Tom Is Done Listening to the Excuses of the Anti-Vax Crowd

click to enlarge Tom Is Done Listening to the Excuses of the Anti-Vax Crowd
KitzD66/Pixabay

If I read one more whiny op-ed piece about how we should try to understand the people who are keeping the pandemic going by not getting vaccinated, I’m going to scream. It’s been a year since the vaccines became available, a year that could have been one of America’s finest hours, one in which a divided country could have come together to stamp out a deadly virus.

Instead, a vocal and vulgar minority has teamed up with the virus, prolonging our national agony. I don’t want to try to understand why these people are doing what they do. It’s not worth knowing. I just hope they all get sick. I’ve never wished anyone dead in my entire life, but I’ll be honest, when I hear about an unvaccinated person who dies from COVID, the most I can muster is “And…?”

I’m just tired of the COVIDiots. (My bilingual friend, Alfredo, calls them Pandejos.) They want our Pandemic Fatigue to lead to our just shrugging and accepting their behavior as a matter of different strokes. But it’s not and it never will be. This is not a petulant child making a scene in public until you give them some candy. These are grown human beings who think only of themselves and, in doing so, are indirectly causing the deaths of other people.

They need to be held accountable. For one thing, if the virus-denier/anti-vaxxer shows up at a hospital, they should be treated, but first they have to get vaccinated. The people who work there have to be vaccinated; the people who shop there should, too.

Another thing we can do is get rid of the stupid excuses that the anti-vaxxers and the America haters have been using for the past year. 

• It’s against my religion: Well, no, it’s not. It’s not against any established religion on Earth. Now, you might have some crackpot white Reverend Ike on cable TV, screaming, “Just send me your money and God will love you” and spouting lies about the vaccines, but that’s not religion. That’s blasphemy. (You could have asked televangelist Marcus Lamb, who railed against vaccines before he died of COVID last month.)

Many hard-core evangelical Christians in America long ago discarded any respect they might have once had for the Golden Rule in exchange for a twisted version of selfish libertarianism. What used to be bedrock Christianity has been replaced by a demon brew of equal parts heresy, lunacy, and Trumpian nastiness. 

Likewise, ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel and the U.S., who had initially resisted getting the vaccinations, are starting to come around on the recommendation of their rabbis, who are, in the performance of their duty and calling, choosing science over unnecessary death.

There simply is no religious reason to avoid vaccination.

• I’m waiting to see if it works (or if it’s safe): That might have sounded like a reasonable excuse to a few people a year ago. Nowadays, it’s the phrase that’s uttered into the speaker to gain entrance to the Dumbasses’ Secret Clubhouse.

Hundreds of millions of people have gotten the first shot and the second shot and the booster shot. The percentage of people who have had adverse reactions is a decimal point followed by a whole bunch of zeroes and then a single digit. Meanwhile, the best guess is that millions of lives have been saved by the miraculous vaccines. And perhaps hundreds of thousands more could have been saved were it now for the confluence of the three M’s—MAGA, misinformation, and morons.

There is no way that somebody can use that lame excuse anymore.

• I’m doing some more research: Unless you have a multi-million dollar lab staffed by brilliant scientists and doctors and a pool of thousands of unvaccinated people who are all of a sudden willing to get vaccinated for science, you’re not doing research. What you are doing is going on the internet, looking for the latest blurt of false information that you hope will somehow bolster the indefensible position that you have already staked out. 

That’s not research. That’s you going online to look at something other than porn…for once.

• I had it, it sucked, but now I have natural immunity: Well, maybe you do, maybe you don’t. 

It would be great if natural immunity were really a thing, but for most people, it’s at best just sort of a thing. According to science (which, apparently, has been banned from Fox News and right-wing talk radio), almost 40% of all COVID-19 cases produce zero productive antibodies. So, for more than a third of all the people who get COVID (and don’t die), all they have to show for it is some really bad memories and maybe some scarred lungs.

For those who do get some immunity out of the ordeal, that immunity fades faster than the immunity they would have received from a vaccination. Finally, if they have some natural immunity, getting a vaccination on top of that more than doubles the protection against the virus.

• I’m standing up for my individual rights. I’m a patriot: No, you’re not. You’re a selfish little B-word. You and your fellow travelers are the reason why we will soon be going into our third year of this nightmare. We could have put it all behind us with a concerted, unified national effort. 

But no…