It's common to see people mistake public health issues for authoritarianism. E.g. Anti maskers may have the freedom to not wear a mask. But their freedom to not wear a mask is not greater than everyone else's freedom to not be harmed by an anti maskers science denial.
I have absolute freedom to swing my fist. But my freedom to swing it ends at the tip of your nose. If I go further, I am harming you and that is basically assault.
At the end of the day, we have to let the scientists/epidemiologists focus on the science and we need to listen to their advise on public health matters.
Polio vaccines, BCG, Measles vaccines, etc are standard in many countries and have helped eradicate many diseases. We cannot continue to allow public health continue to be eroded on the misguided notion of freedom.
Yes I agree we need to listen to their advice. I don't think their consensus advice is that we should make vaccination mandatory. Not yet anyway, in part because some of them don't share your ethical and political views and in part because they're still waiting on two critical pieces of evidence - how much does it break chains of transmission and, partly as a result, how many people do we absolutely need to vaccinate.
In any case, my point was less about the proposed strategy, and more about the sentiment informing it.
Whether some people like it or not, should not even come into the equation as public health trumps whatever stupid delusion some people live under.
I think it would be great if everyone got vaccinated. I expect most people who are offered it cheaply and easily will take it. I don't think we need force to achieve that. Presumably we have different views on the current state of society but inevitably neither of us are right about that, it's just a loosely informed perception.
There are unintended consequences of almost every major policy and in this case yes we want people to take the vaccine to kill the virus, but we also want them to take many of the other voluntary but recommended vaccines further down the line too. How we deal with this vaccine will clearly have an impact on the anti-vaxxer movement, and the public health officials have repeatedly acknowledged the precariousness of the current situation.
If the policy is informed by the notion that we don't care about stupid citizens' delusional notions about freedom then the people you are actively dismissing will read into that much more broadly than this vaccine. There are a lot of those people. I'd suggest a different kind of public health messaging would be as effective and have fewer consequences. The public health officials you suggest we should listen to seem to take a similar position.
Masks are a different issue. Many of them do advocate for it being mandatory and I'd suggest that because the risk of potential opposing reactions and longer term effects is much smaller.