Do you have a death wish!?! Is something I heard many times growing up. Some times it was in rather mundane situations like being on a ladder while painting and reaching over instead of moving the ladder when my mother would rush out of the house yelling, “Do you have a death wish!?!” Or being on the roof after a particularly heavy snow storm shoveling the snow off of the roof and she would come out and hurl her favorite phrase at me again. Once, as a teenager, I was picked up by the Minnesota Highway Patrol going 102 mph in the family 1973 Malibu Classic and heard her yell it at me at concert level. That time I deserved it. When the folks took my driving privileges away, I took the bus into St. Paul for a little nightlife and heard it again. “Do you have a death wish!?!”
It’s a question I want to ask all those who refuse to get a vaccination against Covid-19. Some are refusing the vaccine because of all of the myths and lies surrounding the vaccine. My own niece refuses to get the shot because she doesn’t want to be rendered infertile. First of all, the shot doesn’t render women infertile and second, what makes a woman more infertile than death itself?
Others aren’t getting the shot because at the beginning of vaccinations being available they were often difficult to schedule. One had to be online constantly looking, searching, refreshing and then pouncing on any available appointment time. That isn’t the case anymore. The vaccine is widely available and free. I was in Walmart in Mitchell the other week and they were practically begging people over the speaker system to walk in to the pharmacy for immediate service for a shot. There is no excuse for not getting the shot anymore. For most people the side effects are minimal at best. I had an afternoon of a fever and chills after my first shot, no more than a couple of hours and after the second dose I had an hour of similar symptoms and that was it. Weigh mild symptoms after vaccination versus a long expensive hospital stay or even death, so why are you waiting to get the shot?
Freedom is the answer most people give me for refusing to get the vaccination. It is an argument folks haven’t thought all the way through, in my opinion. For example, we all have a Second Amendment right to own a weapon in this country. That freedom is tempered by our behavior. We can lose the right to own a weapon based on our mental state or our criminal record. Even those of us who have full rights to bear arms do not have the right to take that weapon anywhere we want to, the courthouse or a school for example, and we certainly don’t have the right to discharge it willy nilly any where we want to. We have a right to defend ourselves but we don’t have the right to threaten others. When you are deliberately unvaccinated, potentially carrying Covid-19, it’s like you’re firing a gun randomly in the Corn Palace during a Corn Palace show. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “Your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose.” Your right to be unvaccinated ends when it threatens the lives of others, as it always does during a pandemic.
Several employers throughout the country are instituting vaccine mandates including employers like Delta, Google, Tyson Foods, Microsoft, Walmart, Facebook, Disney, Morgan Stanley and other smaller businesses as well. If you want to work for them you must be vaccinated. Many concert and other entertainment venues are requiring proof of vaccination before allowing patrons to enter, even if they already have a paid ticket – no refunds. There are some locales where gyms, restaurants and bars are requiring proof of vaccination before being allowed to enter as well.
Recent polls, Gallup and others, found that 16% of all Americans surveyed favor and 36% strongly favor workplace vaccination mandates while 9% oppose and 29% strongly oppose workplace vaccination mandates. In a separate poll of just the unvaccinated, 40% said they would get a vaccine if their daily life (work, play, going out to eat etc.) required it.
South Dakota has now seen the country’s largest two-week surge in Covid-19 cases and leads the country per capita in new cases. Your unvaccinated status doesn’t just affect you. When you get sick it impacts your family, your employer, the healthcare system and all who work in it. Your big medical bill impacts the rest of us in our health insurance rates and tax bills for indigent care to cover treatments that sometimes run more than a million dollars. As smokers and the morbidly obese pay more for insurance coverage the same may be true in the near future for those who refuse to be vaccinated. Already there are some in the healthcare field (a doctor in Alabama made national news for this) who refuse to treat the unvaccinated as their stubborn, some might say stupid, refusal to get vaccinated means they wanted to die and so therefore it is a waste of resources trying to save them. Even the unvaccinated after it is too late, as they lay dying in the hospital, beg their family members to get vaccinated and tell others who are unvaccinated to get the shot before it is too late.
The question is a simple one, do you love life and your family or do you have a death wish?