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COVID-19: Public health should ALWAYS trump personal liberty

COVID-19: Public health should ALWAYS trump personal liberty

Last night I was at the emergency room with my wife, Erin, suffering from another lupus flare, an exceptionally bad one, so much so that Erin was in tears, desperate to stop the pain. This was made worse by the fact that I could not stay with her, to comfort her because of active COVID-19 cases, which statistically are 90%+ unvaccinated, leaving me very frustrated by the selfishness of some people.

The latest in a long line of nonsense is Chicago police unions pushing for their members to refuse to comply with local city mandates regarding reporting of officers’ vaccination status. We can safely assume that if any officer is not willing to divulge their vaccination status privately to superiors, that they are unvaccinated. When an officer accepts their badge, they take a pledge to protect and serve, which, if you are unvaccinated, you cannot abide by, potentially passing on COVID-19 to people they interact with.

Red states like Texas and Florida are the worse perpetrators of COVID-19 misinformation, which has had a knock-on effect of increasing COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations more than any other state. Going as far as to actively fight vaccine mandates, and suing school districts if they require a mask to be worn.

I’m reading plenty of stories of people complaining about being fired for refusing to get the vaccine. A surprisingly high number of these people are healthcare workers, who you would think would be the first in line to get vaccinated, seeing the reality of COVID-19 first hand, but it seems common sense is in short supply at this time. I would love to be able to get back to normal, but that will never happen when more than 25% of Americans are anti-vaccination/mask, due to the politicization of vaccines and mask-wearing.

I’m certainly not a particular fan of Joe Biden and his administration, I think he has been ineffective in general, but I 100% support his stance on COVID-19 and vaccine mandates, or regular testing to remain employed by the government, healthcare providers, and within larger private companies.

The double standard among Republicans is astounding, they scream liberty, my body, my choice when it comes to vaccine mandates and wearing a mask inside school buildings, while simultaneously passing laws that control a women’s right to autonomy over her own body, passing ‘heartbeat’ legislation that bans abortion from six weeks, often before a woman knows she’s even pregnant.

I heard an argument in Facebook comments on a news article about the TX heartbeat abortion ban, that you cannot compare abortion to vaccine mandates, as being unvaccinated effects just one person, whereas abortion affects two people. In my view, that is the most uneducated comment that could be made. In the simplest terms, if you are unvaccinated, you are 70-80% more likely to be infected with COVID, and pass it onto family members, including grandparents, who are more likely to be hospitalized or die from Coronavirus. Remember at the start of this pandemic, 20 months ago, when Republicans wanted the older generation to sacrifice themselves to save the economy, very pro-life arent they?

Going back to the first paragraph that inspired this blog, refusing to get vaccinated affects so many more people than YOU, the person who screams my body, my choice. My wife is immunocompromised due to her Fibromyalgia, Lupus, and the drugs she has to take to control these medical conditions, so a visit to the ER can potentially be deadly, especially if medical staff treating COVID-19 patients are unvaccinated. Being sat in the waiting room for 90 minutes, knowing my wife was back there in tears gave me plenty of time to stew in my own thoughts about the selfishness of people, unnecessarily extending this pandemic.

My thoughts during those 90 minutes were most definitely dark, thinking if you refuse to get vaccinated, and you get Coronavirus, hospitals should turn you away, telling you to go home and lay in your bed, which you made, take some Ivermectin, and inject some bleach. Now I have calmed down, obviously, I feel differently, I value life and I want people to live, regardless of their political and ideological views.

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