The fallacy that’s driving #TeamVirus

One of the amazing things about the idiotic controversies surrounding lockdowns, masks, vaccines, and practically every other aspect of the pandemic is the degree to which the extreme right fails to understand the purpose of public health measures.

Let me be blunt: There is a difference between libertarianism and sociopathy. When people claim that compulsory lockdowns, mask-wearing, and so forth violate their individual rights, they are operating out of the erroneous and self-centered assumption that their purpose is to protect them. They point out that they’re capable of making their own decisions about the risks they take with their health. And if that were the issue, they would be right.

But it’s not the issue. Admittedly, the CDC, the WHO, and the public health establishment generally have failed miserably to communicate the fact that while masks, for example, do seem to provide protection for their wearers from contracting COVID-19 (while the pores are big enough to allow the virus to pass through, they are not big enough to let the droplets through which the virus is spread get through, and people who wore masks in public throughout the pandemic seem to have contracted the virus half as often as those who never wore them) that has never been their primary purpose. Remember back in the beginning of the pandemic, before we knew as much about the transmission of the virus as we know now and masks were not recommended by Dr. Fauci and others except for people who actually had been exposed to the virus? The purpose of masks is not primarily to protect their wearers. It’s to protect others with whom the wearers come into contact.

Nobody- literally nobody– knows for certain that they are not carriers of the virus, spreading it everywhere they go. A huge percentage of infectious carriers- perhaps most– are asymptomatic and don’t realize that they have the virus! And that is why we’ve all been encouraged to wear masks- not for our protection, but for the protection of others! There has never been any doubt that even paper masks are effective in preventing people from spreading the virus. And that is, and always has been, the point!

Lockdowns weren’t mainly intended to protect people from being exposed to the virus. Again, if they were, those who have opposed them on the grounds that they are capable of deciding what risks to take with their own health and that their individual rights were being violated by being forced to stay home would have a point. But they weren’t. Again, the purpose of lockdowns was primarily to prevent carriers- including carriers who might well not even know that they were carriers- from mixing with people who didn’t have the virus and giving it to them!

The rate at which people are getting vaccinated against COVID is lagging. There is worrisome evidence that it may be reaching its ceiling. The idea that both the government and private entities have both the right and the responsibility to require vaccinations against infectious diseases as a condition of participating in activities through which various viruses might be spread (including going to school and serving in the military) is both well-established and simple common sense. In a pandemic, there is an additional factor in play.

Obviously, there are a small number of people who for one reason or another- sometimes medical, sometimes logistical- cannot be vaccinated. They clearly are not to blame for circumstances beyond their control. But herd immunity- the percentage of the population that is immune to a virus at which the virus ceases to spread from person to person for lack of available new hosts- is somewhere between 70% and 90%. Nobody knows exactly where the critical percentage falls with COVID. But the virus will continue to spread until the percentage of the population who as either been vaccinated or has had COVID and recovered from it reaches that point.

A refusal to be vaccinated, again, is not a matter of individual freedom. It affects all of us, not just the person who isn’t vaccinated. It prevents us from reaching herd immunity and keeps the pandemic going. And the longer the virus is circulating, the more it will mutate. The available vaccines continue to be effective against the rapidly-spreading Delta variant of COVID, but to a lesser degree. The Pfizer vaccine, for example, is 90% effective in preventing people from becoming infected by other strains. But against the Delta variant, its effectiveness drops to 65%. At this point, the chances of a vaccinated person coming down with specifically the Delta variant remain small. But the longer it’s circulating, the greater the chances will be. Worse, the longer the virus continues to spread, the more it will mutate. It’s entirely possible that new variants may arise against which the vaccines are less effective.

The percentage of the population that has been vaccinated varies from state to state. States such as Missouri or Mississippi, for example, in which relatively low percentages of the population have been vaccinated, are breeding grounds for new variants. It’s not only the populations of those states who are endangered. It’s all of us. If a new variant that is resistant to the vaccine develops, say, in Missouri, it’s only a matter of time before it spreads to the states where the majority of people have been vaccinated. There is no question of individual freedom involved here. People who decline to be vaccinated are putting all of us in danger.

The situation is complicated, obviously, by people like former President Trump, Tucker Carlson, and the far right media, who continue to spread misinformation about the virus, the vaccines, and the danger. #TeamVirus is large and influential. Ignorance ceases to be a private concern when it endangers others. And the resistence to vaccination is driven by ignorance and misinformation, just as resistance to lockdowns and mask-wearing have been.

Freedom is never unlimited. To paraphrase a famous statement by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, freedom of speech does not protect someone who falsely shouts “Fire!” in a crowded theater. John B. Finch once described a hypothetical conversation that might well have been about face masks or the refusal to be vaccinated:

“Is not this a free country?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Have not I a right to swing my arm?”

“Yes, but your right to swing your arm leaves off where my right not to have my nose struck begins.”

The right to exercise one’s personal freedom when one’s own safety is one thing. But there is no right to endanger other people.

There is no right to spread a deadly virus.

There has never been a question of prudent public health measures being a violation of individual rights simply because they restrict or mandate behavior that otherwise might be a matter of individual choice. The argument to that effect is simply silly. This is not a matter of freedom. For most of us, it’s a matter of personal responsibility.

It’s a matter of obligation. Nobody is saying that anyone should be forced to be vaccinated. But the government would be derelict in its responsibilities if it didn’t protect the rest of us by restricting the activites of those who refuse to be. And resistance to that premise isn’t libertarianism. It’s sociopathy.

#TeamVirus can believe what it wants to believe. But facts are facts, lies are lies, and #TeamHumanity has the right to protect itself from those who confuse individual liberty with selfish indifference to the consequences of their behavior for the rest of us.