I have stopped feeling bad about the COVID deaths of the unvaccinated.
Fast death is breaking news.
Fast death is breaking news.
Slow death is just another day in Kentucky.
The messaging from Fox News has evolved and settled into a sweet spot of yes-but-no on vaccinations. Fox news hosts and their guests say they are "not anti-vax." That is the subordinate clause of a primary message of opposition to vaccination. Subordinate clauses give cover. They permit saying with greater intensity that vaccines don't work, that vaccines are rife with dangerous side-effects, that people still get sick sometimes after being vaccinated, that vaccinated people with a breakthrough case are infectious, and that people may need to endure yet more boosters as the virus evolves. Oh, the burden!
Adults in Kentucky are making their own choices. They are consuming the news they select, voting for the leaders they prefer, and are dying because of their beliefs. They don't want a free, lifesaving vaccine. I say, OK.
The Democratic governor of Colorado said aloud both the sentiment and the logical policy response. He said that people have had every opportunity to protect themselves, and if they haven't chosen to do it, it's their "own darn fault." He announced a policy outside the mainstream of Democratic governors. He says that the COVID emergency is over, that vaccinations protect the COVID-concerned from serious illness, so we should end mandates. He is being realistic. People are weary of COVID mandates and now they are backfiring and do more harm than good. It has become a point of pride to resist. Let people choose to be protected from COVID. Or not.
Kentucky's Graves County experienced a tragedy when the tornado tore through the county seat. A live broadcast from Mayfield is playing on CNN as I write this. Fast death is news. A bigger tragedy is that there have been 135 deaths from COVID in Graves County. There has been one death for every 276 people in the county, so far. One in five people in the county have contracted COVID and they are getting 19 new COVID cases a day. Someone dies from COVID about every other day.
Only 42% of the people in Graves County are vaccinated.
COVID is bad in Graves County, but it is not an exception. The county is the rectangular-shaped one, in purple, one county east of the western border, It is an "extreme high risk place," but so is most of Kentucky. Statewide, only 53% of the population is vaccinated.
This is Trump country. An unopposed Republican state senator received 13,461 votes. Trump got 13,206. Trump won Graves County 77%-20%. In May their senator Rand Paul said he would not get vaccinated. This summer and fall he has been prominent as an antagonist of Dr. Anthony Fauci.
The subordinate clause "We aren't anti-vax, but" also permits them to reframe vaccinations as an attack by tyrannical government. It is an outrage that the unvaccinated and unmasked face discrimination and mandates. It is a Gadsden Flag frame, with villains in the form of Biden, Democratic governors, and Dr. Fauci. There are heroes, in the form of resisters, people like Ben Shapiro, a leader in the "Do Not Consent" movement.
Adults in Kentucky are making their own choices. They are consuming the news they select, voting for the leaders they prefer, and are dying because of their beliefs. They don't want a free, lifesaving vaccine. I say, OK.
I am having a change of heart to say it, but I will repeat it: OK. I give up. I don't feel sorry anymore for the tragedy of unvaccinated people suffocating and dying from COVID.
The Democratic governor of Colorado said aloud both the sentiment and the logical policy response. He said that people have had every opportunity to protect themselves, and if they haven't chosen to do it, it's their "own darn fault." He announced a policy outside the mainstream of Democratic governors. He says that the COVID emergency is over, that vaccinations protect the COVID-concerned from serious illness, so we should end mandates. He is being realistic. People are weary of COVID mandates and now they are backfiring and do more harm than good. It has become a point of pride to resist. Let people choose to be protected from COVID. Or not.I would be OK with me if Oregon's Governor Kate Brown said the same thing.
Acceptance. It takes a change of heart from people with a public health, protect-your-neighbor orientation, but I have experienced it. If you are willing to risk dying of COVID, it is OK with me. Suit yourself. I give up feeling sorry for you.
I still feel sorry for tornado deaths, though.
18 comments:
Withholding one's empathy is one thing, but science doesn't allow us the luxury and the virus is perfectly ok with a big unvaccinated crowd to play with.
Until the virus is defeated the risk of a more deadly variant is real and present, perhaps inevitable. And I'm not particularly thrilled about the problem of a health care system so burdened with COVID it can't take care of my heart attack or hip replacement. Government is choosing the path of least resistance with regard to mandates, which I think is a mistake. Impose them, just like any other public health policy.
Wear a freakin' mask, get vaccinated. Whether we like it or not, we are all in this together. The real problem is people are too polite to call out supermarket scofflaws. A little public shaming could save a life.
The problem is that anti-vaxxers are filling our hospitals and depriving others of needed services. My proposal is to give them their own facilities, staffed by health care workers who refuse to get vaccinated, where they can be treated with hydroxychloroquine, bleach, horse de-wormer or whatever quack cure shows up next on social media.
Heads up to commenters.
I welcome your comments. Because of trolls and spammers hoping to seduce people into clicking on malware links, I need to moderate comments. This means I check to see if there are pending comments multiple times a day. Sometimes I do it on the fly, using my I-phone.
The distance from the "publish this comment" and the "delete this comment" is about an eighth of an inch on my i-phone screen. Sometimes my finger slips and it instantly deletes instead of publishes. I can always later delete an unintended "publish" but it takes an awkward workaround to publish one accidentally deleted. I can go to the original notice email I get, copy and paste the content, and then publish it as my own comment. I do that when I can, but not while I am driving on the freeway.
When that happens, comments appear to be deleted then re-appear some various time later.
I am not malevolent here. Nor a censoror. I am doing my best. Please presume good intentions.
Peter Sage
I agree with Mike. Furthermore, the anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers (double trouble) can PAY for their own COVID medical care.
The problem with unvaccinated people is they can turn into vectors and spread the disease cove19.. The very young and immune compromised are then at risk. If Rand Paul wants to make vaccination a political thing then carry it to the extreme - require in-person voters show their vaccination card to cast a ballot.
a bigger tragedy with the tornadoes is the deaths from factory workers forced to work even with the tornado warnings on. And the collateral damage from the poor who were living in unsound structures. I feel more for them than I do the covid victims who die from refusing to be vaccinated.
But I agree that something should be done to stop these non-vaccinated people from clogging up the hospitals. I know of two people in the last couple of weeks who had to wait for a bed for non-covid health issues.
Full disclosure—‘fully” vaccinated here, plus recently boosted. Here’s the—surprise!—but. It’s not specifically COVID-related, except perhaps as the vehicle. There is increasing sentiment, reflected here in the comments too, in favor of dispensing healthcare based not on immediate need but on conformance with personal-care best practices. COVID will not be eradicated, and it’s not practical to base public policy on that nostrum. Spikes rise and fall in blue states or red alike, for various uncontrollable reasons such as variants, seasons, and flattening curves and herd immunity seem like once-cherished fantasies. We’re riding out the transition from pandemic to endemic.
That but again? The logical extension of what is now proposed from COVID fever for public health policy has serious implications beyond COVID. Do we prioritize health care delivery based not on immediate need but on individual patient conformance with personal-health best practices? Are the obese, smokers, drinkers, and those otherwise not optimally compliant with doctor directives, for whatever reason, to be put at the end of the line in certain medical care scenarios, or denied altogether, if a First Class Patient has presented himself instead? The greatest good for the greatest number versus individual “unworthiness” sounds good, but has a bad, even horrific historical track record.
Low D, please lighten up with the slippery slope slop. Nobody’s supporting what you’re describing. They’re supporting letting people who refuse to get vaccinated accept responsibility for their own choices. I agree with them.
The real irony here is what god did. “god” generated a tornado that destroyed churches and killed the innocent. “Our prayers go out to the families” what lunacy is at work here? The COVID god of anger has killed 800,000. But so what, they had underlying conditions like old age,worn out bodies, and bad diets, “pray for the families of these loved ones” God gave life and god taketh away, blessed be the name of god”. Now chose to live by being vaccinated or chose to die by being un vaccinated, bless be the name of a very crazy god that has nothing to do with any of these tragedies. All cooked up by man and his magical thinking. Zeus would have been a more logical god to worship in Kentucky. How about a religious exemption to escape the vax? How about sticking a pin in a voodoo doll? I agree,give them a bottle of oxygen and let them lie in the street Eastern Indian style as I ramble on.
Malcolm--
Concerning COVID-related healthcare and treatment prioritizing, we're already there. With universal or single-payer healthcare the optimal solution for many, the rest is not fanciful. Concerning slippery slopes, venerable Hubert Humphrey said he'd eat his hat if civil rights legislation ever led to race quotas in schools, employment, etc. Today they are bedrock. Indeed it's "racist" not to have them.
People scoffed at venerable conservative battleaxe Phyllis Schlafly when she said that modern gender dogma, ERA and Title IX would lead to unisex bathrooms for kids, elective sexual and gender identities, and thus the very erasure of biological "woman" as such, including in school sports. This month an Ivy league swimmer, on the men's team last year, shattered women's conference records as a prefab woman.
No, L.D., the venerable Mrs. Schlafly was mocked because of her suggestion that housewives should greet their husbands dressed in Saran Wrap when they come home from work. I am not making this up
Mike’s tactic of purposely missing someone’s point and inserting a different point instead cannot lead to productive discussions. Given his persistence in doing this, it may be that Mike does not want there to be productive discussions here. Perhaps his goal is merely to silence people who say things that he disagrees with. Or if that’s not it, maybe he would like to grace us with a clear explanation of what he’s up to with this behavior.
Michael T.:
Actually, it was L.D. who changed the subject from COVID to gender identity. I was just providing a fun fact. Why is that a problem for you?
Requiring employers to shut down during a tornado would be a job killer, according to Chamber of Commerce rhetoric.
Why, tornado-caused deaths create job openings!
I agree.
Let the unvaccinated and unmasked bear the full costs of their "freedom."
I have no sympathy for those who deny climate change, and support climate change deniers, and then perish in a climate-change-related disaster.
Mike,
LD mentioned Schlafly as an illustration of a slippery slope in policy. You responded with an irrelevancy about Saran Wrap, totally missing LD’s point. You do this sort of thing so consistently, “fun fact” or not, that it begins to look like an intentional tactic of conversational sabotage.
I suggest that you intentionally try to engage with what people around here are actually trying to say. That could lead to useful dialog, as opposed to the repartee that your behavior encourages.
We were talking here about COVID and the people who refuse to get vaccinated, get sick and overwhelm our hospitals. All I see from you here is what you accuse me of: an irrelevant personal attack. There's a psychological term for that - you're projecting.
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