From the beginning of the pandemic, I heard one simple idea every now and then, and it seems to express the assumption upon which a lot of policies came to be demanded:
I have a right not to be infected.
That is of course a falsity. There is not and can be no such right, as such. You have a right, at most, to negotiate the terms of your avoidance of infection.
The phrase: “I have a right not to be infected” shows an expectation of a miraculous nature imputed to rights as such, or to government in general.
How rights work in the real world are not so magical. A right is a specific kind of human instrument that only works when specifically limited to performable operations.
After all, every right articulates an obligation. In law, the obligations (and therefore rights) we worry about are those that may be compelled by law, or by those operating under its umbrella. We cannot compel people not to infect each other. We cannot effectuate such an outcome. Viruses are slippery critters. We can only compel people to do this and that. And most of those thises and thats must be negotiated for, traded for, accommodated by manners or by convenience. The error here — this assumption of having a right that is beyond our means to perform — has been made all across the political spectrum. I’ve heard it, or words to that effect, from progressives, conservatives, libertarians. All are wrong. Very wrong.
I suppose at some point I’ll have to write about why this is so. It seems obvious to me, but what’s obvious to me isn’t widely observed. Think of it like a similar notion, which I often hear amongst my compeers: “no one has a right to pollute.” Well, estoppel principles apply, and finders-keepers/first-poopers rights apply, too.
One should not try to make ”rights” do too much work. That is the way to break the tool itself — and rights are a very useful tool. It would be a pity were it broken because its users abused it.
twv
Wirkman Comment 
Hello, Mister Wirkman:
I have been thinking for about six years about the concepts you have just exposed in your post. I do not know much about laws, and I do not know the name of the principle at hand: that a legislator cannot enact a law that forbids a behavior that it is impossible, because such a law would have no object. Perhaps this legal principle does not exist?
Let me present an example. A Parliament passes the following law: “It is forbidden for any Person to write a fiction story, a poem, a song, a novel or a theater play, that describes one or more of its characters performing acts that are impossible in real life for a man to perform, or illegal to perform, under the penalty of life imprisonment”.
Thus, a writer who writes a story about non-human animals talking to each other, or a comic book where a man can fly around the planet in less than one second would be in dire trouble.
One flaw of the letter of this hypothetical law is that it excludes paintings, such as “The Persistence of Memory” by Salvador Dalí, where an impossible situation is shown: three watches giving the exact same hour! This cannot happen in real life. But it is not a fiction story: only a painting.
A defense lawyer could say during a trial: “In order to show that the painter has infringed the law by creating work of fiction we should be completely sure that it is empirically impossible for three watches in real life to give the exact same time. So we should bring all the watches ever created and pick any three of them and try to synchronize them, and if we achieve that then my client must be acquitted, and if we do not, then we pick any other three watches and try again, and we repeat that process until we run out of unsynchronizable watches, which is impossible, because Time itself will end before we exhaust all the possible combinations”.
If the law should be extended to include paintings or designs, then all geographical maps should be considered illegal. This could put and end to all wars.
The Bill of Rights, being entirely a work of fiction, should have no effect in the real world if this Law was active. This may pose a problem to revenue, among other things.
And such a law would make all forms of money printing illegal by default. And all pharmaceutical companies would incur in obvious criminal behavior as all their studies and final products include fictional origins and impossible properties. And all the talk about catastrophic global warming or freezing caused by capitalistic activities would also be rendered illegal.
Hmm, maybe that law is not as ridiculous as I thought!
I now feel the need to hear a podcast with an expert in Law musing over this idea.
Finally, and more to the point: if infecting someone with a pathogen was declared illegal because people have a fundamental right not to be infected, wouldn’t that mean that most if not all of the traditional vaccinations were criminal acts? All of them can cause infectious disease, measles vaccine and oral polio vaccine being two prominent examples. I reckon there is a Principle of irretroactivity of Laws, but I am not sure. I need to dig deeper.