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That’s a bad selfie of me, getting my booster shot almost exactly eight months after getting my second Pfizer vaccine.
If you had told me back then that on Oct. 14, 2021, only 56.6% of people in the U.S. would be fully vaccinated, I would have said you had a couple of screws loose.
In January, most Americans were excited about the vaccine, hoping we’d soon see an end to the COVID nightmare.
Then, vaccine appointments were the holy grail. I spent weeks trying to get one for my almost 90-year-old mother until finally hitting the jackpot at Hard Rock Stadium, the home of the Miami Dolphins.
It didn’t matter that it was more than a half hour away, that people were facing incredibly long waits, or that my mom was in no shape to spend hours in a car. We packed medicines, food, drinks, blankets, and pillows and left very early in the morning, hoping to beat the worst of the lines.
We spent four hours and 15 minutes waiting.
My mom, getting her first COVID vaccine in January, 2020.
When a nurse finally prepared to give my mom her shot, I joked and asked her if I didn’t deserve a prize for waiting that long.
Unexpectedly, the nurse responded, “Do you want the vaccine?”
I immediately asked, “Is the pope Catholic?’
So, she gave me the shot. I should mention that I did not jump the line. I was eligible under Florida guidelines. But people like me then faced a Catch-22: We were eligible, but only people over 65 could make appointments.
My mom and I were the first in three generations of my family to receive the vaccine. There are 22 of us, including spouses, and all are now vaccinated. About half of them are conservatives.
This article is a personal piece with a public moral: Individual actions must not contribute to collective harm, and Americans have a civic duty and moral obligation to get vaccinated.
Oh, and it’s the smart thing to do.
How Politics Eclipsed Science and Common Sense
In January 2021, many scientists were predicting we’d reach herd immunity before spring’s end or early summer because they expected at least 70% of adults would be vaccinated.
At that point, the main concern with reaching herd immunity was to overcome vaccine hesitancy in minority communities.
Also, some on the left were worried that then President Trump had pushed so hard for accelerated vaccine development and approval that the drugs would not be safe.
In fact, when the vaccine was seen as something that could help Trump win reelection, he and most of his supporters were among the biggest pro-vaxxers.
As recently as 2019, when the U.S. faced the worst measles outbreak in a generation, Trump health officials and most Republicans in Congress favored mandatory vaccinations.
That followed the GOP tradition of supporting vaccines and even vaccine mandates. Republicans also often ridiculed anti-vaxxers as nutty liberals.
As Arthur Allen wrote in Politico on May 27, 2019, well before COVID, “Not all that long ago, the anti-vax movement was dominated by the granola-eating, pharma-distrusting left. Conservative opposition was centered among people who also tended to see water fluoridation as a communist plot.”
Full disclosure: I have always supported mandatory vaccinations.
In early May of 2019, as measles cases spread, I wrote an editorial arguing for tougher enforcement of vaccine mandates to protect our kids.
Later in 2019, a month before the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan was first reported, I wrote about the measles outbreak in Samoa. It forced the Samoan government to fully shut down. Despite that, measles ended up killing one in 150 of Samoa’s babies.
What happened? Herd immunity in Samoa had disappeared, thanks in part to a successful misinformation campaign by anti-vaxxers led by a liberal, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
In that context, I cited U.S. Supreme Court precedent, arguing that states could compel vaccines and that they “must move and mandate vaccinations with only extremely strict health exceptions, before more people get sick and children die.”
Where Do Americans Stand Now?
Before some on the right call me a socialist for supporting vaccine mandates, they better be prepared to accuse most Americans of being socialist. And that includes many Republicans.
A CBS/YouGov survey earlier this month found that 69% of Americans believe a COVID vaccine should be required to go to a workplace, and 76% support vaccine requirements to get on a plane.
Separately, the survey found that even 64% of Republicans said they prefer to vote for a candidate who encourages vaccines.
So, Who’s Not Getting Vaccinated?
The group that now has the most entrenched opposition to vaccines is no longer in doubt: White conservatives.
Minority hesitancy has diminished, as evidenced by the data in a series of surveys, including one by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Released on Sept. 28, 2021, it found virtual parity among ethnicities, with 71% of White adults, 70% of Black adults, and 73% of Hispanic adults reporting they were vaccinated.
A day later, a Gallup survey generally confirmed the KFF data, finding that 73% of non-Hispanic white adults and 78% of non-Whites were vaccinated.
However, Gallup’s data showed a major party divide. While 92% of Democrats and 68% of independents said they were vaccinated, only 56% of Republicans did.
The Political Divide Needs to End
The political divide on the vaccine has many causes, including Republican opposition to most moves made by the Biden administration.
But the major reason cited by conservative political opponents is that the vaccine somehow infringes upon their freedoms.
That narrative had started taking hold among some libertarian and fringe elements of the right in the years before COVID.
The Politico article mentioned above quotes Dr. David Gorski, a surgical oncologist who is a skeptic of alternative medicine and longtime critic of the anti-vaccine movement. Gorski says that “The more they dig into it being about freedom, the more susceptible they become to the [conspiracy] theories. Appeals to freedom are like the gateway drug to pseudoscience.”
That "gateway drug" and "pseudoscience" have led to serious confusion among way too many on the right.
It has also led to tens of thousands of avoidable deaths.
Your rights end where mine begin. You are not free to infect me with COVID.
The Supreme Court agrees, ruling that freedoms do “not include the right to expose the community or the child to communicable disease.”
Oppose vaccine mandates in the name of freedom if you must, but why not support vaccines themselves? Conflating opposition to one with opposition to the other makes no logical sense.
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