Vaxing question redux

I addressed the question of mandatory vaccination for COVID and the potential for vaccine passports the other day. You can read about here if you like:

https://thesublimetotheridiculous.blogspot.com/2021/09/vaxing-question.html

It should not surprise anyone who knows me to discover I am against such ideas. But I want to take a moment to look at things a bit further. It was brought on when I read that uber-libertarian Howard Stern asserted that anti-vaxxers should not get health care if they fall ill with COVID. I think such cavalier, indeed reprehensible, attitudes express precisely why we as a society should be very careful about telling people what they can and cannot do.

If someone is denied health care because they didn't get the COVID vaccine on the mere grounds that they made an individual choice as a reflection of their personal freedom (no matter how insidious you might think that choice to be) then I must ask, what else may society deny a person who is acting in ways arguably harmful to the greater society?

Should someone who overeats not receive care? Someone who smokes like a chimney? Someone who drinks too much? Someone who races their car at 100 miles per hour on the highway and crashes horrifically? Surely such folks could or will cost society quite a bit in the long run. Arguably they care no more for their fellow man than the person who will not be vaccinated, if you believe that the anti-vaxxer has no concern for his peers. Indeed if we ever reach the point in the States where there are national health plans on a broader scale than we have it currently, there is a simple and easy to emplace rationale for denying health care: society is paying for it, so society has a right to dictate who gets it. Why? Because your actions can, quite obviously, adversely affect society.

Think that can't happen? Two years ago I never imagined so many freedoms being trampled on for an illness which is, I will say it again because I believe it needs to be shouted from the rooftops, relatively harmless. If it's justified for and accepted for COVID, it's more easily and readily justified for most other human actions. We would then, as Ben Franklin so rightly warned us, have given up freedom for security and will end up with neither. It is a trade we should not make.

Vaxing question

I almost hate to step into what has become a quagmire. Yet, truth be told, so very much of what we face in this world is a marshland. Unless we wish to never express an opinion at all we cannot help but step in a swamp.

To vax or not to vax, that is the question. At least, it's the question dragging down a lot of civil conversation these days. I don't pretend to know the One Best Answer. But I am honest enough to admit it. Too many of my friends apparently walk on a plane of knowledge which I am not certain, by any measure, exists on this issue.

Talk of vaccine mandates are, quite honestly, obscene. The defense that the government makes us do all sorts of things so why not that fails to address the point. Quite bluntly, there are a great many things which government already compels us to do which it should not. That a government might try to compel us to act has no bearing on the morality of the act. 

Still, I will concede that a legitimate government has the moral authority under the right circumstances to force us to do given things. We couldn't have a single law without recognizing as much. So I will allow that even with vaccines those in authority over us might be within their rights to make us vaccinate. Again, without allowing for that we could not morally tolerate the vaccinations forced upon our children. The question then becomes, does the government have the moral authority to do that with COVID vaccines, or, worse, issue so-called vaccine passports?

I must come down on the side of the anti-vaxxers on that. With all due respect to those who will disagree with me, it is rather plain by any reasonable analysis that those who contract the disease by any means will almost certainly survive it. Then we have the fact that the governments don't actually seem to have a handle on it (masks work unless they don't; social distancing may or may not matter; you can live normally with two shots until you need a third; where does it end?) which leads to the legitimate question of whether we can trust government on COVID. And there is a difference, a huge difference, between vaccines being rushed through and the extensive, years long development of those against evils such as polio.

Part of the reason I'm okay with mandated vaccines against polio and measles and so on is that they are well established. It's pretty clear that we don't know all the effects of the COVID vaccines precisely because they're so new. There simply hasn't been enough time to have any real and final idea about their long term use and impact. Men and women are within their rights to be skeptical of them on that basis alone.

As a rule of thumb, acting without adequate knowledge is foolish. You get things such as health care advocates bobbing back and forth on issues exactly because the situation is still in flux. This leads to the rash, knee jerk actions which governments are so good at doing. If you don't mind a bit of a pun, governments (and their media hounds) need to take a pill and calm down. So do we.

COVID vaccine redux

I had an appointment this morning at 10:03 for my first dose of the COVID vaccine. But I cancelled it. This decision was made not out of stubbornness, a recant of my earlier resolve to get the shot. Yet it has all the markings of being all about Marty just the same.

My wife sent me a text yesterday that the Detroit Tigers along with Meijer and McClaren Health Services are opening a 'pop up' vaccine site before the next six Tigers home games. Anyone getting the vaccine there will be given two vouchers which can be exchanged for tickets to that day's or a future ballgame. 

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!

Everyone will also get a Meijer $10 gift card. 

So you know what? I cancelled the earlier appointment and booked one for Comerica Park later today at 4:30. Because hey, I might as well get something for my efforts.

I tell you, it pays to procrastinate. At least sometimes.

If it kills me I will haunt you

Well, I did it. I made the commitment. I wasn't going to; I was going to be thoroughly bull headed and not be bullied (yes, I mean bullied, and in the worst, most repugnant sense of the word) into it. But I have an appointment for my first dose of the COVID vaccine for June 8 at ten o'clock in the morning.

People, and by people I mean society, and by society I mean all too many of you out there, play on fears. You have successfully played on mine. I don't want others to get ill because of me. Further, I do recognize the very valid argument that I should not allow pig headed spite to influence what may arguably be a rational decision. Yet I still don't believe for a moment that COVID was, is, or ever will be a serious threat to me or my family and friends. It posed the greatest threat to a small and well defined segment of the population, a segment we could have and should have easily kept protected.  Shame on you, governors Whitmer and Cuomo, for what you did with the nursing homes: you caused more death directly and immediately with COVID that I ever will or would have, all the while you sons of...mothers deigned to lecture the rest of us on responsibility. The threat to the general population was tiny, and almost certainly would have been taken care of through herd immunity. 

Yet we had to destroy a robust economy, kill numerous small businesses, cause many deaths unrelated to COVID which could have been prevented had we not panicked and made people afraid to seek needed health care for other issues, and affect an election outcome because of it. I don't give a flying...leap what you think of Donald Trump or how happy you might be that he's no longer President. You need to ask yourself: do we want elections profoundly affected by sheer and unwarranted panic? We should not.

I haven't even asked what ought to be the obvious question: now that the government (our servants, mind you, not our leaders) has seen how easily we may be cowed, how much more quickly and over how little else might they try to lock us down again? Believe me, they will try when they feel the right pretense exists. Because after all, they got away with it before. It will harder to keep them from trying it again.

So I will kowtow, I will genuflect before your almighty and self defined omnipotent will, powers that be. I will get my shots. And if I may sign off as the curmudgeon I fully mean to be here, You're Welcome.

A question about health care

Yeah, I'm tired of all the coronavirus talk too. And yeah further, I probably shouldn't even go where I'm about to go. But hell, why should those concerns stop me?

There is a question which has occurred to me which I think needs to be asked and answered honestly but doubt very much that it actually will be on either count. And it is: exactly why were the health care systems of Italy and France and Spain overwhelmed by the virus?

There are two plausible answers that I can see. One is, yes, that the virus was so novel and spread so quickly that no health care system could have anticipated it. It makes a certain sense and is well within the realm of possibility. The other is that their state run health care systems, being notoriously inefficient and uncaring (as government systems tend to be; notice our VA system here in the States), could not have possibly handled the situation anyway. Their bureaucratic nature won't allow it.

I don't know the answer. I'm only asking the question. But it won't get seriously asked or answered anyway because it doesn't fit the narrative. The narrative is that the media in the West and the powers that be in those nations (and too many people in ours) want the government to control health care. And the idea that it can't or shouldn't is simply off the table, not subject to discussion. The idea that private systems might be better suited to respond to crises more quickly and ably is simply seen as nonsense.

The truth is that I don't believe our progressive friends want that question asked. I believe that's because they're afraid of the answer.

You call it maize

I'm sorry people, I'll apologize right up front, because I was trying, I had intended, to keep my mouth shut about the coronavirus panic. And I mean exactly that: this is panic, not pandemic. Or perhaps better, and I do so love alliteration, a panic pandemic of powerful proportions. There: pop all those Ps.

Of the best advice out there I have not heard a thing - not one thing - which is not common sense anyway. I've avoided my elderly mother in recent years when I've had any type of illness. I wash my hands regularly. This is no different.

Or what makes it different (such as it is) is the panic. I would never, ever downplay the effects death has on the person who dies or their family. But as of this morning we are only at 3,200 cases in the US with only 68 deaths. Other things will kill more people this year. This does not merit the panic.

And it is panic. Last week at this time there were few thoughts if any about shutting down sports. Now everything's shut down. That's not sensible. That's not a measured response. It is panic.

I think what's most worrisome in this is that we'll never really know if the shutdowns actually ended the problem. Corona, or Covid-19 or whatever you want to call it, may have died quickly on its own without all the closings. But now that we've had the closings, if they seem to have worked, well, we better expect a major closing of everything once every year or two now, because the precedent has been set.

Calm down. Sit back and take a breath. Do the common sense things. In the meantime, I'm going to work. Ain't no media driven, government enhanced, stock market dragon gonna get my work done but me. Might as well do it.

You call it sensible. I call it fear mongering. Now that's a dragon which feeds itself all too well and easily, and recent events show. It's not getting fat on my time or dime.

How I spent the weekend (so far)

This weekend has been weird. Perhaps it has been for many of us I suppose. I think maybe what's felt oddest is that my weekend has been actually rather normal. It's the other stuff, the coronavirus crap, which makes it feel unusual.

Myself, I have done little differently. I spent close to six hours at my Shop playing catch up yesterday. I washed a load of towels because it seemed there were an overabundance of towels in the laundry basket. I took my morning walk and will take another by 8 or 9 this morning. I ate Chinese.

Whatever the reason for the general panic it didn't hit downtown Detroit. Our local supermarket, indeed all nearby stores, stayed stocked and operating. They even had plenty of toilet paper. Oh, Lysol and hand sanitizer and the like were gone. But nothing else was different at all.

It was very strange not to go to Church. I take my mother to Saturday Mass and of course that didn't happen. Detroit and many Catholic dioceses have closed the Churches to large (or, sadly, large-ish) gatherings such as Church services. I'll watch Mass on TV sometime this morning (I've already checked my options and I have several) yet I know that just won't seem right. I'm not a shut in. At least, not by choice, though I suppose most shut-ins rarely are.

I read, but I've been doing a lot of that anyway the last several years. I watched a quite charming movie yesterday, Yesterday, on On Demand. It was about a man who, after a bizarre event, was the only one to remember The Beatles and their songs. It was one of those movies 'they don't make anymore', charming and engaging and, at the risk of sounding puritan, clean. After watching and liking Gran Torino a few weeks back I am beginning to rethink my attitude on recent cinema.

Though I don't watch sports all that much it was very weird to find no live sports on TV. Very weird. I watched a bit of bowling but it had been taped.

I'm going to stop here because I don't really want to get preachy. I only want to reflect on things. And I've just ended up simply shaking my head.