Vaccinating, That Others Might Simply Live

THE INTERVIEW was on CNN, which is far and balanced, and featured an American mother talking about her dead son. He had been in the military, and had received a purple heart. A sudden gall bladder emergency made it mandatory that he find a hospital and medical care immediately. But he couldn't find one; anywhere, which would or could admit him. Covid 19 had taken over all hospitals, filling up every ICU and occupying the attention of every doctor within reach. After a frantic seven hour search, the purple heart recipient with the exploding gall bladder died. His mother doesn't think he should have died, and nobody else should think so either. What I think is that by now everybody in the United States should be vaccinated, and almost everybody in the world should be, and we should have reached "herd immunity", and the pandemic should be over. A combination of corporate proprietary greed and inefficiency and government incompetence and inefficiency have combined to create a perfect vaccinationless storm of death and disease. The most overwhelming, inexplicable, and nefarious factor by far, however, is simply the refusal to get vaccinated by millions of people who have easy access to the vaccine, who have been reassured by experts ad nauseum that there is no danger, what we courteously call "vaccination hesitancy", what could be called "idiocy", particularly in the United States, where the idiocy has cost hundreds of thousands of lives, and will cost many more. I attended a college football game in ninety degree weather with sixty thousand other people, a game which by any reasonable measure should not have been played. The masking rules for the game were haphazard, complicated, confusing, unenforced, and unobserved. But, the most important thing, evidently, is that millions of dollars were made by the people who want to make millions of dollars. I wore my mask in my seat. Most did not, but in the restrooms everyone wore masks, by law, although many had them pulled down below their noses, which of course is idiotic and ineffective. Why bother wearing one at all? There should br a one hundred percent vaccination rate. But since it is half that, there should be no football games with crowds, not yet. But we Americans are a sub species long grown accustomed to having our cake and eating it too, as we say. We have grown tired of Covid 19, of the attandent precautions, restrictions and limitations, and we have arrived at our predictable solution; eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. And soon we will die, many more thousands of us, as winter approaches and we once again gather together in places where we shouldn't, inadequately masked beneath our inconvenienced noses. We all seem to think that we will be among the lucky winnners of the covid-free lottery, and, of course, most of us will be, but not nearly enough of us.