That was not an option for me, whether it was parents (under 18 at the time), school, extracurriculars, travelling abroad (also for extracurriculars), and more, the vast majority required vaccinations to participate/attend.
Sure, you could just say "well just ruin your future and NEET it up forever", but is that really any different than having it literally mandated? Remember, at the time it was heavily pushed that mandates would not be going away in the future, so the implication was anything forgone in the present would be for naught when you're inevitably forced to recieive it eventually anyway.
Granted, at the time I thought nothing if it, and happily got my first two doses. It was actually the experience of suffering side-effects from the second vaccine and getting labelled "anti-vax" when asking those around me for help that really turned me off the whole movement, forever.
MAGA is populist-leftist in a lot of ways. Really if you took the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 out of the picture it would be much more so.
Old school union Democrats were often fiercely anti immigration too. Trump turned Ohio from purple to red and carried a lot of that region by pulling in these people.
I’m not personally a fan of populism of either left or right variety. It almost always has a negative outcome. It turns out that experts, even if they are sometimes assholes, often do really know something, and purging them and putting crackpots and apparatchiks in charge has consequences. People who don’t know how to do things don’t do them as well.
RFK is going to be an epic disaster. I think he’s the worst person in the administration in terms of potential long term blast radius. He’s a crank who will kill people with new agey granola anti medicine bullshit.
I used to regard that stuff as part of the loony left. I guess it was. Trump is the Sauron of crackpottery, gathering all con artists and crackpots to himself as if by some magical magnetism.
I lived in Orange County CA at the start of the pandemic and moved to Cincinnati in the great diaspora. Went shopping in both places. Was never asked about a vaccine. I did have to mask up.
I don’t recall being asked about a vaccine anywhere. If I worked certain jobs I can imagine it, and those would be jobs where it would make sense.
There are countries that had a stricter response, but this is a US centric discussion. Hearing Americans complain about lock downs makes me roll my eyes. The USA did not have “lock downs” outside a few very dense metros you were free to leave at any time.
Or the conservative viewpoint now that one is entitled to have a job, and people MUST be nice to you? Sounds very leftist if you ask me.