Kay Ivey, the Republican governor of Alabama, had an epiphany the other day. Lamenting the spike in Covid cases in her rabidly red state, just when it seemed like the pandemic was under control, she declared: “It’s time to start blaming the unvaccinated folks, not the regular folks. It’s the unvaccinated folks that are letting us down.”
Gee, ya think?
Let me reframe my question:
Are you as fed up as I am?
Enough, already, with these people who think that “freedom” gives them the right to spread the virus and allow that it to mutate even more. Enough, already, with these people who are too clueless about science, or too wedded to viral lies, or simply too MAGA-addled to fathom that in these unique times, public health outweighs private selfishness.
I’m fed up with their ideological blinders. (Politico reports: “Many people…are turning down Covid-19 vaccines because they are angry that President Donald Trump lost the election and sick of Democrats in Washington thinking they know what’s best.”) Most especially, I’m fed up with their snowflake sensibility, their hurt feelings about how the pro-vaxxers are supposedly ganging up on them; as one non-vaxxed Covid sufferer whined on TV the other day from his hospital bed, the vaccine message is being “shoved down my throat.”
What’s to be done about these people? Clearly, cajoling them to protect themselves and others in order to curb the pandemic isn’t working. Clearly, trying to reason with them – using stuff like, oh, stats and logic – is a waste of time, because they think that appealing to the better angels of their nature is akin to shoving something down their throats.
Enough with the carrots. Now it’s time for the stick.
You want to travel by plane, train, or bus? Prove that you’re vaccinated. Otherwise, stay the fug home.
You want to go to a concert or a movie or a play or a ballgame without being vaccinated? Too bad, stay the fug home.
Your favorite restaurant won’t let you in because you have no proof of vaccination? Go home and make hamburger helper.
In other words, just stay the hell away from those of us in the common-sense majority (68 percent of adults have received at least one dose), because we don’t want to suffer the consequences of your reckless stupidity.
Better yet, the un-vaxxed should the shots and partake in daily life with the rest of us. That seems to be what’s happening in France. President Macron recently announced that, beginning Aug. 1, anyone who wants to enter a cafe, restaurant, theater, shopping mall, or long-distance train must show proof of vaccination, or, at minimum, proof of a negative Covid test. The public response to that announcement? More than three million citizens signed up for shots in the first five days.
Obviously, the stick approach wouldn’t be easy to implement here. Many freedumb-loving Americans couldn’t care less what happens in faraway effete France. And President Biden remains reluctant to impose any federal mandates on, for instance, interstate travel. And private retail businesses can’t be required to turn away the un-vaxxed.
On the other hand, retail businesses are free to impose whatever rules they choose in order to safeguard the health of customers and staff; the federal government can credibly argue that a vaccination mandate for interstate travel is more imperative for public safety than the TSA screenings we’re all required to endure; and states are free to impose vaccination mandates – as decreed in 1905 by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that Massachusetts had the right to require shots against smallpox. The key passage worth remembering: “The rights of the individual may at times, under the pressure of great dangers, be subjected to such restraint to be enforced by reasonable regulations as the safety of the general public may demand.”
I don’t enjoy feeling so ticked off, but I have plenty of company. Steve Schmidt, the former Republican strategist, is also mad as hell and can’t take it anymore. From his new Twitter thread: “(The anti-vaxxers) scream about rights and repeat nonsense…with comprehension levels similar to a parrot. We will never hear an utterance, from any of them, around concepts like responsibility and obligation as they invoke ‘rights’ which don’t exist…There is no right to go to concerts, football and basketball games. There is no right to fly…Those people should accept the consequences of their actions, and the consequences mean they are the ones in constant quarantine. They can stay home, while the world opens for the rest of us. Their world can shrink to the footprints of their living spaces…Enough is enough with the bullshit and insanity.”
Indeed, Schmidt has faith in the power of coercion: “Faced with the choice between a dramatically shrunken world and a safe and effective vaccine, it will be amazing to witness how many people leave the stupid at the clinic door.”
But we’ll never know as long as we keep saying “pretty please.”
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Did you notice my use of “fug” in place of the f-word? That’s an homage to Norman Mailer. His first novel, The Naked and the Dead, was festooned with the f-word, but this was 1948 and his publisher suggested that “fug” would be an acceptable alternative. Years later, a rock group – The Fugs – did its own homage.