THE DEVIL MADE ME DO IT!

Apparently, if you say you believe in a god that is opposed to vaccination, or at least opposed to a covid vaccination, then it is okay for you to infect your neighbor.  (The problem is sufficiently prevalent that it has come to the attention of the Pope, and he has instructed priests to refuse to give parishioners a letter or certificate they can use to avoid covid vaccination.)

 How did we get to this place? We got here because timorous business leaders and cowardly political leaders have established vaccination mandates that exclude those with religious excuses.

Is it unreasonable to ask what a person’s religious beliefs have to do with the likelihood of disease transmission, whether the victims, are believers or non-believers?

We now know that, i) 90% of covid hospital (or morgue) patients are not immunized, and ii) non-immunized persons are the cause of increased infection and death rates, and iii) immunized persons run the risk of “breakthrough” infections that, while unlikely to result in hospitalization or death, may result in milder forms of the disease, and even may result in ”Long Covid.” 

So the question is, absent proof that being a believer in an anti-vax religious movement makes it impossible to transmit disease, why is a person’s religious belief even relevant to the issue of vaccination? 

And unvaccinated people, god-fearing or not, will, for sure, transmit covid. There is a current report from the CDC of a Marin County, California unvaccinated teacher transmitting the disease to 12 students in her class of kids too young to be vaccinated. The kids, in turn, transmitted the disease to a dozen parents and friends, many of whom were vaccinated. 

What school principal allowed an unvaccinated teacher into a classroom? Did the school have a policy requiring teachers to be vaccinated? If the school did have such a policy, and the teacher had an exemption because of her religious beliefs, would the kids who were infected have avoided their illness?  Would they have avoided taking the virus home with them and enlarging the pool of victims? 

Is there a religious exemption for a drunk driver who argues he should not be held criminally responsible for vehicular homicide because his intoxication was caused by drinking sacramental wine at a religious service? 

If my questions seem foolish, consider this: there is now pending in the Eleventh Circuit, a case involving a group convicted and sentenced to prison for vandalizing a military base. They argue on appeal they should not be punished because they were acting in accordance with their “sincerely held religious beliefs.”

Or take the case of Dhokar Tsarnaev, the Chechen “freedom fighter,” who with his brother, planted pressure-cooker bombs that killed three people and injured 260 others at a Boston Marathon. While hiding from police, Tsarnaev wrote a note saying he would stop killing Americans when they “stopped killing us.” The Supreme Court has now has on its docket his argument, among others, that he should avoid the death penalty because his older brother had earlier killed three people and that fact put pressure on him to kill Americans. I suggest the “pressure” argument has a lot in common with the religious exemption argument. It basically says, I am not responsible for my conduct outside legal norms if I am influenced by some outside influence or pressure, be it religious, ethnic, fraternal, or whatever.

Is it any wonder that Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos fame, (infamy?) apparently will argue in her forthcoming trial that she defrauded investors, patients, and physicians because of pressure by an abusive business partner? Another defendant’s brief entitled, ‘’The Devil Made Me Do It?”

The FDA final approval of the Pfizer vaccine saw many institutions adopt vaccination requirements for their employees and some even for their customers. Doubtless there are more to come. To my observation, a large number of these mandates had a religious exemption hedge. Ridiculous and self-defeating. 

Between the religious exemption hedgers and the DiSantis morons, we could be fighting this disease for a decade.

A bientot!

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