(Dobbs) Self-Serving and Selfish...
"Freedom of choice" in the pandemic leaves no choice for the rest of us.
These people still refusing vaccines to protect against Covid— astonishingly, it’s about 80 million Americans— are insane. Foolishly, selfishly, irrationally insane.
To be fair, not all of them. Some have underlying medical conditions that make them wary, some might have allergies to vaccines, some who’ve had Covid count on their antibodies to protect them, some are just scared of the unknown. And some go along with what a conservative Iowa preacher wrote to exempt his parishioners from vaccine mandates: “A Christian has no responsibility to obey any government outside of the scope that has been designated by God.” In other words, some believe God’s against it.
But 80 million people??? It’s madness.
Don’t they read the news? Don’t they trust science?? They probably did… once. The news says that as this week started, we were up to an average of about 1,650 Americans dying every day from Covid. Again.
Think about that with the simple visual, below: each “X” is a Covid death on a single day. Or to be more graphic, each “X” is a human being who died, in a single day this week, of Covid. A mother, a father, a sister, a brother, a daughter, a son, a co-worker, a friend. A human being who will never come home again. Just stare at all those X’s for a moment. There were this many Covid deaths yesterday. There are this many today. There will be this many tomorrow.
And what about science? It says, almost all of them were unvaccinated. Taking it a step further, in one of three large studies published last week, more than 600,000 Covid cases in 13 states were analyzed. The verdict? Americans who have not gotten their vaccinations are eleven times more likely to die of Covid than those who have.
You’d think this would be enough to get people who’ve refused the vaccine up until now to run to the nearest place they can find to get it.
But they don’t. Why not? Because there are Americans in positions of trust— right-wing politicians, right-wing media, right-wing clergy— who aren’t just philosophically against mandates for vaccines but who are openly opposing not just mandates but the vaccines themselves, shamelessly telling people that this whole thing is some sort of left-wing conspiracy.
It’s madness.
We have history with vaccines. Although imperfect, they are medical miracles. By and large, vaccines prevent illness. Like polio. Like measles and mumps and rubella and all the rest. Vaccines save lives.
But in these days of vaccine defiance, politics eclipse science.
So you have faux patriots on the right discouraging their fellow Americans from protecting themselves from the pandemic. Texas Senator Ted Cruz is sponsoring a bill in Washington to stop mask mandates and forbid vaccine passports. South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, whose state suffered a tenfold increase in Covid cases last month, told Fox News that by opposing mandates, “We’re just allowing people to make personal choices,” as if there aren’t other victims infected when someone makes the irresponsible choice. In South Carolina, which currently has the second highest per capita rate of Covid cases in the country, they’ve had to cancel elective surgeries in the state’s overwhelmed hospitals, yet Governor Henry McMaster said after President Biden announced federal vaccine mandates, “We will fight them to the gates of hell to protect the liberty and livelihood of every South Carolinian.”
The gates of hell? That’s where politicians like these might end up themselves. When you catalogue the ten states right now with the highest rates of Covid, nine are governed by Republicans, most preaching that their freedom of choice trumps our freedom from Covid.
And it’s working. These politicians— and their fellow travelers in clergy and media— have persuaded ordinary Americans to enlist in the madness. Last week for example in upstate New York, the Lewis County General Hospital announced that because roughly a quarter of its staff still hasn’t been vaccinated and some have even resigned rather than get the vaccine, its maternity unit will be forced to stop delivering babies beginning about a week from now.
In Colorado, the public health department in suburban Denver’s Jefferson County had to stop sending out its vaccination vans a week ago after people drove by “screaming obscenities at vaccine staff and throwing garbage at them,” according to The Denver Post. “Someone threw unidentified liquid at a public health nurse,” the report says, and another driver “ran over and destroyed temporary signs the clinic had put up around its vaccine tent.” What were these reckless rabble-rousers thinking, when in a state of close to six million people, hospitals right now are down to fewer than 200 intensive care beds because of the surge of Covid? “Let’s put more people in the hospital?” It’s mad!
The Covid-caused scarcity of ICU beds is especially alarming after yesterday’s story about an Alabama man with heart pain, who was turned away by 42 hospitals in three different states because they were in even worse shape than Colorado and were completely out of beds in cardiac ICU. He finally got one 200 miles from home. But it was too late.
It’s gotten to where even a prominent Republican political consultant, Whit Ayres, who has worked to elect the likes of Florida’s Ron DeSantis and South Carolina’s Lindsay Graham, has had enough of all the reactionary rhetoric about freedom of choice, as if it exists in a vacuum. “Liberty has never meant the freedom to threaten the health of others,” he says. “That is a perversion of the definition of liberty and freedom.”
But this madness is a perversion itself. It has put the United States in last place on the list of major Western industrialized countries for the percentage of citizens who’ve had at least one shot, and Japan’s on track to overtake us soon in the percentage of those who’ve had two shots, which will put us at the bottom of both lists.
It didn’t have to be like this. 1,650 Americans didn’t have to die like this every day. If these opportunistically obstructionist leaders had put the public good ahead of their own, there wouldn’t still be 80 million people without shots.
It’s madness. And it’s on them.
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For almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
Greg, you make a strong and well-researched case for the idiocy of those who refuse, on unfathomable grounds, to get vaccinated against Covid 19 and its variants.
There is, however, a dimension to the resistance that you did not address and which may be a strong reason why so many have refused.
As you know, I provided medical care and treatment in five different decades, both in the field and in a hospital setting. Through numerous school experiences, certifications, examinations, recertifications, seminars, in-service trainings, etc. there was a common theme stressed to me as a healthcare worker - that is the right of ANY individual, who is in a competent mental state, to refuse medical treatment or care. There were no "ifs, ands, or buts" offered. I and thousands of others offering medical assistance have had the experience of someone "just saying no" to a myriad of medical procedures, medical assistance, or just plain old 'first aid'. When that occurs, it is frustrating and difficult to accede to those wishes or declarations, but a medical provider is bound, BY OATH, to do just that.
You have undoubtedly seen many declarations of "freedom of choice" in this matter, as I have. The most vociferous and heartfelt essays have been by some of the nurses and other health practitioners who have had the most difficult confrontations with the effects of Covid. It seems to be contrary to rational thought that those who have seen so much of the dire effects of the pandemic are so much against mandatory vaccination. And yet, there it is. There are approximately 22 million health care workers in the U.S.; many of whom are struggling with the choice of whether to be vaccinated or not.
My take on the issue isn't political - right wing this or left wing that - it is with understanding that a "code" of care and conduct that is so ingrained in so many of us makes for a very difficult choice in a very difficult time.
You also know that I am fully vaxxed and will continue to follow that path as it is made available to me. I hope that you can recognize that there are factors to these decisions that aren't necessarily political and that they pose a conundrum to those who have sworn an oath to a particular way of action. If I had a means to administer vaccine in my hand right now and there was someone on my front porch who had not been vaxxed, and it was in my power to provide it to them, I would gladly do so - unless they refused. That would be the end of it for me.
Given current circumstances, I, too, think such refusal is irresponsible and dangerous to all. I can, however, understand it. However risky it is to avoid the shot, there will always be those who will refuse; often on personal rather than political grounds. That's just the way many are wired.
Liberty isn't freedom and besides freedom isn't free - we just need more Americans to think deeply and earnestly about the trade-offs.