As the population returns to its new normal, the issue of getting vaccinated will come more into focus.
Eventually governments, businesses, universities, social gathering spots and churches will be forced to decide whether they will mandate vaccinations. If you happened to read Jack Horner’s Science column last week, it was eye-opening.
He wrote about why we should care about other countries getting vaccinated. The short answer had two prongs.
First, a lot of the retail items we buy are manufactured in foreign countries. Our Walmart addiction has forced labor out of the country on a massive scale. So we need the people to be healthy who are collecting the raw materials and parts, manufacturing, packaging and shipping the products we buy.
Reading about the participants in the International Folk Art Market, it’s clear many of the artists are coming from countries with no vaccines. Not low vaccine availability, none.
We are all so fortunate to live in a country with the knowledge, means, skills and money to produce and distribute a life-saving vaccine on such a scale. Yet we have those in our population who won’t cease the golden opportunity, which a vast majority of the world’s population would gratefully grab with both hands.
Horner listed some countries and the necessary goods we get from them. A sampling: India provides 35 percent of our generic pharmaceutical drugs, and we love our drugs in the United States. Americans will take a pill for darn near anything. India’s population is 10 percent fully vaccinated. Taiwan produces 60 percent of our computer chips and 4 percent of that country is vaccinated. The full list is long and painfully sad.
Our federal government should be sending vaccines and personnel to distribute it to every corner of the earth.
The other problem with the 30 percent of the United States stubbornly declining the vaccine is both scientific and medical. We could callously state it’s their choice to not get vaccinated and they will be the part of the population that becomes sick and many will die. Math says as the unvaccinated die, the vaccinated will be a larger part of the population. So math and Darwin’s “survival of the fittest,” says eventually the whole population will be vaccinated simply by attrition.
However, the virus doesn’t agree. As the unvaccinated become sick, they do two things. First they pass the virus on to other unvaccinated people. Again remember the burden on hospitals and refrigerated trucks in parking lots for body storage.
Second the virus mutates in the host and becomes something different in the next body it sickens. Case in point, the current Delta variant sweeping through every state.
Left unchecked, eventually these mutated strains will become something our current vaccines don’t combat, or combat at a much lower efficacy rate. So eventually the vaccinated could become infected by a new strain and we are back where we were this past winter: lockdowns, closures, distancing, masks, distance learning and isolation.
Most of the anti-vaxxers are the same ones whining the loudest about the above listed restrictions.
We know we’ll not change the minds of anti-vaxxers. They’re not interested in facts, only what they read on their Twitter feed and favorite blogs.
Statistics show that 99.5 percent of deaths currently occurring are among those who have chosen to not be vaccinated.
However, the population smart enough to go with facts and do the right thing will eventually come full circle and pay the price for those who refuse to participate in the answer to COVID-19.
Forced vaccinations sounds autocratic and wrong but unfortunately, just as governments at all levels enforced restrictions to protect us from our own stupid behaviors, it may well become necessary for all of the institutions we frequent to enforce their own rules regarding vaccinations, again just to save some folks from themselves.
Darwin would probably be bothered.