Covid vaccines: Rights and responsibilities

Covid-19 vaccine-hesitancy is understandable. Maybe you don’t trust the previous administration’s rush to usher through lightning-speed science to develop the vaccines, or the current administration’s encouragement to use them. Possibly you have doubts about the vaccine or the disease itself. Maybe you are just afraid of needles. You do not owe an explanation to anyone. As citizens of this great nation, we have the right to choose, the right to decide for ourselves.

I do not begrudge one penny of my taxes spent on Operation Warp Speed, though I wasn’t given the opportunity or right to make that decision. Sometimes exceptions to our rights have to be made.

I do believe that all rights come with responsibilities and limits. My right to swing my arm ends where your nose begins. Our right to get drunk does not allow us to do so while driving a car on public roads. Your right to own a weapon requires you to use and store it safely.

Your right to refuse the vaccine and masking gives you the right to contract coronavirus, but does not give you the right to expose the vulnerable, especially children, too young to receive the vaccine, but not too young to die of the disease.

The Covid-19 U.S. deaths among 0-18 year old children is rising, now over four times greater than this group’s average seasonal flu deaths over the last 15 years. That might not sound like a lot – unless it is your child.

This dreadful disease and its variants are evolving – and so too must our behavior. Herd immunity by disease was a reasonable hope, but Covid-19 has shown that it can just mutate to produce another, more contagious, variant to which we are not immune. The Covid-19 Delta variant is as contagious as chickenpox, but much more deadly, and is infecting more of our young people. Herd immunity can be achieved by vaccine (think polio and smallpox). That you have no symptoms, or already had coronavirus is not protection – you can still spread the disease.

If my fellow citizens choose not to receive the Covid-19 vaccine, I truly do not care, but those who make that choice should consider themselves loaded lethal weapons, and behave accordingly.

We might very well be facing another horrific social shutdown, keeping us from our families and friends, overloading our hospitals, closing our businesses and schools, and resulting in more unnecessary suffering and death. If you refuse to protect yourself, and others from you, you forfeit your right to complain if shut-downs happen again.

It is not the socially distanced mask-wearing fully vaccinated citizens who have created yet another coronavirus storm.

Bobbie Worth lives in Whitefish.