The Antivaxxers Are Ruining It For Everyone

[Celerity]

Something needs to happen, and soon, to save us from the rising tide of idiocrats.

https://thebanter.substack.com/p/the-antivaxxers-are-ruining-it-for



WASHINGTON, DC -- I’m old enough to remember May 2021. It was the month when my second Pfizer vaccination kicked in and it seemed like we were emerging from four years of darkness -- the final year being the darkest. In particular, I was looking forward to returning to the gym, maybe a road trip to the shore for a weekend -- there was a long list of things on my post-COVID to-do list, suffice to say. It turns out, the New Roaring ‘20s ended up lasting about 20 days (give or take) before warning signs began to materialize on the horizon. Like the worst kind of coitus interruptus, it really felt like we were on the verge of escaping the disease. For a moment we tasted freedom, and now it’s being ripped out from under our feet. We were on the verge of being released from prison but at the last minute a gaggle of a-holes framed us for crimes we didn’t commit and now we’re back for another sentence. We’re being held hostage by some of the worst people in the world: chronological adults who are incapable of acting responsibly, mainly because they don’t know how to digest information or to see this as not a personal issue, but as a community one.

They’ll never grasp that getting vaccinated isn’t about them personally, it’s about the community of people around them and, more than anything else, it’s about the urgent process of collectively eradicating the virus from our lives. The antivaxxers are ruining it for everyone, and there’s no sign they’re going to change, not until it’s too late. One of their primary excuses against getting vaccinated, they say, is due to the emergency use authorization to release the vaccines to the public without the usual FDA testing process. As we all know, vaccinologists had been developing the mRNA process for years, so it’s not like the vaccines were devised and manufactured within the span of the pandemic. But what antivaxxers don’t understand is that the hospital treatments specific to COVID were also Link to tweet
" target="_blank">brought to market under emergency use authorizations. In other words, both the COVID vaccines and the COVID hospital treatments arrived without the usual clinical trials process.

So, if a guy refuses to get vaccinated because he stupidly believes the vaccines are unsafe, he’s likely to get COVID, landing him in a hospital where doctors will apply equally “unsafe” treatments to save his life. Only now, he has COVID, too, and he’s taking up a valuable hospital bed. He could’ve been vaccinated in the first place, like a grownup, and avoided all of it, but now he not only has the disease but he’s being treated with medicine that was just as quickly rushed to market. And if he decides to get vaccinated later, it’ll be too late. Duh. Perhaps equally as confused are the members of the kneejerk rodeo clown caucus that continues to proudly tweet in defense of “medical privacy” and “medical freedom.” Madison Cawthorn is the most recent one. Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire just signed a bill protecting medical freedom, aimed at vaccines and masking. Ironic that the anti-choice, anti-women faction is suddenly all about retaining the freedom of medical choice -- a constitutional right to privacy (except for women, trans people, etc).

At some point soon, I’m betting at least one prominent Red Hat will tweet that the Fourth Amendment guarantees a right to privacy. My money’s on Charlie Kirk. (Of course, the Fourth Amendment is the basis for the Supreme Court’s Roe v Wade decision.) Not for nothing but the “freedom” people are making sure the rest of us will have to, once again, curtail our own freedom to stay healthy. States are reporting everything from upticks to large-scale waves of new variant cases due to antivaxxers and COVID shirkers who refuse to do the right thing -- the adult thing. These people are variant factories, pumping out new iterations of the virus around the clock, each one more powerful than the original. And until they’re snapped back to reality, we’ll never be rid of this pandemic, and I’m not feeling particularly hopeful at the moment. Something needs to happen, and soon, to save us from the rising tide of idiocrats. Not only are they killing themselves, but they’re risking the lives of the responsible ones, you and me, by manufacturing variants that can blast right through vaccine immunity. The culture war is quickly turning into germ warfare, and unless Republican leaders get their houses in order, the forthcoming winter is going to be especially chilling.

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