You Not Being Vaccinated IS Our Business!

Those on the right would like for us to believe that being vaccinated or wearing a mask is a personal choice, and by refusing to do either they are just exercising their person freedom. They even go so far as to say it is none of our business whether they are vaccinated or wear a mask in a crowd. They are wrong!

A person choosing to not wear a mask or not be vaccinated is putting other people in danger and making the pandemic last longer than it should. And that is our business. You don't have the right to endanger the public health anymore than you have a right to drive drunk or yell "fire" in a crowded theater. Rights have some limits, especially when it comes to endangering others.

Here is some of what Jamelle Bouie had to say about it in The New York Times:

“I don’t think it’s anybody’s damn business whether I’m vaccinated or not,” Representative Chip Roy, Republican of Texas, told CNN last month. Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, wrote similarly (albeit less abrasively) in May that vaccination was a “personal and private decision” and that “no one should be shamed, coerced or mandated to take Covid-19 vaccines that are being allowed under an emergency use authorization.”

Johnson and all the others are wrong. Wearing a helmet while bike riding, strapping on your seatbelt in a car — these are personal decisions, at least as far as your own injuries are concerned. Vaccination is different. In the context of a deadly and often debilitating contagion, in which the unchecked spread of infection has consequences for the entire society, vaccination is not a personal decision. And inasmuch as the United States has struggled to achieve herd immunity against Covid-19 through vaccination, it is because we refuse to treat the pandemic for what it is: a social problem to solve through collective action.

From the jump, the federal government devolved its response to the pandemic, foisting responsibility onto states and localities, which, in turn, left individual Americans and their communities to navigate conflicting rules and information.

This approach continued with the arrival of vaccines. Until recently, in the face of a vaccination plateau, there was not even a mandate for federal employees to be vaccinated. States and employers have been left to their own devices, and individuals face a patchwork of rules and mandates, depending on where they live and where they work.

Is it any surprise that millions of Americans treat this fundamentally social problem — how do we vaccinate enough people to prevent the spread of a deadly disease — as a personal one? Or that many people have refused to get a shot, citing the privacy of their decision as well as their freedom to do as they choose?

Consider, too, the larger cultural and political context of the United States. We still live in the shadow of the Reagan revolution and its successful attack on America’s traditions of republican solidarity and social responsibility. “Over the past 50 years,” Mike Konczal writes in “Freedom From the Market: America’s Fight to Liberate Itself From the Grip of the Invisible Hand,” “both our personal lives and our economy have been forced ever more deeply into market dependency.”

This extends into our political lives — and our political selves — as well. If American society has been reshaped in the image of capital, then Americans themselves have been pushed to relate to one another and our institutions as market creatures in search of utility, as opposed to citizens bound together by rights and obligations. . . .

Not because they are lazy, of course, but because this is the society we have built, where individuals are left to carry the burdens of life into the market and hope that they survive. This so-called freedom is ill suited to human flourishing. It is practically maladaptive in the face of a pandemic.

That’s why families and communities were left to fend for themselves in the face of disease, why so many people treat the question of exposure and contagion as a personal choice made privately and why our institutions have made vaccination a choice when it should have been mandated from the start. . . .

When you structure a society so that every person must be an island, you cannot then blame people when inevitably they act as if they are. If we want a country that takes solidarity seriously, we will actually have to build one.