CommentsCOMMENTARY - The fact that Americans refuse to get vaccinated as the pandemic rolls into its third year is deeply disturbing.
And yes, it was identified in December of 2019 and probably existed prior to the Wuhan outbreak, which is why it’s called Covid-19, not four months later when the world as we know it shut down.
But we’ve had incredibly effective vaccines for a year and in this wealthiest of all countries to have huge pockets of the unvaccinated contracting the virus and dying despite the best efforts of overworked and often overwhelmed hospitals is a travesty.
That dramas over housing the poor, justifying murderers and repealing the rights women have to their own bodies can take precedent is frankly appalling,
However, the last straw – or should it be straws? – are a Congresswoman tweeting "Every single year more than 600,000 people in the US die from cancer. The country has never once shut down. Not a single school has closed. And every year, over 600,000 people, of all ages and all races will continue to die from cancer.”
And the adoption of “Our bodies, Our lives” by the anti-vaxxers.
That Marjorie Taylor Greene needs to leave the House and be enrolled in remedial education is self-evident. No-one has ever contracted cancer seated in a classroom.
But vaccination rights can never be considered equivalent to abortion rights – because it’s really, REALLY hard to get someone pregnant by coughing on them.
And the purveyors of the assertion that forced abortion and forced vaccination can be compared are far more dangerous to society as a whole.
For decades, America quarantined contagious diseases as a common sense and routine public health precaution – Ebola most recently – and no-one complained. We required all children be vaccinated before allowing our children to go to school.
Yes, people should be able to make decisions about their own bodies but not if they refuse to isolate – completely, from everyone, forever – and become a walking, talking vector of death.
In many ways they are more dangerous than a nuclear explosion – the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima together “only” murdered between 129,000 and 226,000 Japanese. And the economic impact of their choice, both immediate through medical bills and long term through continued disruption to our financial markets, is devastating.
Society has ways to address those who act inappropriately. We lock up our murderers. We confine the disturbed to institutions to protect the rest of us.
There can be no religious exemptions – what religion tells its members go forth and kill and is not condemned?
Yes, there are probably a few people who have valid medical reasons but until everyone else has been inoculated, they should be in isolation, especially with the rise of the more contagious Omicron variant.
The vast majority of the 20,000 Americans who have had significant reactions to the vaccine are not regretting the shot despite debilitating vertigo, fuzzy brains and other symptoms impacting our lives – only that the CDC is not doing more for us and for those with long Covid.
What city can allow its frontline public safety officers to interact with people on a daily basis when those officers refuse to be vaccinated?
How much will the City of Los Angeles have to pay out in lawsuits for allowing unvaccinated police and fire personnel to remain on the job?
(Liz Amsden is an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions. In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today's world.)
