You Are Not Wrong To Be Angry With The Unvaccinated

We have had three vaccines that work for several months now -- and yet, the number of new cases of COVID-19 and the number of deaths from it are once again surging. There is only one reason this is happening -- too many people are refusing to be vaccinated, and sadly, many of them are doing it for political reasons (following the lead of Republican officials who don't want President Biden to get credit for ending the pandemic).

The unvaccinated are responsible for the resurgence. They are responsible for the shortage of medical personnel and the lack of space in our hospitals. They are responsible for the breakthrough cases of COVID among the vaccinated. They are responsible for the spread of the new and more virulent Delta variant (which is even attacking young people and children). 

It short, they are responsible for putting everyone in danger. And I sick of it. I'm angry -- especially at those who claim it is their right to put the lives of others in danger by refusing the vaccine. It's time to mandate the vaccine in schools and in all workplaces -- and I don't care whether the vaccine refusers like that or not!

The following is a small part of an op-ed by Paul Waldman in The Washington Post:

On Monday, the Food and Drug Administration granted full approval to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for the coronavirus, and approvals for the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines could follow soon. This could be a significant step in convincing the millions of unvaccinated Americans to finally get vaccinated, even if it doesn’t quickly transform the state of the pandemic.

It’s also an opportunity for us to say to the hard-core vaccine refusers: We’re done with you.

We’ll treat you when you come to the hospital, of course, because that’s how medicine works; while doctors and nurses dealing with the wave of covid-19 patients caused by the delta variant might like to turn away anyone who refused to take a vaccine, they won’t. But it’s time to refocus our outreach efforts and our public and private pandemic policies so that accommodating, understanding and pandering to the refusers is no longer one of our chief concerns. . . .

To those who say “mocking those people will never convince them to take the vaccine!”, let me suggest that it’s too late to persuade them. I’m not talking about the hesitant and the uncertain — they can be persuaded, and we need to redouble efforts to reach them. But when you see that in Mississippi — which like many states with low vaccination rates is now being ravaged by the delta variant — the state’s chief public health official felt compelled to make a public plea for people to stop drinking livestock dewormer, since a good number got the idea that it’s a treatment for covid, you have to ask if there’s anything at all that would persuade committed refusers.

Actually, we know how they got the dewormer idea: the supercharged rumor-spreading machine known as social media. Over the weekend, Facebook reluctantly admitted that “an article raising concerns that the coronavirus vaccine could lead to death was the top performing link in the United States on its platform from January through March of this year.”

It’s gotten to the point where at a rally on Saturday in Alabama of his most loyal dead-enders, former president Donald Trump said that while he believes in everyone’s freedom, “I recommend: take the vaccines. I did it. It’s good. Take the vaccines,” and boos rang out.

I’m pretty sure that if between swigs of horse dewormer, your uncle is booing his god-king Donald Trump for saying a good word about vaccination, gentle persuasion isn’t going to have much effect on him. . . .

They’ll be trying out insane new treatments, while the rest of us shake our heads at people who’d rather gargle with turpentine (or whatever the next Facebook remedy is) than get a free lifesaving vaccine. They’ll keep engaging in unhinged and violent public behavior (like assaulting teachers over mask policies), for which they should just be arrested. Our only concern should be keeping ourselves safe from them; they deserve no more consideration than that.

They won’t disappear, but we can treat them like social pariahs. And if they don’t like it? They can go ahead and wallow in their fantasies of oppression and courageous independence. Nobody said “freedom” was free.