COVID, COVID, AND MORE COVID

As much as I try to avoid this subject, I find it impossible. Today's New York Times Sunday Review has a full page front page article on how to deal with the rage vaccinated people feel for unvaccinated people. The article’s conclusion?  “So when all else fails, if your anger at “the unvaccinated” feels unbearable, focus less on those whose actions are beyond your control" and think about your blessings.

Hogwash.

Recent reports make it clear that "breakthroughs" are growing in number, and while vaccinated people “theoretically” have the capacity to communicate the disease to other vaccinated people, science tells us that is “rare," and between 97 and 99% of the people being treated for covid in the hospital and who died there are unvaccinated. Bottom line:  breakthroughs are the result of vaccinated people coming in contact with unvaccinated people.

Apparently, the statistics show that for most of the unvaccinated, the issue is “freedom of choice.” Really? I'm willing to concede their freedom to risk suffering from covid and even to choose to take the risk of dying from it. But I certainly do not concede they have the "freedom" to infect me or my family. I do not concede they have the "freedom to choose " to incubate the next and possibly even more deadly variant. I do not concede that one has the “freedom to choose” drive drunk or to drive 90 miles an hour on a 45 mile an hour road occupied by other vehicles. 

But the shrinks have it right: being angry doesn't change anything, unless you use the anger to focus on a solution to the problem that is making you angry in the first place.

So here is my proposal:

1. No employment, anywhere, for unvaccinated people. The companies that have adopted a policy of employees choosing vaccination or regular testing are equivocating.  Employers that fear they will lose too many workers who refuse inoculation are simply going to have to suck it up. It will be temporary. If the right to be employed becomes universal, then vaccination will become universal. There is no reason to allow a potential disease carrier in your place of business, masked or unmasked. We isolated Typhoid Mary, and we should do the same with "Freedom of Choice" unvaccinated holdouts.

2. Same with high schools and colleges.  And if and when the vaccine is approved for five-year olds, same with grade school, public and private. No whining.

2. No religious exemptions. There are no religious principles that authorize adherents to infect and kill other people. Madness.

3. For those relatively few people who have medical issues that preclude vaccinations, companies ought try to accommodate them via remote work. Obviously only some occupations are susceptible to this solution. An employee who works on a loading dock is simply going to have to find another way of making a living. The ADA did not contemplate requiring changes in the workplace that threatened the lives and safety of co-workers. This is war.

How to accomplish this? It's up to businesses. Vaccination should be an absolute requirement. (Did you know that Walmart, the largest employer in the United States, with annual profits of hundreds of millions of dollars, has a policy requiring management to be inoculated but no such requirement for the 1.5 million workers who face the public daily?) The government can help, but only business can get this job done. They need to put on their big boy pants and do what’s right for the country that is the safest and wealthiest in the world. They owe us that much.

By the way, have you noticed that the “Freedom of Choice” states with the lowest vax rates (and highest disease rates) are universally ANTI Freedom of Choice when it comes to a woman’s reproductive Freedom of Choice?

A bientot.

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