Anti-vaxxers and drunk driving

 Analogies are imperfect things, but used properly, they can make a valuable point in far fewer words.

The COVID anti-vaxxers* today are analogous to drunk drivers. Drunk drivers have a misplaced confidence in their ability to manage the risk of drunk driving to themselves and others. They believe it is their choice to drive while impaired. Yes, if you drive drunk and slam into a bridge abutment, the only person who pays the ultimate price for your bad judgment is you. But if you run a red light and kill a mother of three and her mother on the way home from a church picnic, your “freedom” has destroyed the freedoms of others, living and dead. It’s the same with not getting vaccinated: if you are the only one who dies and you die at home, you are the only one to pay the ultimate price for your misplaced confidence in your judgment. But if you take up a hospital bed that could have been used for an accident victim or cancer patient, or if you infect others who end up hospitalized or dead, that’s not “freedom,” that’s criminal selfishness on the same scale as drunk driving.
Drunk drivers deserve our scorn and society’s disapprobation. Likewise for COVID anti-vaxxers. They should be shunned and quarantined. They should be banned from indoor workplaces, schools and all indoor public places. They are then free to exercise their freedom and share their indifference to life and health with anyone who is like-minded.
There is some bleating in the anti-vax crowd about ‘forced vaccination’ and comparisons to Nazi Germany. Nobody is seriously talking about forcing people to be vaccinated; that’s just a straw man for the dishonest. And the shameless comparisons of rules preventing unvaccinated people from going to work or school to Nazi death camps and the butchery committed by the SS-Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet Union is not only ahistorical, but contemptible.
There was a time before the FDA emergency approval when vaccine reluctance was understandable from the POV that the vaccines were not yet approved. As a subject in the Moderna phase III trial who was vaccinated six months before the FDA approval, I take a back seat to no one here in my awareness of the vaccine mechanism and risks. The data demonstrating the effectiveness of the Moderna, Pfizer, J&J and AstraZenica vaccines are overwhelming. Rejecting an effective vaccine in a pandemic is an insufferable abdication of civic responsibility. But it is especially insufferable when it is accompanied by holier-than-thou blather and perverse blindness. There is zero excuse to not be vaccinated, to apologize for anti-vaxxers or to attack those who advocate universal vaccination for COVID-19.
*note that I’m referring to anti-vaxxers who have no compelling medical reason not to be vaccinated.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/vaccine-benefits.html?fbclid=IwAR0OPrqEAMCaJa0b6DSjpVDlWbQqsiuPXuzcmvNmJHr8CjPdKs8RKUJEIn8



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Two sides

Image
  Yes, there are two sides to every question. In most cases, there is a correct side and a wrong side. In the case of Kamala Harris, the correct side is that she was born a US citizen. The wrong side is that her parents had to be citizens or permanent residents for her to be a citizen. President Trump pretended to be unsure about this, just as he pretended for five years that Barack Obama is not a citizen. In the case of the Harris noncitizen claim, it is backed by the racist C laremont Institute: "The Claremont Institute masquerades as an intellectual salon of the right, but it is really just a racist fever swamp with deep connections to the conspiratorial alt-right. It even granted a fellowship to Jack Posobiec, who helped promote the notorious Pizzagate conspiracy theory. Claremont’s resident bigots offer deranged fantasies of violently expelling Americans from their home country because of their ethnic backgrounds. Their work deserves the intellectual weight given to that of D...
Read more

Who chooses?

Over at jabberwocking.com , Kevin Drum blames pro-choice writers for failing to make the case for reproductive choice. Well, from everything I've read, a clear majority of Americans believe that Roe should still stand. Seems like the case has been made, and if we lived in a truly representative democracy, a limited national right to abortion would be preserved. But beyond that reality, I think Drum has it exactly backwards. Why does the burden of proof fall on those advocating for personal autonomy? Seems to me the null hypothesis is that women should be allowed to make decisions about their own health, and that the justification for nanny state intrusion into such decisions rests with the minority who assert state coercion. Democrats need to hammer on the right-wing GOP to explain why the government takes temporary custody of pregnant Americans. https://jabberwocking.com/liberals-really-suck-at-defending-abortion/
Read more

Black Earth

 Just finished reading “Black Earth: The Holocaust as history and warning” by Timothy Snyder. It is a detailed account of the Holocaust, as well as an effort to abstract lessons from this history for our time. Like his book “Bloodlands,” Snyder’s “Black Earth” makes for painful reading. As the grandson of a Ukrainian Jew and the son of a Jew, I would have been targeted in the Holocaust had I been in the wrong place. I had read several histories of Europe in World War II that included the Holocaust. I knew the basic story of the Holocaust and Hitler’s anti-Semitic vision. I learned a great deal by reading this book. I won’t belabor the ghoulish atrocities committed by the Nazis and their collaborators. To summarize them here would be to trivialize the enormity of the crimes and invite pointless debate about who did what and who suffered more. You’ll have to read the book to understand Snyder’s historical insights. However, I learned many things that I did not know by reading thi...
Read more