Letter: Freedom Is a Group Project
December 14, 2021
Please think long and hard before you brush off masks and vaccines as personal choices. Hairstyle is a personal choice. Diet is a personal choice. Whether or not to wear sunglasses is a personal choice. Having children is a personal choice. Driving at night with your headlights off is not a personal choice. Tax evasion is not a personal choice. Bringing fireworks onto an airplane is not a personal choice. Endangering other people, regardless of intention, is not a personal choice. Your right to throw a punch ends where someone else’s face begins.
Enjoying the benefits of civilized society entails accepting reasonable limitations to your personal freedom. Your individual decision not to wear a mask or to skip the vaccine affects everyone. When you allow your body to be an incubator for a deadly and rapidly mutating virus or needlessly take up an ICU bed, you’re prioritizing your right to be irrational and obstinate over the broader rights of your friends, family and neighbors to be safe.
I understand that using the words irrational and obstinate is confrontational, but I believe that we have crossed the Rubicon and that we need to call these conspiracies what they are — crazy.
There is essentially no disagreement among qualified experts as to the efficacy and safety of masks and vaccines. The scientific consensus is clear. Any genuine confusion or concern regarding the efficacy and safety of the vaccine is rooted in a refusal to look for information in the right places. If you’ve watched a few videos on YouTube or Facebook and have decided that the CDC, doctors and researchers are all engaged in some effort to hurt you, you are being irrational. If this irrationality is motivating you to skip the vaccine, shut down school board meetings and spread disinformation, you are being obstinate.
We’re playing an aggressively optional and incredibly stupid game with incomprehensible high stakes. Fortunately, the debate surrounding mandates is slightly saner. Even among some who accept the safety and efficacy of the vaccine, skepticism exists surrounding whether or not it is appropriate for the government to mandate it. I think that it is.
It’s important to remember that government agents will never break down your door and pin you down while they inject you — fantasies in this vain approach Alex Jones levels of absurdity. Vaccine mandates simply mean that if you refuse to take the vaccine, your access to certain spaces and activities will be limited to protect the public. Given that the downsides of receiving the vaccine are statistically negligible, I believe that the government is well within its rights to require it in certain situations.
No one is intrinsically interested in controlling you. Please don’t flatter yourself into seeing conspiracies around every corner. While I accept that large pharmaceutical companies do shady things, remember that the profit motive dictates that this vaccine be perfectly safe and effective. If it made you magnetic, Pfizer wouldn’t be able to sell as many doses. It is in their best interest to make a safe and effective vaccine.
All this aside, if the logical extension of your idea of freedom is anarchy — line-item veto power over laws that you don’t like — you are not a constructive member of your society. Freedom to should not overrule freedom from. We’re free from innumerable societal ills like pandemics, conflicts and other dangers because we’ve all agreed to accept reasonable limits to our personal freedom.
Think about the big picture and do your part to make your community safe and healthy.
— Joe Draper, University of Utah student
John Hedberg • Jan 14, 2022 at 9:10 am
Apparently, self-righteous stereotyping and assuming the worst about other people’s actions and intentions didn’t die out at the end of the MLK civil rights era. It used to be the hallmark of both civil rights and civility NOT to judge one another. That was based on the spiritual concept that we’re all co-equal siblings whose duty is always to love one another first, before any momentary disagreement. Now, while baselessly accusing innocent others of insensitivity and hatred, people seem to trumpet the belief that their own hatreds and bigotries are always justified (which is the height of insensitivity). Love, along with humility, seems to have (temporarily, I hope) left the building.
I actively anticipated the 2 Pfizer shots I received last Spring, since I was told that these would not only prevent me from getting COVID, but would also prevent me from spreading it. Then, on August 30th, I tested positive for COVID a mere 5 months after my double-dose. I got the booster anyway, but since July, science has shown that vaccinated (even boosted) people not only get CVID, but they transmit COVID at levels roughly the same as people who were never vaccinated. This is the reason CDC Director Rachel Walensky reinstituted her mask recommendation for vaccinated people on July 30th. To quote her press release that day, vaccinated people had “similar viral loads”, and therefore transmit the virus at similar rates to non-vaccinated folks. Oops!
So, the vaccines wear off in about 5 months (hence the need for boosters, which also wear off), and vaccinated folks transmit the virus at roughly the same rate as non-vaccinated folks: that’s the reason the mask recommendation was reinstituted by the CDC for vaccinated people. More recently, there is now evidence that some masks (cloth, for instance) may not be as effective as we initially believed, hence Dr. Fauci’s advice to double or even triple your masks: unless it’s a scientific or medical mask, one mask evidently is not enough to make a great deal of difference. It’s mere theater.
Now we come to Omicron. South Africa, who is weeks ahead of us in the Omicron wave, reports that Omicron is 60% -80% less severe than Delta, and Delta has now been almost entirely replaced by Omicron in the US. When Omicron patients show symptoms at all, they mostly report severity equal to an average head cold. When you consider the science of epidemiology, this circumstance could actually be the opportunity the world has been hoping for without knowing it. In most countries, the vulnerable populations inclined to hospitalization and death (less than 20%) have already been protected by vaccine. Since most pandemics end as the population achieves natural immunity from the virus itself, Omicron is the way nature actually ends most pandemics: a less severe strain infects almost everybody, and thereafter nearly everyone has natural immunity for decades or life.
Let’s turn to the supposedly “unvaccinated” for a moment. Many of them are the same essential worker “heroes” we all saluted during the heat of the first lockdowns. They got COVID, continued to work, and they now have immunity that studies suggest is stronger and more long-lasting than any of the vaccines. Many of the people who now aver from getting the shot are health care workers who know that vaccines can come with unforeseen complications, some even affecting fertility, so there are a large number of young health workers anticipating parenthood who already have natural immunity and don’t see any medical reason to put their posterity at risk by a vaccine that’s still barely tested, long-term. This is just one example of a group more medically knowledgeable than you or I who have perfectly valid reasons for believing that their “personal choice” is a lot more valid than, say, yours! 😋
The CDC website indicates that 63.4 million Americans have had COVID, which means that between 15-20% of Americans already have natural immunity to COVID better than a vaccine. Since the same website also indicates about 80% of Americans have had at least one jab, that means we’re already at the threshold of herd immunity. Since the vulnerable 20% of the population is largely protected by vaccines, maybe the scientific thing to do now with a less severe variant like Omicron is to keep protecting the vulnerable, but allow everyone else who chooses to the option of resuming their normal lives, since getting the virus for most of us is actually the scientific and historical means of ending the pandemic for all of us: full enduring herd natural immunity.
To circle back, Utah’s coronavirus website indicates that for every 2.9 cases of COVID in Utah, 1 of them is among the vaccinated: that’s better than 33% of current cases among those vaccinated and boosted (see Risk Factors: https://coronavirus.utah.gov/case-counts/). Vaccines aren’t slowing down the spread of COVID at all, and neither are most single masks, but at this point, most of us aren’t vulnerable to hospitalization or death. CDC Director Rachel Walensky indicated last week that 75% of COVID deaths were among people who had at least 4 (four!) other serious comorbidities. Most were over 65, and most of these folks are now vaccinated, so is there really a risk of “punching someone else in the face” at this point if I make a personal choice not to wear a mask, or not to get a shot when I already have natural immunity, just because you refuse to face and get a grip on your own apparently groundless and irrational fears? 💛
With Love, All the Best,
J Hedberg