In a move of moral perversity ignoring the logic of every public health effort ever undertaken, Republicans nationally are pushing legislation granting protection against discrimination to- wait for it- unvaccinated Americans.
Yes, that’s right. Republicans are on record as supporting the granting of special rights to potential carriers of the COVID-19 virus, and effectively adding sociopathy to race, religion, sex, national origin, and sexual orientation as legally protected characteristics meriting special status under civil rights legislation. It continues to become clearer and clearer that the GOP believes that there is a constitutional right for ethically depraved narcissists to selfishly risk spreading a deadly virus among the rest of us.
Well, no. I should retract that. The logic of the general Republican position would not discriminate. It would grant legal protection to all viruses. Logically, it would mean that people who might be infected with smallpox could freely mingle with the rest of us, and their movements could not be consistently restricted. Folks potentially exposed to Ebola could jostle us in the subway, and there wouldn’t be a thing the government could do about it. Ain’t freedom wonderful?
How do people become so preoccupied with their own supposedly unbounded and unlimited “rights” that they fail to see that for a person who might be a carrier of a potentially deadly and highly contagious disease to mix freely with the rest of the population deprives everyone else of their right to remain healthy and alive? I guess that’s what happens once we elect a narcissist president. All of a sudden, a movement arises to make narcissism our national ethos forevermore.
You can’t make this stuff up. It can’t be emphasized strongly enough that this is not a debatable matter about which reasonable people might disagree, any more than Republican efforts to disenfranchise minority voters (well, except for sociopaths and the willfully ignorant, whom they apparently want to make protected categories). This simply nuts. The position that sees lockdowns, masks, and strong incentives to be vaccinated as somehow violations of individual liberty is pure, unadulterated moral and intellectual perversity, and if we let the sociopathy from which it springs prevail (which I’m confident that we won’t), we all deserve the consequences natural selection will inflict upon us.
As well it may. At this very moment, a new flare-up of the Delta variant is occuring in the states with the lowest vaccination rates. What we’re experiencing now is a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” If the consequences were restricted to them, one could argue that they would simply be the result of decisions the newly-infected had made for themselves. But some people are becoming infected because for one practical reason or another they can’t be vaccinated. And as long as Missouri, Mississippi, and the other hotbeds of resistence to vaccination remain, the virus will have a chance to mutate in their midst and produce new variants- variants against which the vaccines may no longer be effective. It is not an exaggeration to say that those who willfully refuse to be vaccinated are responsible for keeping the pandemic going not only in their own midst, but potentially elsewhere. They are putting us in danger of losing a golden opportunity to put COVID-19 behind us. They are not only endangering the lives of those in their midst who cannot be vaccinated. They are potentially also endangering the lives of those of us who have, but who can’t assume that Missouri and Mississippi and the other vaccine-resistent states will not be statewide Petrie dishes, breeding variants of COVID-19 against which the vaccines will be useless.
The rhetoric to the contrary, nobody is advocating compulsory vaccination. But it seems only reasonable to treat vaccination against COVID the same way we’ve historically treated vaccination against smallpox, polio, and other diseases. It’s not simply reasonable that unvaccinated people be prevented from participating in activities through which they might potentially spread the disease to others. “Vaccine passports” stand firmly in the mainstream of the way in which ours and other democratic societies have always dealt with situations like this.
It’s not merely the entire history of Western political theory and of constitutional law that tells us that one’s right to swing one’s fist ends at the point of the next guy’s nose. It’s common sense. But common sense seems to have entirely vanished from a conservative movement increasingly dominated by the fruitcakes these days, and there seems no limit to the absurdities it can unabashedly embrace.
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