There seems to be an idea that vaccinated people cannot return to normal life until they have seen everyone else forced to be vaccinated.
When will we return to normal? That has been the question looming over the coronavirus pandemic ever since we were told 18 months ago that we were starting “15 days to stop the spread.” We have crossed a lot of hurdles since then. Multiple effective vaccines are widely available in the United States and many other developed countries. Treatments are much better, reducing mortality rates. Some of the things we originally feared, such as transmission from surfaces and transmission in outdoor settings, turned out to be illusory. And yet, we are still living with a lot of fear and restriction: fights over mask mandates, indoor events being canceled, businesses and schools not returning to full in-person speed.
One side of that coin, albeit one that is a more complicated story than some on the left would like to tell, is people who continue to be resistant or hesitant to take the vaccines. (There is no practical difference whether you are resistant or just hesitant, if you haven’t gotten vaccinated; the two categories just refer to the hope that some of the vaccine-hesitant people can yet be persuaded.) That remains a problem, and solving it continues to present a lot of challenges. But the other side is people like this:
Matthew Boedy, an associate professor of rhetoric and composition, sent out a raw emotional appeal to his students at the University of North Georgia just before classes began: The Covid-19 Delta variant was rampaging through the state, filling up hospital beds. He would teach class in the equivalent of full body armor — vaccinated and masked. So he was stunned in late August when more than two-thirds of the first-year students in his writing class did not take the hint and showed up unmasked. It was impossible to tell who was vaccinated and who was not. “It isn’t a visual hellscape, like hospitals, it’s more of an emotional hellscape,” Dr. Boedy said.
Dr. Boedy is a healthy adult. He has been vaccinated, so his risk of getting an infection on any given day is about one in 5,000, and his risk of getting a bad enough case of COVID to require hospitalization is closer to one in 1 million. He is, on top of that, insisting on wearing a mask — a totally unnecessary precaution for a vaccinated person to address risks that low, but one that would reduce that already-minuscule risk to an even lower figure. Yet he feels that it is an “emotional hellscape” to return to the classroom.
This is risk aversion taken to an unhealthy extreme. All across the country, people who have been vaccinated face a risk of serious illness from COVID that is far less than dozens of other risks they used to face in daily life — and yet, they insist on masking, social distancing, foregoing activities they used to engage in, and in some cases continuing precautions like obsessive hand sanitizing and the maintenance of plastic barriers that we know now are simply theater. And they remain obsessed with telling other people what to do. What will it take to convince these people to return to normal living? It is clear now that it will take a very long time for COVID infections to go away everywhere, especially given the difficulty of getting the entire global population vaccinated, even vast third world countries and no-go zones like Afghanistan. (Even in the United States, fewer than half of the population get a flu vaccine every year.) Certainly, alarmist reporting on “breakthrough” cases is not helping, and our public-health authorities appear incapable of talking these people down because a lot of the public-health authorities themselves think this way. There seems to be an idea that vaccinated people cannot return to normal life until they have seen everyone else forced to be vaccinated — but would even that do it? The insistence in some quarters on reimposing mask mandates without regard to vaccination status would suggest that even compulsory vaccination will not be enough.
Eventually, we just have to face life again. Get the shot, stop worrying about everybody else, and accept the fact that it is never going to be possible to live in a zero-risk world anyway. There is life to be lived.