Most adults who refuse to get vaccinated against the coronavirus bear some attitudinal resemblance to the dwarves in The Last Battle of the Narnia series.
Offered a chance at salvation from ruin, the dwarves refuse to accept it because they insist that all authorities, including those who try to offer them hope, are untrustworthy. Literally sitting in paradise, they believe and insist they are in the dark corner of a smelly stable. Offered a magnificent feast, they insist the repast consists of old turnip bits and water from a donkey trough.
“At any rate, there’s no Humbug here,” they say to each other. “We haven’t let anyone take us in. The Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs.”
Aslan, the Lion-Christ, explains to others baffled by the dwarves’ behavior: “They will not let us help them. … Their prison is only in their own minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.”
To be emphatically clear: It’s not that they are evil or even stupid. They are just stubborn. They have been misled by voices of authority so many times that their automatic response is to disbelieve what they are told, to insist they are self-reliant, and to stick up for their tribe and its preferred view of the world, no matter what.
If you listen to many (not all) of today’s vaccine refuseniks, you hear similar arguments. As in: “Fauci lied about masks, so why should we believe him or ‘experts’ now?” Or: “The government shut down our schools even though it turned out that children are unlikely to contract, or be superspreaders of, the virus — so why should we trust the government on vaccines?” They (whoever “they” are) say they’re trying to save me, but I can take care of myself, thank you very much.
The unvaccinated are for the unvaccinated.
One can empathize with them but still insist they’re wrong — which they are.
John Barry, author of The Great Influenza, the Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History and a faculty member at the Tulane University School of Public Health, explained why in an insightful, even-handed July 26 column. The key, he explained, is in how viruses mutate. The vaccines, so far, are efficacious in blocking or lessening the severity of all known current variants. But that doesn’t mean it will block all new variants.
The current spike in COVID-19 cases is overwhelmingly occurring among the unvaccinated. Result: The disease spreads among the unvaccinated, increasing the odds of some new variant emerging that negates the protections of the vaccine. So unvaccinated people are not just putting themselves at greater risk of illness, and they are not just endangering those to whom they might pass the coronavirus, but they also increase the dangers to those already vaccinated because they are making their bodies available as loci for the virus to mutate in this manner.
For those of libertarian leanings who don’t want government mandates, this obstinacy is thus counterproductive. The single surest way to entice government officials to reinstitute business closures and travel restrictions is to cause a new outbreak resistant to current vaccines. That’s exactly what the unvaccinated may be doing, to the detriment of both the health and the freedom of themselves and everyone else.
“The virus remains the boss,” Barry wrote. “COVID-19 may still surprise us, and if it does, at this still middle-aged stage of the pandemic, it’s more likely to be an unpleasant surprise.”
The best way to stop an awful surprise is to accept, by free choice, the life-saving grace the vaccine now offers, before it’s too late.
