a compromise whereby if somebody is going to, where the government requires that, if you're gonna go somewhere, that you either have proof of vaccine or proof that you don't have COVID? No, but that's better, but no, no. And why would you oppose that? Well, I've hugged patient zero at FreedomFest and I've been all over the place and been exposed to plenty of people who have COVID and here I am without it. I haven't contracted it yet. So why should I be subjected to a mandate or medical experimentation when I'm perfectly healthy? Comment, Ilya, on that response. I don't have a lot to say on that, except to say that vaccines by overwhelming evidence from around the world are shown to be more effective at both preventing disease and also preventing hospitalization and death than all of these other measures, like testing, masking and so forth, which are both less effective and more intrusive. So I say if we opt for any restriction at all, opt for the less intrusive one, not the one that's less effective and actually more of an infringement on liberty. I see some people lined up for questions. So please raise your question, ask a question, no need to identify yourself and address the person that you'd like to answer the question if there's a person of that kind. I have a question to Professor Soman. Two parts, is it fair to compare vaccines for polio or flu that have been around for 50 years, have an excellent track record with the new novel vaccines mRNA technology that has really no long-term side effect data? That's number one. And number two is the data from Sweden, Africa, different places, shows very low mortality rates without vaccinations. How do you count for that? Those are two questions, check over here. On the second question, I don't know about the data from Africa, the data from Sweden shows mortality rates comparable to that elsewhere in Europe. So you can say that they're not having a lockdown, didn't lead them to have higher mortality rates than European countries that didn't have a lockdown. Nonetheless, they've had tens of thousands of people die of the COVID and almost every one of them was unvaccinated. On the issue of comparing the current vaccines to ones from the past, I would say two things. One is, we are now much better scientists are not me personally, of course, the scientists are much better at testing vaccines than they were 50 or 100 years ago with polio or the smallpox vaccine. And the like, second, we now actually have evidence from billions of people who've taken these vaccines and the rates of side effects and other issues are actually not long-term dose vaccines in the past. As for the long-term point, my understanding for again, this scientists view is not mine is that the effects of vaccines, if they have negative side effects at all, it is almost always within the first few months, not many years afterwards. And I would add that by your reasoning that people should not have taken the smallpox vaccine or the polio vaccine or the measles vaccine and the like, until they had waited decades and that would of course, allow those diseases to kill many more people over a longer period of time. So it is not my claim to vaccines either in the past or today are completely without risk. It is rather that at least in some cases, the risk is vastly lower than the risk of letting deadly contagious diseases spread. Thank you very much. Smallpox has much higher mortality rate than COVID. On the other hand, COVID is more contagious. Excuse me. Angela, do you have a comment on your response? Oh, yes. If you play Russian roulette, there's a five out of six chance you won't shoot yourself in the head. Thankfully, it's not mandated though. Next question, Krut, with Kasky, take it away. As we have to, as you mentioned before, the pro side here will be more grilled in this audience. And so I will also ask you a question. You said the effect or the benefit of vaccines is undisputed. We had, we are just going towards the end of a wave that has 250,000 deaths in the United States. When we go back to early 2020, we had 150,000 deaths. And then nobody was vaccinated. Now at least 80% of the people who are at risk of dying are vaccinated. If the vaccine would actually have an effect, wouldn't one expect fewer people to die with the vaccine than without the vaccine? Yeah, and you would expect that and that is exactly what has happened. Among the unvaccinated, the death rates are 10 to 20 times higher than among the vaccinated. And of the 250,000 people that you mentioned, over 90% of them were unvaccinated. You look around the world, you see similar results. The death rate among the vaccinated is far, far lower. And it's even more so when you control four factors like age, because the elderly are more at risk from COVID, but they're also more likely to be vaccinated. And when you control for that, you're gonna even start her result. So yes, you would expect that and that is exactly what we have seen. But we have had a higher death rate among the unvaccinated from the Delta wave than the original one. As I understand it, that's because Delta is vastly more contagious and therefore spreads to more people faster. I think it's an ancestry tour, but I'm not commenting on it. Okay, comment on Ilya's response. Would you want to wave comment? I just fundamentally disagree with everything that Ilya is saying about vaccination. I've worked in the medical industry, I've spent 40 hours preparing for this debate. My entire life has been consumed by this stupid thing for the past two years. They're not, the vaccines are not keeping you safer. That's it. Next question. My question is for Angela. I think you made it pretty clear in your opening statement. A little louder, please. Oh, it's because of the mic. Sure, my question is for Angela. I think you made it pretty clear in your opening statement what you think about utilitarianism in general. But my question to you is, do you think that any rights violation, no matter how small is ever justified if the payoff is large enough? I think that any rights violation, if you are going to try to justify it, needs to be made on an individual case-by-case basis. And that justifying, taking away someone's rights with a sweeping mandate is terrible and should never be allowed. Do you have a comment? So two things. One is there can be situations where we trade off not just rights against utility, but rights against other rights. And a wide range of libertarian thinkers permit that there is a right to the life and a right to protection against attack and the like. But in order to effectuate that, that sometimes requires restrictions on rights as well. I mentioned the examples of taxation for the police, for the military and the like, and also which are much more severe infringements on liberty than vaccination is. It's at some level, it has to be true that any such things have to be done on a case-by-case basis. But we can't judge the cases unless we have a general rule. You have to have some kind of principle by which you approach the cases. And I would maintain in common would a wide range of other libertarian thinkers that when you can have a very large savings of human life at a very small cost in liberty, that's a general rule that should be applied to particular cases. Which cases fall within that? That's a matter of factual dispute about the effectiveness of vaccines, how dangerous the disease is and so forth. And on those issues, unlike the moral issues, on those issues, I think we do have to look to the people who are expert in that particular field, which would do respect, I do not think includes either Angela or myself. Next question. Professor Solomon. Next to the mic, go ahead, please, go ahead. Going off of just what you just said, you talked about how the facts of the matter will vary on what the cost benefit is within a cohort. For the people to create a vaccine mandate, you would need some kind of regulating body to do that. Do you think that they should be able to do that? Decide for those people which ones have the cost benefit that is preferable for them, and how do you think that would apply to other situations that are vaccines? So it's a good question. I would say a couple of things on this. One is, yes, the general principle applies to other situations, but the fact of the matter is that there are actually very few other situations where a mandate that imposes a small infringement on liberty has a huge payoff in why it's safe, but in those few other situations, yes, most libertarians, not all, but most other than anarchists, do you accept some functions of government that impose restrictions on liberty and sometimes hurt innocent people but have a larger payoff? I mentioned the examples of having some kind of law enforcement and having national defense and so forth. I meant specifically like a board that determines whether you are a person who qualifies for a mandate or not. Yeah, so I was getting to that in any kind of function of government that operates at all. Obviously you have to have a system for determining who will bear the burden, how big will it be, how big will the expenditures be, and those systems are routinely flawed. I meant with the police and military also. We have lots of wasteful spending. We have abuses of power and so forth. When you compare, however, vaccine mandates to even very basic functions of government that libertarians typically accept, the history of vaccine mandates is actually shows many fewer examples of abuses than those other areas do. I'm not gonna design sort of a complete institutional framework for this in the next 30 seconds that I have. I would merely say that such frameworks, both with vaccines and with other issues, there should be a presumption against mandates that's only overcomeable upon strong evidence, and there should be multiple checks and balances that address the issues. It shouldn't be just up to one small group of experts or one black and official. Make sure the mic is close to you. I was saying that there should be a system of checks and balances, so it shouldn't be up to just one person or one small group of experts and the like. And I would say the same thing with any other coercive policies by government with the private sector, I would have fewer restrictions, and I think the same thing is also true in the public sector when it's a matter of imposing a vaccine mandate on government employees, particularly those who themselves wield coercive authority over the public and who have to have unwilling contact with members in a population who can't refuse like police, military, firefighters, and so on. May I just again jump into the moderate's prerogative and hone in on the question I put to Angela? Let's say if somebody shows proof of acts, as you said, that doesn't decisively prove that that person doesn't have COVID because people have died with it. But if somebody has proof, that 24-hour proof, let's make it an easy case, that you don't have COVID, isn't that just as good? If that person willing to provide that proof? Isn't that just as good? There was actual proof that it was as good as being vaccine. Sure, the problem is that just as vaccination does, is it greatly reduces the danger that you pose or is it? It doesn't eliminate it, but the same thing is true with passing a COVID test. A COVID test can be wrong. Well, we're possessing them, aren't they? Equivalent, that's the point. So, no, I don't think they're equivalent because the effect of a vaccination lasts for months at least, whereas the effect of a test, you could pass the test today, but still have COVID tomorrow. Well, we're talking about 24 hours. The question was a 24-hour proof. And obviously, the vax, as you said, means that you could still have COVID. Because people die of COVID. I'm sorry? And so could the test. Well, of course, that's why they may be equivalent, correct? In theory, yes. In practice, the coercive apparatus needed to force people to test every 24 hours is first, I think, probably impossible, at least in the U.S. And second, obviously, vastly more intrusive than getting a shot, even if you get the shot every few months or every year. I would add, by the way, that contrary to what Andrew has said, there are actually a number, lots of vaccines out there where you get periodic boosters. MMR is a well-known example, measles, mumps, and rubella. Next question. The American government has spent $40 billion to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In my mind, and I have background in physics, this is the most absurd thing any government has ever done. You feel like carbon dioxide or vaccination? I'm talking about, I wanna know what their opinions are on global warming. I'm afraid. That's a very good question, but for another debate. So next question, please. No. Good evening, thank you both for coming. Numbers aside, individual liberties aside, can you both speak to the general degradation in science that's been kind of happening for a long time now? I mean, it's become almost religious that maybe we don't seem to reason anymore. I don't know what's going on. It's kind of sad. Well, general, the general degradation of science, do you wanna answer that first, Angela, and then Julia? Academia has been incredibly politicized. I believe that it is largely controlled by people who lean left politically, and that influences medicine, and we have to be PC in medicine now, and it is controlled by a particular political party, and that is unfortunate. I do think that it is degraded, and I believe that information about it is also suppressed. Especially if you watch a lot of CNN or MSNBC, you're not gonna think the same thing that I think about medicine, and it's unfortunate that it takes so much arguing and researching just to get to the truth about health and wellness. Comment, Julia? Yeah, so is there a PC bias in academia? Yes, most academics are left-wing. So when you have an issue that splits experts along right versus left lines, then yes, you might be suspicious that if there's more experts on one side than the other, then that's just because there's more left-wing people in academia than right-wing people. The issue of the effectiveness of vaccines, however, is not one actually that splits scientists along or right versus left lines. Libertarian or conservative scientists don't have noticeably different opinions on that question from more left-wing ones. And more generally, in the hard sciences, I think there is less political bias than in the humanities or the social sciences and the like. That's not to say that you could never have sort of seemingly hard science conclusions that get established because of some sort of political bias, but if so, I would want to see the proof of that, particularly in an area like this one where there's actually a pretty broad cross-ideological agreement among the people who are actually experts in this particular field. Oh, yeah, do you want to make a... It's not even the politics, it's the pursuit of truth. The scientific method seems irrelevant nowadays. It's blindly in the blind. So I'm not a scientist, but as far as I can tell, among people who do do scientific research, I think they use the scientific method at least as well today as in the past. If anything, modern experimental techniques and technologies and the like are actually better than those of decades ago, that's certainly true in the social sciences, which I'm more familiar with. Modern research, for instance, in economics has better experimental methods than was the case 40 or 50 years ago. My guess is that that's true in the hard sciences as well, but I have to admit, I don't know as much about that as I do about the social sciences. Next question, next question. I'll just begin by saying social division in the country and censorship has made it so difficult for people to talk to each other. So thank you, all three of you, for putting this on. It's a great type of free exchange of ideas. You're very welcome, go ahead. I got a couple for Professor Stoneman. You made it very clear that you have a nuanced position. You're only defending some mandates, not all mandates, including a mandate given by the private sector. So just to clarify, what is your position as President Biden's executive order requiring private companies to issue vaccine mandates? Yeah, so I've actually written on this. It has a number of legal problems which have written about it. Perhaps in a different form, I could talk about them, but one of the promises I think that the agency OSHA has exceeded its mandate. I also think that the order fails to make a lot of distinctions about the could reason we made about sort of risks in different kinds of workplace settings. And further, I think, deputizing private employers to enforce this is itself a burden that is problematic when there are other better pathways that could be adopted that would not create such a burden. And I mentioned several of them already, conditioning welfare or tax benefits, enforcing mandates only in places where you already have to show an ID to get in somewhere and the like. So I think that particular order for private employees, I think is legally dubious. And in fact, one court has already ruled against it. And policy-wise, it's not a great idea. On the other hand, I do support his vaccination mandates for most federal employees and especially for the armed forces. And I think there is a case to be made, although here there are some complexities, but there's a pretty good case to be made for the mandate that he has imposed on medical institutions that receive federal grants. I have a really good question, Julia. How about the mandates imposed just the other day by the mayor of DeBlasio of New York City on private sector, private good. Do you have the same view, same dubious view? Pretty much. I don't know whether there are legal problems that are similar and that I just don't know much about the laws of New York state and how much legal authority DeBlasio has. But as a mechanism of enforcement, I think it's problematic and for some of the same reasons as the Biden national mandate is. Comment from you. Yeah, I don't believe that you should have to choose between being homeless and destitute or taking a shot that you may not need or that might hurt you. I think that's a bad move. Yeah. Next question. I just have one more. Oh, for Mrs. Oman. If you are in favor of COVID mandates during this time of a pandemic, what is the precise standard that is a measurable numerical metric to be reached for our society to discontinue all the COVID mandates? Is it a certain percentage of the population vaccinated, a certain percentage with COVID antibodies or an average COVID death rate or comparable to regular flu, what? Yeah. So I don't know that I'm capable of saying this should be the exact precise line. My point is that there are gonna be some cases which fall easily on one side of the line or the other and the current situation sadly with a highly contagious pandemic, with thousands of people still dying and the threat of new variants being developed if a higher vaccination rate isn't reached. I think easily falls along on the side of the line where at least some mandates are justified. I think the point at which it could be stopped will depend in part on various scientific facts such as what will be the transmissibility of the dominant variant and some others as well. But I would add also that it's true, you could get this wrong and have it last too long just as you could have it last long enough. One reason why I worry less about this than with other coercive measures is because this is a very modest degree of coercion for the reasons that I mentioned earlier. That said, there should always be a presumption in favor of liberty and therefore if we get to a point where things are hazy and it's unclear, then I would sort of, so to speak, break the tie against having more mandates rather in favor of that. Coming to Angela, do you wanna make a comment? Does it, I hope we have an end in sight at some point. Angela, comment, no, okay. Okay, this will have to be the final question, so get laid on us. Awesome, thank you both for being here. My question is for Angela. Stepping away from the current COVID situation we find ourselves in, if theoretically there were a very different disease with say a much higher mortality rate and no or very few antiviral treatments available, but there were a vaccine that greatly reduced lethality, do you think a mandate could ever be justified in a scenario like that? I don't and I don't think that it would be necessary. I think that if we saw something that was really deadly, visceral, like a science fiction horror movie, we would all be staying at home, we would not be going to the grocery store and ordering from Grubhub and still trying to go about our lives in parties, we would all be staying home and terrified. And I don't ever believe that it's okay to mandate experimental treatments and there are no mid or long term studies on the COVID shot yet. And so I would say that the same thing should apply for something that's more deadly, we should not subject people to medical experimentation against their will. Thank you for the question. Yeah, and now we have to wrap it up and go to summary. I want to make it clear that neither, that all three, none of these people on the stage has said that they are not vaccinated. There's no such statement has been made by anybody on the stage if there was an implication to that effect. Then that was unfortunate, it was unintended. Nobody on the stage has said that they are not vaccinated. Not me, not Angela, not Ilya. So please make that clear to the audience and to those who are listening. All right, we have a final summation and that will come from Ilya. Five minutes to summarize. I'll take, I'll sit down and you can take the podium. I'm not sure that there's a lot to be added to what's already been said. So I'll just make a couple of very basic points. One is that this is a broader debate about the nature of vaccine mandates, generally not just very specific policies that exist today. And I would add that it is not the case that vaccine mandates for other diseases only existed 200 years ago or 100 years ago. We still have them for measles for other things as well. And one reason why we still keep measles at bay is because we have a high vaccination rate for it. And the same is true for a number of other dead wheat contagious diseases. So the history of vaccination for at least solidies, dead wheat contagious disease is one of great success in reducing death rates, so much that we barely even think about most of these other diseases anymore in part because of the enormous success of vaccination. Secondly, I can understand a point of view which perhaps Angela has or some others have, if she doesn't, that you could never have coercion for anything anywhere. If that's true, then we wouldn't have government at all and then we would have a much larger debate about government versus anarchy which certainly rages in the libertarian circles from time to time. But if you agree with sort of even the standard list of minimal functions of government that those libertarians who are not anarchists accept like national defense, police protection and some others as well, all of those actually pose much greater risk to liberty and require greater sacrifices through taxation and other restrictions than do vaccination mandates of the kind that I have been talking about. So I think if you reject them even in these scenarios where there is a big trade-off in terms of saving large numbers of lives at very little cost, then you have to bite a large number of other bullets which if you're an anarchist you may well be willing to bite, but otherwise I think that you should not. The next point that I would make is about evidence on the COVID vaccines and their effectiveness and the like. As I've said before, this is not my area of expertise. It seemed to me that it is not actually Angela's area of expertise either. She may have worked in a medical industry but she's not an epidemiologist. She's not a specialist in this area. So on these kinds of technical questions I think the best we can do is follow the general consensus or the dominant view of the people who are experts in this area, especially when they tend to agree with each other across ideological lines. As I mentioned earlier, it might be a different situation if you saw well left-wing experts believe the vaccines are effective whereas right-wing ones think they're not. Then we might say we're in the presence of sort of ideological bias, motivating people. The subject of ideological bias is one where actually I'm someone of an expert I have a book called Democracy and Political Ignorance where I go into this at some length. This is not one of those areas where the experts are divided along ideological lines. It's one where they're pretty firmly upon one side. And finally, I would say this, that when we're looking at policy in the real world and we face trade-offs, we do not currently have a libertarian government. We're not like who to have one anytime soon. If you have a deadly contagious disease spreading with little or no check, that government is gonna take various kinds of harsh measures. Vaccine mandates are much less restrictive and much more effective than some of these other things which can be done. And as I mentioned earlier, with the Delta wave, which happened during a period of vaccination precisely because we had the vaccines available, we saw much less in the way of other much worse coercive measures than we did in 2020. There was much less in the way of lockdowns, much less in the way of school closures, much less in the way of travel restrictions and so on and so forth. And with a higher vaccination rate, we could benefit from that beneficial trade-off still more. We still do have some measures in place which are unjust and which I oppose like mask mandates, like some reverse the travel ban on people from Africa and some other things as well. But we can get rid of that in part by promoting greater vaccination. And the final, very final point is simply that this is a limited resolution and my purpose is to defend some vaccine mandates, not all or even perhaps most. The basic idea is that we should accept them in the limited cases where they save large numbers of lives at very little costs, whether it be costs in utilitarian terms or costs to liberty. I think that's something that libertarians can and do accept in other contexts and we should accept it here as well. Thank you so much and thank you for coming and for taking part in this exciting debate. Thank you. Five minutes of rebuttal of a summary for you, Angela. I oppose these mandates from a libertarian and a utilitarian perspective. I will remind you that actually this is something that you should be encouraged by. The reason that smallpox is not so prevalent today is not just because of a vaccination. It's because it continued to mutate until it turned into the very oldest strain and it became less deadly and less harmful. And so maybe that's what Omicron Perciai 8 is about to do for everyone. So take heart. I am so sorry about what's happened to the city of New York. It is really heartbreaking to see and it's one of the reasons that I oppose mandates. We'll never bring Sherry back, the dead 13-year-old girl. Her mother will never hold her again. She'll never pet her dog, go to prom or college, get married, make memories with her own children. And that goes for everyone who died from these shots and these mandates. Andrew Nadeau of Long Island is, he's a riverhead school board candidate and experienced naval corpsman who's treated thousands of COVID patients and has personally recovered from COVID. He's being forced out of the Navy right now because he's refusing the COVID shot. In his refusal letter to his commanding officer, he cited the Nuremberg Code and said, human experimentation is only permissible if it satisfies basic principles of moral, ethical and legal concepts. The Nuremberg Code states, the voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent. In his letter, he went on to quote C.S. Lewis. C.S. Lewis states of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. Those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. If we stay on this path, where you go, what you eat, what you put in your body, your biometric markers, what you speak, who you speak to will all be monitored for your own good, right? According to government edicts, your liberty will cease and you will be safe according to government standards. But eventually that feeling of safety will slip away as you realize you've been caged because the inside of a government cage is a very unsafe place. Good times make weak men. Weak men make bad times and bad times make strong men. We are entering bad times and we desperately need strong men. As a country, we've culturally rejected being the hero of our own story. Instead, we've gone back inside Plato's Cave. Many Americans have just rejected courage and rejected truth. We've become unwilling to fight to preserve our liberty. Politicians openly mock us for wanting freedom. People go on MSNBC and say things that embarrass a lot of libertarians. It's a republic if you can keep it. We put up with taxation, we complained about the Patriot Act, we complained about TSA, we protested lockdowns, but we didn't truly fight back. So the time to fight back is now. Now, lots of people value security over freedom, but there's no security in allowing a despotic police state to dictate how you live your life. If we keep going down this path, we will end up in a fusion of communism and fascism. It's better to be secure in your convictions than place your faith in totalitarian edicts or policy wonks. Every single one of you can make a difference. Every single person in this room can do it. Work up the courage to say no, be brave. It's easier to fight for this on the streets than it is from inside a prison cell or a gulag. For anyone who says they're not strong enough to stand up to this stuff, I say yes you are. You are strong enough and you're not giving yourself enough credit. It grieves me to see LA and New York City destroyed by these mandates. I'm a city person. I love city living. I love crowds, nightlife, hustle, in your face humanity of this beautiful city. I love it. Does anybody know Zinkichi restaurant with the little train cars? Shut down. Vice of ice, gone forever. People have abandoned this city because of government edicts. They've ruined it. Even Michael Malis has gone. A New York City treasure. What the government has done here is wrong and what they've done to you all is wrong. How do societies lose their freedom? One little sin at a time. You go to work, someone's lording their cubicle authority over you. Someone's tyrannical and you don't have the wherewithal to stand up to them. You see someone else being bullied or censored, medical information censored and you don't have the backbone to stand up for them. Government thugs rob you of your income, lock you in your home, force you to get vaccinated if you wanna keep your job. You roll over. It's like, okay, you're a slave. And if you continue to be a slave, you will continue to generate tyrants. But the good news is that there are more of us than there are of them. And if we work together, we can overturn these mandates. Gene has taken a lot of heat for continuing to hold debates in a venue that enforces mandates. Instead of giving him grief on social media, we need to help him. We need to overturn these mandates. Focus your energy on fighting this thing and building each other up, not tearing each other down. We are having an organizing call on Thursday the 16th, specifically to over to your New York City's mandates. I am going to help you guys through initiative. Get involved, let's unite and do this. These mandates do not make us freer or safer. Let's reclaim our humanity and oppose medical mandates. Thank you. Well, Jane, please open the voting. And so now we have to get the results of the voting. And thank you. Drum roll please. I forgot to bring the Tutsi roll. So I'm sorry about that, but I'll be awarding it later to whoever. Okay, while vaccine mandates are an infringement on freedom, some are justified due to their big payoff in life saved. That was defended by Ilya. Ilya, you began with 15.85% of the vote and you ended with 28%. That means you've picked up 12.2 points. Congratulations, Ilya, on picking up 12.2 points. That's the number to beat. Now, Angela began with 52.44% and ended with 67%. So she nosed you out by 2.4 percentage points. Not a huge win, Angela, but you do get the Tutsi roll. Congratulations, Angela. And congratulations to you both. Thank you.