The revolt of the vaccinated

I hate being angry first thing in the morning, but here we are.

I was on the phone with my wife. She's currently in Indiana, as she splits her time between there and LA. I filled her in on the status of our COVID outbreak. I mentioned that in Public Health's press release from yesterday, it stated that only 68% of LA County healthcare workers had been vaccinated. She then proceeded to inform me that her niece and her niece's wife were two of them. They refused to get vaccinated because "they don't know what's in it." They're waiting to see if we vaccinated die off from the vaccine.

To say that my rage was titanic is an understatement. It's because of people like that that I'm still doing contact tracing, rather than being back of the library. And by not vaccinating, they're putting their daughter, my precious grand-niece, in danger from contracting the virus. Yesterday, we had the first child in LA County to die from the virus. In my work, we're seeing more and more children being infected. 

We vaccinated have had enough. I don't care if you're just "waiting", or if you're an anti-vaxxer. The result is the same: infection, hospitalizations skyrocketing, death. The people who are "just waiting" I consider to be worse. They're depending on the rest of us to get vaccinated and get to herd immunity, while they do nothing to help in the effort. 

Just yesterday, LA County's Board of Supervisors moved to mandate vaccinations for all of its employees or weekly testing. (I'm one of them.) 

Mirroring moves by the state and cities of Los Angeles, Long Beach and Pasadena, Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn and Sheila Kuehl will ask their colleagues next week to approve a policy requiring all 100,000 county employees to either be vaccinated against COVID-19 or undergo weekly testing.

"We have a responsibility to protect our employees, the residents who depend on them and lead by example," Hahn wrote in a Twitter post Tuesday announcing the motion, which will go before the board next week.

Enough is enough. Our lives are being held hostage by the pernicious who feel they owe nothing to the broader society. They're akin to sociopaths, manipulating the majority with their specious arguments and beliefs. They want their freedom? Fine. But they can do it over there, in their homes. They can stay in their homes, in resplendent isolation, while the rest of us who have done what we're supposed to do to heal society go about our business.

Year by year, decade by decade, the plague of self-centeredness has made this country more and more unlivable. People think that their needs and wants are all that matters. They have no inkling of responsibility towards others. They are the center of their own universe, and everyone else is their satellite. That's not how a functioning society works. It can't work that way if its members feel they owe nothing to anyone else. And the majority of us, who do what's right, have had enough. Almost two years of this pandemic, and we're done. 

Ignorance has had its day. Time to crush it.