The wrong people control the vaccine discussion
The lowest common denominator is deciding who gets to live -- by not deciding
We seem to be willing to risk death rather than have to prove we’re vaccinated. We must be insane.
After more than 600,000 American deaths, we’re still kidding ourselves about COVID. The virus will keep mutating fiercely among the freedom-loving unvaccinated, and each new, worse strain will get people sick in new, unAmerican ways.
In Missouri, cases of the virus have doubled since early June, when there were already more than in much bigger Illinois, next door. Tests of the sewers in the southwest and northwest parts of the state indicated that the more virulent Delta strain from India is moving fast there. As of last week, it had turned up in 16 of the 23 Missouri sewer systems that had been tested, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Yes, public health techs check sewers. They don’t think viruses are spread from there. Viruses just wind up there because everything winds up there.
Delta virus is swimming around in Missouri sewers because it’s swimming around in Missouri people. That’s because in the more rural parts of the state, less than 40% of the population is vaccinated. In some counties, it's less than 20%.
Whatever is compelling this reluctance to vaccinate, it’s not a good enough reason to let the refuseniks associate with the rest of us, who seem fine, as promised. Lock the doors and give the keys to adults who have shots.
Erik Frederick, chief administrative officer at Mercy Hospital Springfield, a Missouri facility where the variant is having a field day, was quoted recently by the Associated Press: “If people elsewhere in the country are looking to us and saying, ‘No thanks’ and they are getting vaccinated, that is good.
“We will be the canary.”
As cool a quote as this is, I think it’s out of touch with reality. New rural surges are unlikely to remain “hyper-regionalized,” as some doctors predict hopefully. It wasn’t that way in 2020 and it’s not shaping up that way in 2021, either.
After all, Springfield, MO is 40 miles north of Branson, where they’re packing them in again for twangy music.
So country fans are coming from all over to sit next to people who are unvaccinated, unmasked and possibly diseased. Then they’re going back home to places like Chicago to sit next to other people in barns like Wrigley Field, which are now allowed to fill all the way up again so they can sell more $11 beers in plastic cups.
But that’s okay, as the disease is on the ropes in Illinois because more people are vaccinated. Right?
But not that much more. Only 46% of Illinois residents are fully vaccinated.
Some people say not to worry because only 0.13% of those infected by the Delta variant in the UK -- which had that head start with the strain -- have died, and that's a low rate.
But worldwide, only 0.02% of those infected by garden-variety COVID didn't make it. And that’s a lower rate. Yet it piled up a lot of bodies, didn’t it?
There may be a slew of infected people to plug into the algorithm, as the Delta variant is reportedly 140% more contagious than the COVID version that first emerged from Wuhan.
Rural Arkansas -- is there any other kind of Arkansas? -- is another Delta hotspot. But not to worry. There is so little going on in COVID-rich places like Washington and Benton counties that surges there will never be a factor beyond the state.
Sure. Nobody needs to visit Benton County, home of the headquarters of Walmart, the world’s biggest private employer.
Less than 35% of the residents of Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Wyoming are vaccinated. In Mississippi, it’s below 30%, and the state broke COVID case records last week.
But those idiots who are unvaccinated can’t expect to be helped, so what of it? Well, millions of those aren't necessarily idiots. Many are children under 12 who haven’t yet had vaccines made available, and probably won’t for months. And the Delta variant especially likes kids and other fresh-faced types.
Let’s sacrifice our kids to our weirdo politics. They’ll thank us for it later.
In the afterlife.
The vaccines are said to work almost as well on this new strain as on the old. So that’s good.
But we’ve known for months that the vaccines are much less effective for those with cancer, and there are about 10 million people in America who have that. They’re also less effective for those with auto-immune diseases, and there are 23 million of those. It’s not as helpful with organ transplant recipients, either, and there were 39,000 more of them last year.
No problem exposing them to the proudly unvaccinated. Sick people are a drain on the economy.
Some currently healthy people contract COVID despite being vaccinated because vaccines sometimes fail. They can get plenty sick, and stay sick for a long time, maybe permanently. Those people include medical professionals caring for infected patients every day -- many of whom got COVID unnecessarily.
Medical professionals in Missouri are reportedly demoralized as they risk their lives trying to save patients who refused vaccination. All over the country, medicos are returning to retirement or otherwise quitting because these people some of us hail as heroes are treated as disposable by others.
We talk big, but we do not have their backs, and they know it. They’re sharp enough to be able to tell when they’re getting screwed. They graduated from medical schools.
The World Health Organization, wary this week of Delta’s burgeoning spread, recommended people wear masks more often.
In general, Americans probably aren’t going to be doing that. They're already going to concerts and sitting next to strangers without knowing whether they’re vaccinated. If people are willing to risk death to hear an Eagles cover band, who can help them?
We can. If we force people to do the right thing, they’ll have to. Vaccination should be the ticket to hanging out with people who don’t want you to kill them.
In New York, Madison Square Garden and Radio City Music Hall are checking immunization cards at the door. In Chicago, there’s a city-backed series of concerts that requires them, too.
And everyone’s still having a good time. There aren’t riots at the doors. We could be requiring proof of vaccination everywhere people congregate.
Would that make us a “Show us your papers” country? Not so much. We check for age where alcohol is sold. That hasn’t led to everybody wearing brown shirts.
By this time in 2023, the REAL ID law will require most everybody have a national identification card. That makes a vaccine check seem comparatively benign.
It’s something that only affects people without a shot. And that’s an easy problem to solve.
After all, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1905 that people who refused the smallpox vaccine could be fined. That’s not happening here. We’re just talking about people being turned away at basketball games.
Vax checking would cause delays getting into venues. That’s not heartbreaking, but maybe it wouldn’t have to be so bad. The Cubs, for instance, can afford to add some personnel at the door to help maintain the $60 per person gross they're lapping up.
I’m curious whether the big New York venues are acting responsibly mainly because their state’s not one of the 30 to enact a law shielding businesses from liability for spreading COVID. There's nothing like a call from an insurance company to encourage good citizenship.
Illinois doesn’t have a shield law, either. Six Republican senators sponsored one about a year ago. It wound up where most Illinois bills with no Democratic support go.
But we can’t expect fear of liability -- or civic duty, for that matter -- to make corporations do the right thing in Illinois or anywhere else.
Our governments have to require it. If legislatures chicken out, governors can hand down edicts. Why not? Many of the shield laws were enacted that way. If you can do something that’s pro-business by executive order, why not something that’s pro-life expectancy?
It’s about time we stopped kissing the asses of politicians who are owned by corporations, and personally fretting over the welfare of big businesses. They don’t fret about us. We need to grow up as a species.
CEOs aren’t our parents, and they don’t know better. We’re big kids. If we can’t stand up for ourselves to save our own lives, we don’t deserve to live. And we might not.
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