Joseph Sabino Mistick: Vaccines give us choice to prevent more sickness, death
Share this post:
“On the Beach,” the 1959 movie based on Nevil Shute’s novel, is hard to forget if you were a kid when it was released. It’s about a group of people waiting for a deadly radiation cloud to reach them in Australia, the last surviving part of the world, after the outbreak of World War III.
Since the early 1950s, we had been ducking under our school desks during nuclear attack drills, and the movie reinforced the need for that. It added to our sense of unease, a feeling that something bad was coming.
There were reminders of that same feeling on the beach at the Jersey Shore last week. Things seemed almost normal, except for the growing reappearance of the face masks and those reflexive glances when anyone nearby coughed.
Many of us thought covid-19 was behind us when we planned a few days on the beach, but the delta variant changed that. Now, “relative relaxation” is the best you can hope for if you follow the news. There is a sense that something bad is coming — again.
Vaccinations have increased in some critical areas of the country, but there are still those who simply refuse and are now spreading the virus. For the vaccinated, this refusal to help us avoid certain loss and heartache causes a range of emotional responses — between outrage and great sadness.
Some anti-vaxxers claim an unassailable right to do what they want, everyone else be damned. But there is no right, morally or legally, to harm others.
Some refuse the vaccines because their “emergency use authorization” lacks final FDA approval. That’s like refusing help from a strong swimmer when you’re drowning because he has yet to receive his final lifeguard certification.
But the tide is starting to turn against the unvaccinated. As Alabama’s Republican Gov. Kay Ivey recently said, “It’s time to start blaming the unvaccinated folks, not the regular folks. It’s the unvaccinated folks that are letting us down.”
And pushback is beginning to spread. Some public and private employees must now be vaccinated or face frequent testing and isolation in the workplace. And more cities are requiring proof of vaccination at private and public events.
Restaurants and bars are starting to require vaccination proof from customers. And there are calls for the unvaccinated to pay more for health insurance, rather than have the rest of us bear the cost of their decisions.
Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb described the future of the unvaccinated in starker terms. Gottlieb told CBS News that we will eventually achieve herd immunity, but it will come at a high cost to the unvaccinated, “given how transmissible this variant is.”
With the unvaccinated composing 97% of recent hospitalizations, Gottlieb’s point is this: Herd immunity will be reached through a combination of those who are vaccinated and the infected unvaccinated, many of whom will either be hospitalized or die. It is that simple and horrible.
According to Gottlieb, the unvaccinated and vulnerable now have a “choice in terms of how (they) acquire immunity.”
As bad as it is, we are still better off than those people in “On the Beach.” They were helpless as that invisible cloud approached, but we still have a chance. Just get the shot.