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A dear friend may have died because of people not willing to take COVID seriously [1]
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Date: 2022-12-13
We got a rather jarring reminder that COVID is still with us when the CDC recommended masking up if you’re in an area with high community spread.
According to the latest weekly report, the list of areas with high community spread includes New York City, Long Island, Los Angeles, and Phoenix, among other places. But the high-risk, the immunocompromised, and those who can’t (rather than won’t) be vaccinated knew long before that announcement that they were entering the fourth year of this pandemic.
While scrolling through the comments on my earlier diary, I was stunned by the number of people who have been shut in for the better part of the last three years. I look at those comments and think about people who refuse to get vaccinated and I want to scream. There are people who are no longer to live their lives all because those around them aren’t willing to get over themselves and get vaccinated. I suspect that was at least part of Kathleen’s calculus when she ultimately decided to let things take their course. Either chemo or a transplant would have likely left her shut in for years because, to put it in the most diplomatic terms I can use, too many people around her were too damn selfish.
I know of a few people who have refused to get vaccinated even after having bouts with COVID themselves. Do they realize that they’re not just endangering themselves, but people like Kathleen who are at high risk for breaking bad if they catch COVID? People like them, and others, were why when I heard that Kathleen had died, I wanted to scream.
Situations like this are why I, albeit reluctantly, believed that we should have implemented vaccine mandates. As drastic as this might have been, a vaccine mandate would have been far and away the least invasive way to protect against COVID. That’s not just me saying it. Alan Dershowitz was of a similar view when he sat down with Larry King in June 2020.
Dershowitz pointed out that government would be well within its rights to mandate an effective vaccine to protect against a “Typhoid Mary” infecting us. He cited a 1905 Supreme Court case, Jacobson v. Massachusetts, which upheld states’ authority to mandate vaccines.
You might think that the Roberts Court would be inclined to overturn that precedent, given how tilted it is to the right. But in August 2021, Justice Amy Coney Barrett turned down an emergency appeal from Indiana University students seeking an exemption from a vaccine mandate. Tellingly, Barrett denied the appeal without even asking Indiana officials for comment or referring it to her colleagues for further discussion—as SCOTUSBlog put it, a sign “that she and the other justices did not regard it as a particularly close case.” And this is coming from a woman who openly declared she was Antonin Scalia in a skirt.
It’s very possible that Kathleen was a brutal example of why COVID is not just about the deaths. It’s as much, if not more, about the debilitating complications that can be brought on when this virus sends your immune system into overdrive. The fact that her family even had to ask that question is yet more proof that we are dealing with a moral failing.
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