Mandates Over Liberty: Unjust Costs of COVID-19 Control

In 2020, the arrival of COVID-19 unleashed numerous restrictions across the United States: cities locked down, businesses faltered, and vaccines became compulsory for many. These mandates, enacted by government and business entities, promised protection but instead ignited a fierce debate over their legitimacy and consequences. At their core, these policies curtailed personal autonomy and imposed a vaccine with well-documented risks, challenging the principles of a free republic. Somin (2021) argued that the Biden administration’s vaccine mandates exceeded executive authority by claiming powers Congress never clearly delegated, a critique rooted in the Supreme Court’s rejection of the OSHA employer mandate (pp. 69-71), an overstep that betrayed the democratic balance of power. This essay asserts that government and business entities in the United States should have been prohibited from imposing any COVID-19-related mandates, including lockdowns and vaccine requirements, because these measures violated individual autonomy in a free republic and enforced a dangerous vaccine with significant health risks, as supported by public health data and ethical scholarship. Through an examination of autonomy erosion, vaccine dangers, and mandate failures, the overreach of these policies reveals a clear overreach, underscoring the need to prioritize liberty over control.

COVID-19 mandates eroded the self-governance essential to a constitutional republic. Lockdown and vaccine requirements curtailed self-determination, replacing individual liberty with state control in ways that clashed with foundational and fundamental U.S. values. Somin (2021) argued that these actions unjustly extended executive power beyond democratic oversight (pp. 69-71). Bailey et al. (2024) have reinforced this, positing that “state actions—such as a regulation or statute, or a government employee’s activity”—exceeding constitutional bounds, as many mandates did, render them void, undermining the legal framework meant to protect liberty (p. 236). The government overreach seen during COVID-19, undermining the free will of the people, is the reason that the United States formed as a country—separating itself from the tyrannical England who overstepped their government control over the people. Supporting this, Mingazov and Sinyavskiy (2020) have observed that governments worldwide imposed emergency rules restricting civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights, signaling a pervasive rollback of freedoms during the pandemic (p. 151).

Ethical analyzes further expose a profound assault on informed consent and personal freedom. Olick et al. (2021) argued that mandating vaccination overrode the right of health care personnel to make voluntary health decisions, a cornerstone of medical ethics (pp. 2960-2961). The importance of personal freedom to make decisions regarding one’s own health is paramount; to deny personal health decisions infringes the most basic ethical right. Frequently accompanied by this infringement, Keown and Paton (2023) have criticized the United Kingdom lockdowns for uniformly restricting all citizens irrespective of risk, imposing coercive measures, ignoring viable alternatives (pp. 132-133). Further, Steuer (2024) demonstrated that Slovakia’s excessive quarantines and inadequate planning weakened agency under inconsistent emergency governance (pp. 95-96). This ethical overreach compounded the legal violations, exposing a rampant, international systemic disregard for autonomy.

Proponents of these COVID-19 mandates, however, maintain that emergencies warranted such restrictions. Prainsack (2022) acknowledged that robust public infrastructures, like inclusive health care, mitigated pandemic burdens, implying that collective support systems could justify mandatory policies (p. 233). Stolberg et al. (2022), in a New York Times COVID-19 briefing, reported that the Justice Department defended the mask mandate as a valid CDC exercise, asserting legal grounding for emergency measures. Yet these claims are refutable, as shown by Bailey et al. (2024), who have demonstrated that persuasion through voluntary compliance, rather than mandates, could have balanced public health with constitutional protections, avoiding the ethical and legal pitfalls of coercion (p. 249). Permitting voluntary choice without forced government mandates upholds the values of a free republic and ethical standards. Government’s preference for coercion over collaboration with the people highlights a troubling imbalance, undermining the principles of a free society.

The extensive health risks posed by COVID-19 vaccines rendered their mandates use indefensible. Evidence demonstrates severe—and numerous less critical—side effects that disproportionately burdened low-risk populations. Roh et al. (2024) have reported a significantly higher incidence of Alzheimer’s disease and MCI (mild cognitive impairment) among mRNA-vaccinated individuals within three months post-vaccination, suggesting a potential neurodegenerative risk (p. 713). Anilanmert et al. (2023) have identified myocarditis, thrombosis, and rare Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease cases as serious complications following mRNA and AstraZeneca vaccines, with notable risks in younger age groups (pp. 22-23). Yang et al. (2024) have found vaccinated children infected with COVID-19 faced an 8.3% incidence of new-onset asthma, nearly triple the rate of unvaccinated peers, but much greater than that was the finding that “For Cohort 2, COVID-19 infected vaccinated children exhibited an 8.3% incidence of new-onset … death” (p. 131). Fraiman et al. (2022) have reported elevated rates of serious adverse events of special interest in the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccine clinical trials, with a combined excess risk of 12.5 events per 10,000 vaccinated participants (p. 5800) while Dyer (2021) has reported that United States and European regulators warned of rare but serious cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome potentially linked to the Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines, with the FDA noting about 100 suspected cases after 12.5 million J&J doses as of July 2021 (p. 1). These findings reveal a pattern of harm that belies the narrative of universal safety.

Moreover, longitudinal studies suggest mRNA vaccines introduced additional dangers that challenged initial safety claims. This is supported by Lee and Broudy (2024) identified a major uncover on vaccine risks, being millions of stereomicroscopically visible artificial self-assembling entities, ranging from 1 to 100 ?m, in incubated Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccine samples, raising concerns about nanotechnology with unknown biological implications (p. 1180). Fung et al. (2024) have demonstrated that observational studies of vaccine effectiveness in early 2021 were skewed by biases such as case-counting windows, age differences, and declining infection rates, potentially inflating estimates by 50%–70% even for a hypothetically ineffective vaccine (pp. 32–34). Gortler (2022), a writer for The Federalist, has argued that the Food and Drug Administration and manufacturers failed to investigate thousands of VAERS reports of cardiovascular events like myocarditis and pericarditis following Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, despite early signals in Food and Drug Administration reviews and higher risks confirmed by CDC data (pp. 2–3). Such evidence underscores the precarious foundation of vaccine mandates to people’s health and wellness.

Advocates for the COVID-19 vaccine argue that benefits overshadowed these risks. Many claim that the mRNA vaccines were highly effective and held a low risk, such as Polack et al. (2020), who have reported that the BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine achieved 95% efficacy against symptomatic COVID-19 in a phase 2/3 trial, with only four related serious adverse events (e.g., shoulder injury, lymphadenopathy) among 21,720 recipients over two months, suggesting a favorable short-term safety profile (pp. 2607, 2609). Further, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2025) also claimed adverse events were minimal compared to COVID-19’s impact. Yet, there is significant evidence to suggest that these claims are not as simple—or accurate—as these reports say. As the article by Anilanmert et al. (2023) shows, there are indeed persistent side effects, including “myocarditis, pericarditis, thrombosis, thromboembolism, thrombosis, thrombocytopenia, anaphylaxis … Lymphadenopathy, bleeding, arthritis, heartburn, decrease in memory brain fogging/reduced mental clarity/attention, vertigo-like symptoms, paralysis, incoordination, palpitations, heat/cold intolerance” (p. 22). Furthermore, Anilanmert et al. (2023) argued that insufficient long-term data of these risks, the justification for the mandates, is undermined (pp. 22-23). This dismissal of evidence transformed mandates into a reckless imposition rather than a reasoned safeguard.

Both lockdowns and vaccine mandates lacked the efficacy to justify their widespread adoption. Lockdowns failed to lower mortality rates consistently while inflicting severe economic and social damage. Despite the measures taken against COVID-19 by governments, the efficacy to prevent the spread of the virus was highly ineffective. As Romney and Zio (2021) have demonstrated, through global infection data analysis, that death rates from COVID-19 remained strikingly consistent—around 50 to 60 per 100,000—across countries like the USA, Brazil, Italy, and Sweden, despite vastly different countermeasure strategies, suggesting that lockdowns did not significantly alter mortality outcomes (p. 123). Lee and Broudy (2024) further highlighted this same problem in COVID-19 prevention, showing South Korea’s 88% vaccination rate and subsequent 89% infection rate in April 2022, suggesting that mRNA vaccines failed to prevent transmission and may have increased susceptibility to infection (p. 1181). The COVID-19 lockdowns were not only highly ineffective, but also extremely costly. As broken down by Keown and Paton (2023), the UK lockdowns cost £84 billion in business support and £70 billion in furlough payments, thus dwarfing plausible benefits even if they averted up to 20,000 deaths (pp. 138-139).

Natural immunity and individual risk assessment, meanwhile, presented viable alternatives that were unjustly overlooked. Spigarelli (2021) has criticized the exclusion of natural immunity from policies like vaccine passports, arguing that the 42.5 million Americans who had recovered from COVID-19 by September 2021—possessing robust, long-lasting protection—were unfairly denied equal privileges despite posing no greater public health risk than the vaccinated (pp. 23–24). Further assessing the lack of government recognition for alternative protection, Bailey et al. (2024) have noted that courts and policymakers often ignored individual risk variations, enforcing broad mandates over tailored, evidence-based strategies (p. 243). This neglect of evidence-based options exposed a critical flaw in mandate strategy

Supporters contend that mandates protected public health. Supporters of the COVID-19 mandates such as Ayouni et al. (2021) have concluded from a systematic review of 18 studies that public health interventions—like city lockdowns, travel restrictions, and social distancing—effectively reduced COVID-19 transmission when implemented early, with seven studies linking lockdowns to lower case growth (pp. 9–11). Similar commonly stated beliefs can be found in The New York Times, as reported by Stolberg et al. (2022) who cited expert concerns that lifting mask mandates could increase risks amid rising cases, implying mandates bolstered safety. However, as shown by Lee and Broudy (2024), transmission of COVID-19 in South Korea was not solved by a high vaccination rate (p. 1181), thus suggesting that measures taken by governments were highly ineffective. The failure to integrate natural immunity or risk-based approaches further undermines this defense, suggesting coercion triumph over science.

Prohibiting all COVID-19 mandates would have preserved both liberty and safety, aligning with empirical evidence and ethical standards. Somin (2021) has underscored that judicial limits on executive power, as seen in NFIB v. OSHA, safeguard constitutional freedoms against unilateral overreach, a vital check even in crises (pp. 91-93). Steuer (2024) has proposed that fostering a culture of justification, where leaders transparently rationalize emergency measures, offers a less coercive alternative to Slovakia’s flawed states of emergency (p. 100). Bailey et al. (2024) have concluded that respecting constitutional limits and individual autonomy, rather than imposing mandates, upholds the ethical and scientific integrity essential to public policy (pp. 249-250). The overreach of lockdowns and vaccine requirements not only jeopardized individual autonomy, but also imposed risks and inefficiencies that evidence could not sustain. Future responses must reject such heavy-handed control, embracing policies that honor a free republic’s core values.

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