Live and Let Die

The state of the COVID pandemic in the United States has been pretty clear since early in the summer. The country has split, culturally, into two groups. About two-thirds of us rushed out to get the vaccines as soon as they were available. The other third decided they would accept mass death as the cost of going about their lives.

Early in the summer, I described this as accepting a higher level of risk, but that’s no longer appropriate, because the idea of “risk” implies uncertainty. It implies that you cannot know the results. But we’ve now had several months of watching the Delta variant surge across the country and claim tens of thousands of additional lives. Almost all of these deaths were easily avoidable. Between February and July, for example, there were nearly 9,000 COVID deaths in Texas. Only 43 of those people were vaccinated.

These deaths are not the result of neglect. After a rapid rollout that outperformed most other large nations, the COVID vaccines are widely and easily available at no cost. Yet the unvaccinated have actively resisted a preventive measure that could save their lives, as well as the lives of others around them, and they are doing so with increasing belligerence.

There is a cantankerous streak in Americans that leads us to defy authority and want to make decisions for ourselves. But what do we do when that ethos of “live and let live” turns into an insistence that we live and let die?

Read the rest at The Bulwark.