On paper, at least, Chicago could lose half its police, and Seattle over 300 cops, within a few days. Spokane is expected to fire 24 of its 318 firefighters on Monday, October 18, the deadline for enforcing Washington Gov. Inslee’s vaccine mandate applicable to public employees.
And the state’s highest-profile vaccine refusenik, WSU football coach Nick Rolovich, is waiting to learn his exemption status — and his fate.
It remains to be seen whether employers will actually fire employees refusing to get vaccinated. That likely will depend on the employer.
On October 13, Business Insider reported that United Airlines will fire 232 of its 67,000 U.S. workers for not complying (story here), although a federal judge that day ordered the airline not to put employees seeking exemptions on unpaid leave pending resolution of a lawsuit (story here). It’s unclear whether that affects any of the 232 employees facing termination.
The resistance is inexplicable. Why would someone give up their job and career to avoid taking a life-saving vaccine? Of 361 active-duty law enforcement deaths so far this year, 231 or nearly two-thirds are from Covid-19. Vaccinations against other diseases are routine. I don’t get it.
Most Americans wanted to be vaccinated, and quickly, so the early strategy was to produce large numbers of doses and prioritize vaccinating those at greatest risk from the virus. This took several months. Then general distribution, along with a proliferation of vaccine sites, got shots to those waiting in line. Part of the government’s effort to encourage vaccinations was paying for them with public money so they’d be free to the recipients.
That left the holdouts, and President Biden decided the stakes were high enough to adopt a coercive strategy focused on making vaccination a workplace safety rule, which effectively made employment dependent on getting vaccinated for the bulk of the U.S. labor force, including nearly all public-sector jobs. Human nature being what it is, compulsion never sits well, but only brings out the stubbornness in people.
There are political benefits for Biden from getting more people vaccinated. His future political prospects may ride on taming the pandemic and not letting it drag down the economy. Trump lost his re-election bid largely because Covid-19 was still raging out of control and hurting the economy. But you’d have to be pretty cynical or partisan to believe that Biden’s doing it for his own political advantage, and not because people are dying, health care workers are burned out, and hospitals are so overwhelmed with Covid-19 cases that heart attack victims and others needing urgent care in Loveland (or wherever they are situated) can’t get it.
And that’s the point. We all live in this country together, we’re in the pandemic together, and to defeat the virus we need to pull together. This is not the time for rugged individualism. Mask and vaccine resistance helps keep the pandemic going. It also endangers people the resisters come in contact with, and as mentioned above, creates drains and overloads on our health care system. A growing number of vaccinated Americans see the resisters as selfish, and that’s not inaccurate. There’s just a strong sense, to people with any sense, that the resisters are just plain wrong.
There are times when your individuals preferences, wants, and desires have to take a back seat. There’s such a thing as not only asking for, but requiring, sacrifice. Military conscription and wartime rationing are examples. Our country is at war against an invading virus that has killed more of us than all our wars since 1865 put together. If that isn’t enough reason to require a national effort, then nothing is. And what about the kids left without parents?
Voluntary compliance is always preferable to forced compliance or sanctions for non-compliance. People kicked out of jobs for not getting vaccinated won’t be contributing to our collective well-being. They won’t be driving trucks, manning warehouses, moving goods, processing foodstuffs, or ringing up sales. Supporting them by means other than productive work will be a drag on the economy. It’ll make worse an already acute worker shortage. It’s not good for anybody.
Maybe, as a society, we won’t have the collective will to enforce the vaccine mandates. They may turn out to be a failed strategy. But demanding “freedom” in a situation that requires cooperation seems a poor excuse for making vaccine mandates seem necessary in the first place.
It’s really time for the holdouts to live up to their obligations as citizens and members of their communities by cooperating with something the community urgently needs. And they may be saving their own lives, or their loved ones’ lives, by doing so.
Photo: State employees demonstrate against state vaccine mandate in Olympia, Washington
