Again, I’m just going to share a tweet, and perhaps enlarge upon it a bit:
No. No one is “entitled to stay unvaccinated…” Perhaps legally, but not morally… https://t.co/L12WUTitVi
— Brad Warthen (@BradWarthen) November 4, 2021
I’m just reacting to a headline, of course. The writer of the column is very much taking this guy, whoever he is (and yes, I can see he’s in a football uniform, but that’s all I know), to task. But she is wrong to throw the guy a bone by saying he is entitled to do the first thing.
No, he isn’t. He lives in a society. A society doesn’t work unless we accept, at the minimum, the obligation not to harm the people around us. That’s pretty much minimal. All the other things involved in making a complex modern civilization work — the laws, the system of government, the roads, a monetary system, and so forth — come after that.
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Of course, you might say, “Well, he’s only a danger to other unvaccinated people.”
First, that’s not true. No vaccine is 100 percent effective, although they come pretty close. There are still breakthrough infections. And the more people who are vaccinated, the less likelihood of such breakthroughs occurring.
Second, we should care about the unvaccinated, too. They may be antisocial, and they may be idiots. But the penalty for that certainly should not be death. As long as they’re alive, there’s always hope of redemption. Anyway, people like this guy are not “entitled” to kill other people like them…
What’s the death rate for COVID for healthy world class athletes, vaccinated or not? When he’s back in 10 days, he will have natural immunity that is as good as the vaccine. He didn’t kill anyone.
I think it is still an open question how well natural immunity compares to vaccinated immunity but I’ve heard that some studies suggest natural immunity is shorter lived and much more focused on the very specific strain you had – whereas the vaccine is more protective against more strains and for longer.
You are just focusing on his own personal outcome – how will he be affected – will he die? Why such a single minded point of view?
You say “he didn’t kill anyone”. How on earth do you know? It is entirely possible that the chain of infections he started may have killed someone.
How many people that he may have infected went home to unvaccinated older people or children with underlying conditions? How many people he may have infected gave the virus a platform to mutate into something that no current vaccines may handle? We don’t know yet.
The point is as long as the virus is propagating it has the opportunity to mutate and it could mutate into something worse. Which, even if you are just going to focus selfishly on yourself and think that’s ok because I’ll likely survive, you must acknowledge the larger effects on society of another rampant surge like the initial (before we had vaccines) – from maxing out the health care system and shutting down the economy – is not good.
It is definitely to all of our advantage as a community for everyone to get vaccinated so that we can suppress the infection before it can mutate again.
I saw a cartoon once where a guy wanted to dig a hole through the bottom of his cabin on a boat. Some said he had the right to because it was his cabin. It sounds like you are defending that guy. But the problem since we are all on the same boat we are all affected by his actions.
Stephen A Smith – a popular host on ESPN ripped him a new one yesterday. It was brutal.
Would not surprise me to see him rightfully suspended. He lied to a lot of people, and of course he’s been giving interviews to media folks, close up, without a face mask for months now.
He’s violated his employer’s policies this entire season.