Anti-vaccination activists set up a scary moment in time

Anti-vaccination activists, let me be blunt.

It's your funeral, but it's our health care workers, hospitals and medical systems. Please stay home when COVID-19 comes to call.

The delta variant is causing cases to spike in all 50 states. Florida is a hot spot. Of course, unvaccinated Americans are those who are sick and dying from this most contagious variant.

There's no reason for a healthy adult to be walking around without having received a COVID-19 vaccine.

It makes common sense: Get thee to a shot in the arm if you haven't already. Protect yourself and others from a ravaging virus. Don't contaminate the commons, which just opened again.

To pursue the anti-vaccination point, if you're seriously in need of a ventilator to breathe, sorry, but that takes you from a private case to a public cost. It's unfair, in case you care.

The stock market is jumpy that millions of Americans just don't get it - the vaccine. A surge would be tragic.

Vaccine mandates in public places are what the experts tell us must be done. Mask mandates may be necessary to check contagion. Los Angeles is requiring indoor masks once again.

Our pressed medical workers should be given gratitude and wellness, not another round of the same crushing battle they fought on the front lines.

Doctors and nurses are not happy to see fresh, preventable cases of COVID-19 after how hard they worked to treat an endless stream of patients from March 2020 to May 2021. They lived through the worst crucible.

In that dark time, about 600,000 people died. Their loved ones reeled from the pain a death from COVID-19 brings to a bereft family.

By preventable, I mean the Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines are safe, free and available. All are effective against the delta variant.

All this goes for you, too, Tucker Carlson. The Fox News show host is a major purveyor of misinformation about COVID-19, which he shares with a sneer. Mask wearing for children is tantamount to child abuse, so he says.

Chances are he's vaccinated; he won't say.

Facebook stands accused, by President Joe Biden, of "killing people" for having so many sources spreading lies about COVID-19 masks and vaccines.

Currently, about half of the nation has been vaccinated.

However, "hesitant" is too good a word for the unwilling. Anti-vaccination activists are not shy and retiring.

This schizophrenic state of affairs seems deeply wrong to a daughter of a doctor whose lifework is immunology.

I grew up hearing stories of vaccines - from smallpox to polio. They were the greatest medical advances on the books.

Vaccines are godsends to earthlings, I heard at the dinner table. How lucky we humans were to have them through science. To know they even existed.

Years prior to the pandemic, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was a leader in opposing all vaccines. His movement's logic meant many unvaccinated children got "free rides," depending on other children's vaccines to stay healthy.

Doubtless, Kennedy set the stage for this very moment in time.

For the first time in American history, politics harmed medical progress and cleft us down the middle.

Public health was politicized when former President Donald Trump and a host of House Republicans defied mask rules, even after Trump was treated for a serious bout of COVID-19 at Walter Reed National Military Hospital.

When the vaccine landed, Trump got it quietly.

But he never wielded his power to urge swaths of followers to get vaccinated.

Carlson chimed in with his raving threats. They are the modern equivalent of witchcraft fears in Salem.

One tragedy of the pandemic is that it did not unite us in any meaningful way. The remedy was isolation in private spaces, so we were cooped up with no place to go, nobody new to see, relying on screens for social life and entertainment.

Take the Depression and World War II as collective experiences. Then, we were all in the same boat, on the same side. Morale rose high on the homefront.

Our outstanding health care workers have borne the heaviest burden in a century, since the last global pandemic. The Spanish flu claimed 675,000 Americans.

Witnessing near that many die will long live with us.

Don't make us go back.

© 2021, Creators