Anti-Vaccine Propaganda

People often miss the important difference between having a right to do something and that something being a right or reasonable thing to do. People have a right not to get vaccinated for covid. It’s a free country. Adults refusing vaccination do not create serious risks except for each other. (Those of us who are vaccinated are either immune to the disease or well enough protected that if one of us gets infected, he probably either will never know it or will have only the equivalent of a mild head cold. Kids under twelve are at  very little risk of getting really sick and should become eligible for vaccination in a few months. Also as another aside, I mean to exclude from consideration here people who have already had the disease because I do not know whether or not their acquired immunity is robust and long lasting enough to make vaccination unnecessary.) But what they have decided is wrong. I feel sorry for many of them who have been conned, manipulated, or just plain frightened into making a bad decision. 

I have no sympathy for the politicians and people in mainly the conservative media who are doing the conning, manipulating, and frightening. They have a right to do what they are doing, but what they are doing is wrong – cruelly, foolishly, yahooishly wrong.  Not everything in life should be political. Conservatives are supposed to know that. The decision to or not to be vaccinated should be a reasoned, pragmatic, medical one, not a political statement.  The fact that some authoritarian Democrat governors and other officials have gone too far too gleefully in bossing people around during the epidemic is irrelevant to the question. So are the absurd things coming from the teachers’ unions and the misrepresentations, lies, and panic mongering  coming from people in the traditional media. So are the political biases of Tony Fauci and the character and policies of Biden and Harris. Yet some conservative politicians and media people behave as though they were, and that getting vaccinated is somehow caving in to the Dems and their flacks in the media while going unvaccinated is standing up against them. They also make light of the epidemic itself - treating the new, more contagious version of the disease and even the present increases in serious infections as something of a joke. Some of them spread scare stories about harmful side effects of the vaccines while neglecting to mention how rarely they happen and even repeat silly monster movie stuff such as stories claiming the vaccines alter people’s DNA.

They should know better, and they surely should think about the harm they are doing. For old and already very sick people, getting vaccinated can be a matter of life or death. For the young and healthy vaccination can be both a way to feel and be safer and to help get their lives back to normal. For kids  vaccinating enough teens and adults (and soon the kids themselves) can be a way allow them to ditch the masks  and return to a normal childhood. It is hard to excuse preaching against it to make trivial political points.