We know what works against Covid-19, but the virulent Delta variant is raging out of control this summer, and health experts are worried about what will happen when winter flu season arrives.
From the start of the pandemic, America has also been afflicted by raging stupidity driven by ignorance, misinformation, conspiracy theories, and stubbornness. The “land of the free” has become the land of “I’ll do what I want, and screw you.”
That attitude, coupled with the Delta surge now filling up hospital wards with desperately sick children and young people, has revived the debate over mandates. Some health experts believe mandates are inevitable. Scientific American jumped into the fray with an August 2021 article headlined, “Vaccine Mandates Are Lawful, Effective and Based on Rock-Solid Science.” (Read it here.)
A retired public policy professor from Virginia would go further. He says,
“The answer may be to treat refusal to vaccinate the same way we treat drunk driving. Drunk driving is not simply a personal choice. It’s also a threat to the health and safety of others and must be penalized.”
(Read story here.) The logic behind his argument is that unvaccinated people put others at risk. This gains potency as the number of “breakthrough” cases (i.e., vaccinated people getting infected) goes up. The vaccines aren’t 100% effective, no vaccine is, their principal value lies in the fact they’re highly effective at preventing serious illness and death. They’re significantly, but less, effective at preventing infection; vaccinated people get infected and spread the virus to others.
The Delta variant is bringing this issue to the forefront because it has over 1,200x the viral load of the original variant, making it much more transmissible. In simple terms, people infected with Delta — which now accounts for nearly 100% of U.S. infections — put far more virus-laden aerosols into the air simply by breathing. That makes Delta much more contagious, and masking more critical than ever. In this respect, it seems to make no difference whether people are vaccinated or unvaccinated. In this context, the purpose of vaccinating more people is to reduce infections, and therefore the virus’s ability to jump from person to person.
But we’re not at the point yet of officers pulling people over and asking to see their vaccine cards. (These can be faked, but so can driver’s licenses; cops run licenses against databases, and vaccine cards also can be run against databases.) That smacks of a police state, and there’s also a general reluctance to physically force people to inject a foreign substance into their bodies. That’s qualitatively different from requiring people to wear masks and socially distance.
What’s evolving, instead, is a kind of de facto partial quarantine. Vaccine refusers aren’t banned from society, but many big employers aren’t letting them into workplaces, they won’t be able to serve in the military, they face exclusion from sports and music venues, restaurants, and other businesses, and they may not be able to board airplanes and cruise ships.
They don’t like it; this blog has said, “tough, go suck eggs, the rest of us have rights too.” (Read that posting here.)
Certainly, the time has come to ignore their anger over restrictions, and turn a deaf ear to their temper tantrums. But I’m not persuaded it’s time to force vaccinations on people who adamantly don’t want them. (Note: I have no medical expertise. I’m a lawyer, oriented to due process, personal rights, and fair play.) As I understand the science, it’s not necessary if enough of us get voluntarily vaccinated.
However, I do support separating the unvaccinated from the vaccinated insofar as practicable, in the same sense of supporting the police removing drunk drivers from public roads. They’re a danger to us. And they have no right to mingle with us.
The unvaccinated are, in fact, asserting such a “right,” and more: They want a “right” to hide the fact they’re unvaccinated, and they’re also asserting a “right” to send their unmasked children into classrooms with masked children. These aren’t rights; they’re a form of assault.
Treat vaccine refusal like drunk driving? I don’t think we’re there yet, in terms of being willing to do that. But practically speaking, there’s not much difference between anti-vaxxers and drunk drivers; and as the pandemic drags on, affecting all of us, it may come to that if there’s no other way to bring the virus under control.
That’s not my opinion of what we should do, but rather a prediction of what may come to pass.