With the United States passing the tragic milestone of 750,000 coronavirus deaths this week, it’s long past time for conservative leaders to stop playing rhetorical footsie with anti-vaccination advocates.
Why is the supposedly anti-abortion party so apparently blase about a disease that has caused more deaths in 20 months than this nation has suffered in all its foreign wars combined? And most of these aren’t peaceful-in-their-sleep deaths; they are instead marked by long, slow, excruciating, suffocation-like experiences that some describe as “a thousand bees stinging them inside their chest.”
By now, most of these deaths are preventable. The available vaccines keep roughly two-thirds of all recipients from contracting the disease at all, and they keep more than 95% from being hospitalized for it. Nevertheless, more than 1,100 U.S. residents continue to die daily from COVID-19. This is horrifying. It’s also, in most cases, the result of a poor decision.
Aside from some good, strong statements in favor of vaccinations by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, most Republican officials spend far more time yelling against vaccine mandates than they do urging people to get the inoculation voluntarily.
Yes, of course, most (but not all) of the government coronavirus mandates, especially from the federal government, are misguided and perhaps unconstitutional. But Republican leaders expend outlandish amounts of energy not just opposing unwise mandates, but tacitly feeding fear of the vaccinations themselves.
By late September, 90% of Democrats had been vaccinated compared to just 58% of Republicans. The anti-vaccination conspiracy theories are causing people to get sick and die. And those theories are senseless. The same people who say they “don’t want a foreign substance” in their bodies have no problem taking shots or pills to cure them of another, less contagious and less deadly disease without a second thought. And even if you feel they have a right to take that risk, are they right to put others at risk, either by causing a shortage of hospital beds or increasing the likelihood that those who cannot be inoculated will contract the disease?
Unless you have some specific contraindication, there is no good reason to distrust these vaccines. They are safe, and they work.
Republican officials should be clear in distinguishing between what the government should require and what individual people should freely choose to do for their own safety and for the common good. Freedom, after all, adds greater personal responsibility for avoiding choices that endanger the broader community or diminish its resources to others’ detriment.
Too many conservatives are forgetting that last point. The absence of compulsion is not an excuse for selfishness but a call to a voluntary community. In this case, the choice to get vaccinated serves both self and others.
None of this, by the way, is to say that vaccines should be the only public policy response to COVID-19. Treatments must be made just as readily available as vaccines. We also need to find ways of communicating scientific truths to the public more persuasively.
Europe is now experiencing a new surge of the coronavirus, with what might be a delta sub-variant spreading even faster than before. We in the U.S. are likely to experience another surge this winter, but its consequences can be mitigated, at least somewhat, if leaders stop indulging anti-scientific nonsense.
