It's Time For A National Vaccine Mandate
I want to live...and you should too
Radio icon Howard Stern had some blunt words for people who are refusing to get vaccinated to stop the spread of the coronavirus.
“When are we gonna stop putting up with the idiots in this country and just say it’s mandatory to get vaccinated? Fuck ’em. Fuck their freedom. I want my freedom to live,” Stern said on his SiriusXM show on Tuesday, according to clips posted online. “I want to get out of the house already. I want to go next door and play chess. I want to go take some pictures.”….
“So like, if you have a heart attack or any kind of problem, you can’t even get into the E.R. And I’m really of mind to say, ‘Look, if you didn’t get vaccinated [and] you got COVID, you don’t get into a hospital.’”
“Go fuck yourself,” Stern added, according to The Hill. “You had the cure and you wouldn’t take it.”
I love freedom. I love liberty. I love that being an American allows me to enjoy both in ample quantities 24/7/365.
Unfortunately for some of my fellow Americans, rights (such as liberty and freedom) don’t exist in a vacuum. Rights come with corresponding responsibilities. Sometimes those responsibilities can, should, and MUST take precedence over whatever rights individuals may claim. For the past 19 months, we’ve been living in such times…and it’s about damned time that some of us stopped whining about “MUH RIGHTS!!” and started to recognize the need to step up and meet their responsibility.
In northern Idaho, hospitals are operating under “crisis standards” of care. This means that healthcare is being rationed. It’s a worst-case scenario that can mean that car accident victims may not get treatment because so many beds are occupied with COVID-19 patients.
Idaho is an outlier currently, but it’s a harbinger of what could be coming to other parts of America. The worst part of it all is that this is completely preventable.
On September 1st, a 73-year-old Alabama man having a cardiac emergency died because a nearby hospital couldn’t make space in its ICU for him. The hospital in the man’s hometown of Cullman, AL, contacted 43 hospitals in three states. Unfortunately, none were able to make space to provide the emergency care he needed. The reasons? All available beds were occupied with unvaccinated COVID-19 patients.
Why is this happening? The ONLY reason we’re heading down this path is because of the millions of intellectual and moral homunculi who still refuse to get vaccinated. There are still states, mostly red, where vaccination rates don’t yet approach 50%. This is inexcusable and, frankly, immoral.
I’m no fan of Howard Stern, but I’m behind him 100% in this instance. It’s time that we stopped pandering to those too selfish and ignorant to recognize their duty and responsibility to society. As things stand now, the unvaccinated are setting the agenda. Their intransigence and arrogance determine the rate of COVID-19 transmission as well as the death rate.
They’re also having an overwhelming impact on the availability of care for non-COVID patients…and it’s now clearly costing innocent people their lives.
It’s time for that to stop. Safety and efficacy have been established with the Pfizer vaccine having received FDA approval (and Moderna and Johnson & Johnson not far behind). It’s time for the government to mandate vaccination for everyone over 12.
Yes, that means “forced” vaccinations…but guess what? There are precedents for doing this. During the 1918 Spanish Influenza pandemic, vaccine mandates helped defeat the disease. There’s nothing illegal OR immoral about a national vaccine mandate. Of course, the enforcement mechanisms are as yet merely conceptual. Still, we’re certainly not talking about jackbooted thugs pulling patriots from their homes, throwing them to the ground, jamming a knee in their back, and forcing a needle into their arm.
Then again, force doesn’t have to be involved in the enforcement of a vaccine mandate. I suspect that any mandate will have a financial enforcement component, whether an actual fine or a tax credit that would require proof of vaccination. I’m not a public policy planner, so I’ll leave that to minds more nimble than my own, but a vaccine mandate is absolutely viable and, at this late date, eminently reasonable.
However a mandate is established, it’s important that it happen soon and that it has some teeth to it. We’ve lived like hermits for 19 months…and, like most of us, I’m sick of it. I want my life back. I want to do things without wearing a mask and thinking about things like transmissibility and social distancing.
As for Stern’s other point, if you don’t trust science enough to get a vaccine, you shouldn’t be able to get admitted to a hospital when you get COVID-19. Likewise, if you can’t be bothered to avail yourself of a basic precaution- getting vaccinated- you shouldn’t get to waste precious resources (i.e., a hospital bed) when you contract COVID-19.
Go fuck yourself. You had the cure and you wouldn’t take it.
Yes, it’s harsh, but I’m tired of anti-vaxxers believing they can have their cake and eat it, too. If you don’t believe the science, you shouldn’t get to take advantage of it when you’re deathly ill and desperate.
Call it “tough love” or what you will, but it’s time that those of us who have met our responsibility and made the right choice demand that the rest of us step up as well. Because the truth is that they’re responsible for the mess we’re in now…and they have blood on their hands.
It’s no longer about “MUH RIGHTS!!!” Instead, it’s about their responsibility to help ensure that we beat COVID-19. And if they won’t do it willingly, then we need to be willing to force them to do it.
Fuck ’em. Fuck their freedom. I want my freedom to live.
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