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