We got a rather jarring reminder that COVID is still with us on Dec. 8, when the CDC recommended masking up if you’re in an area with high community spread.
According to the agency’s latest weekly report, areas with high community spread include New York City, Long Island, Los Angeles, and Phoenix, among other places. But the high-risk, the immunocompromised, and those who can’t—rather than won’t—get vaccinated knew long before the announcement that we were entering the fourth year of this pandemic.
While scrolling through the comments on my earlier story, I was stunned by the number of people who have remained shut in for the better part of the past three years. I look at those comments and think about the people who refuse to get vaccinated and I seethe.
There are people who are no longer able to live their lives—all because those around them aren’t willing to get over themselves and get vaccinated. I suspect that was at least part of Kathleen’s calculus when she ultimately decided to let things take their course. Either chemo or a transplant would have likely left her shut in for years because, to put it in the most diplomatic terms I can use, too many people around her were too damn selfish.
I know of a few people who have refused to get vaccinated, even after having bouts with COVID themselves. Do they realize that they’re not just endangering themselves, but people like Kathleen who are at high risk for things breaking bad if they catch COVID? People like them, and others, are why when I heard that Kathleen had died, I wanted to scream.
Situations like this are why I, albeit reluctantly, believed that we should have implemented vaccine mandates in 2021. As drastic as this might have been, a vaccine mandate would have been far and away the least invasive way to protect our nation against COVID. That’s not just me saying it: Even Alan Dershowitz was of a similar view when he sat down with Larry King in June 2020.
Dershowitz pointed out that the government would be well within its rights to mandate an effective vaccine to protect against another “Typhoid Mary.” He cited a 1905 Supreme Court case, Jacobson v. Massachusetts, which upheld states’ authority to mandate vaccines.
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One might think that the Roberts Court would be inclined to overturn that precedent, given how tilted it now is to the right. But in August 2021, Justice Amy Coney Barrett turned down an emergency appeal from Indiana University students seeking an exemption from a vaccine mandate. Tellingly, Barrett denied the appeal without even asking Indiana officials for comment, or referring it to her colleagues for further discussion—as SCOTUSBlog put it, it was a sign “that she and the other justices did not regard it as a particularly close case.” And this, from the woman who openly declared that Antonin Scalia’s “judicial philosophy is mine, too.”
My friend Kathleen was, quite possibly, another brutal example of how COVID is not just about the deaths and short-term impact. It’s as much, if not more, about the debilitating complications that can be brought on when this virus sends your immune system into overdrive. The fact that her family even had to ask that question—Could COVID have destroyed her liver?—is yet more proof that we are dealing with a moral failing.
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Darrell Lucus
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