If the ultraTrumpian governor of Alabama can speak the truth about our country’s surrender to a virus, what is holding the rest of us back?
"It's time to start blaming the unvaccinated folks, not the vaccinated folks.”
I would put it slightly differently. Blaming the unvaccinated is easy. It’s time to start DEALING with the them.
Us “vaccinated folks” spent a year and a half doing the thing. We turned our lives upside down, and we didn’t complain about it or claim that we were morally superior. We isolated ourselves from family and friends. We figured out how to work from home. We educated our children about what was happening, helped them through months of no playmates, and figured out how to help them learn in front of the computer. We were robbed of any and all gatherings—the fabric of our lives and society itself. No funerals. No weddings. No proms or graduation ceremonies. We did everything we could to keep our loved ones, our friends, and our fellow citizens safe. We followed the advice of medical, scientific, and public-health experts. We waited patiently for our turn to get vaccinated and did so as soon as we could. We watched as the number of new infections and deaths dropped as the vaccination rates rose this spring. We rejoiced as our states and towns began to open up early this summer. We had joyful reunions with our families and friends who had likewise sacrificed and done the right thing. Most thrilling of all, we allowed ourselves to imagine a time this fall when the country would have passed the 70% vaccination threshold, the economy would be growing again, bars and restaurants and music venues would have reopened, our children would be back at school with their friends and teachers, and we would be able to gather with our fellow human beings again.
We were fooling ourselves.
Today anyone in the United States can be vaccinated whenever they want to be, but only 49% of Americans are fully vaccinated. Most experts believe that our country won’t be on the road to eradicating the coronavirus until 70% of us are vaccinated. The Delta variant is driving a wave of new infections and deaths. Cities like Los Angeles are re-masking again. Just this week in my own Facebook circle, eight people who were vaccinated have tested positive for the virus. This is insanity.
Unvaccinated Americans are willingly transforming parts of our country into science-free zones in which people will once again die needlessly and in which the coronavirus is provided with an unprotected population it can use to mutate into one viral variant after another, each more deadly than the last, until it finally creates one that is immune to all vaccines and we have to start over.
The governor of Mississippi is right. We have only ourselves to blame. Our scientists developed a remarkably safe and effective vaccine--in record time. Our government handed it us. So far, half of us have willfully rejected an opportunity to end a plague that has killed over 600,000 of our fellow Americans and to get back to our normal lives.
It’s hard enough to try to process this colossal American failure, but when you peel back the layers of the anti-vaxxer onion, it’s impossible not to wonder if these are the end times for the America that valued education, attracted scientists from all over the world, and worked collectively to eradicate earlier pandemics and diseases. If you look at the beliefs that the anti-vaxxers use to explain their inaction, none are legitimate, regardless of how passionately they are held.
Some anti-vaxxers are physical cowards—people who are afraid to have a needle pierce their skin.
Some anti-vaxxers are intellectually or socially isolated people who don’t even understand that there is a pandemic.
Some anti-vaxxers are “fuck science” people. These are the folks who are so intellectually insecure that their knee-jerk reaction to science is to be suspicious of it or reject it out of hand. Ignorant of the role science has played in the development of all the things they take for granted in their lives, science has, for them, become the enemy, a symbol for all the preachy know-it-alls who threaten and irritate them. These folks will never be convinced by an argument grounded in science. They take pride in getting their marching orders not from peer-reviewed science but from completely bogus YouTube videos made by others like them.
Some anti-vaxxers are otherwise informed citizens who are a deluded fringe element of the laudable, science-driven mass movement that began in the 1960s that exposed the toxicity of American life—the poisons in our food, in our air, in our dirt, in our solvents and weed killers, and in our water, and how those toxins find their way into the bodies of ourselves and our children. The anti-vaxxers who have spun out of this movement ignore data showing that vaccines are safe and effective for the general population and are fearful of all vaccines because of the ingredients that go into them and because some individuals experience side effects from any vaccines. These are the lifestyle ecologists who can’t see the forest for the trees—the folks who used to be driven by science but who now insist that vaccines cause autism, despite the mountain of scientific evidence to the contrary.
Some anti-vaxxers believe that the government is not only the problem, but an active force for evil from which we must be saved, either through the efforts of a strongman savior or via a mass insurrection. These are the folks who believe that the vaccine is a vehicle for the implantation of microchips, that the coronavirus is a weapon developed and used against us by the Chinese, and that vaccination is just the first step in a master plan by the government to create a population of willing sheep. (Not all of these people are insane conspiracy theorists. Most of us may not know about the long history of African Americans being used for medical experiments by our government, but the African American community knows about it, and some refer to it when they explain their resistance to vaccination.)
Some anti-vaxxers excuse their opposition on religious grounds. This is the truly frightening tribe that thinks of God as the sole owner of life and death decisions and not as a being who gave us brains so that we could take some of that load off of His shoulders.
Some anti-vaxxers are the Trumpers who hate everything that involves a Democrat. Everything, These are the folks who revere Trump for developing a vaccine so quickly (as if he did that work himself) but who refuse to take it now that a Democrat is in the White House.
These, then, are the people who stand between us and a normal life and a better economy. What are we going to do about these them?
“Nothing” is not acceptable. “Reason with them” ignores the reality of who these people are. “Force them” is a solution our government has never attempted, one that wouldn’t work, and one that would clearly lead to violence. And we don’t need every American vaccinated—just another twenty percent of us.
The answer lies in a reality that surfaced recently in focus groups run this month by right-wing political pollster Frank Luntz. Most of the unvaccinated people in this country identify as Republicans, and Luntz has been helping the Biden administration understand how Republicans feel about the vaccine. Luntz learned that what once was Republican hesitancy about vaccination has hardened into opposition, and that Republicans are now beyond persuasion. But those same Republican voters told Luntz that, while they were adamantly opposed to the vaccine, they would get vaccinated if that was the only way they could fly on an airplane, attend school, or go to a sporting event or a concert.
There’s your solution, America. It’s a hell of a lot simpler than developing a vaccine or isolating at home for fifteen months. You don’t want to be vaccinated? Fine, you don’t have to. That’s your right. You can have your death cult. But by refusing to do so you forfeit public travel, education, and entertainment. We would get that additional twenty percent vaccinated within a month if we took these steps.
We’re Americans. Are we really going to sacrifice our health, our society, our money, and our country to these anti-vaxx motherfuckers? Get loud and clear about how you feel about the prospect of the coronavirus getting a new lease on life after all you’ve sacrificed. Petition your government, your schools, and your travel companies to ban these death cultists until the pandemic is over. Enough is enough.