The U.S. Department of Defense will no longer mandate flu vaccination for military service members or civilian personnel, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Tuesday, in a tweeted video that nothing shy of a credible imminent threat to murder my entire family could make me watch. Vaccination, according to a portion of the video quoted on the department's website, will be issued only to those who "believe that the flu vaccine is in your best interest." America's drunkest sweaty tryhard touts this move, in his tweet, as "restoring freedom to our Joint Force."
Ah yes, freedom and your individual best interest, famously what military service is all about. Will Hegseth's military issue heavy packs only to those warfighters who believe carrying 65 pounds on their back is in their best interest? Will it only give high-risk orders to those soldiers who regard death at age 23 as compatible with their personal ambitions? What do you suppose will happen to the next civilian Department of Defense employee who declares loyalty-check polygraph tests inconsistent with their personal beliefs?
Apropos of nothing, influenza killed more than 45,000 American soldiers during the "Spanish flu" pandemic of 1918–20, including nearly 16,000 who were deployed to France and fighting World War I. Had the flu vaccine been available then, any American serviceperson who refused it would have had their ass booted through the roof of their mouth. Hegseth has talked a lot about maximizing the lethality of America's service members; credit him, I suppose, for taking a true yes-and approach to the challenge.
This policy change is a lot of things. Dumb, for one! Certain to kill some number of American soldiers and their family members, for another. Completely needless, embarrassing, embarrassingly characteristic of these embarrassing times: Yes, yes, and yes. What I am thinking about right now, though, is that it is also a handy illustration of the right's infantile, ruinous concept of freedom.
You or I might think that steady, dependable protection from a deadly contagious virus is in fact very freeing—that a society (or a military!) in which rigorously maintained herd immunity cuts off the vectors through which communicable diseases otherwise travel to find their victims is a much freer one than one in which, for eight months of the year, you incur a substantial risk of contracting and/or spreading influenza whenever you venture into a room with other people in it. You might think that a society, uh, freed from the omnipresent invisible threat of influenza (and measles and smallpox) by the simple requirement that each medically eligible person get a quick and painless injection is, all in all, much freer than one in which nobody has to get a shot they don't want, but many many people thus by necessity do have no choice but to be killed by a disease they do not want and against which they have taken every available precaution.
That is because you and I are thinking of freedom as a common good, something made possible by certain shared commitments. We are not thinking about a simple lack of formal lawful boundaries on individual behavior. We are thinking of a free society—a place where people build and uphold mechanisms for nourishing, supporting, and protecting each other, and thus where an individual does not have to spend their life darting from shadow to shadow like a reef fish, with destitution and death tailing them at all times—rather than just an unconstrained guy with a machine gun, expectorating a richly infectious broth of wriggling pathogens in a nightmare world the mere description of which would make Hieronymus Bosch crap his eyeballs out.
Unfortunately for all of us, the latter is the American conservative's puny dream of freedom, right down to the sputum and all its teeming life: a world in which I am free to do as I please, and you are free to be killed by it, and I am liberated from having to notice or care. Better to reign in hell, and all that.
