New Year’s day, 2022. I’m sitting at a one-lane bridge on the east coast of the Coromandel, watching and waiting as a stream of cars drive over the bridge towards me, reminded once again of the big lessons of 2021 – consequences and the limits of freedom.

While so much of the world is wrestling with new waves of Covid infections, I was enjoying the freedom of heading to the beach to ride some real waves with my wife and sons. I was free, in that moment, to ignore the road rules, the science of mass and velocity and drive onto that bridge and into the oncoming traffic. But that choice would have had dire consequences. It would be, frankly, stupid. The law of the land, love for my family and a sense of self-preservation told me to sit tight, sacrifice some time and wait for the safe moment.

It was the lessons of 2021 laid out before me on the first day of 2022. Whatever way you view that pandemic-stained year, it underlined to us all that choices come with consequences. Yet there are some who aren’t interested in that lesson. They prefer conspiracies to consequences. They protest the loss of a kind of freedom that has never existed and ignore that their freedom steals freedom from others. They’re the anti-vaxxers and ‘freedom and rights’ groups

If you’re a parent, you probably know a thing or two about consequences. It’s something you want your children to learn and understand – that if you do your best, you’re more likely to succeed, if you make a mistake there are lessons to be learnt, if you go down one path there’s an opportunity cost. And so on. Often you agonise over when to intervene to save your children from the consequences of their actions – when to protect them and when to let them learn for themselves. Ultimately, I hope that my boys will learn the importance of the choices they make and the impact they will have on themselves and others. That they will learn about responsibility, opportunity and the price you sometimes pay. And that they will learn that there are no guarantees in life. No true liberty, because chance, circumstance and the actions of others are always pushing our lives this way and that. Even so, I hope they will come to see how much choices matter.

Of course, the importance of choice is most often stressed by those on the right of conventional democractic politics. A focus on the individual means a focus on the importance of the choices those individuals make. Usually that argument continues that the consequences of limiting personal freedom and ‘big government’ are worth resisting – the unemployed aren’t motivated to find work and become dependent on the state, taxes punish success and hard work and the public sector starts to wallow in inefficiencies.

Those on the left usually argue that circumstance, history and the choices of others have undermined the choices of many individuals, especially those lower on the social ladder. Some will blame all bad outcomes on ‘society’ and insist that no blame attach to individuals.

Yet in the the Covid culture wars, these arguments from the right and left are often as not being turned on their heads. What stands out to me is that when it comes to vaccines, those fighting for their ‘freedom and rights’ tend to argue for free choice and then... nothing. The argument about the consequences of their choice either goes down the rabbit hole of inaccurate nonsense – hidden vaccine deaths, Bill Gates-driven global power grabs, vaccines are poison etc – or they don’t exist at all. They want the right to choose, no matter the consequences.

It’s a position with no ethical foundation. It’s the equivalent of a child arguing for cookies, “just because”. And to try to make that argument in the life and death stakes of public health is, well, nuts. Because public health debates are not like almost any others.

When it comes to public health, collective decisions are essential because, as John Donne sagely wrote, none of us in an island. Pandemics do not respect individual choices, free will or market forces. It’s all for one and one for all or we all suffer.

You can set taxes high or low and see good and bad outcomes. You can allow some free choice in who runs schools and tertiary institutions without the entire education system collapsing. So it goes for most policy decisions. But if you allow even some free choice when it comes to road rules, the whole system breaks down. If every 10th driver chooses not to obey the give way rules at Coromandel’s one-lane bridges, people will die. The same if people don’t obey red lights or driving on the left hand side of the road. They require near-universal compliance to work.

So it is with vaccinations. And with so much Covid-related policy. The importance of strong government, trusted institutions and collective compliance have all been writ clear as New Zealand – and others – have enacted public health rules that prioritised the wellbeing of the many over the liberties of the individual. Such choices have saved many thousands of lives globally and I only wish more countries had seen how coming together to lockdown, track and trace and vaccinate serves both the collective and the individual. And protects the basic freedom to live without the fear of preventable death.

That is why I struggle with the perfectly reasonable argument that we should be understanding when it comes to people who choose not to get vaccinated. And why I have limited sympathy for those whose choice to not get vaccinated is turning their lives upside down. How sympathetic would we be to anyone who chose to ignore red lights because they were an attempt by government to control our rights of movement?

Where I can find common cause is their argument for free speech, the right to assemble and stubborn questioning over any government mandate over what we put in our bodies.

The powers we give to governments in a democracy such as New Zealand are many and mighty. Agents of the state can take our money in taxes, force our children to go to state institutions (ie schools), and even lock us up. We concede all those liberties for the greater good and most of us do it happily. But our rights as individuals still matter and have been hard fought for over the centuries. One of the most basic rights we should protect is what we put in our bodies; beyond even our homes and families. What we do with our bodies should in most circumstances be something the state has no power over. Acknowledging that is perhaps a useful starting point when it comes to public discourse about anti-vaxxers and holding our body politic together.

The problem with the anti-vaxxers hanging their opposition on that peg is that their argument fundamentally wrong. They have not lost their right to assemble and to speak out. Most importantly, there is simply no vaccine “mandate” and those of us who engage in that public discourse should probably choose our words more carefully. A mandate is an order or instruction that allows for no choice and, when it comes to what we put in our bodies, should be the last resort of any government.

But in truth there is no ‘vaccine mandate’, because there is a choice. The state is not forcing injections into people’s arms against their will. There is no law requiring vaccination, no imprisonment or firing squad if you don’t get jabbed.

Rather, there are consequences. True, they are harsh consequences. Punishing. Even unfair to the individual. The consequences can involve someone losing their livelihood, some rights of movement, even precious relationships. Teachers and nurses who are good at their jobs are no longer in those jobs precisely because there is no mandate; they exercised their right to choose not to be vaccinated and now have to endure the consequences.

It’s a high price to pay for their choice. Some of the highest a government has demanded of ordinary citizens in peacetime. But make no bones about it, it’s a choice. Every New Zealander has the choice to live in this country as a legal citizen whether they choose to be vaccinated or not. If they don’t like the consequences, they can make a different choice. (In truth, potentially the worst consequence could be to their own health, with unvaccinated people many time more likely to be hospitalised or die due to Covid, as has been shown by research all over the world - here, here, here, here, here and here, for example).

And those consequences are there for one clear and obvious reason – the safety and well-being of the many (which in this case includes many of society’s most vulnerable). Indeed, they are there for the freedom of the many. Because contrary to what the anti-vaxxers chant and write on their signs, this isn’t battle between freedom and mandates. It’s a choice between competing freedoms.

The freedom of that teacher or nurse is, ultimately, secondary to the freedom of the many to send their children to school or attend a hospital without fear of catching Covid. That freedom of the many to not suffer from a life-threatening pandemic clearly trumps the freedom of those relatively few anti-vaxxers. On one level it is undoubtedly unfair that you should lose your job for refusing to put something into your body. But isn’t it more unfair for every patient or pupil you deal with to have to live with the risk of your choice? On the hierarchy of rights, undoubtedly it is. The consequences of your choice have an impact on me. And him. And her. And them. So in this zero sum equation, the rights of the many outweigh the rights of the one.

And, to be quite clear to those crying about their unprecedented loss of rights - it’s hardly the first time they have ceded liberties to the government for the greater good. Just look at taxes, police forces and, yes, road rules.

Which brings us back to that hot summer’s day at the Coromandel one-lane bridge. I mean, who would be daft enough to demand their rights to drive over that bridge whenever they wanted, even if it put their own and others’ lives at risk? Well, it seems there are thousands in New Zealand who just might. Just don’t expect me to support their right to do so, however deeply they may believe in their cause.

If they make the choice to put themselves and others in danger, I can have compassion for their suffering, but I struggle to find sympathy when there are dire consequences for that choice. If they want the right to make that choice, they can live with the responsibilities that come as a result.

It’s the lesson we try to teach our children and it’s just as true if you choose not to be vaccinated during a pandemic. Or if you ever decided to ignore the road rules at a one-lane bridge. Consequences. There are always consequences.