Getting Vaccinated is NOT a "Personal Choice"

Having followed the wrongly named "Christian Right" - these individuals are neither truly Christian nor right in their beliefs - I determined early that few groups of people are more selfish and self-centered than evangelicals who thing (i) they can do whatever they want and (ii) to hell with the rest of society which must put up with their selfishness, hatreds and bigorty.  That mindset has now spread to much of the Republican Party base and what's left of the so-called conservative movement. It's all about individuals and their prejudices and, too often, outright stupidity.  The common good of society means nothing to these people and society as a whole must suffer so as to endulge their claimed "religious freedom" or more broadly "freedom" to do whatever they want regardless of the harm done to others. With the Covid-19 pandemic again increasing its grip on America all because far too many - a majority being Republicans - have refused to get vaccinated.  Those becoming infected and dying now - sadly, including children - did not need to undergood this suffering had everyone been responsible and gotten vaccinated at the earliest date possible (the only silver lining is that the brunt of the suffering is falling on the unvaccinated and the GOP base).  Given the consequences, getting vaccinated is NOT a personal choice as laid out in a column in the New York Times,  Here are highlights:

When asked if he had gotten a Covid-19 vaccine, Lamar Jackson, a quarterback for the Baltimore Ravens, declined to answer. “I feel it’s a personal decision,” he said. “I’m just going to keep my feelings to my family and myself.”

Jackson echoed another N.F.L. quarterback, Cam Newton of the New England Patriots, who said much the same a few days earlier. “It’s too personal to discuss,” Newton replied, when asked if he was vaccinated. “I’ll just keep it at that.”

Jackson and Newton are not the only prominent people to say hey, it’s personal when asked about the vaccine. It is a common dodge for public-facing vaccine skeptics or those using vaccine skepticism for their own ends. “I don’t think it’s anybody’s damn business whether I’m vaccinated or not,” Representative Chip Roy, Republican of Texas, told CNN last month. Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, wrote similarly  . . . .

Johnson and all the others are wrong. Wearing a helmet while bike riding, strapping on your seatbelt in a car — these are personal decisions, at least as far as your own injuries are concerned. Vaccination is different. In the context of a deadly and often debilitating contagion, in which the unchecked spread of infection has consequences for the entire society, vaccination is not a personal decision. And inasmuch as the United States has struggled to achieve herd immunity against Covid-19 through vaccination, it is because we refuse to treat the pandemic for what it is: a social problem to solve through collective action.

From the jump, the federal government devolved its response to the pandemic, foisting responsibility onto states and localities, which, in turn, left individual Americans and their communities to navigate conflicting rules and information.

This approach continued with the arrival of vaccines. Until recently, in the face of a vaccination plateau, there was not even a mandate for federal employees to be vaccinated. States and employers have been left to their own devices, and individuals face a patchwork of rules and mandates, depending on where they live and where they work.

Is it any surprise that millions of Americans treat this fundamentally social problem — how do we vaccinate enough people to prevent the spread of a deadly disease — as a personal one? Or that many people have refused to get a shot, citing the privacy of their decision as well as their freedom to do as they choose?

Consider, too, the larger cultural and political context of the United States. We still live in the shadow of the Reagan revolution and its successful attack on America’s traditions of republican solidarity and social responsibility. . . . .If American society has been reshaped in the image of capital, then Americans themselves have been pushed to relate to one another and our institutions as market creatures in search of utility, as opposed to citizens bound together by rights and obligations.

Not because they are lazy, of course, but because this is the society we have built, where individuals are left to carry the burdens of life into the market and hope that they survive. This so-called freedom is ill suited to human flourishing. It is practically maladaptive in the face of a pandemic.

That’s why families and communities were left to fend for themselves in the face of disease, why so many people treat the question of exposure and contagion as a personal choice made privately and why our institutions have made vaccination a choice when it should have been mandated from the start.

Recently, much has been made of the anger and frustration many people feel toward vaccine holdouts. “Vaccinated America Has Had Enough,” declared the former Republican speechwriter David Frum in The Atlantic, writing that “the unvaccinated person himself or herself has decided to inflict a preventable and unjustifiable harm upon family, friends, neighbors, community, country and planet.”

If we want a country that takes solidarity seriously, we will actually have to build one.

The selfishness of the unvaccinated is criminal and one can only hope that more and more businesses - large supermarket chains would be a great start - will bar the unvaccinated and force these horrid, selfish people to do what they should have done months ago.  Meanwhile, people needlessly continue to sicken and die.