Time to play hardball with the unvaccinated

A law in the state of Florida, the Baker Act, empowers police, doctors, or family to involuntarily confine an individual to a mental facility where “there is a substantial likelihood that without care or treatment the person will cause serious bodily harm to himself or herself or others in the near future, as evidenced by recent behavior.”

Here is a thought experiment. Is there any reason why we shouldn’t apply the same principle to the unvaccinated in this and other states and their political enablers like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and his counterparts in other states?

This would be a logical application of the reasoning that underlies the Baker Act. The unvaccinated certainly have a substantial likelihood to cause serious bodily harm to themselves or others. With rare exceptions the unvaccinated are the people with Covid-19 in Intensive Care Units (ICUs) in hospitals across the nation, including some states in which the ICUs are at or beyond full capacity. The same is true for the morgues and the funeral homes.

The unvaccinated pose a substantial risk of harm to others by exposing innocent people to the virus — including those with compromised immune systems, frontline workers, and children who don’t yet qualify for a vaccine. Republican governors have put their constituents at risk by following insane policies that turbo-charge the virus.

This is a thought experiment instead of a policy proposal only because it is not politically feasible in this freedom-loving society that approved enslaving people for hundreds of years. To be clear, I would favor something like the Baker Act being applied to the unvaccinated, the howls be damned of those who want the freedom to risk death not just for themselves but for everyone else too. But I know it won’t happen.

There is not enough political courage to go around in this country for anything like that. In the face of the ferocious Delta variant of Covid-19, even the response of the Biden administration, which has been much more aggressive than that of the Trump administration, has been too wimpy. When I see that 2,000 Americans a day are dying of Covid-19, mostly unnecessarily, I feel no need to justify my anger at the ignorant, the superstitious and the obstinate. Nor to defend my hardline remedy: the government should treat the unvaccinated as it did draft dodgers during the Vietnam War. You will go to Canada, you say? Unvaccinated, they won’t let you in — there or in any other country.

The glorification of an abstract concept of limitless individual freedom devoid of responsibility or consideration of the consequence of actions is one of the main causes of our Covid catastrophe. It is, as well, the main reason for another epidemic that has been with us for a long time and has only been getting worse: the epidemic of gun violence. Personally, I have no use for the Second Amendment. I would use it for…never mind.

“Freedom,” Janis Joplin once sang, “is just another word for nothing left to lose.” The distorted characteristic American concept of freedom has been used to rationalize a lopsided social order where the private is king and the public plays the pauper—and pays the piper. After 40 years of Republicans defunding, discrediting, and dismantling government, including public health and health care in general, lo and behold, we were left totally unprepared to fight an unanticipated attack by a lethal viral foe. Now I have a sense of how Stalin must have felt when, after brutally purging his army and stupidly trusting the Nazis, he had the Germans sitting at the gates of Moscow, Leningrad, and Stalingrad.

Stalin eventually turned things around and waged a withering scorched earth war against the freezing Germans, routing them back to Berlin in abject defeat. We must do the same, wage an all-out fight against Covid-19, defeat the virus, and consider the unvaccinated as deserters.

I can hear the anguished cries of the faint-hearted. That doesn’t matter to me or to the policies that will be implemented. Policies that cuddle the unreasonable spell disaster in war. As the toll continues to rise, albeit perhaps at a diminishing rate, that truth will dawn, and policies will get somewhat tougher. But it will be way too late. Between now and 2022, at the current rate, another 180,000 will die for a total of almost 900,000. If we cut deaths in half, the total will be closer to 800,000. This is the greatest, unnecessary catastrophe in American history where, as Pogo famously said, “We have met the enemy, and it is us.”

It seems almost obscene to discuss this devastation in terms of numbers. Each number is like a tsunami or an earthquake that sets off waves of pain and sorrow, that destroys countless families and friendships, and that marks the survivors for life, physically and mentally.

The whole nation, touched or not by the scourge, is suffering and will suffer indefinitely from one vast collective episode of PTSD.

Never again.

Never forget.

Never forgive.